A Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Idea: Disrupt US Politics | Hacker News Reader

A Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Idea: Disrupt US Politics

sina.is

19 pointssinak10 comments

If all you've got is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail...

The problem with US politics isn't that we need some magical way for assholes on the internet to bicker more efficiently; it's that political culture is just broken. It's Us vs. Them mentality, the news and blame game, and the fact that nobody has any fucking idea how the economy actually works, in spite of having very strong opinions about it.

This is why it's important to oust both parties. Even if you think only one of them is the real problem while the other isn't so bad, if one of them remains, most people and media will remain stuck in the old Us vs Them culture. The system and everybody in it is toxic. They all need to go.

But doing that will require the obscene political step of a vote of no confidence, a recall election, and a complete reform of campaign finance laws.... for which we need the help of politicians.

I like a lot the idea of a proxy agent inside the parliament voting for online citizens. It seems like the only viable path to direct democracy. A few times ago I imagined a similar platform where people would vote using gov-issued credentials. But now I don't believe that is the right solution, I don't see my grandma vote about startups taxation and I don't see myself voting about agriculture problems. Then using friends or "online parties" seems a nice solution, though it will undoubtedly create lobbies, fishing, hacking, any new kind of piracy to get people set you as their proxy.

Anyone can suggest a new bill, and if there is a quorum of voters who approve the bill, it is voted on by the full membership, with a simple majority deciding the result. There is a similar initiative in the EU, it's called Citizen's Initiative, if at least 1 million people support a bill (total of EU Citizens being over 500 millions), then it goes to discussion at the European Parliament: http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome

Anyways, that's a sweet dream, and a very challenging startup idea.

I'm not a fan of direct democracy at all. The majority of people's knowledge of important statistics on subjects such as crime, employment, taxation, etc, has been severely twisted by media sensationalism. Putting people who have a shaky grasp on reality in charge of a country is a recipe for disaster.

Though Liquidfeedback doesn't seem to be quite as direct as that. Whether it would work in reality would depend on how these proxies get their information. From reliable sources, or newspaper headlines and angry blogs.

If you want to persuade people of the benefits of direct democracy, you probably don't want to bring up the California initiative system as an example. Ballot initiative's in California are part of the reason the state's government is so disfunctional, and they've ended up that way because they're such a bad version of direct democracy. Ballot initiatives just involve an up-or-down vote on specific issues in isolation, without involving the population directly in the responsibilities of day-to-day governing, so, as in California, you get an incoherent patchwork of spending commitments and limits on tax increases. A better example of direct democracy might be something like participatory budgeting. I see there's a plan to test this out in San Francisco [1], although the SF plan doesn't seem to involve the public deliberation that participatory budgeting in Brazil involved, which may make it exhibit the same problems as ballot initiatives.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/san-francisco-to-test-onlin...

I was thinking about this a while back when a comic on convictions was posted here and one of the comments asked if we should trust someone in politics who holds strong convictions or someone who bends with the wind.

If a politician holds to their convictions they are derided for being inflexible, if they change their mind they are accused of just being in it for the votes.

Can't we just let machine learning take over and train a bunch of digital politicians about the stuff we want to happen? Or are we so used to being told what to think by charismatic leaders that we couldn't live in a data driven political system?

(Only somewhat tongue in cheek.)

Equivalent in Australia: http://www.senatoronline.org.au/

Going by this page, they received all of 209 votes in this year's election: http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/results/par...

I think we need to find a way to stop people voting for unaffordable policies that benefit them.

When I started PlainSite (http://ww.plainsite.org), my friends and I talked about how cool it would be--given the country's current state of affairs where money trumps all else--to allow people to donate small amounts toward a specific cause, and then allocate funding to politicians based on their willingness to forward the cause, as a kind of uber-lobbyist responsive to the people.

Unfortunately, that would constitute money transmission. So I kept working on the parts of PlainSite that didn't involve that. But maybe one day when the money transmission situation gets resolved (and it's been 593 or so days of waiting so far on one federal judge), that will be possible.

Generally, it's worth noting that the problems in American politics are mostly not technological in nature. They're a lot deeper, and this is precisely the kind of argument where Evgeny Morozov is correct: technology cannot solve all problems. It still can solve some, but at the end of the day, the simple fact is that we have extremists in Congress running the country.

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