A coincidence of great and minor powers

[Michael Allan]

David Hilvert wrote:
> 
> Politics has interested (and irritated) me for a long time, and
> political theory, while interesting, seems to have maddeningly little
> effect on political practice...
> 
> It is my hope, at least, that political ideas might begin to have a
> mobility and potency approaching that of software ideas, with the
> better ideas finding greater success and currency.  Perhaps Votorola,
> or a similar system, could make this happen; it seems, at least, to be
> the most advanced software of the sort, and most scalable (compared,
> e.g., to [5]), I have seen so far, and it would be nice to see it
> applied in practice.

We should have a trial server in at least one community within a few
weeks.  If we can strengthen its implementation and its superficial
technical design, then it should work.  The essential approach seems
to fit with social theory.

I don't know of any precedent in practice.  It hasn't been tried yet.
The logical, technical architecture (A) is peer to peer.  Political
theory doesn't seem to shine any light on it.  It was only in broader
social theory, bringing in the person-to-person elements of society
(B) that I found a grounding for it.

(A) Technically, we have a peer-to-peer voting medium, in which anyone
can vote for anyone with complete freedom.  A vote is inalienable.
The voter retains control at all times over its placement.  (It never
disappears into ballot box, beyond reach.)  So the voting system maps
to the social reality; we vote as freely as we speak.  And yet,
despite all the freedom and apparent disorganization it would imply,
the results are nevertheless meaningful because of how the votes tend
to cascade together and seek out lines of agreement (just like people
do).

We also have a peer-to-peer collaborative medium in which the working
text has the same structure as a population - individual variant
drafts, one per drafter - with bits of text freely exchanged amongst
them by copy and paste.  And yet, despite all that freedom, the
results are nevertheless meaningful because of how the voting system
(above) is applied to the *drafters*, encouraging their population of
drafts to converge (and diverge) in content, until it matches the
structure of agreement (and disagreement) forming in the broader
community of voters.

(B) The best grounding for the technology seems to be the theory of
communicative action.  Communicative action deals with how people
reach agreements amongst themselves in the person-to-person spheres of
society, where they are more-or-less beyond the reach of power and
other "steering media".  It also deals with the other spheres of
society (governmental, economic, cultural) and explains how they
interrelate.  (It's all very new to me.  I was surprised to learn that
such a theory even exists.)

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/