

Hyperarchy: Democracy for the Digital Era - nathansobo
http://blog.hyperarchy.com/2011/07/19/hyperarchy-democracy-for-the-digital-era.html

======
vannevar
I like some of these ideas, particularly the flexible system of delegation.
But right now the issue-ranking system seems like a weak link. It's too
simplistic and could easily devolve into an exercise in voting on bumper-
sticker slogans. There should be tools for more reasoned exploration of the
issues, like an argument mapping tool for instance
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map>). Don't just let me vote on a
tweet-sized solution, let me see the arguments made for and against it in a
structured way that I can also vote on.

~~~
kdeldycke
The concept of Hyperarchy was already explored by demexp.org. Look for
instance at the aspect of vote delegation:
[http://www.demexp.org/dokuwiki/description_of_the_political_...](http://www.demexp.org/dokuwiki/description_of_the_political_project#the_vote_delegation)

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Ronkdar
It's an interesting idea, but I see some major problems.

1) It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity.
There's quite a lot of inertia/sentiment preventing this sort of situation. If
you can't insure that each person only gets one voice, then the system breaks.

2) What happens when the Goon Swarm arrives? No, I'm serious. It's hard to
troll the government as it stands today. The internet sees a lot of groups out
there whose only goals are to inconvenience others. This system could actually
give Anonymous etc. real world power.

~~~
1880
> It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity

Actually, it's quite possible nowadays in many countries, with the
introduction of smart ID cards.

~~~
Ronkdar
That is... relatively scary. I feel that one of the essential features of the
internet is its anonymity. Take that away and it loses some of its value.

~~~
jerf
This isn't the Internet. It may run over the Internet, but it isn't the
Internet. It's a government. A more delicate balance of accountability and
anonymity is called for.

I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and
immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a
house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more
relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance.
Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a
lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large
scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security
later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future
we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the
space now.

(There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's
engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into
Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)

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nhaehnle
The concept of flexible delegation is really interesting, but what about
secrecy of the ballot? Is there any way that can be ensured? The article does
not touch on the subject, unfortunately.

~~~
sp332
Secret ballots are only useful to prevent coercion. Why else would you want
your ballot secret?

~~~
zeemonkee
Because I might be turned down for a job or apartment or loan because of my
political views ?

And because it's frankly nobody else's business how I vote ?

~~~
sp332
Voting is an inherently public, civic act. It's not a personal matter. Your
vote has a direct effect on lots of other people. Why shouldn't you be
accountable for that?

~~~
slowpoke
The problem is that, as others have mentioned, from openness results social
pressure, and social pressure can severely affect your decisions.

On the other hand, openness of course leads to transparency, and transparency
prevents corruption and lobbying (to a considerable degree, at least).
Interestingly though, this is _also_ due to social pressure.

My vision would be a system that combines techniques such as the ones deployed
in BitCoin and NameCoin (Public Keys) to ensure unique identities but still
preserve anonymity. In a such a system, everyone could freely speak their mind
anonymously, yet still be accountable (in this case meaning he or she can be
identified as some individual, but not as a specific person). This would also
lead to reducing debates to facts and arguments, by effectively completely
depersonalizing it. It would no longer be about people, it would be about
problems, ideas and solutions.

I don't really know if this technically feasible (I'm not even sure if it
makes sense to anyone but me), but I think it would solve many of the problems
with _real_ democracy.

~~~
beatpanda
>transparency prevents corruption and lobbying

This isn't really true. I'm interning at the Sunlight Foundation this Summer,
and some of our free tools are used by lobbyists with less money to spend than
some larger interests here in D.C.

Transparency can actually lead to _more_ , but more _varied_ , lobbying.

The really remarkable thing about transparency is just how much corruption is
completely knowable and out in the open, yet totally ignored.

------
pnathan
I am always reminded of the Athenian state, and how the vagaries of public
opinion swung its direction wildly and rapidly.

A stable -archy needs to have an inherent conservatism to prevent public
hysteria ( _cough_ MSM _cough_ ) yanking the direction around.

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SkyMarshal
TLDR: Vote delegation. Not quite implemented yet, but in progress.

TSDG (Too Short, Don't Grok): _"Even as simple as Hyperarchy makes voting, no
one has time to share their opinion on every question. So Hyperarchy recasts
representative democracy as networked democracy. Instead of electing a Senator
you've never met to represent you on everything, you elect individuals you
trust personally to represent you on specific issues. I can give my girlfriend
power to vote on my behalf for questions about health and nutrition, while
delegating to my coworker for questions concerning programming languages or
digital privacy. So when my girlfriend votes about health or my coworker votes
on technology, they vote for me as well.

But the real power is when influence flows through multiple connections in the
social network. Suppose I delegate to my girlfriend on questions about
nutrition, but she in turn delegates her vote to an expert like Michael
Pollan. Then he inherits not only her vote, but mine as well. This transitive
nature of delegation allows power to flow to individuals with expertise. By
gaining the trust of a few influential people, Michael Pollan can emerge as a
super-representative, voting on behalf of a huge number of followers. But you
can change your delegation at any time, so Pollan would keep that power only
as long as he deserved it."_

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beefman
The founders didn't design things they way they did because they traveled by
horse (and I highly doubt it took a week from Monticello to Philadelphia),
they designed things so that only the most capable citizens would be elected
to leadership. They say this explicitly in the Federalist Papers (ok, maybe
that bit was Hamilton, but still). They rejected direct democracy: by framing
the nation as a "republic", with the assumption that only landowners would
vote, through the electoral college, through the creation of the Senate, and
by vesting remaining powers to the States. The term "democracy" is hard to
find in American political discourse prior to the McKinley administration (the
start of American imperialism) and didn't really get going until Wilson (entry
into WWI). The most populist Presidents (Jackson and Bush II) have notably
been among the worst.

Then again, if this tool really scales to 300M people, what's to stop the
delegation of votes from leading to the same representative power structures
and coalitions (which have more to do with game theory and human psychology
than the prevailing mode of transport)?

~~~
nathansobo
"It was a long journey in those days from Monticello to Philadelphia, where
the Congress was held. Part of the road ran through the wilderness, and it
took more than a week to get there."

<http://all-biographies.com/presidents/thomas_jefferson.htm>

Footnote at the bottom of the page: Source: "The Lives of the Presidents and
How They Reached the White House" by Charles Morris, LL.D., 1903. (We didn't
check the book though)

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sodiumphosphate
I had the same exact idea regarding delegation years ago, but I no longer have
the requisite faith in humanity to agree with it.

How many of us are actually wise enough to delegate a vote, when we think
ourselves wise and others foolish?

And how many of us are actually qualified to decide public policy, when we can
barely manage our own affairs?

Just imagine what sort of absurd tyranny a vast mob of common humans could
accomplish if the power were truly given to them.

It would be surreal.

( A minimal republic, and a system of full-on social darwinism, to me, appears
to be ideal. )

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meriksson
I have recently created something related, targeted to the Swedish political
scene. The basic idea is similar but the concepts I use are quite different.
If I may say so myself, my take on it is less sophisticated but more elegant.

Google Translate does an OK job with the site (although the Swedish word
"Kontakt" should not be translated as "Plug"):

<http://digitaldemokrati.se>

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitaldemokrati.se)

(The site currently runs on a minimal Heroku setup, so it will go down quickly
if this catches some attention here on HN. Nevertheless, enjoy it while it
lasts.)

Also, the project is open source, although the main public repo is currently
in bad shape and not quite up to date:

<https://github.com/digitaldemokrati>

If there is some interest in this, I could do a write-up in English and post
it here as a separate submission. Anyone interested?

PS. After lurking and posting from throwaway accounts since 2007, this is my
first HN post in my own name!

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CodeMage
I can't seem to find the option that allows me to delegate. If that's
implemented, I haven't been able to test it.

With that in mind, I wonder about how the delegation would work in practice.
It sounds like a good idea, but the devil's in the details. For example, if I
delegate my vote to someone else on a whole class of issues, but I want to
cast my vote on a specific issue in that class, would that work?

Also, it would have to have some good controls for notifications. On the one
hand, if I delegate my vote, I would like to stay informed about how that vote
is being used. On the other hand, if there's a lot of voting going on and I
get a notification every time my vote is used, it might just turn into noise
for me. And the quantity might increase drastically if I have a long chain of
delegation and people in that chain keep "overriding" the links that are
further away.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea, but there's a whole lot of details
that remain to be solved. I'm really interested in seeing whether and how
they'll address those details.

~~~
SkyMarshal
According to the last paragraph on the linked page, vote delegation isn't
implemented yet, but that seems to be top of their to-do list now.

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beatpanda
Or we could use the freedom of information, power distribution,
disintermediation and distribution efficiency made possible by the internet to
obviate the need for centralized government.

I'd vastly prefer that to yet another version of allowing other people to
determine my life for me.

~~~
mwhite
It seems to me that that is exactly what this has the potential to do. It's
only being framed in the language of centralized government because people
might not be ready to deal with the truly revolutionary implications of such a
system.

~~~
beatpanda
Not if anyone is still bound by the decisions of the majority.

~~~
mwhite
Just because people are bound by the decisions of the majority doesn't mean
it's centralized. They may decide that the cost of sometimes having to abide
by group decisions that conflict with their individual preferences is
outweighed by the benefit of being part of a group with an optimal decision-
making process that (presumably) provides benefits to its members that they
would not get if they chose to remain unaffiliated. All the while remaining
decentralized.

Reading <http://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html> totally altered the way I
look at this.

~~~
slowpoke
>Just because people are bound by the decisions of the majority doesn't mean
it's centralized.

That wasn't the point my grandparent was making. The first and foremost
critical flaw of democracy is (and always will be) that the majority can
dictate over the minority. That has nothing to do with centralization.

Also, it's not about "personal preferences". It's about minorities effectively
being dominated by the majority, without them having _any_ way to fight back.
While there might be some basic rights to protect minorities, they are
essentially always stripped of the most important and fundamental right in
such a society: _influence on decisions that concern themselves_. That is -
factually - a tyranny for everyone who is not part of the majority.

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gleenn
This is a pretty useful tool for doing retros at Pivotal Labs. Makes figuring
out what to talk about super easy and eliminates the whole dot voting
awkwardness.

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zwieback
Good ideas in principle but I'm reminded of my experience tuning PID
controllers for servo motors: too much P and you have wild, out-of-control
oscillations, too much D and you never get to your target. The I value has to
be carefully chosen to make sure misrepresentations are gradually amplified to
break through the collective perception threshold.

As stated I think there's not enough damping in hyperarchy.

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espeed
Where is the contact info for the people behind Hyperarchy? This is similar in
concept to something I published a few years ago called "The Electors"
(<http://theelectors.org/>), and it would be cool to chat with the Hyperarchy
crew.

~~~
alissa
nathan@hyperarchy.com, maxbrunsfeld@gmail.com they would love to talk to you.
i am alissa@hperarchy.com, their sister/gf respectively, so i help them in my
free time get in touch with interested people and whatnot!

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melipone
It's about time. That do remind me of Philip K. Dick's novel where the
President is replaced by a computer program, tho!

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riffraff
kind of reminds me of the daemon/freedom™ novels by daniel suarez, in a good
way.

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scrod
This is a terrific concept, but it's also too important to be relegated to a
private web site. Until the software can be run as a local application
(perhaps as part of a mutually-corroborated P2P network) and its internal
workings made fully verifiable, this is merely another fancy web-based-UX
demonstration.

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ristretto
Elected representatives have set terms. We trust them with our vote for a
specific period, and they can even make decisions that hurt some of our
interests. Has this been taken into consideration? If we can switch votes at
will, then it's not much different than crowdvoting. What about abuse of
power? Is there a third leg (justice) to punish abusers?

