
A prototype of a decentralized political party - lamito
https://hack.ether.camp/idea/a-prototype-of-a-decentralized-political-party
======
empath75
Trying to end corruption in the US, I'm starting to think, is what has brought
American politics to its current low state. I think the worst political
decision of the past few decades was the move to ban earmarks. Whatever
negative things you can say about them, earmarks gave congresspeople a way to
please their constituency without reference to some particular ideological
test. They could always say: "Well sure, I didn't vote to ban abortion, but we
did get a new agricultural research center." Without the ability to drive
federal dollars to their districts in return for 'selling out' their parties
ideology, a lot of congressmen have lost the ability to vote for anything at
all. It's wrecked the committee systems, the budget process, everything.

Same deal with banning unlimited donations to candidates while allowing it to
superpacs that technically aren't allowed to coordinate with the candidates.
You haven't made candidates less beholden to big donors, you've just put the
big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because their spending dwarfs
the spending of the candidates themselves.

~~~
kbaker
Just going to have to disagree... I think earmarks are exactly the thing that
caused congresspeople to lose all of their power.

> you've just put the big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because
> their spending dwarfs the spending of the candidates themselves.

When the donors are the corporations, and earmarks result in higher profits
for the corporations, a dangerous positive feedback loop occurs where you
basically end up with corporations controlling the government instead of the
elected politicians.

As far as the worst political decision of the past few decades, watch this
video if you have an hour to spare. It lays out the case where _adding_
transparency in congressional voting is really the root cause of Congress
being so screwed up. It might change your mind...
[https://youtu.be/1gEz__sMVaY](https://youtu.be/1gEz__sMVaY)

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Kapura
This techno-utopianism "solution" fails to understand that the basic goal of a
political party is to get people elected into office, full stop. Even if your
radical decentralised crowdfunded party makes you feel good, if you're not
getting people into legislative and executive positions, you are doing it
wrong.

Further, all of these theoretical goals break down when the theories collide
with reality. All systems can be gamed, and the way to reduce the effects of
it is not to embark on quixotic quest to create a completely transparent party
where everybody has perfect information of all things at all time. Rather,
focus on incentivising whistleblowers and removing corruption when it meets
the light of day.

~~~
BerislavLopac
> the basic goal of a political party is to get people elected into office,
> full stop

You'd be surprised how many people think that parties exist to promote a
certain ideology and bring it into power -- not necessarily by getting
elected.

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jacques_chester
Voluntary voting effectively gives people with a single-issue obsession more
power than everyone else, because they show up to vote. In compulsory voting
systems, the outliers are moderated by the median, whose concerns are
typically less emotional (abortion, guns) and more economic (price of milk,
mortgage rates).

Political parties are a concentrated form of voluntary voting. One of the
reasons the USA's primaries system is such a caricature factory is because
it's a concentrated form of a concentrated form of voluntary voting.

There are many people who propose models like these and don't think through
the end game. The end game is that any party where elected representatives
have their votes directly controlled by party members is a party that will be
instantly stacked by well-organised single-issue whackjobs.

You like crypto? Too bad, the terrorists use it, vote it down. You're OK with
gay marriage? Too bad, Jesus is agin it, vote it down.

Techno-utopianism doesn't solve for the fundamental constraint, which is that
people will _always_ disagree. No system can create smooth consensus. What is
left is to design a safe, functioning system. Direct democracy's historical
performance in this respect is _abysmal_ , which is why we have representative
democracy instead.

~~~
abecedarius
> Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal

Is that true? It certainly has its critics, but in classical Greece it more
than held its own in a highly competitive ecosystem for ~180 years. I'm sure
at least that we need more experiments with different institutions.

~~~
riffraff
180 years is not much, other kind of republics fared better (the roman
republic lasted 500 years, and the venetian republic more than 1000).

Also, the direct democracy in, e.g. Athens actually encompassed a very limited
number of people (adult males owners of land) so it's not 100% comparable with
a modern version.

I do agree we should try more things though.

~~~
abecedarius
Owning land was not required. In Pericles's time they did add a requirement
that both parents be Athenians, not just the father. I agree that the details
and context matter, and there are a lot of details beyond "all the citizens
can vote". (Here are some that HN readers ought to find cool:
[http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.ht...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html))

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wcarss
This is an interesting thought but it does not get into the motivations for
why a real political party might make the choice to operate this way -- there
likely needs to be some perceived comparative advantage to the potential users
of such a model for them to use it, or else why take the risk and venture into
the unknown?

I think it's possible that a DAO could be part of a system that does provide
such an advantage -- it may even be the case that it alone confers one! But I
don't know what it is and want to see one articulated.

This topic is of current interest to me, as I've been reading summaries of the
history of political and philosophical trends lately[1]. The interplay of
different power groups with economic, technological, and other factors to form
novel systems for controlling their environment is very complex, and fun to
speculate about, especially the internet's role in possibly allowing new power
structures to exist that may lead to new systems.

1\. In particular, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, which has
been a surprising lot of fun.

~~~
DennisP
I'm not convinced this particular model would help, but in principle, I think
a party could gain advantage by a system that gave it better collective
intelligence...choosing better candidates, deploying better strategies,
organizing volunteers more effectively, etc.

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TheSpiceIsLife
_Got your idea? Great, now you need write it up and tell everyone about it so
you can find your teammates and supporters_

Reads to me as: got an idea? Form a political party.

I predict internal politics will destroy this idea _because_ any group that
believes it is immune to politics is already infected but in denial.

We _can 't_ escape politics. It's what we do. It's the fundamental fractured
structure of the human experience.

We need politics because it's the best and least harmless place to put those
criminals we call politicians.

Also, amusing the domain is .camp. The word camp shares the same origins as
the German word kamf which means _to struggle_. Yep, politics sure is a
struggle.

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tener
Will have a feature to create a subparty and transfer all of parent party
power into it?

~~~
noobermin
I am out of the loop but since the DAO hack does anyone really trust ethereum
anymore?

~~~
methtrader
Yeah you're sort of out of the loop. The majority of the community believes
that "a manual override is necessary every now and then on the path to
building autonomous robots"

It's a platform in development, and it's made huge strides in security and
governance since the hack.

------
lumberjack
M5S is trying to do that in Italy.[1] Though they don't use any crypto
technologies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement#Ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement#Ideology)

~~~
sweetdreamerit
Italian citizen here. The experiment was interesting, but it's implementation
is quite sub-optimal: when you have to govern, you recognize that matters are
quite more complicated and you need to compromise. This is not necessarily
wrong, if you have the intellectual honesty to admit that the utopian purity
that you assumed as the main differentiator between you and the "old, dirty
politics" is, well, an utopic oversimplification.

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natrius
I think sharing control of funds is a weakness. Not just when it comes to
smart contracts that will inevitably have bugs, but for organizations in
general. Instead, we can create organizations without boundaries and govern
them the same way we govern genres of art—if you do something that aligns with
the brand, your action is part of the organization.

That's why I built Benefactory, a platform for decentralized nonprofits. We
can weave individual efforts into an organization with a strong brand so it's
easier to attract recognition and further contributions.

Here's an organization dedicated to making Ethereum easier to use and build on
top of: [https://media.consensys.net/2016/09/07/introducing-the-
commo...](https://media.consensys.net/2016/09/07/introducing-the-commonwealth-
of-ethereum/)

Join our Slack and help us build a commonwealth for every genre of public
benefit. [http://slack.benefactory.cc/](http://slack.benefactory.cc/)

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brador
This is simply "Tyranny of the Masses" 2.0.

The next revolutionary system will be adaptive algorithms, created for
fairness, implemented by system engineers, with strong feedback mechanisms for
improvements.

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Neputys
What a marvelously ignorant idea. Why is it so hard to understand that there
will be no magic machine that will allow you to live happily ever after
without need to think.

~~~
AroundTheBlock_
Why is it so hard to understand that there will be no magic machine that will
fly into space and put satellites that will relay our messages to one
another...oh wait...

~~~
Neputys
ouch, dat STRETCH ;)

