
Liquid Democracy - guerrilla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Democracy
======
JSavageOne
So much of the frustration in the U.S. is rooted in the mismatch between what
civilians want and what elective representatives are doing. Time and time
again when civilians express their frustration - like what's going on now in
these nationwide protests - our elected representatives tell us to just calm
down and "go show your frustration at the next elections if you want to see
change".

It strikes me as awfully out of touch because that's exactly what we've been
doing all along, yet we don't see the results we want. So either it's our
fault because we just suck at this voting thing, or there are systemic
inefficiencies in our elective representative democracy.

Liquid democracy seems to be the ideal form of democracy because it gives
every citizen the freedom to vote directly on the issues, or to delegate their
vote if they wish. Liquid democracy was not technically feasible in 1787 when
the U.S. Constitution was written, but technology has come a long way since
then.

It's a shame that it's almost considered sacrilege to even suggest that the
political system our founding fathers devised over 200 years ago may not
actually be perfect in 2020, and could be improved with some modernization.

~~~
bobbydroptables
>"go vote if you want to see change".

>It strikes me as awfully out of touch because that's exactly what we've been
doing all along,

Well this is not quite right. Many people (especially young people) actually
don't vote, especially in the smaller local elections that elect people like
your police chief. The two party system in the US is broken but young people
not voting makes it worse.

Politics would looks _very_ different if 90% of millennials started showing up
to vote. Dare I suggest they might even start running for office?

~~~
colordrops
Many young people don't vote precisely because they see it as being an
ineffective way to enact change, since the politicians they do vote for don't
implement the ideas they ran on. They also see the establishment doing
everything in their power to hobble candidates (read: sanders) that are
actually honest, consistent, and striving for the common man rather than
corporations and other powerful entities.

[https://i.imgur.com/F9kdJqL.gif](https://i.imgur.com/F9kdJqL.gif)

[https://img1.quotesuniverse.com/quotes/01/noam-chomsky-
quote...](https://img1.quotesuniverse.com/quotes/01/noam-chomsky-quote-during-
the-whole-neoliberal-period-the-last-generation-both-political-parties.jpg)

People, including the young, are demotivated by rigged games.

~~~
wilg
Is it true that politicians don't do what they ran on? I think that may be a
myth. My understanding is the opposite:
[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-
ke...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-keep-most-of-
their-promises/)

------
Barrin92
This used to be a big thing with the pirate party in Germany before they
started to wither away a few years ago.

Personally I think this would pretty quickly converge back to more traditional
forms of democracy because I think it's unlikely that people directly
participate in a lot of decisions and you get back to something comparable to
the status quo in most existing democracies.

I think any system that wants to make accurate decisions based on aggregate
preferences probably needs to be able to collect them passively rather than
actively.

~~~
guerrilla
That's the beauty, they don't have to directly participate if they want to but
they can at any time if they need to.

------
verdverm
I discovered his idea in the blockchain world and find the concept quite
interesting. Essentially you can allocate your vote on different topics to
different representatives or vote directly if you wish. It's highly
competitive and fluid in terms of representative accuracy to the constitutes
opinions, as you can change representatives at will (depending on how you set
it up).

I wonder how we could test it out for elections? It likely needs to start
small or in the private sector, or post-revolution would give opportunity to
rewrite laws in a major way

~~~
stutonk
When I first heard of this, I was also quite intrigued. But I wonder if it
might actually be vulnerable to some of the darker patterns of human 'social
markets' if implemented in its freest form; we already have something that has
the structure, if not the character, of a liquid democracy: Twitter. In such a
system, people with a lot of allocated votes would end up with considerable
de-facto power that would nonetheless be constantly volatile to emotional
outburst no-confidence tectonics if you were allowed to re-allocate your vote
at any time/the voting distribution was monitored in real time. You'd also
almost certainly end up with Zipfian popularity gravity wells where some
representatives were more popular simply because they're more popular, perhaps
without genuine merit.

~~~
verdverm
This is important to note, thank you. Our social nature (and dark it can be)
must be accounted for in policy decisions... better than it has been recently.

------
david927
The wonderful thing about this is that it effectively eliminates the legalized
bribery that happens with lobbying. There are 15 lobbyists per congressperson
just for the finance industry, each sitting on top of who knows how much
money.

Also, it allows for "voice on demand." If 95% of legislation is unimportant to
the average person, it can safely be entrusted to the representative. The 5%
that is important gets a direct voice.

It seems vastly more democratic.

------
ethn
The point of representative democracy is to prevent the tyranny of the
majority in mitigation of the deterioration of minority rights.

~~~
dragonwriter
No, that's the point of Constitutionally limited government, which is an
orthogonal feature to representative vs. direct democracy.

~~~
ethn
A constitutionally limited government can explicitly hurt minority rights, for
instance the Confederate States Constitution, or betray intentions of
principles through direct democratic procedures by interpretation and
enforcement.

With direct democracy you do have tyranny of the majority while this is
certainly mitigated in a representative democracy; for instance the 2016
election where the popular vote would have selected a different president.

The US founding fathers were very familiar with Aristotle who stated:
"Unlimited democracy is, just like oligarchy, a tyranny spread over a large
number of people.”

Indeed the US founding fathers' decisions reflect this, If we're to believe
their commentary, they picked a republic with the motivation of liberty for
all with emphasis on the elective structure, Constitutional Convention of
Hamilton 1787 : "We are now forming a republican government...Real liberty is
neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate
governments.”

Scalia has a good talk about this, how a merely constitutionally limited
government is completely ineffective of guaranteeing its provisions, its
interpretation, and its enforcements: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd
--UO0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0)

"Every banana republic has a bill of rights"

------
tunesmith
I used to be in favor of this but now I think it's in precisely the wrong
direction. We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex
tradeoffs and compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the
complexity of system effects. We don't need more ways for people to
capriciously offload their civic duty to whoever _seems_ most willing to
responsibly accept their proxy.

~~~
Supermancho
> We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex tradeoffs and
> compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the complexity of
> system effects

The effort, to be educated, is not optimal on a capitalist playing field
withing a nation as large as the USA. The information is overwhelming and the
result (individual voter franchise) is pathetically ineffectual. It's a fool's
errand, which is the outlook shared by many americans.

