
Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina - santisiri
http://www.fastcompany.com/3043388/the-y-combinator-chronicles/why-y-combinator-funded-a-radical-political-party-in-argentina
======
dguaraglia
Man, even if well intentioned, this is bad. This kind of "passive" intrusion
(combined with the not-so-passive, government sponsored intrusion) is why some
South American countries have a deep-settled distrust of the United States.

Disclaimer: I was born in the US but grew up in Argentina. I have a pretty
good grasp of the subject, but I'm obviously not free of bias.

"What could possibly be bad about a young party of people looking to introduce
some liberal, progressive changes?" you ask. Well, the problem is that helping
a party that caters to younger people (read: rich and middle class young
people; the working class in Argentina doesn't care about getting pot or being
able to ride the Subte back from the clubs) can be seen as anti-government.
And to a certain extent, it is. I won't go into what I believe about the
current government or the opposition, but having foreign money influence a
very vocal sector of the population is definitely meddling with the country
internal affairs.

At the end of the date, this is drop in the bucket compared to the amount of
money channeled through the State department, but if you put all like efforts
in the same bag then you have a very strong case to support the theories that
the US government is actively trying to get Kirchner and her allies out of
power. It's not as overt as a coup, but it's still bad.

~~~
abandonliberty
At which point does it become bad intrusion?

Is sharing ideas bad? Money? Offering, rather than being asked?

What about something like the concept of democracy. Or, since the intrinsic
value of a concept may be difficult to understand, let's consider the US
constitution. It likely cost quite a bit to produce in inflation adjusted
dollars. What if they ask us for it, they seek it out themselves, or we give
it to them?

I'm very confused. This is a very gray area with a fantastically slippery
slope.

~~~
scardine
I hate to answer on political threads because I'm always downvoted into
oblivion, but there we go...

I'm writing from Brazil but lived for a while in Argentina and do business
with people from other places in the subcontinent.

I grew up during the iron years, where the military dictatorships here
tortured and killed hundreds of dissidents, so most parents educated us to
fear the police and avoid talking about politics at all costs. I guess this is
why people don't like to participate in the civic life (hell, in Brazil people
avoid even condo meetings because "I don't like controversy").

I think lobbying is frowned upon here because most people equate it with
public bribing (not too far from the truth), which leaves us we with
traditional bribing only.

Go figure.

~~~
dguaraglia
I always found the difference between Argentina and Brazil quite surprising.
While I lived there (for seven years, in Santa Catarina) I felt like people
were very divorced from politics, and would avoid the topic as much as
possible. The only people that would engage me when I asked questions about
politics (mostly because I wanted to learn the history of the country) were
people from bigger cities (mostly Paulistas.)

Argentina went completely the opposite way: once the dictatorship was over,
people became incredibly political because we wanted to avoid the same kind of
political vacuum that created the first coup. As a result, most people in
Argentina will argue about politics, even when they don't have a completely
educated opinion on the matter (but hey, that's how we work on most stuff
anyway, heh.)

Agreed on the conflation of lobbying with bribing. Unfortunately there's too
much evidence suggesting that private interests putting money into politics is
not a good idea.

------
zby
Update: It looks like it is not just polls - there is also a debate tool
(although does not look very sophisticated). Still the article talked mostly
about polls.

I don't know - maybe it is a step in the right direction - but I have the
feeling that polls are not very good way to make decisions. There is a lot of
thought put into stuff like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-
making](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making) \- and hey -
there are even very pretty web apps that claim to be based on this:
[https://www.loomio.org/](https://www.loomio.org/)

And by the way: [http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-
controversy/2014/0...](http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-
controversy/2014/07/what-we-expected-all-along-nsa-hacked-online-polls-we-
suspect-that-voting-machines-and-ballot-counting-scanners-are-also-hacked-and-
rigged-2480144.html) \- I don't know, maybe the current parliaments are not
very good - but at least they are real - not armies of sock puppets.

~~~
makeitsuckless
I used to feel that way, and was strongly against the argument of using tech
for direct democracy.

For years I worked on leveraging tech to improve the transparency of (local)
government, and to close the gap between the voters and their representatives.
I believed in the representative democracy (unlike many other techies), I just
believed it needed to be improved.

I unfortunately came to the conclusion that party politics have completely
corrupted the current systems. Over generations the establishment has learned
to game the system so perfectly that the elite will remain in charge no matter
what happens. Even new "anti-establishment" parties are quickly absorbed or
corrupted.

I've come to believe that the essence of renewing democracy is _change
itself_. Not because one system is fundamentally better than the other, but
because it will break the stranglehold the current political elite has on the
existing system.

Change is the essential ingredient. Undermine the power of the establish
parties by any means necessary, even if that means decision making will
initially get "worse". At least it will be a return to actual democracy.

That, and transparency. Pretty much any political system can benefit from much
more transparency

~~~
seandhi
I think I would be okay with a direct democracy as long as any legislation
passed through direct means underwent a judicial review for constitutional
issues before someone was directly harmed by said legislation. The current
system of requiring locus standi before a law can be challenged is bad enough
with representatives who are supposedly more educated on legal matters passing
laws of questionable constitutional legality - I could only imagine how much
worse it would be with a largely uneducated (on legal matters) population.

What's that saying? Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for
dinner or something?

~~~
warfangle
That's what Great Pyrenees are for ;)

------
thomasfoster96
I've got a few issues with this sort of idea, and to be frank, Internet-based
pseudo-direct democracy has been raised many times before, although
DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation
software.

1\. I don't see anyway that direct democracy by way of an online poll or
consultation is any better than the representative democracy that many
countries already have. Such an approach will result in a representative in a
legislature who will be biased towards a more technical and engaged audience
than the wider community.

2\. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why
not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for
the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions.
Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy,
which will probably take the same amount of time.

3\. In a (my) perfect world, a mixture of representative and direct democracy
works best. I'm not sure turning representative democracy into a pseudo-direct
democracy will have good long term consequences. I doubt (putting cynicism
aside) that every voter in a democracy has the time and energy to put as much
into politics as a paid politician puts into it nowadays, hence I think we'll
always need a bit of representative democracy.

~~~
seykron
> although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political
> consultation software

Agree, as long as the legislatives have not a legal commitment with a system,
it is just a very sophisticated poll.

> 2\. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread,
> why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or
> decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of
> jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true
> direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time.

I'm a member of the Pirate Party of Argentina, and we're trying to do just
what you're saying. We've got a direct democracy platform[1] and we use our
processes to collaborate with different social movements and government
institutions.

For instance, the previous year we participated in several actions and
discussions about national bills using our transparent and open process[2]. In
our experience, direct democracy works very well as a bridge between real
people problems and the representative system. It encourage people
participation and it provides real engagement within the organization.

Thanks for pointing out these points!

[1]
[https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en](https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en)
[2] Here is an article about what we done the last year:
[https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-
pirate...](https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate-party-
ga/)

~~~
thomasfoster96
I'd you don't mind me asking, how is your direct democracy platform any
different to how most political parties work internally anyway? What that
charter describes is how a lot of political parties reach policy decisions,
and it doesn't really describe anything that resembles direct democracy that
the whole electorate takes part in.

~~~
seykron
The platform is not for the whole electorate because we are no longer trying
to participate in elections (it is explained in the journal article), we are
now a non-electoral political organization. There is a lot of
literature[1][2][3] and a bunch of experiences[4] related to the
implementation of high-scale direct democracy, but looking at the argentinian
politics it is a very far horizon at the moment.

Despite of that, we're not that special. There are a lot of organizations
(social movements, collectives, local assemblies) all around the world that do
organize by using some kind of direct democracy strategy. But we want to bring
direct democracy to institutional areas at some level[5]. In order to reach
that purpose we've got three main values: direct democracy to take decisions,
transparency as the social contract, and free culture as the foundation of our
values and principles. Based on these values, we're focused in organizing
actions related to the political space.

Regarding direct democracy, we take decisions based on a consensus process
rather than voting. This changes the people's mindset and promotes
participation instead of competition, it breaks hierarchies and distributes
the power among all members. We have not a "board", we have a process to take
decisions that we call "dissensus-based process". We consider that consensus
is a permanent status, and dissensus is the lack of consensus. So in order to
take a decision there's a very simple constraint: the three pirates rule. If
three persons want to organize an action, they just do it unless someone says
"I DO NOT AGREE", so it must be discussed until there is consensus again.

Regarding transparency, we have our own infrastructure and we adopt tools that
helps with transparency: mailing lists, wikis, git, loomio, etc. There're are
not "private activities", everything we do is public or "semi-public" (post-
facto) when it is quite critical.

Of course, it has several issues. It is a challenge to make the organization
grow because it depends on people that think based on quite similar values.
We've got a set of principles[6] and political guidelines[7] to appeal when
there is dissensus.

I hope you now could figure out yourself how different we are from other
political parties.

[1] Aaron Swarz - Parpolity or the power of exponents:
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity)
[2] A classic: The Principle of Federation - Proudhon:
[http://www.ditext.com/proudhon/federation/federation.html](http://www.ditext.com/proudhon/federation/federation.html)
[3] The new anarchists - David Graeber: [http://newleftreview.org/II/13/david-
graeber-the-new-anarchi...](http://newleftreview.org/II/13/david-graeber-the-
new-anarchists) [4] [http://www.david-
kilgour.com/mp/democracy.htm](http://www.david-kilgour.com/mp/democracy.htm)
[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_insertion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_insertion)
[6]
[http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Declaraci%C3%B3n_de_Princip...](http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Declaraci%C3%B3n_de_Principios_Partido_Pirata_Argentino)
[7]
[http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Bases_de_Acci%C3%B3n_Pol%C3...](http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Bases_de_Acci%C3%B3n_Pol%C3%ADtica)

------
santisiri
Hi everyone, I'm one of the founders of DemocracyOS.org and The Net Party
(partidodelared.org). Let me know what you think about DemocracyOS as an open
source vote & debate tool, and our political strategy with The Net Party where
we have candidates committed to vote in congress according to DemocracyOS.

~~~
kriro
Are you in contact with the Pirate parties of different countries? Your party
sounds like it uses the idea of "liquid democracy" which is discussed quite a
bit by the Pirate parties if memory serves right. I think the German one at
least discussed some tools to use/build for the entire vote/poll mechanism
which I assume is built into your collaboration product.

You'll probably end up in some upcoming startup books as an unusual MVP (is it
M?). "Found a political party".

Good luck, political change is really hard and I do like the concept of more
direct wisdom of the crowd like politics. I'm not sure about your product but
access to governments and understanding how they work is pretty valuable.
Government tools tend to be internally-viral (one community usues it, it
spreads). I'm curious if the fact that you are also a party might be dangerous
for the product though. Pretty often useful stuff is blocked on principle so
for example if your party seems "left", conservative city councils might not
use your tool due to that (likewise the other way around). Pretty interesting
problem to have.

~~~
seykron
There exist a very active Pirate Party from Argentina[1] based on a direct
democracy processes[2]. The "Net Party" actually doesn't exist, it is just a
mask to sell DemocracyOS. If you get into their site, there's nothing about
politics, it is just entrepreneurship bullshit.

And by the way, they are no longer a "legal" political party, they lost the
legal representation because they didn't reach the electoral law requirements
it would be irrelevant information if they would have something beyond the
software, but they don't.

[1] [http://partidopirata.com.ar/](http://partidopirata.com.ar/) [2]
[http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Org%C3%A1nica/en](http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Org%C3%A1nica/en)

~~~
piamancini
We lost representation this year, but the Pirate Party was never a political
party in Argentina. They didn't even run for elections once. So please...

~~~
seykron
Actually we chosen do not participate in elections, but we're still a
political organization. You can take a look at our report published in the PPI
journal[1].

Anyway, I've got not problems with experimental politics, I do study
anthropology and believe me, I have a good idea what a social experiment is. I
personally consider you a very smart person and I know you understand which is
my concern about The Net Party. The Net Party is not what it says it is.
There's no transparency, you're not looking for political agreements in order
to use DemocracyOS in other way than a poll, you're not using the money to
develop a software oriented to the principles you say it has, you do not
define your ideology and anyone with slight knowledge of politics and history
can see which it is.

You operate like a startup company and not like a political organization. I
have not problems with your ideas (I personally don't share them, but I think
it is an open discussion), I have problems with your actions. You're cheating
people and you know it.

[1] [http://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-
pirate-...](http://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate-party-
ga/)

------
touseonce
> Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina

The title made me laugh. If I told you some wealthy Ivy League guy/gal who
used to be an intern for the Bush administration was building a political
party... you would figure out this new party would end up far from being
"radical".

> Mancini's Partido de la Red—"Net Party," in English—is a wild experiment in
> direct democracy that seems to take inspiration from both Occupy Wall Street
> and Reddit (a Y Combinator alum and ongoing investment).

"Net Party" has nothing to do with occupy Wall Street. The founders are a few
wealthy Argentinians. I find hard to believe they are building a tool to
change the status quo in any way (this would mean a risk of losing some of
their privileges). It looks like a great self-promotion project though.

Also, the article later mentions: "DemocracyOS already had some revenue when
Mancini applied to YC". Now, that makes a little more sense: DemocracyOS _is_
a for-profit endeavor, after all. Gotta give them some credit: mounting a mock
political party (and then selling it as a product) is one hell of a marketing
stunt! The fact that there is some money making future behind the initiative
also explains the backing from YC.

------
marianov
I hope they use the money to ditch the code and do a clean start because last
time I checked the system was not safe, transparent,secret or auditable

[http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/](http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/) Buenos
Aires City Legislature installation

[https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app](https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app)

~~~
santisiri
The Buenos Aires Legislature never agreed to install an SSL. We are doing it.
Feel free to contribute to the code.

------
seykron
The difference between Pirate Parties which use liquid democracy and "the Net
Party" is that Pirate Parties actually use software to support their political
platform. The Net Party has not even something that may look like a political
platform, they use politics to sell the software.

And by the way, The Net Party lost the legal status this year.

------
elemenofi
Hello, I am an argentinian and the reason why I dont like DemocracyOS is
because it just adds another middleman. I am sick and tired of representative
democracy. It is a hoax and an illusion that we must get rid of as soon as
possible. Adding another layer of abstraction between voters and politicians
just adds to the noise of this already abandoned channel of communication.

I want to vote on the laws myself and ask politicians for advice and briefs of
the projects, not the other way round.

Cheers

~~~
santisiri
The idea is to make that middleman (the representative) committed to the
people. We cannot go against the Constitution, if you like that approach there
are other political alternatives you might want to consider.

------
viciousambition
I like this idea, but I don't know if a trojan horse in the footer sends the
most positive political message.

------
nraynaud
This is extremely risky to fund a political party with foreign money, in
particular in the CIA's backyard.

~~~
seykron
It is actually forbidden by the Argentinian Electoral Law.

~~~
piamancini
make up your mind, are we or are we not a party? if we are not, as you got
tired if claiming then it's not illegal.

------
dschiptsov
Because in politics there is always an "investment" side.

~~~
smcl
Hey, sorry I downvoted you accidentally when switching windows due to my
laptop being slow and stupid :)

~~~
dschiptsov
Hey, thanks)

