
What Happens When Techno-Utopians Run a Country - denzil_correa
https://www.wired.com/story/italy-five-star-movement-techno-utopians/
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jotm
Oh Jesus no. Direct democracy is becoming worse every day, as more people are
born. The more people there are, the worse direct democracy gets.

Even with the best education, the number of uninformed, misinformed,
uninterested and just plain dumb people is going to outnumber the
informed/interested by a wide margin. And their votes are equal.

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basch
How do you algorithmically form expert/meritocratic consensus.

I imagine a message board, somewhat like reddit, where the subreddits each
have their own weighting (a constitution of sorts, could include succession
and election rules), and each voter has rpg like characteristics. The anarcho-
socialism board would weight votes from people with certain properties heavier
than people who dont match their idealism. The software would build your user
profile points based on how you vote, inferring from like voters. Then at the
end there would need to be SOME form of truth, or what each sub believes to be
truth, so the software knows when a person is correct about something and when
they are wrong.

The beauty of this system being that a person can vote all over the place, and
be considered an expert in one sub, and an idiot in another, but still be able
to participate in both systems. Multiple parallel reality consensuss can be
formed, and then compared to the popular consensus.

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alanfranzoni
Well, they forgot to say that five star online platform -
[https://rousseau.movimento5stelle.it](https://rousseau.movimento5stelle.it)
\- is a php handmade webapp with a lot of security problems. Not a good point
for the movement.

I think the wired article is decent, maybe it misses one important notion: the
five stars movement has been critical at giving a lot of millennials some new
interest in politics. For sure it's not the perfect party, but from a
participation pov is the best thing we've had in Italy since decades.

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AnimalMuppet
I found it rather frightening how one man could create a "democratic movement"
and control it to get it to vote the way he wanted - and how almost nobody
involved saw the manipulation.

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User23
This isn't a bug of democracy, it's a feature. Democracy means whoever has the
best propaganda and persuasion wins and people have absolutely no idea when
they are being persuaded. Ask anyone, they'll tell you that advertising
doesn't work on them and they make their own decisions. And yet advertising
works well enough to be a multi-billion dollar business, especially during the
political season.

If you don't like this, then you don't like democracy. If that's so, no
problem, you're in good company. The ancients disliked democracy because in
their experience it inevitably degenerated to tyranny. Republicanism and
federalism are two ways to attempt to garner the benefits of popular rule
while mitigating the drawbacks.

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oriettaxx
The content is pretty good, and the fact that Casaleggio is not alive anymore
can be clearly seen on today's big strategic mistakes the 5 star movement is
making, and after reading the article I think this is not even a bad fact.

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User23
The thing they got spot on is that the current crop of elites are not nearly
as smart as they think they are. This is of course observably true, just look
at the outcomes they achieve and fail to achieve.

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m-p-3
Mirror

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQiAPBXLtDSDV4V2GbvMSAidE7bAaenstdb3TY...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQiAPBXLtDSDV4V2GbvMSAidE7bAaenstdb3TYMkG4JcJ/)

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basch
Is "All he needed was" the end of the article or did I get paywall truncated?

I pay for paper wired, i should probably figure out how to sign in someday...

