Is a Representativeless Government Possible?

I've been thinking this one over. We've seen lots of debates/arguments/etc over various governmental models, ranging some various socialist plans, to archy, to capitalism, etc. But here we are in a whole new universe, with very different needs and wants than are traditionally the case in r/l. So on that note, I pose the following question....

Is it possible to have a governmental form that has no leaders, no elected officials, no representatives...but instead exists solely as a function of society as a whole?


To better clarify...is it possible to form a society that has built into it the processes, methods, and technology that allows every member of that society to have their voice, and the 'government' will essentially be a dynamic reflection of that whole collective voice? If it's possible, what would be needed? What would be the pitfalls? And can it be made to exist as a self-sustaining 'entity'?

(For sake of open debate, I ask that we restrict ourselves to the thoughts above...comparisons to other government models, etc, kept for the time being in reserve for other threads)


- Newfie

Actually, there's a common name for the sort of government you're proposing....

well are the choices:
1) everyone gets a say every decision?
2) no one (or only the oligarch(s)) get a say any decision?

since representative governments become "some people have a say" - namely the representatives. though in theory the votes have a say through the proxy of the represenative.

in everyone gets a say in every decision, then you get a bunch of uninformed people making in some decisions they shouldn't be. i wouldn't wan't someone who has less than a college level physics level of knowledge deciding how to design nuclear power plants. and i wouldn't want people who don't know what big-O means designing servers for sl.

in no one gets a voice... well people tend to vote with their feet and leave.

Possible, yes. But a society of direct democracy might be very volatile. Even something as basic as zoning could flow and ebb as various factions gained and lost favor. And a few powerful individuals with significant resources and some skill at propaganda... ugh, I don't want to think about it. It's like Orwell's 1984, with Rupert Murdock as Big Brother.

I tend to believe this is what we have now Newfie and Im lovin it

i tend to think we have a nice benign oligarchy with some"squeakywheel"ocracy and "let's ask them"ism.

did I miss something, I thought newfie clearly stated............ "comparisons to other government models, etc, kept for the time being in reserve for other threads"

Arguing for a technocracy?

There've been a number of people in SL arguing the "uniqueness of the virtual world" theme for some time. They're generally met by silence, or by the counterpoint that all unique things evolve from known and used paradigms.

"Having a say" doesn't necessarily mean "taking a vote". The phrase dynamic reflection speaks to me as "making the changing will of most of the people known". Seems to me that that's less of a problem here - where the technology enfolds social relations and debate, and the population is of a relatively high order of awareness and opinion-making.

I see the problem as what do you do with the will of the people? and who does it? In other words, it's an operational problem. "Government" has been conceived of as a "tool" of the people's will. The power of popular consent is collected, correlated, and turned into order, law, policy, and action by a small number of persons "entrusted" by the people.

Modern democracy, socialism, and fascism all have used the same "tool" to address similar issues, but in different ways - with different results. The problem is that the tool has a tendency to assume an existence independent of the people. Entrusting doesn't work, and the tool rules. To me, the question is how to keep that from happening.

I don't think anyone in SL would conceive of government here as anything other than a tool of the will, or as completely unnecessary.

uh... sorry.
hard to talk about stuff without using existing terminology.

It is not an exact match, but to a degree you are talking aobut something very close to "Technocracy" here. It evolved from the scientific outlook of the 1950's I think (would have to look it up), the idea being that much of the functions of government are ineficiently produced because of the party system and that the majority would be better served to have such things be performed by the appropriate highly trained members of society as opposed to politicians and beurocrats.

In this sense it was criticised for being an approach that favoured simply "putting scientists in charge," of most things. Another critisiscm is of course the genreal tendency to fasict behaviour it engenders.

It was as I remember fairly Utopian setup in practice with it's main members having little or no politicla savy (being scientists of course). The organisations buildings in each town were often mistaken for churches in that they were usually identical with their symbol (A yin/yang symbol), being displayed above the door outside.

If you have ever read that (heinlein?) story about the scientists who pose as religious leaders to save the future using the "magic" of technology, you aren't far off from these guys. They have not been around for a while though so all of this is from memory. Apolgies for any errors or confabulations etc.


As a complete system of government it notably falls short but is an interesting option that has never been persued at least overtly by any government so far.

One might argue that things like the National Science Council and other scientist run institutions are really the same thing in another guise.

Dianne

One has. Foucault, On Madness, about how social scientists have replaced shamans and priests as rulers of the world.

Hate to bring this up, but there's a somewhat uncomfortable blend of technocracy and anarchism advocated by Vernor Vinge and others that sounds almost exactly like what Newfie was describing. Government, they claim, can be replaced by a technical solution that enables everyone to participate freely in a continuous "town hall". However, expertise is identified among the population, and the operationalization of the people's consensus is turned over to these various experts - different experts according to the issue to be solved.

*Church Lady voice* Could it be.... mmmmm... Anarchy?

(edit)


Oh! This is exactly what I was thinking about.

-Ghoti

Close but not quite...what sparked my question was I recently finished reading a new novel by Steven Baxter - "Coalescent". The subject matter was about hive-type society among humans, in which no one person was a 'leader' or 'representative' or 'queen', etc. Running of the society (aka 'government') was a natural product of their customs and culture. The entire 'hive' was self-governing, but also no 'representative' individuals within the 'hive'.

While a technocracy is close, it still requires people who 'represent' a portion of the populace in decision-making. What I am thinking of is one that has no formal representation at all, only societal culture and processes to allow government to become an emergent feature of society as a whole. Technology would definitely need to be very advanced for something of such a nature to occur, at the very least...but before that can happen, we need to identify how it would all fit together.


- Newfie

People are capricious creatures. Chaos would consume any society that "dynamically reflected" the will of the people.

I don't want the will of the people dynamically reflected in my life. Not in RL and definetly not in SL. The average person has the intellect of a tree stump. Thank the GOD (Ancient Spider), that we get such a low voter turn out in the U.S.

Briana Dawson

hehe ya, Harry Harrison used that theme in his Stainless Steel Rat Is Born novel *worships*!!

I'm thinking that we could have a form of government like Heinlein proposed, and took heavy criticism for, in Starship Troopers, the movies glossed over the political aspect, but the book was pretty blatent about his citizen voter ideas. Essentially you earn the right to vote, and those who vote take it pretty seriously. In Sl you could "earn the right to vote" based on how long you have been paying tiers and/or doing/making things that make SL better or by hosting charity events or something that shows you are not just a casual player but an asset to game. This may seem unfair but might give the dedicated an extra push to work even harder at coming up with new things. Just an idea!

Newfie Pendragon wrote:



You raise a really interesting question. How could a direct democracy type model function, assuming we were starting from a clean slate.

One of the major criticisms of direct democracy relates to whether voters would be making informed decisions. Perhaps part of the problem here is the whole concept of a single vote in time. Perhaps if we look at more of a market system, with repeated choices over time, we might get a more useful result.

Instead of a vote at a single point in time, consider an ongoing alignment on one side or another of an issue. You go in with one choice, but at any time, based on information or observation, you can switch to another position on the issue. It would be more of a weighting system than a voting system. More like the free market where you decide each day where to spend your money.

Another aspect of this approach might be to impose a cost to expressing a position on an issue. In a market model it costs you to make a transaction. Similarly, if we tried to apply market thinking to direct democracy, there would be a cost to taking a position on an issue. If it ceased to be important to you, you might decide to drop out of the weighting because the ongoing cost exceeded your interest in the issue. This would also cover the question of whether someone has anything at stake in the issue. The more that was at stake, the more determination there would be to take a position.

There might also be consideration to how many positions you could hold at a time. In order to prevent simple financial strength from affecting political involvement, a limit to taking positions on 10, or 20 or 100 issues might level the field. OTOH, perhaps financial clout should be recognized with more ability to be involved.

What collective voice?

Yeah. I am not sure about any kind of government in SL, especially since there are no good working models inthe real world to emulate.

But this idea, (usually referred to as a "Meritocracy" is very appealing to me. It wont fly nowadays because we have spent the last 30 years or so convincing ourselves that we are all "equal" and that everyones weepy opinion on everythign is as valid as everyone elses.

In a Meritiocracy, those who's goals never soar higher than a TV a beer and a bowl of chips (see my signature below), would be tolerated, but not recieve full citizenship or be allowed to vote.

In most setups like this, they are also not allowed to reproduce. Full citizenship and reporductive rights being allocated only to those who care and are contributing.

Which is fine by me.

How did the thread get diverted from the representativeless scheme Newfie introduced to one in which people are proposing a voting system in which the right to vote is denied to those who choose to kick back, relax, and mind their own business?

The only way an automated government of the people would work is cold hard factual information on every issue being understood by everyone who votes. Majority wins, thats it. Unless its a situation in which a compramise can be met based on the percentages of the votes. People can choose not to vote. Those who want to be involved can have their voice. Random people must be selected from those who voted to tally the votes and announce the descisions. No "entrust", random people every time. 60 random people that don't know who else is going to be counting the votes, count the votes. Their results will be posted in a public place for all to see. The numbers that match up the most will decide the outcome of the vote. This is how I see this working in SL that is.

Whats wrong with how SL is now? I don't see any problems really, Well goverment wise. Anyways why would you want to bring that stupid RL idea in SL?

Ferren, in RL, they already tried the idea of making people pay for votes, i.e. only landowners get to vote. Or they tried to make African Americans pay to vote in the "poll tax" which was outlawed as a form of racism. I'd hate to see that revived under the cloak of some kewl new cyber thingie, when it's just the age-old power-mongering.

I'd definitely be opposed to a technocracy, Seth, especially the brand you appear to be touting, with its apparent tropism for glorification of violent anarchic leaders and leftwing sects. We already have a loose situation where the technologically savvy attempt to lord it over others, often acting as if their information and knowledge is a kind of arcane magical spell only for the illuminati, and people with just common sense and gut suspicions get ridiculed as tinfoil hat wearers on teh Intarnut blah blah. We definitely have too much of that, with a small but vocal minority feeling they're in a privileged domain that brooks no dissent because it's "too complicated" for "the rest of us". Remember how the Catholic Church used to do that in the dark ages?

Newfie, your idea that there is some "function" of government that can be isolated as a series of automatic and impersonal processes that essentially can be computerized is interesting, but belongs to the technological utopia and arcane domain and as such bears a good deal of scrutiny.

The fact is, Philip's attempt to put that sort of direct democracy here on this website has all kinds of fatal flaws we've discussed --

-- vote-purchasing -- this was tried as an obvious experiment right here on the forums
-- vote-swaying by various movements and groups -- people rally their spam lists to vote a certain way, people can't or won't get informed and take direction from friends, bosses, etc.
-- alt-gaming -- alts can vote
-- squeaky-wheel ism -- the loudest and most frequent posters get to have a say
-- favouritism/insiderism-- certain propositions already have a pre-cleared go-ahead from Lindens or influential older players; those who learn to work the system and get the right unofficial nods from Lindens get to put up propositions

There's no such thing as an "impersonal mechanism" that works free of people. And once something gets free of people like that who provide the necessary scrutiny and corrective, it becomes the property of a technological elite which is the usual Bolshevism of a tiny "educated elite" believing they are the "advance guard" etc.

There will be all kinds of forms of coercion that take place subtly and not-so-subtly to influence such an "impersonal mechanism". To take but a tiny example: a good number of "subs" are going to take direction on how to vote (if they *must* vote) from their "doms". I didn't sign up to live in a community endorsing slavery and force in this manner, and yet this form of governance will be accepted as a "voting mechanism" by your "impersonal machine". Ditto other kinds of coercion that can happen in a wide range of settings -- apprentices to craft guilds masters; tenants and landowners, especially on private island sims; people on one sim afraid of neighbours' retaliation; consumers dependent on businesses for supply; etc.

It's no accident that union members cry "nothing about us/without us" when dealing with management. They don't want automatic and impersonal processes that management sets up without their voice participating and serving as a corrective.

Don't forget as the experience of an Algeria or a Russia proves, direct democracy and mass democratic participation doesn't necessarily give you a liberal, fair, and just society with tolerance for minorities and wisdom of government without oppression.

If you made it possible for everybody to touch a voter on something like Tringo listings, you're not going to get what YOU might desire which is a world in which Tringo is filtered out.

The importantance of a free media operating without fear or favor can't be overestimated as an important corrective to any system of government, by technology, technocrats, or old-fashioned ward-heeling.

In response to the original post, yes, representativeless government is possible. In a society governed by a brutally oppressive authoritarian regime there is probably no sense in which the government is representing the oppressed bulk of the population.