The idea:
Internet-enabled direct democracy with elected advisers and an emphasis on social networking. We are the law makers. We make the decisions!
The Coming Age of Internetocracy
Copyright 2011 by Lawrence A. Compagna
Table of Contents
Preface – page 6
When Ideas Meet Gunfire – page 7
The Wave – page 13
The Wave Described – page 15
How it will work – page 19
Change by Peaceful Means –page 28
The Argument Against– page 30
Ghost Towns– page 32
A More Formal Description– page 34
Voting Regions – page 37
A Moderate Version – page 38
Criticism and Rebuttal – page 40
The “Perfect Storm” – page 47
Afterword: “The Occupy Movement” – Page 48
About the Author – Page 51
Preface
A few months after this book was first written a peculiar movement began... Occupy Wall Street. At first the movement did not seem to have a defined purpose, but as time went on it became clear that many of the demands of the occupiers seemed to be compatible with those expressed in this book.
At the time of second issue the movement continues to grow and where it ends I have no idea. See the afterword for more on this phenomenon and how it relates to Internetocracy.
When Ideas Meet Gunfire
Flash forward to another place and time. The youth are rebelling. They face tanks; they face the armies of the people in power.
They have only rudimentary weapons, but they have a cause: they want to be empowered to make decisions on the issues raised in their parliament, their Duma, their congress. They have grown weary of being “represented” by politicians when, thanks to the internet, they are able to represent themselves.
They are tired of a small segment of the population unduly influencing these political representatives in ways that benefit only them. They are tired of corporations paying lobbyists to influence these representatives for their benefit.
In short, each adult man and woman desires a way to influence the lawmaking bodies of the world directly, without the use of a representative.
It has finally dawned on the masses: the internet has developed such that direct democracy via the internet, what we call “Internetocracy” has become possible.
So they demonstrate peacefully, and when that does not work, the demonstrations become more aggressive, and when even that does not work the non-violent protests begin to take an ugly turn.
To reiterate, no longer do the masses want to rely upon a “representative” who is often swayed by party policy, lobbyists, or personal greed. That is not say there are some do-gooder politicians, but far too often even the do-gooder is representing their own view of what is good and not the view of his or her constituent.
The peaceful protesting dies out, but because their voices are not heard the protests turn violent. Thousands die, but the people in power hang on. They will not relinquish their power without a fight.
Thousands always die when a new political idea takes hold of the youth. Think of the turmoil in the Middle East in 2011, or the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, or even the American Revolution. The shift to a new and completely revolutionary political idea is seldom attained through peaceful means. Too many people in power will lose that power to give it up peacefully.
They all involved new political ideas that rattled the existing power base, and they all resulted in huge shifts in power, but not before thousands or even millions had died.
Then next wave cometh......
The “Wave”
It will come.
The mere existence of the technology means that the movement will eventually rise up, and it will be opposed by the existing powers, and the power will be overcome by the new movement.
Unfortunately today’s powerful people will not sit idly by, so the change will only come about with violence. But it will come.
The “Wave” described
What will come? What is the “Wave” of which I speak?
The revolutionary idea of which I speak is that of ONE issue, ONE person, and ONE direct vote lodged on the internet with the expert assistance of elected advisers who stay tightly connected with the world of his or her constituent using the social networking tools that have emerged over the past few years as well as sites such as YouTube to make frequent and direct broadcasts to the constituents.
The fundamental unit for enacting legislation is the person. The fundamental unit for electing advisers is the community.
The chief different between this system and the current system is that the elected official cannot vote on new legislation, they can only advise. The ultimate decisions are made by directly by the voting masses over a secure encrypted connection.
Some issues will seem quite simple to the voter and he will need little assistance from the elected advisor. Others are complex bills, perhaps a free trade bill or a bill to limit immigration. Such bills will rely heavily upon the advice of the elected adviser to guide the people through the weighty issues.
Obviously the elected adviser will still be a person of some prominence and wielding significant power, but those powers will be significantly less than elected officials have today. In a representative democratic system the elected official is in office for a period of time and can vote on a bill as he or she sees fit... often having to tow the party line or worse yet; succumbing to the lobbying influence of an unseen special interest group. More often than not these unseen lobbying groups are large corporations and the wealthy.
Furthermore, some representative democracies allow for significant campaign contributions that effectively make the elected official beholden to those who provided the funds to get them elected.
These abuses would be limited in a new system where elected officials did not actually make the final decisions.
In today’s democracy we have one person who can elect one representative. This model, which was at one time revolutionary, has now become outdated. The old model was necessary because of the vast distances between the centers of power and the constituents.
Today’s technology has made these distances irrelevant. With the internet comes the ability for every man and woman to study and vote on every issue. The only requirements are an internet enable device, an internet connection and an ability to read and write.
The ability to read and write, at one time thought to be the minimum educational requirement to vote, will now have to be accompanied by another requirement. Everyone must have access to the internet.
The ability of every man and woman to vote on every issue via the internet with the support of elected officials who provide sage advice to their constituents will from this point on be called “Internetocracy”.
Internetocracy takes democracy one step further from its present position, and almost back to the time of Athenian direct democracy when each eligible person voted on each issue.
How it Will Work
You sit down at your computer. You have a cup of coffee next to the keyboard; it’s a beautiful sunny day. You check your email, your Facebook, the news.
Now you log in to the voting portal.
The voting portal is a secure connection, just like the one you use for banking.
There are a handful of issues being considered by government right now. You are only interested in two of those, so you will not vote on the others. You will be considered as abstaining from those votes, and leaving the matters to others who wish to have a say.
But the other two you are deeply interested in. One involves prison reform, and the other is a bill to change the speed limit from 70 miles per hour to 60.
You are not allowed to vote until you have studied the mandatory information. The mandatory information includes a summary of the issue, a summary of the proposal, and a written recommendation from your elected and hopefully wise advisor. In addition to the mandatory documents there are other documents deemed optional. Among the optional documents are detailed documents, statistics, studies, and even YouTube videos that provide a forum for both sides of the debate. Your elected advisor will also have videos discussing the legislation.
There are also user blogs on the subject, and a comments page. There is even a Facebook page you belong to where the issues are discussed via wall posts, notes, etc.
You read a few of these, but they too are optional.
Before voting you have just finished watching a very interesting YouTube video where the issue is hotly debated by both proponents and detractors.
Reviewing these videos, blogs, and comments are optional, but the required documents are a minimum if one wishes to be eligible to vote on an issue.
You study these documents. They summarize the issue, and both sides of the argument.
You then go to an online forum where you can discuss the issue with other people who are interested in it. You interact with other real time. One person gives you their phone number and you call them to discuss. You discuss the issue with a friend over Skype.
All this took you an hour on a beautiful Saturday morning.
You’ve done your research, you feel ready to vote even though the deadline is not for another week. So you vote “Yes” to the prison reform bill, and “no” on the other issue.
You log off your account and head to another important function: Your date with a surfboard at the beach.
Meanwhile in another part of the country Marge is a shut in patient at a local hospital.
She is very civic minded and has studied every outstanding bill currently being considered, as well as every related document, both mandatory and optional. Even though she is elderly she is very adept at using a computer and the internet. If she wasn’t she would’ve gone to a place specially set up to help her exercise her democratic right, perhaps the library down the street.
On the bills voted on by the surfer, she votes in the exact opposite opinion. No prison reform, yes on the speed limit law.
It’s a stalemate. If only these two people vote, the bill will not pass.
A bill can only pass with a 50% plus one majority, if that is what is agreed upon in your jurisdiction. Others will set the bar at two-thirds, and so on. But in your area, it is 50% plus 1.
But wait, Josh has just logged in!
Josh is a wealthy businessman, very right-wing in his leanings. He is also a member of a visible minority.
After studying only the required documents, he votes no on prison reform, and no on lowering the speed limit to 60.
The “No” side wins.
The process has worked at the grassiest of the grassroots level!
Democracy has prevailed. The masses have spoken.
Change by Peaceful Means
Gandhi and other intellectuals have promoted a peaceful path to change. Although such means have had some success, they are by far the minority.
There will at first be peaceful attempts at change aside those who are more radical and less patient.
But as the power center resists the change, the growing frustration of the populace will see the support for those who promote violent change gain in popularity, especially among the young male population.
The longer the change is resisted, the stronger and more virulent the agents of change will become.
Until one day they take up arms.
This is not an endorsement of violence. The most constructive course for this to take is for representative democracies to re-invent themselves into direct Internetocracies so that long-term economic grow can be sustained. This is possible and preferred, but it has not been the way that changes such as this have taken hold in the past. We can remain optimistic, however.
The Arguments Against
There are many who would argue that the masses cannot vote directly on an issue, and that they need to be represented by better qualified people.
I argue that most of the “qualified” people are attorneys who wish to use an elected position to consolidate a position of power for them self. Such people are inherently motivated by selfish reasons are poor representatives, especially when the populace has the means (the Internet) to study issues and represent themselves on each individual issue they feel strongly about.
Today’s elected law making representatives would be replaced with elected officials who would serve as advisers to their constituents. They would not decide the fate of new bills. They just provide expert advice to their constituents and allow the masses to decide for themselves.
There are also those who would argue that technology can be manipulated. Those were probably the same voices that alleged that internet banking was not possible because the internet could never be secure enough to manipulate wealth. That, of course, has proven to be untrue.
By way of comparison, if billions of dollars can be moved around daily on the internet, the medium is secure enough to facilitate direct voting on new legislation at the grass roots level.
A number of specific criticisms will be examined later in this book.
Ghost Towns
The centers of power will not in fact be ghost towns, but the buildings that house the people who represent constituents will be largely empty. These building are not longer the primary center for debate. Debate is waged on social networking sites, YouTube, and a variety of other forums.
Consequently there will be no need for a congress, a parliament, or a Duma. The process is virtual.
But there will be one aspect of government that will be exempt from significant change: the actual civil servants who are employed by government to run the day-to-day affairs of the government.
A new level of civil servant will also be added: those who administer the voting portal, and those who translate the results of voting into action.
And they will carry out exactly what we the voters decide.
A More Formal Description
Summary
Internetocracy is the political concept that advancements in internet technology should be utilized to create a direct democracy.
In this paradigm, there is no longer a reliance on an elected representative government, but a reliance on the constituent.
Representatives are replaced with elected advisers whose job is to use their expertise to advise and advocate for their constituents, especially when the legislation is complex.
Background
The concept of elected representative government is a paradigm that has its roots in a time when communication, technology, and the level of education necessitated such a model.
Over time certain regions of the world have become more literate, communication has been greatly improved, and internet technology has become widespread and secure. Consequently, it is argued that the population of such regions can and should exercise a more direct influence in the law making process through the use of a secure internet based system.
Benefits
The ability for each voter to participate directly in the law making process pushes the process down to its lower level, and reduces the reliance on a concentrated group of people who are may be tempted to use such power for personal gain, or who may be easy targets for people who wish to compromise the process.
It is argued that in a direct web enabled democracy, it is more difficult for a small group of people with interests in opposition to the mass population to unduly influence the process for their own benefit to the detriment of the constituency as a whole.
Another potential benefit is that more people are apt to vote if they can do so from the comfort of their own home on their own computer. This is particular true of people who may not be very mobile due to illness or who are frail.
Voting Regions
With a system where representatives are no longer required to decide the fate of bills, the entire system of geographic representation becomes redundant. Not only is a congressman from Rhode Island not required, the idea of Rhode Island being represented is not necessarily required. Perhaps the one useful vestige of this concept is that an elected expert advisor could be a resident of this area to more easily provide face-to-face interaction with his constituents.
Each voting citizen of Rhode Island would cast a vote, and those votes would be tabulated against the votes of the entire nation. In such a system a law cannot pass if the popular vote was truly less than 50% plus one.
In a Commonwealth country like Canada there would no longer be ridings, because there is no need to send a representative from a distant region to the center of political decision making. Through the use of our internet portal, we are all at the center of political decision making.
Because the process is more virtual the elected adviser at the federal level could spend more time in his constituency providing face-to-face interaction.
A Moderate Version
If those in power voluntarily gave much of that power up, it would be possible to modify the current political landscape to allow the direct participation of the masses via the internet.
In this paradigm, the elected official no longer votes on laws. His or her purpose is to see to it that the will of the constituent, as reflected through direct voting on each proposed law in the voting portal, is carried out by government. It is, as has been stated before, also an advisory role. Thus the elected official would be a person with significant credentials.
The representative would be elected, but not to make laws. He or she could also be impeached by the electorate and removed from office if the constituents feel that performance has been unsatisfactory.
The previous descriptions for how direct voting by the masses would take place in the voting portal all still apply, as do the examples. It is just the role of the current politician that has changed.
The key point is that elected officials would no longer be “law makers”, they would be agents of their constituents empowered to ensure that their will as expressed directly in the voting portal is carried out and to assist them.
Because the representative does not have the ability to decide the fate of new bills, the power of the corporate lobbyist would become negligible as they no longer have just one person to influence from a constituency. They essentially have to influence every constituent. It will be far more onerous to attempt to influence thousands where previously only one person had to be influenced.
Criticism and Rebuttal
Like any new system there are many detractors with criticisms that are sometimes valid. Here are some of those criticisms with a rebuttal to them.
Criticism: The internet is not secure enough to facilitate on-line democracy with binding votes tallied electronically.
Rebuttal: The security embedded in certain aspects of internet traffic is encrypted and now considered very safe. As a primary example I cite the banking industry. Billions of dollars are transacted safely and securely over the internet every day. Most readers will be very familiar with this.
Criticism: Electronic democracy such as “Internetocracy” can be hi-jacked by people how are the experts in the code used.
Rebuttal: Again I point to the banking system where trillions of dollars are at risk if internal and external controls were more permissive than they are. However, on-line banking is very secure because of these controls and it has been in use for several years now. The internet programs that support the democratic process would be at least as secure as those in the banking industry.
Criticism: Direct democracy will not support my view of the world. Case in point, it may not result in the legalization of marijuana.
Rebuttal: The democratic process should not pander to a minority interest group so long as that groups human rights are not violated. The rule of the majority is a basic tenet of Internetocracy.
Criticism: A tyranny of the majority over the minority would ensue if Internetocracy was in use.
Rebuttal: This is a valid criticism. It is imperative that some sort of charter of rights and freedoms be in place upon which all legislation must abide in a world of Internetocracy to ensure that the majority do not infringe upon the rights and freedoms of the minority through legislation. An example of this would be protecting the rights of the gay and lesbian community to coexist peacefully.
Criticism: The masses are not educated or intelligent enough to decide upon legislation.
Rebuttal: While the electorate may not be as educated or intelligent on a whole as those who are in power today, the fact is that many of the same people who are in power today would be those who act in the capacity of “elected adviser”. Therefore the brain trust will continue to exert influence, but they will be far less open to corrupting influence and will be forced to stay closely in touch with their constituents. In complex matters the will be the ones upon who the electorate rely upon for guidance and wisdom as they make the final decision.
Criticism: Representative democracy amounts to a delegation of law making which frees the masses to carry out their day-to-day business. In other words, the legislative process is too time-consuming.
Rebuttal: This is also a valid concern. The process will have to facilitate giving the electorate an overview of all pending legislation and allowing them to pick and choose which bills they wish to participate on. As shown earlier in this book, most people will only want to participate on deciding bills which have a direct influence on their lives or over which they feel strongly about. Few people will vote on everything.
Furthermore the bills will have to be presented with easy to understand summaries of the legislation along with the recommendation of the elected advisor. Such information would likely be mandatory before someone could log a vote. From this point the voter could study more materials, view more YouTube videos, and discuss with other voters before ultimately deciding the issue. The voter would be free to choose to ignore the recommendation of the elected adviser and vote with his or her conscience.
Criticism: Not everyone has a computer or the internet.
Rebuttal: the use of personal computers, smart phones, and the internet is wide spread through the first world. Still there are those that do not have access to these resources. The government would have to create a grants system to ensure that even the poorest have access to at least one computer in the household with an internet connection. This should be as basic as the right to a primary education.
In cases where people are not comfortable with the use of a computer, there must be centers where they can find both a computer and someone to aid them so that they can participate in the direct democratic process.
The “Perfect Storm”
Currently we have two developments that are about to come together: The internet has evolved to allow direct voting on bills, and there is intense dissatisfaction with the existing political system.
The intense dissatisfaction stems from the constituents perception that professional politicians are in fact working for the wealthiest individuals or for corporations. In other words, politicians are seen as using their positions of power to benefit themselves and not for the good of the people. This is a generalization of course, but this is the way the masses currently perceive politicians.
Afterword: The “Occupy” Movement
The first version of this document was published shortly before a worldwide phenomenon erupted.... the so called “Occupy” movement. It began with “Occupy Wall Street” and has since spread to many cities around the world.
According to CNN Author Alan Silverleib in an article published on that website (Oct. 18, 2011) called Occupy Wall Street: How Long Can It Last?:
“While the protesters highlighted a number of causes, the overarching theme remained the same: populist anger over an out-of-touch corporate, financial and political elite.”
I propose this is the beginning of a movement that will eventually lead to a revised system of democracy, one that is direct with its defining characteristic the complete absence of representative law makers.... a movement henceforth known as “Internetocracy”.
According to an article written by Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson in the Christian Science Monitor (Oct. 25, 2011) called "Does 'Occupy Wall Street have leaders? Does it need any?", the Occupy Wall Street [movement] and similar movements, symbolize another rise of direct democracy where people collectively make decisions for themselves without having elected leaders that has not actually been seen since ancient times.
About the Author
Lawrence Compagna is a management and information technology consultant who advises large organizations on how to streamline both business processes and their information technology infrastructure to achieve greater efficiency and be more effective.
He resides in Southern California.
Correspondence can be sent to:
Box 437, 24 Roy Street, Seattle Washington. 98109
The Internetocracy Facebook page is located at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Internetocracy-Democracy-refined/259184544098941
Note: A short book discussing the concept is available for free on Google Documents at:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3N6vBE7b053ZjA2Nzk3MmYtMjc0Mi00N2NjLTkxOWEtZTY4Y2JjZDVkZGFk&hl=en_US
