Decentralized Governance — Of, By, And For The People

Dan Larimer, the brilliant creator of Bitshares, Steemit, and the soon-to-launch operating system for decentralized applications, EOS, has stated that governance is the problem the blockchain must solve, and that it's the problem he's dedicated his life to solving.

Each day I act to bring about non-violent solutions to world governance because I enjoy the creative problem solving process.

It’s not just about coming up with hypothetical solutions that might work if the government got out of the way, the solutions have to be so powerful and so effective that they work even with the government in place today, that they are capable of displacing government.

Until we find solutions that are able to replace the things that government does in the real world [we’ll] always have government, so we need to be actively looking for ways to coordinate, incentivize, and communicate with one another to give ourselves our freedom. What I’ve suggested is that governments are just a form of consensus. It’s centralized consensus, centralized reputation. What we want to do is replace government consensus with some kind of decentralized alternative.

Given the accelerating disintegration of our world at present, not to mention our own nation, the governance problem needs to be solved without delay. Current governmental systems are producing staggering amounts of collective unintelligence at a time when collective intelligence is the only thing that can save us from eventual catastrophe.

Perspective

The question is, how do we go about solving the governance problem in a decentralized way? I think a good first step toward an answer is to put things in historical perspective. The current American system was the last major leap forward in governance, embodying the ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment.

Arguably, its foremost proponent and philosopher in the New World was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, co-author of the Constitution, and third President of the United States. What principles might he offer to guide us? Jefferson was first and foremost a champion of self government, which is to say, government of, by, and for the people. He said that government should embody and implement the will of the people, and played an instrumental role in establishing our democratic republic with guarantees of free speech and a free press to endow we the people with a voice through which to inform our elected representatives of our collective needs and desires.

The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it… The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney.

This bears repeating… The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will. Jefferson’s reasoning here encapsulates the very core of our solution — we need a new and better organ (i.e., decentralized) through which to determine and announce our collective will, and if we produce this new organ it will automatically have the necessary legitimacy, the legal authority, to replace our existing government.

Collective Intelligence

But why, you may ask, is Jefferson necessarily right about this? How is it that the people are able to produce decisions superior to those of dedicated hierarchies of highly educated professional experts?

The answer to this question appears to be that the people, collectively, are intelligent due to what has been called, the wisdom of crowds, which says that so long as the people are diverse, decentralized, and independent, and there is a way to aggregate their feedback on specific subjects, that their decisions, predictions, and judgments will be consistently as good or better than experts in those subjects. This is an amazing truth, and one that strikes me as nothing less than an undiscovered law of nature.

Because of the wisdom of crowds, the people can be seen as a natural resource, a reservoir of collective intelligence that need only be tapped by the right extraction technology (i.e., our blockchain-based decentralized governance solution) in order to reap a bounty of precisely what we need to turn our earth ship around and save ourselves from ourselves.

But that said, now the really big question emerges. What exactly is this revolutionary new technology for determining the will of the people? Dan Larimer is searching for it, but has not yet found it. In fact, no one else has come close to finding it as far as I know.

Nonetheless, a principal requirement certainly would be that the new decentralized organ must facilitate a true national dialogue in which the people have a voice. This means our solution must be a new kind of media more than a new kind of government; not broadcast, but feedback intensive. And this truly puts us on revolutionary ground, for we are not only implying a merger of media and government for our solution, an idea with which Jefferson would almost certainly have agreed, we’re talking about reinventing the media facilitating our national dialogue itself.

Media

In Jefferson’s day the national dialogue was mediated by the so-called fourth estate, newspapers, and the guarantee of a free press he placed front and center in the Bill of Rights…

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And this is what Jefferson had to say specifically about newspapers and government. Astonishing, I think you’ll agree.

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Let that sink in… For Jefferson, the progenitor of the last great leap forward in governance, the media component was more important than the governmental. So it would appear that we are moving in the right direction, evolution is indeed at work. And yet, despite the emergence of the Internet, or perhaps even because of it, our free press is now failing miserably.

Why is this happening? Here is yet another trillion dollar question, but a few answers stand out as obvious:

• As Ben Garrison lampoons here, social media censorship is rampant, in lieu of some sort of public vetting of the truth, and MSM is just as bad by acts of omission.
• Centralization within partisan political silos that seldom speak to each other, only broadcast their viewpoints to their existing audiences.
• Media monopolies are not open, not transparent, and offer little if any feedback opportunity to the people.
• The social media filter bubble phenomenon is especially pernicious.
• Fake news — sensationalism (clickbait profiteers), political extremism (alts left and right), and deliberate propaganda (MSM) — appears to justify the censorship.

And it bears repeating… the main thing missing here is the key ingredient for a national conversation, and that is feedback. The Internet is capable of providing it, but is currently not doing so, at least not in any effective way. Instead, we’re getting more and more censorship from the Internet media giants.

Requirements

Given these shortcomings, in addition to the principal requirement for the new system — that it make possible a true national dialogue giving rise to the emergence of the will of the people — we can now append some additions. Our new governance system must also:

• Be based on feedback, and we must use Internet media technology to achieve that.
• Be open, meaning that it must make it possible for all sides of an issue, left and right, to talk directly to each other, to debate, with the public feeding back to decide the winners.
• Be decentralized and secure so that it is trusted by all.
• Be equipped with all possible conflict resolution mechanisms.
• Produce measurable consensus on specific individual issues.
• Provide the vetting of all news in public, by the public, with full transparency.

So given these as our requirements, how close are we to the emergence of a new system of governance? As you might expect, there is good news and bad. Here is the good news, as far as I can tell.

• We will soon have blockchain technology upon which to construct our new system — namely, EOS — to provide the essential massive scalability, decentralization and security. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
• Conflict resolution is fascinating for people. Conflict is the heart of all drama, and so conflict between left and right over the issues of the day will actually drive scale. People will use the new system because they are entertained by it.
• Conflict resolution and consensus mechanisms are essentially the same thing, and appear to be achievable by aggregating collective feedback on the individual statements of experts discussing and debating the issues of the day.
• A more formal consensus generation process, a kind of virtual assembly, also seems possible.

But then, of course, we also have some bad news.

• None of the blockchain governance projects of which I’m aware are solving the core problem of determining the will of the people, that is, how to facilitate a national dialogue and achieve feedback at scale. Most are trying to work with existing governments to augment and enhance the voting process (e.g., liquid democracy). While these projects are laudable, they are not going to have the necessary impact in time.
• Mass scalable collective conversation, conflict resolution and consensus are admittedly hard problems to solve.
• Most people don’t read enough, or read well enough, to participate in a text-based collective governance system.
• Text comments, the primary method for feeding back on text posts and articles, don’t scale well and lead to trolling. They end up requiring moderation, which is expensive and prone to partisan censorship.
• People prefer video to text, but current video solutions a la Google Hangouts don’t scale well either, as only one person can speak at a time, and the ability to moderate live group conversations is a rare talent. Again, moderators are too often partisan, and this kind of video doesn’t solve the feedback problem either; consider the uselessness of the live chat feed attached to most webinar and other group video solutions.
• Censorship, due to centralized vetting, the argument from authority, exacerbates conflict and polarization. Censored groups resort to violence when they can no longer be heard, and this could actually lead to civil war. Again, we really are running out of time.

Solution

Given all this, is a new governance solution even remotely possible, and if there is hope, what might it look like?

What appears certain is that the solution be a new decentralized media system capable of facilitating a new national dialogue that produces the will of the people on the issues of the day. The new system must be capable of scaling massively, and people must want to use it, they must be entertained by it. They cannot be compelled to use it out of a sense of duty or obligation, that is, because it is good for the country.

This new conversational media system must be based on video, not text, because most people prefer watching over reading, and video offers built-in transparency and discourages trolling. However, such a video solution is going to require a significant breakthrough, as Hangouts and the like are simply not up to the challenge.

Television, especially the TV talk show, is undoubtedly the most popular medium for collective conversation ever to appear in human history, and so our solution should be modeled after that, but it must also offer feedback. In short, conversational video must be reinvented. One can imagine a video conversation platform featuring a multiplicity of multi-threaded conversations, each dedicated to a specific news story or issue, and each with its own panel of experts, allowing the audience to not only indicate their level of agreement with what the experts are saying, but to submit their own video questions and comments, even to join the experts and become panelists themselves.

Something like this, built on EOS and capable of scaling into the millions, would enable a new national dialogue to take place in every nation on the planet, bringing forth the collective intelligence so essential to our survival. It would give the people of all nations a voice, and allow the general will to emerge, which Jefferson equated with the law itself, the very foundation of legitimate and wise governance. In the beginning, such a secure, accurately measured consensus could be presented to government representatives for formal enactment into law, but perhaps eventually it might even replace the system of representational government Jefferson was so instrumental in establishing here in America. Were such a system to come into being I have no doubt whatsoever that he, and Dan Larimer, would approve.