[Deep Thoughts] The Last One

[Kyle]

Note: It's the last of the list of "deep thoughts conversation starters" I found on the internet. Enjoy, then weep.

With the invention of the internet and the advent of big data and crowd sourcing, it’s finally possible for citizens to govern themselves directly. Is it a good idea for the masses to directly govern themselves or is governance something better left to professional politicians?

[Phoebe]

No offense because I like reading the things people post in response to these questions, but this last one is another example of the basic nonsensery of the enterprise. "Professional politicians"? And the false-dilemma choice is between being ruled by this group or the totally unsupported premise that people can directly rule themselves via, I guess, the Internet or Tumblr or something? What the hell? It's a bad question. It's a bad question that only reinforces stupid, irrational thoughts about the subject matter.

[Tahlvin]

I take it the idea is that there is now enough information available to "educate" the average person about issues, and infrastructure in place to allow quick "votes" on issues, so why not do away with legislatures and just allow the people to rule directly in that capacity.

No, I do not think that's a good idea. There are subtleties and complicated interplay between issues that I wouldn't trust myself to make, let alone some other people I know who vote. You end up with a situation where nothing gets done because people can't agree, or stupid stuff gets done because people react rashly and emotionally rather than logically.

Electing "professional" politicians allows us to theoretically put in place someone to represent our interests, who can take time to study details and interplay between issues and make educated choices. And I like the approach of having different houses with different terms of office (2 years, 4 years, 6 years), so you have a mix of representatives of shorter term that are somewhat subject to the current moods, and others of longer terms that can take a longer view and not react as emotionally to a hot-button issue of the day.

Yes, I realize that's an idealized view, and the actuality is much more fucked up. But can you imagine how fucked up it might be if we try to involve every voter in every decision?

[Phoebe]

I don't disagree with anything you said. I still have a major problem with the whole premise of the question. How is it somehow obvious that the internet has made it possible for direct democracy to occur in a way it couldn't before? That is so far from being obvious to me it's not even funny. How is it that people have access to information or education about issues in some radically transformative way they didn't before? And what is a professional politician? Any representative or executive decider? Judges? Any member of the executive branch bureaucracy? It's an extremely loaded term that belies a particularly screwed-up way of thinking about political life.

[El Jefe]

[Tahlvin]

[Phoebe]

[Phoebe]

[WillyGilligan]

Phone lines have been available for a long time, but you still had to get to the phone. Now we're at a place where most people have cell phone connection. You can theoretically have constant communication for voting now that you didn't have 10 years ago. You can now reach into your pocket, see the entire bill being debated, get political commentary arguing the merits and register your choice in short order (depending on how fast you read and watch videos). You could theoretically push out a mass text notification to the population that there there is a decision to make, a link to the details and a 12 hour deadline to register your vote via app. That's new.

It also doesn't fix the other issues that the Founding Fathers had with direct democracy, and it opens up the democratic process to network attack and exploitation in ways that representatives travelling to D.C. and standing up in the same room doesn't. I say the Demo-Singularity is a bad idea.

I personally think CSPAN contributes to the dysfunction of our government, but that's a separate issue.

[Phoebe]

I don't disagree with anything you're saying; my complaint here is with the question and the assumptions that prompted it. Arguably such decisions would have been easier in the past, or at least equally as easy, when fewer news sources were consumed by a larger segment of the population. Many modes of public broadcasting of important messages were extremely effective, and it's still true today. The same problems people would have had getting to a phone to communicate their information exist with respect to cell phones today. I really don't see that anything has changed in that regard, except that you can look up real-time information far more quickly. Maybe that helps when you need to make an emergency decision that you want to crowdsource. But how many decisions of our democracy are emergencies that benefit from crowdsourcing? Right now we can't even get our s*** together to help people who are stranded in crisis on an island, and we knew their problem was coming fairly long in advance.

So now look at any other kind of decision, which isn't an emergency requiring immediate access to detailed information and a quick means of communicating a message back. In other words, nearly all the decisions that the legislative branch of government makes. How exactly is Big Data supposed to be helping us here? Where is the obvious trail of connected dots that leads from there to direct democracy being a possible solution, supposedly for the first time now? What special magic of crowdsourcing applies itself to legislative deliberation and decision-making? The question is just fundamentally screwed up and does not account for its own assumptions.

[El Jefe]

I don't think direct democracy works outside of rather small groups stuck in similar situations, and interacting face to face on a near daily basis. Take your general department teams/crews in retail environments. When you're working in close proximity on a regular basis (for the same, largely unchanging, goals), you can put things to a vote and expect reasonably informed responses with analysis of the whole scope of problems being faced.

Tackling larger issues with a great deal more vagary and nuance in civilization sized groups? I remain unconvinced. The better version of this question would have looked at opinions on an impartial third party running the show (ala our new machine overlords). There's more room to work with that topic.