Liquid Democracy is a fast, decentralized, collaborative question-answering system, which works by enabling chained answer recommendation. It occupies the middle ground somewhere between direct and representative democracy, and is designed to ensure that the things we all hold in common stay properly maintained (by small, stealthy, distributed teams of anarchist kung-fu badasses, if need be), even in the face of radical technological change.
I love liquid democracy! Have done so ever since reading that article 10 years ago.
However, a very important point made by Sayke, the guy who came up with the idea, is almost universally missed by most people who talk about it these days, and by every single software implementation I’ve seen to date.
And that is the difference between vote delegation/ proxies and vote recommendations.
See here where he writes:
Other systems similar to LD have been designed, but as far as I know they employ vote proxying, rather then answer recommendation
And here https://campaigns.wikia.com/
I’d just like to stress the difference between vote proxying and vote recommendation. One’s “pull” and the other’s “push”, and that’s a big part of what makes liquid democracy unique. With liquid democracy, people can request recommendations from multiple people, and from there they can do all kinds of things – take the average, ignore some recommendations, ignore all the recommendations and vote their unique conscience, etc. with proxying, you can’t do that, and that’s why proxying isn’t enough
He doesn’t spell it out, but vote recommendations also help to keep power at the edges where it belongs, and makes it harder for people to become too influential.
Please, everyone, stop saying delegative democracy is liquid democracy, because, really, it isn’t.
As Sayke wrote at the end of that article from 10 years ago:
I felt like LD was being sorely misinterpreted – people were basing their picture of LD off of 3 year old information. I didn’t want to see mischaracterizations surround an idea I came up with. If people are going to hate it, I want to make sure they’re actually hating it, and not a strawman of it, you know? So, I wrote this article.
And hence why I wrote this article too. Because the Liquid Democracy I love is NOT Delegative Democracy.
“… with proxying, you can’t do that …”
Why not? With the system I am working on (Mesh Democracy) you could over-ride a delegates vote. And it should not be so hard to set up multiple “Representation Tokens” indicating if the default situation should be average/consensus/whatever.
Really – I get what you are saying – but I really don’t want to manually vote on every issue – I want more automation!
It isn’t really what I’m saying, it is what Sayke said (although I agree) 🙂
re: why not? Well ‘proxying’ is generally assumed to me giving your vote to some*one* else. If you want to make it mean pretty much that same thing accepting people’s vote recommendations then great!
BTW, I spotted in this article that DemocracyOS is supposed to do liquid democracy stuff too. Pia Mancini writes:
Yes – Ed has also mentioned he’d like to have some form of LD in represent.cc
I guess the line between “delegation” and “recommendation” is a little blurry – really a scale of automation, which should be customizable!
I’d prefer to be forced towards the recommendation end of the scale, as I can always automate my client manually 😉
I like what Alex says and also what Sayke says, however, there is an important flaw to democracy, whether it is delegative, direct or recommended: it is based on opinions of people on a agree/disagree dichotomy. History seems to point out that since the birth of groups of people trying to work together, that this is basically fucked. My personal experience confirms this. The discussions of the People’s Front of Judea from Monty Python’s Life of Brian sum up my feelings towards most democratic groups.
I think mesh and liquid democracy are towards something better, but all concepts so far that I’ve heard of are also stuck in this (language) paradigm. So the challenge in my mind is how to break from this.
Some general principles to work towards I believe include:
1. Needs-centred dialogue (similar to Nonviolent Communication)
2. Socioecological Context
3. Empericism
4. Automation
5. Consent
A completely ideal process may be elusive, but I’m gradually defining something that could at least work – it mixes some basics from Alex’s concept of mesh democracy, with a bit of sociocracy 3.0 and something I call SURI (Satisfied, Unfulfilled, Resources, Ideas).
Have you heard of PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting)? Some permaculture groups use it. SURI is a remix of this. Part of SURI is an NVC style needs dialogue – proposals are developed around solutions to satisfy needs.
People don’t “vote” agree/disagree in a consensus, instead there are stages and rounds (summarised here):
Stage 1 | Developing a Proposal:
1. A group dialogues about which major needs are unfulfilled in their community – within a socioecological context
2. Dialogue for technical, ecological and/or social ideas to meet the identified needs.
3. Break away to form small teams (maybe 3 or 4), based on skills and interests, over a set period of time to detail solutions and form one proposal per team (much like a hackathon)
Stage 2 | Offer Proposals and SURI:
1. One proposal is presented to the group and each person:
2. S – Gives evidence for how needs could be Satisfied by this proposal
3. U – Gives evidence for how needs might be Unfulfilled by this proposal
4. R – Highlights Resources – available or lacking – which could enable or prevent the proposal
4. I – Offers Ideas or something interesting
5. Repeat for all proposals
*If the community is large (i.e. about 50 or more), an app can be used by everyone, which collates the information – whether people are there in person or not.
Stage 3 | Cooperate and Collaborate
1. Teams dialogue to figure out how their proposals could cooperate and collaborate
Stage 4 | Update Proposals and repeat SURI:
1. Each proposal has a physical area to be worked on in an open space, where cross-pollination of ideas is faciliated
2. Repeat Stage 2
Stage 5 | Decision
1. Each proposal is named and each person in the group has the opportunity to object with reason
2. If nobody objects – with good reason/evidence why needs could be unfulfilled – then the propsoal goes through by consent. People consent by not giving reasoned objections
2b. If there is an objection, a proposal either goes back to stage 4, or is scrapped, depending on the objection
3. Proposals that have gone forward are celebrated! and then actioned
Stage 6 | Action
1. This needs work!
Hi Charlie, nice proposed process, reminds of lots of other nice things 🙂
Remember, though, that the point of liquid democracy is to replace military hierarchy but to still be able to make decisions very fast!
What this touches on is the fact that there is no one decision making process that fits all circumstance. I’m reminded of this classic piece about when not to use consensus:
https://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/when-not-to-use-consensus/
Cheers Josef,
That’s a tasty article. I prefer consent decision making, rather than consensus, it’s usually much quicker and more satisfying in my experience so far. This is part of a way of doing consent I’ve experienced:
https://sociocracy30.org/the-details/circles-and-decision-making/
I don’t see how liquid democracy based on vote recommended consensus will be as fast as the consent based process I’ve proposed in most situations where a community is trying to improve the lives of people living in it. In emergency situations, In my experience, consent is way quicker. Also there’s no point in being quicker or more efficient if the efficiency has no reference to needs in a socioecological context. This will usually be pointless, as it’s not related to the underlying reality. History will repeat itself – the speed or efficiency will be a cognitive distortion without this. For example, why is it good to quickly decide whether to give someone a monetary fine or not, if the underlying issues of human needs are not dealt with? The opinion-consensus-recommendation process becomes less relevant.
This reminds me of this piece on sportsmanship from the perspective of cooperative games:
Sportsmanship, for example, is an artificial concept that wouldn’t exist at all except for competition: Only in activities where people are attempting to defeat one another is it meaningful to talk about doing so in a graceful or virtuous fashion. (People who play cooperative games don’t require reminders to be “good sports” because they’re working with one another toward a common goal.) Likewise, theft does not exist in cultures where there is no private property – not because people refrain from stealing but because the idea literally has no meaning if people’s possessions are not off-limit to one another. There is no such thing as leisure unless work is experienced as alienating or unfulfilling. You cannot commit blasphemy unless you believe there is a God to be profaned. And jaywalking is a meaningless concept in Boston, where I live, because there is simply no expectation that pedestrians should cross only at intersections.
From https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/whos-cheating
Consensus of opinion to solve problems becomes meaningless in a needs & evidence based consent system, especially when people’s basic needs (food, shelter, comfort, water, etc) are fulfilled through automated processes.
liquid democracy that follows people is not safe. it is like facebook without the cats.
structurally it is a map of the decisions and trust that everyone has.
there is a reason that elections are anonymous.
it could easily be broken by deep sixing one delegates votes and breaking their trust tree.
in our society where there is so much corrupting pressure on regular democracy this puts direct pressure on people. our problem is not the democracy but the capitalism that is distorting it for individual interests.
we could achieve the same responsiveness by having issue trees and voting for issues and forking those choices if we want to differ on some sub issue.
that would be safer than tracking people and more focused on the challenges we face.