[extropy-chat] Re: [wta-talk] Max More article on democracy andtranshumanism

[Technotranscendence]

On Sunday, November 16, 2003 4:04 AM Giu1i0 Pri5c0 gpmap at runbox.com
wrote:
> I think we should make a difference here between
> the concept of democracy and any specific
> mechanism for the application of the concept.
> Concerning the concept itself: everyone should
> be involved in the management of the community
> of which ve forms a part, I am just not going to
> give it up as it is a central part of my worldview.

I'm not sure that is what most people mean by "democracy."  I refer you
to Robert Nozick's _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_ too.  Therein he gives
something which, IIRC, is basically the tale of a slave.  He starts out
with a person in what is without controversy a state of slavery: you're
owned by someone else who decides what you do and when you do it.  The
tale progresses to where there are limits on the owner's power.  E.g.,
you have weekends off or you can keep a portion of your production for
your wants.  The tale proceeds further to where the owner takes on a
bunch of advisers.  The next stage, IIRC, is one where there's no single
owner, but now 10,000 other people vote on what you do.  The final stage
is one where your vote gets tallied in as well.  Now you have a say in
your management.:)

But you just mean having a voice -- not necessarily majority rule or
"rule by the demos."  In which case, I refer you to Myron Lieberman's
_Privatization and Education Choice_ -- a basically boring tome, but its
author brings up an interesting distinction between voice and exit
organization.  (Most of the book is online at
http://www.educationpolicy.org/files/privbook/httoc.htm , but the part
I'm referring to is only reference in the table of contents, but does
not appear to be online.:/)  In a voice organization, you have a say in
the management, but you're pretty much stuck with the system and you
have to work within the system to get things done.  Examples are
governments and government agencies in Western democracies.  E.g., in
the US, the local zoning board is appointed by a public official who is
ultimately elected.  You can, in many cases, go before the board and try
to convince them of your position on an issue.  Or you can work to
change the composition of the board.

In exit organizations you usually have almost no direct say in the
management of the organization, but you can decide not to do business
with it.  An example of this is almost any business that does not have a
legally enforced monopoly.  While you can't change the way things are
run directly, by take your business elsewhere you can avoid any
discoordinations between you and the organization.  (You can even form
your own organization to provide whatever want it is.)

Voice organizations tend to be slow to change and when the do change
it's follows the pattern of punctuated equilibria -- viz., long periods
of stasis until would be reformers have enough power to overturn the
existing order and install a new one that lasts for a long time until
the next wave of reform.  Generally, voice organizations also need some
form of compulsion in the end to prevent loss of membership -- which
would, obviously, make them exit systems.:)

Exit organizations tend to change much more quickly as they tend to
minutely track coordination with other community members.  (This applies
to for-profit and non-profit organizations, since if enough people exit
either type, eventually they will fail.)

> Concerning specific mechanisms, I think we are
> not doing too bad in most of the Western world,
> but of course there may be better mechanisms.

I agree there would be better mechanisms even within the voice
organization of Western democracy.  For instance, requiring
supermajorities for certain issues, such as tax increases, would make it
hard for the organizations to pander.  There are also other
possibilities, such as sortition, sunset laws on all policy legislation,
and the like.  However, these are all cosmetic and, eventually, would be
overturned by any effective elite.  (In fact, this is the history of
democracy: how special interests overcome any obstacles to obtaining
state power to redistribute wealth and control society.  See
Hans-Hermann Hoppe's _Democracy -- the God that Failed_ for an political
economic analysis of this.  Hoppe's site is http://www.hanshoppe.com/ )

But it also depends on what your standard of evaluation is.  Western
democracies are better than, say, totalitarian dictatorships, but are
they really better than other alternatives, such as free market
anarchism?  Also, are they getting better or worse as time goes by and
why?  Hoppe and others (public choice economists) would argue that
democracies are not only getting worse but must always get worse because
of their very nature.  They would point out that the nature of the
system eventually works against the rhetoric.  Special interests easily
capture positions of power, e.g., and hand out favors to supporters as
well as work to minimize adversaries.  (The system might balance, BUT
the problem is no one inside it wants to remove the machinery of
despotism.  Each person or group only wants to capture it.  To be sure,
even when limits are placed, these are easily overcome by, e.g., placing
the right enforcers (cops, prosecutors, executives) or interpreters
(judges) or having emergency clauses and the like.)

> For example, we have grown up saying
> that the model of direct democracy (every
> citizen votes on every issue) breaks down
> when a community grows in size

This depends, too, on what you mean by it working on the local level.
The old saying about democracy being four wolves and a deer voting on
what to have for dinner comes to mind.  The only check on this would be
something like consensual democracy which would mean nothing is done
unless everyone agrees -- which is kind of the democractic equivalent of
an exit organization.:)

Rather than, though, setup these internal limits, the better method
appears to be to limit the democratic system's power.  If, e.g., it
doesn't have power over what is published or broadcast, then there's no
need to vote over whether _The Catcher in the Rye_ or nudity on TV
should be allowed.  (In the long run, though, power tends to add to
itself.  If you get someone demagoguing against nudity on TV or
Salinger's novel, eventually someone's going to say, "There ought to be
a law against that!")

> and then the community must switch to
> representative democracy. This is not
> necessarily true in a posthuman society
> where everyone has ver brain permanently
> linked wirelessly to the global net. There
> for every decision to be made you can
> google those (and only those) whose lives
> can be impacted on by the outcome of the
> decision, and poll their input even without
> their conscious involvement. This would
> be direct democracy on a global scale.

But how would their vote be tallied?  Do you also assume there would be
enough information (the Hayek Knowledge Problem would be faced even by
posthumans; in fact, it would be faced by any information system that is
not omniscient:)?  Do you likewise assume there would be no special
interests that would try to thwart others or redistribute costs?  Also,
how would you decide conflicts?  E.g., imagine posthuman X just wants to
keep on transcending, but a large body of other posthumans decide it
would be nice to get rid of X -- or take X's resources for some other
purpose?  Even if X screamed that this would negatively impact it, what
if the others didn't care?  What would stop them?  Certainly not
democracy -- especially if they are the majority.  We're back to the
four posthuman wolves voting with the one posthuman deer on what to have
for dinner.

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/

    See "Communication Breakdown: The Novels of Stanislaw Lem"
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Lem.html