[liberationtech] Freedom in the face of power and a vanishing vote

[Peter Lindener]

Hi
   Mike A-

   I my analysis finds two broken aspects to the flow of information
regarding the true desires of the electorate into the governance policy
decision process.
  1st problems regarding the information flow of the electorates desires, is
related to how are system of representation is currently configured....
Representational trust relationship management apparently does not scale well
towards the many-to-one, infrequently group-selected, not so accountable,
politically twisted by money, single representative.
  2nd regards to need for a wide open option choice spaces with prioritized
preference ranking between each voters expressed ranking of alternatives...

   Both of these problems are fully addressable....  But the second of these
challenges has only recently been properly addressed with in the more recent
work the Joey Durham and I collaborated on together.

   Feel free to write with any questions you or others might be having...

   all the best
       -Peter Lindener


On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Michael Allan <mike at zelea.com> wrote:

> Dear Peter,
>
> > ...but it is not entirely a lost cause....  These problems regarding
> > the transmission of the desires of the electorate into the
> > governance process can with the appropriate Social Network based
> > Decision systems ... can be effectively addressed....
> >
> https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=11uyedC3rAWHaNZDIP5JLcVIcbL_1oTGdOeoYSTKhdxg&pli=1
>
> Thank you, I definitely agree!  I have a question about how the
> delegable proxy works here, and I'll forward it shortly.  I'm a
> software engineer working on project Votorola, and we use similar
> models.  Maybe we can collaborate?
>
> > My own personal opinion is that the formalitys of Information
> > Theoretic Social Decision Theory can be applied here..... This t
> > gain significantly more insight as to what is not working in our
> > current socio-political system....  Yes even in America..... There
> > seems much is currently boken within our system....and it is not
> > hard to use mathematical induction to show that such is so...So in
> > that sense [Michael Schudson's] statement that things actually work
> > in our American democracy...seems more like wishful thinking than
> > critical, formal analitc review.
>
> Except that the break appears at a single point.  I took care in
> responding to Michael's defense of the system that the voter not reply
> as an offended victim of that system, but rather as a passive aspect
> that insists on nothing but its own existence.  I now take it as a
> structural fault (a break) and these are its two broken ends:
>
>    * individual person
>
>    * individual vote
>
> The individual person matters greatly in a modern society; while the
> individual vote matters not at all.  The structure has failed at this
> precise point, between the two.  My first impression of the immediate
> cause and effect:
>
>   A. The electoral system's model of society is wrong.  The formal
>      aggregate of votes in the count engine does not correspond to an
>      actual aggregate of voters in society.  The individual votes are
>      brought together to make a result, but the individual voters are
>      not brought together *as such* to make a decision; therefore no
>      valid decision can be extracted from the result.
>
>   B. The breakage is total, but the failure is non-catastrophic.  The
>      electoral system has collapsed onto an external party system
>      that is now carrying the full load.  The electoral system has
>      been bypassed.  The result that was supposed to be a decision of
>      the voters is actually a decision of the parties.
>
> I lack experience in this kind of system analysis, and this is only a
> preliminary assessment in any case, but I think the cause and effect
> (A, B) are palpable in the narrative.  Michael's defence is an attempt
> to hold the structure up, but the fault manifests itself everywhere,
> and the structure cannot stand as it was supposed to.
>
> Can anyone see a flaw in this analysis?  Please critique freely,
>
> --
> Mike Allan
>
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