How Tech Can Help Save Democracy

medium.com ^ | 11/29/16 | Ben Rattray

[spintreebob]

Americans feel government doesn’t serve them, their voice isn’t heard.

Most solutions focus on the next political battle. While short-term battles are important, we need long-term solutions more profound than better policies, politicians or parties; we need a better political system.

Technology has been blamed for our current political environment; for social and economic disruption that led to disaffection, for spreading fake news. Well-designed technology offers the best chance of creating the political system needed: more participatory, responsive, informed democracy. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Silicon Valley invested billions designing technology to improve industries; commerce, communications, travel, transportation. Less than 0.01% of that has been invested in technology to improve democracy.

Money invested in politics has been dedicated to advertising. We needed a better democracy, instead we got better ad targeting. There are important changes that major tech platforms can and will make to mitigate the impact they’ve had on political discourse; in particular fake news and filter bubbles. The tech sector shouldn’t be satisfied with reducing harm; we should be ambitiously investing in new tools that address the key requirements for an improved democracy.

Technology is uniquely capable of creating a political system that addresses the public’s growing frustration by satisfying the following three core needs:

Mass Civic Participation: Citizens need effective outlets for expressing their voice on the issues that matter to them more often than every 2–4 years, and at the local as well as the national level.

Responsive Government: Elected officials need to be responsive to citizen concerns and directly engage with them in a way that ensures they feel authentically heard.

Trusted Information: We need a new channel of distribution for political information that elevates trusted sources to guide citizens as they take civic action; a trust graph for politics.

[spintreebob]

I don't agree with much of what he says. But FReepers and Conservatives: Be prepared. Either choose to participate in what the left builds and influence how it is built ... Or build a better mousetrap that will draw more voters to the new re-education.

[Olog-hai]

---

Either choose to participate in what the left builds and influence how it is built

---

That is not the way to fight the left. Whatever the left builds is inherently corrupt.

[Squantos]

So we’re a Democracy now versus a Republic with democratic processes ?

[spintreebob]

Does FR have a ping list for Tech-and-society? If so, I want on.

Ben Rattray, the author, is founder and CEO of Change.Org which is famous for its petitions from citizens. The gofundme sites are a direct result of his action.

This article is his opening pitch for him to get big bucks from FB, twitter, google, etal to build his trusted version of the truth delivery system. I predict he will succeed in raising big bucks. He will want some conservative participation. The question is how much and who.

[BenLurkin]

Tony Blair explained this the other day: The future of democracy is too important to be left up to the voters.

[JimSEA]

“we need a better political system.” Lenin had some ideas on this. Stalin, Mao, Obama and Merkel have some amazing ideas on this.

[jonose]

I would like the States to take back control of the Federal Government by enacting a system that allows registered voters to direct the congressman or Senator to how to vote and which bills to introduce and support.

Each registered voter would get a pin number and a State web site would be the official online voting site. Penalty for not carrying out the vote would be ineligibility to ever run for office in that Stat again.

[spintreebob]

We would create a trust ranking index. The measure of how trusted a source is would not be based simply on their total number of followers, but on the number and diversity of other highly trusted people who follow them, whose trustworthiness would be measured by the number and diversity of other highly trusted people who follow them, and so on. The result would be to surface the people and organizations of all political perspectives who are highly trusted both by the trusted members of that community and by trusted people with different perspectives.

So different perspectives are not the same thing as diversity in this plan. And only some different perspectives are trusted in this plan.

In the LBGTQX community the Ls, Bs, Gs, Ts, Qs, and Xs might each bring different diversity and trust each other and thus be trusted perspectives. But all Evangelicals and devout Catholics might have have no gender preference diversity. Therefore, they will have no diversity trusting them and thus they will not bring a trusted perspective?

This is obviously in the early stages. Above all else, trust and trusted perspectives is subjective. In this model there is no room or value in the concept of objective reality.

If all trusted environmental experts agree about climate change, then that agreement is more important in a democracy than objective facts. If those who bring objective facts disagree with the trusted experts then clearly those whose are objective are not experts and thus are not trusted?

[logitech]

“How Tech Can Save Democracy”

Greece has been waiting for this for like a long time.

Get back to us when you figure it out.

Sincerely,

The Founding Fathers, USA

[JimSEA]

My main worry is that a “serious” group will secretly decide to assassinate both Trump and Pence to seize power for the “progressives” and form a puppet government with all the appearance of some sort of people’s movement. Open war is closer now than ever with the hysteria over Trump and Pence.