Ten Soft, Fluffy Pillows

I find that, for a lot of people, when they are first confronted with the intentions of the Straight-Up Plan, they feel like they are being pushed over the edge of a cliff.

“Wait, what? Total voter power? All at once? Without conditions? How could that possibly work?” The mind reels. One is standing at the lip of a deep chasm, filled with dangerous possibilities.

If you are used to ideas that ‘put the voters in charge’ but with a lot of conditions to control the processes they use, where they get their information, how to conduct deliberation, etc., you will experience a slight sensation of ‘loss of control.’

I will admit, it is a leap. But I would argue, it’s a small leap. And there are at least ten, big, soft fluffy pillows to land on!

So, let’s start looking at the heft and fluff of those pillows. 

Pillow #1: Self-determination theory

Here is the fear: Ordinary voters will be irresponsible, disengaged, reactive, or manipulable. Here is the pillow we land on: Self-determination theory is well supported, and it predicts that people function better when they experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The legacy system deprives voters of all three. The Straight-Up System restores those experiences. We are not asking today’s politically disempowered voters to behave magically better. We are changing the conditions under which they participate. Power should not be seen as the reward for civic maturity. Power is one of the conditions that produces civic maturity. Any dire predictions about the insidious effects of ‘rational ignorance’ need to be posed, not in isolation, but in the context of the real benefits of self-determination. 

Pillow # 2: Information theory and entropy

The fear is that millions of voters cannot possibly process all that complex legislation. And here is the pillow: Correct. They cannot. That is, if information has to pass through a chaotic media environment full of bias and then somehow aggregate into a single mass opinion. But Straight-Up Democracy does not rely on mass opinion forming in the wild. It creates channels for creating high quality information: Circles, delegates, caucuses, committees, Back & Forth communication records, direct votes, revocable proxies. The Straight-Up System reduces informational entropy by organizing flow. That is, it reduces error and loss of signal. The problem is not that voters generate too much information. The problem is that the legacy system gives that information nowhere coherent to go.

Pillow # 3: Cybernetics and feedback loops

The fear is, mistakes will happen. Here is the pillow: Yes. They will. But the key question is whether the system can detect and correct mistakes. The legacy system actually has incredibly slow, crude feedback: elections every two years, filtered through parties, donors, campaigns, media, and the structure of incumbency. DSUp has continuous feedback: voters can vote directly, revoke proxies, replace delegates, switch Circles, form new caucuses, and hand out orders. The issue is not whether democracy makes mistakes. It always will. The issue is whether the system can correct them before they metastasize.

And, if you are now worried that the system is so responsive it will never find stability, fear not.  The Straight-Up System also has all of the characteristics of a stable, homeostatic biological system.   

Pillow # 4: Network theory

The fear is, direct voter power will become a mob. Here is the pillow: DSUp is not an undifferentiated mass. It is a network. Local nodes, small Circles, delegation chains, caucuses, committees, direct voter override, and multiple pathway for influence. A mob is many people with no structure. Straight-Up Democracy is many people with structure. In fact, we like to call it ‘the structure of freedom.’  The Straight-Up System does not unleash a mob. It converts an atomized mass into a connected network capable of solving problems at an unprecedented scale.

Pillow # 5: Principal-agent theory

What’s the fear? That delegates and representatives will become the new politicians. Here’s the pillow: In the legacy system, the agent escapes the principal. In DSUp, the principal remains connected to the agent through revocable proxy, direct voting, recorded orders, and recallable delegation. This puts an end to runaway delegation.

Pillow # 6: Public choice theory

The fear: these new institutions we are creating will be captured. The pillow: Capture happens when concentrated actors can control chokepoints. DSUp removes the main chokepoint: the elected representative as sovereign decision-maker. Since voters retain direct voting power and can revoke proxies, capture becomes harder to stabilize. Straight-Up Democracy does not assume virtue. It assumes self-interest and then changes the machinery through which self-interest operates.

Pillow #7: Stress biology and agency deprivation

Here is the fear: Voters are angry, irrational, tribal, and overstressed. Pillow: Yes — under conditions of low control, low predictability, poor feedback, and social isolation. The legacy system produces political stress and then uses the resulting behavior as evidence that voters cannot govern. Straight-Up Democracy changes the stress environment substantially. We should not judge the voters’ democratic capacity by how they behave inside a system that structurally humiliates them.

Pillow #8: Living systems and biomimicry

Fear: The system will be too complex to manage.

Pillow: Living systems manage complexity through distributed sensing, local processing, feedback, redundancy, adaptation, and repair. DSUp works the same way. It does not centralize all intelligence in one legislature or one elite body the way the legacy system does. A living organism does not need every cell to understand the whole body. It functions because each part has a role, a connection, and can give and receive feedback.

Pillow # 9: Sortition itself

Fear: Without sortition, lawmaking cannot be intelligent, representative, or deliberative. Pillow: Exactly. That is why voters will adopt sortition once they have power. Again, sortition is not made unnecessary by voter power. It becomes necessary because of voter power.

And finally, Pillow # 10: The Straight-Up Transition Wiki: A Guide for the Sovereign Voter

Follow me here. The Democracy, Straight-Up! Project will be implementing the Claim Your Seat Voting Portal, the software that makes Straight-Up Democracy a practical reality. The software itself will function like a constitution–it won’t let voters violate the fundamental principles needed for true democracy, namely, voter sovereignty, human-scale affinity groups, layered aggregation and revocable delegation. But it also treats the voters like a legislature. And a legislature gets to make its own decisions as to how to organize the work of law-making. Now, a DcL can get its ideas from anywhere, but we will have a website linked to the software with an extensive Best Practices section. There, the delegates and voters putting the DcL together, will find what they need. Given sufficient funding, we will have a program in place to advise and work with DcLs individually, and as a group, on best practices for conducting the work. There will be, as currently contemplated, a two-year period during which the first DcLs are building; the early adopters will be filling the ranks of the DcL, and looking to pass resolutions and draft legislation that will facilitate legislative work once the DcL ‘goes live,’ that is has one of their own members sitting in their seat in congress. If you understand what is meant by ‘agile development’ in software, you’ll understand the process of developing a DcL to full capacity. 

How do we generate content for the Best Practices Section? We’ll be creating a wiki, since that is the cheapest and most practical way to go. Like any wiki, it will be written by volunteers. How should the committee system work once the two party system is caput? What is the system for earmarks once patronage and party loyalty are out of the picture?  What about appropriations, Community Project Funding, federal grants, oversight, the new House Office Manual, and a set of rules for the transition to the Straight-Up System? Wherever will we find people who will happily spend 40 hours drafting a proposal for each of these?  It’s not like there’s a legion of nerds out there, who have maybe left their jobs in government and academia. It’s not like they would be thrilled to find a place where their obscure expertise actually matters. Who, in that situation, would want the chance to change everything that was wrong with the system they spent their careers struggling to work in. Oh, wait a minute…