Digital Shadow Governments

General Chat
#1

Hey folks,

this is more me thinking out loud than anything else but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Audrey Tang and the digital democracy project she is part of

If you’re not I highly recommend this podcast episode which covers the fascinating story of how she came to be the digital minister of Taiwan

In a nutshell, she and her friends built a complete digital government infrastructure that could replace the opaque existing one and registered it under the domain .g0v (rather than .gov)
Later in 2014 there was a student-led protest which ultimately led to the government agreeing to use the gov zero infrastructure

Of course this was a black swan event and so many synchronicities came into play to make this possible…but I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth while to play with the idea to create more of these “digital shadow government” infrastructures
So that when the opportune moment comes they can upgrade existing democracies in similar ways as in Taiwan

HoloChain would AFAICT be the perfect framework for that since its decentralised nature would prevent a power grab by any party and thus make adoption by the government in question less risky (at least that’s what it looks like from my limited understanding of the technology, please correct me if I’m wrong)

Maybe there could even be a single shadow government framework which could be customised to the need of each individual country thus making development much more efficient?

TL;DR:

  • build digital government infrastructure that is more transparent and efficient and is plug and play for the respective government
  • wait for the opportune moment (crisis, protests etc.) when the government will agree to adopt the infrastructure as a win-win choice
  • prepare it for LOTS of places to increase the likelihood of catching these opportune moments globally

Thoughts?

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#2

This is a really interesting idea. I wish I had more time to participate in a conversation about this. I bookmarked the podcast to get back to it.
I believe we need to be experimenting with building parallel structures to the existing system. It’s great to see the idea sprouting up all over.

I agree that Holochain would be the best structure. While there are other “new internet” projects out there, e.g. Urbit, ThreeFold. I don’t think they have the same kind of resiliency that Holochain does. I don’t know them well enough.

It looks like lots of the tools are showing up in the Holochain ecosystem.
Neighborhoods, Flux Social, Hylo. Some group(s) just needs to start designing the patterns to apply the tools with.

1 Like
#3

I do like that idea. I’d propose to design those digital government templates with a more decentralised pattern in mind - like implementing tools for direct democracy. Or at least design tools for rapid feedback.

I am rather frustrated with the way most western democracies are run these days. Every four years we elect a bunch of people. They make all the decisions. If we don’t like one of those decisions, our only true way of communication is to vote for someone else (in their entirety) in another four years - not a lot of informational flow here…

On a related note, such a digital government would be the perfect tool for direct democracy / idea incubation (which is actually something we could start testing, even if it hasn’t been adopted as the official platform yet). It goes a bit like this:

  1. Any person can formulate a proposal
  2. Next it will be sent to a dozen random people in the system for review
  3. If a majority regards the proposal to be at least discussion-worthy (fair points / no red flags), it will be passed to the next tier
  4. This cycle can repeat a few times, always increasing the tier of participants one or two orders of magnitude. If the proposal reaches the top level (lets say 100.000 people), it becomes an official point on the political agenda

That way it would be a pretty straightforward process for anyone to propose an idea. And we’d crowd-source the evaluation, therefore sharing the burden of the review process (just like Holochain).

Some more thoughts:

  • One can subscribe to certain topics of interest / competence to preferably receive proposals in that category
  • All proposals will be anonymous until they have gone through the whole process. Only after they have been passed / rejected, whill the author be made visible
  • Since the review process takes time (lets say two weeks per tier), there’s enough of a slow-down effect to stop impusilve proposals from being rushed through.
  • It will be a great (and important) challenge to design a fair and useful reputation system
  • A good reputation might allow fast-tracking of ideas (entering your proposal on a higher tier, thus shortening the review process)

Just imagine what an awesome display of Holo-Power that would be! :sunglasses:

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#4

I love the idea @jakob.winter

Aligned with the Holo-Spirit I feel that what is of most value is an ecosystem of these pluggable democracy modules - the more diversity the better - so that each party can decide for themselves what they would like to use

Maybe this thread could serve as a place to crowdsource ideas for this democracy toolkit

Let me start by adding a classic: liquid democracy

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#5

Our current systems are really some form of abdicating our responsibility and selecting a new “king.” All the way down to local governemnt elections.

Are you guys familiar with @artbrock’s “The Future of Governance is not Government?” Cant get link for you now. Don’t remember what he’s said, but it is a good addition to the conversation.

#6

You mean this one?

Reading this I get the feeling that the “battle plan” I outlined in my first post was actually a/the core motivation for HoloChain/Ceptr right from the beginning ^^

Cool to see the energies/ideas converge in this space

Let me add this resource outlining design criteria for future governance systems

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#7

Yup That one!

#8

those tables juxtaposing the two paradigms is incredibly helpful: “Resource Optimizing Commonwealth > Separate Ownership” as well as “Systemic Accounting > Transactional Accounting”.

though imo ‘commonwealth’ is a bit of an overused term, i think a liquid-democratic and non-proprietary digital and material commonwealth is basically what i think many p2p/dweb projects are all aiming for.

do you know the people behind the project? who is the ‘CEO’ who is looking for an assistant?

edit: also is the project working on producing anything in the material world?

#9

I know at least Forrest Landry is involved which I learned from a now dead link elaborating his Ephemeral Group Process (https://eonvlabs.com/ephemeral-group-process)

Which is now starting to be implemented and tested in the real world: What is EGP? – EGP.Community

Besides that I have no clue

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#10

still haven’t dared to look into Landry because i tried and got a bit overwhelmed. maybe i will soon. how big is his influence on the project which you mentioned in your introduction post on the introduction page? how much of your work is influenced by him?

#11

Haha yes I can relate, his Immanent Metaphysics is a real mind-bender.

Funnily enough the pitch you referenced is from a time I wasn’t too familiar with his work yet so there is not much overlap.

However, his ideas were so profound to me that I “rewrote” the whole thing from scratch using his formalism.

I can’t do it justice here but, in a nutshell, you can start to think about arbitrarily abstract concepts and their relationship by identifying the trinities which they are a part of.

E.g. subjectivity, objectivity and their relationship or past, present and future

His formalism then allows you to treat them with a rigour akin to particle physics, which is insanely powerful given the breadth of topics you can discuss.
For example, in his own work he treats topics like time, consciousness, particle physics, goedels theorem, quantum mechanics, mysticism, choice etc. all using one singular toolkit!

In my own work I use his toolkit to understand our relationship to stories by identifying the trinity consisting of what I call the MonoLogos, DiaLogos and InterLogos.

Where the MonoLogos represents all the ways stories reach us in asynchronous ways through symbols (Wikipedia, Books, Youtube Videos etc.) and the DiaLogos represents the way they reach us synchronous in the context of conversations (Face to Face, Zoom etc.).
And the InterLogos simply constitutes their dynamic relationship (e.g. sharing a blog post in the chat of a zoom call)

There are more trinities I use in the final project but that’ll be communicated more clearly in the updated pitch I’m working on. More on that soon :slight_smile:

Btw, I consider myself still a beginner in understanding the Immanent Metaphysics so take everything I said as an intuition aid more than anything else.
If there are people out there who feel more confident with the toolkit feel free to reach out, I’d love to have some conversations to deepen my understanding and share intuitions.