Sam Strasser

My friend Jeff called me the other week to propose an idea, or rather to verbally think, as he often does.  Democracy, it seemed, was on Jeff’s mind, and its relation to the internet.  I, a fan of the internet’s power to empower people, love to talk about such things, and so Jeff and I struck up a conversation.  That conversation has continued, taking the form of email, phone calls, facebooking, social bookmarking and some blog posts.  He and I argue, and agree, and it is fairly fun to debate how it is, and how it should be.

Our idea has settled at a sort of equilibrium, and I thought I would try to explain it, all in once place, in one form, and let the conversation continue from there.  As has been the case, though, even since I started writing this post, a change has occurred.  Our idea, which had been in such a describable state of equilibrium, now has two very distinguishable pieces: the abstract idea and one possible implementation.  Here I describe the abstract idea only.  A later post will be about the implementation.

The guiding principle of Jeff’s idea, simply put, is that technology should allow democracy in the pure sense of the world, in that every person should be able to participate in every decision of some entity.  The idea is often called direct democracy, and many of the criticisms against it can be addressed with the massive spread of the internet.  I will address the (and my) concerns with the particular idea many times in the future, but let it suffice that I believe in the idea of a direct democracy.

With that idea in mind, consider a new community, centered on the internet, which governed itself.  As software evolved, it could elect to upgrade, update, change or revamp itself.  It could choose to sell itself (for example, with online advertisements), and it could choose to redistribute that wealth in any way it saw fit.  It could pay an individual deserving praise or it could contribute it to a fund, or anything else.  It could, and almost certainly would, do things that neither Jeff nor I can imagine now.  I really can’t know.

It is weird to say that it, the community, will take such concrete action; usually we don’t think of community as being able to take such individual actions.  But that is the idea.  By having direct and equal access to all decisions, participants could do anything they liked.

So that is the idea that we finally settled on, that I want to address as time goes on.  First, I think, Jeff should correct the oversimplifications and errors I have committed here.  Our last conversation was by telephone, and I am prone to forget things.

In the future, I will address my abstract concerns, and I will introduce Jeff’s concrete idea, if he doesn’t do it first, that is.