Political Machines

online

This talk is an adaptation, and extended discussion of the ideas written about in a recent article: https://bit.ly/2V3TmMA This article was translated by Audrey Tang and reposted on the PDIS site: https://bit.ly/3hNiFfD

At g0v 2016, I gave a talk entitled "pol.is in Taiwan: Bridging the gap between public discourse & public policy". Since then, the world has been inspired by Taiwan's approach to deliberative democracy.

In contrast to deliberative mechanisms evaluating one issue at a time, "Political Machines" focuses on political parties in democratic societies as "compression algorithms" for the public will, given an input of every issue simultaneously. That is, political parties are mechanisms for reconciling and reducing complexity in democratic systems — but the fight against polarization is a fight against oversimplification.

Civic technologists can work with organizations like independent news to create public models of the public will that are higher dimensional and thus higher resolution. This is a call to embrace the complexity parties handle as a problem which can be approached with care and consideration rather than fear of chaos and disorder.

Challenging ourselves as technologists to think about democracies beyond parties provides an enormous opportunity and freedom to consider what processes institutions might adopt with independently funded members of legislative bodies. This talk will consider both theory and case studies from around the world.