/tech/ - Technology

How can the process of drafting out agendas for voting be organized? I guess the speaker would need the ability to make a voting proposal, possibly before they even start their speech. For example when they first expresses their desire to speak they could also make a voting proposal.

>For example when they first expresses their desire to speak
I mean to the application, so that they would be added to the randomized pool of speakers.

There is also the problem of various time zones, considering that Assembly meetings should be regular with fixed time intervals. I guess meetings should be on weekends so that people wouldn't need to worry about going to work in the morning, and shift from one timezone to the next in sequential order.

The flow can be programmed to be something like this:
1. A person expresses their desire to speak and gives a voting proposal.
2. He is drawn randomly from the pool of speakers and is given a fixed time limit (if he is not kicked out by the majority vote while he is speaking).
3. A discussion phase when other people can express their opinion on the issue.
4. A vote on the issue.
5. Repeat with the next speaker.

>He is drawn randomly from the pool of speakers
Tho order of speakers should be drawn preferably before the meeting, so that speakers could better prepare and coordinate their time.

If we assume the Assembly meetings would be every weekend, then proposals should be submitted at workdays.

>>11989
>Tho order of speakers should be drawn preferably before the meeting
Also I guess there also should be a phase at the beginning where some voting proposals are dismissed right out of hand by majority vote just based on their descriptions.

Nobody wants to waste time on some pet issues when there are plenty of society-wide issues to resolve.

I'm thinking how can decentralized architecture be combined with authenticated access based on real identities… The application would need to check against some database of people who have verified citizen rights.

>>11991
>The application would need to check against some database of people who have verified citizen rights
Or I guess every verified citizen should be given some hardware identity token.

>>11980
>What would a video conferencing application that can support multiple billion users look like?
If you only want a program that scales to billions of users, without any special higher order organizational forms.
You could use Jami, that's a peer to peer video conferencing software under a foss license, that appears to have no obvious scaling bottlenecks.

>How can moderation be organized in such an application? I guess some aspects can be programmed in, like speaking time limits, and speaking order could be randomized. Also considering all users would be authenticated could muting or kicking be organized on a voting basis?
>I honestly was thinking about VR chat based assembly but that seems far more cumbersome.

Oh you don't really want video conferencing. You want to have a online political venue for democracy.
Two main problems:
1 - authenticating people, even if it currently is too expensive to generate enough fake video of fake people to skew your results, it eventually won't be. That means you need to check up on people in meat-space.
2 - if you want to use computers to vote on politics, you need to make those computers secure enough that it's more expensive to manipulate a vote than what can be gained from vote-manipulation. Current computers are perhaps secure enough to vote on trivial local town issues, like is the local park going to get a basket-ball court or a volleyball court.

If you have genuine democratic ambitions, you can't really replicate online content moderation. It's not a democracy if you can kick people out or mute their political opinions.
To quote the late Mark Fisher, calm down your
<priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn,
<academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake,
<and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd

I don't really know what you want out of this, only that you appear to be focusing on how to wrangle people, rather than empowering collective decision-making. Maybe i'm mistaken about your intentions.

You don't need the excommunication tools, if you give every user the ability to filter what ever they personally find disrupting or objectionable.

>>11993
>You could use Jami, that's a peer to peer video conferencing software under a foss license, that appears to have no obvious scaling bottlenecks.
sounds cool, will check it out

>Oh you don't really want video conferencing. You want to have a online political venue for democracy.
I want a platform for society-wide political decision making that uses video conferencing as it's core for multi-person interaction.

>1 - authenticating people
I'm thinking of unique hardware identity tokens.

>2 - if you want to use computers to vote on politics, you need to make those computers secure enough that it's more expensive to manipulate a vote than what can be gained from vote-manipulation.
Voting in the Assembly should be open.
Integrity of the system could be ensured by the decentralized architecture with billions of nodes.

>If you have genuine democratic ambitions, you can't really replicate online content moderation. It's not a democracy if you can kick people out or mute their political opinions.
How is it not a democracy when majority votes to mute or kick some person?

>only that you appear to be focusing on how to wrangle people, rather than empowering collective decision-making
ability to "wrangle" individuals by majority voting is empowering the collective decision-making

>You don't need the excommunication tools, if you give every user the ability to filter what ever they personally find disrupting or objectionable.
The conference should be a public space and synchronized across all nodes. There is no place for personal preferences here.

>>11987
>if he is not kicked out by the majority vote while he is speaking
Also, voting procedure should be engaged automatically at the beginning and be cumulative for the whole duration of the time given to the speaker, so that if a certain threshold is achieved in the process (for example 51% of votes) the speaker is automatically muted and kicked out.

>>11995
Also people should be able to take their vote back and forth, so that they could interactively react to the speech of the speaker.
But if the threshold gets triggered the issue is automatically dismissed.

>>11987
>A discussion phase when other people can express their opinion on the issue.
Dunno how to organize this step..

enabling everyone to speak at the same time would be a disaster, so we could repeat the same procedure of people expressing their desire to speak on the issue and then again randomly drawing from the pool with some time limit

Sounds a bit like the clubhouse app, which tbh is one of the least enjoyable apps in practical application

>>11997
>and then again randomly drawing from the pool with some time limit
again this is why the ability to mute people is important to punish spamming behavior

if you have nothing to say - stay silent, time is a scarcity

>>11998
>the clubhouse app
<The main feature of Clubhouse is real-time virtual “rooms” in which users can communicate with each other via audio. Rooms are categorized based on differing levels of privacy. “Open rooms” can be joined by anyone on Clubhouse, and all rooms default to this setting on creation. In “social rooms,” only users followed by the moderators are allowed to join. Users need to receive an invite from the moderators to join “closed rooms.”
how is it similar?

>enabling everyone to speak at the same time would be a disaster
though there also should be a period of "live" discussion with randomly drawn human moderators at the end of the meeting to organize the actual enforcement of the decisions of the Assembly by delegating tasks to various institutions such as various high level soviets

The other problem I see is that meetings of the Assembly might take all of the weekends, which would require a high level of political engagement from the population
people would need to learn to enjoy politics, it would need to become their way of life

one of the solutions is also the reduction of the workweek

another question is, assuming people should be paid for attending the Assembly, how do you ensure that they are actually engaging in politics and not just logging in, and then going to watch anime or something?

Dilemma:
politics is a socially necessary work, so people who are engaging in this work should be rewarded relative to those who don't
ie people who attend Assembly on weekends should be rewarded compared to those who watch anime all weekends

but how can we avoid the free rider problem?

>>12003
>but how can we avoid the free rider problem?
I guess if logged in users don't at least vote on the issues - they shouldn't get paid
and if they are forced to at the very least vote then we already got their attention away from the anime

But on the other hand blind voting is undesirable. So it might be more desirable for the people who weren't listening to the speaker to not vote at all…

Maybe use AI to analyze user patterns to determine their engagement level? I'm grasping at straws here lol

Or maybe majority of people would be politically active and attendance levels would be high even without special rewards

I imagine all the boring stuff would be voted out and relegated to the lower levels of the political hierarchy at the preliminary stage, and the speakers would need to be entertaining to keep themselves from being voted out by the irritated public

>>12001
>such as various high level soviets
that's why their official representatives should also be always present at the Assembly meeting

>>12007
>to keep themselves from being voted out by the irritated public
that's also why not engaged people are undesirable - they dilute the votes of the politically engaged, because threshold is a share of the total population in the conference

so any "dead souls" are harmful and should be punished

I guess the application itself could measure the engagement levels based on some behavioral patterns and act accordingly notifying the rest of the network that the user is harmful and they can be discarded when calculating the threshold share.

tho how reliable can those patterns be is another question.

I guess the most obvious pattern is when application is not in the foreground or muted.

>>12011
>>12010
>>12008
>>12009
Tldr: how to create a platform so that idle busy bodies with a high tolerance for listening to bs can dictate rules for productive members of society with a low tolerance for vacuous pontification.

>>11994
>I want a platform for society-wide political decision making that uses video conferencing as it's core for multi-person interaction.
You want to replace physical spaces with digital spaces. Ok that's reasonable it would lower the organization overhead. But to be honest we do need better computer security, at minimum all the technical components have to be open for inspection, and every part has to be publicly vetted so that we can rule out political manipulation via technical subversion.

>I'm thinking of unique hardware identity tokens.
Sure that sounds good if that means that you check for meat-space existence of a person when handing out the tokens.

>Voting in the Assembly should be open.
>Integrity of the system could be ensured by the decentralized architecture with billions of nodes.
No that's not enough, if you want to funnel important political decision-making that could affect war and peace through this thing, you need to secure every layer of the technology, including the hardware and software stack. It's even reasonable to think about the construction of a dedicated microchip fab that ensures that interfaces devices don't have back-doors.

>How is it not a democracy when majority votes to mute or kick some person?
No there is no democratic which-hunt where we vote on whom to burn at the stake either.
Seriously what is wrong with you ?
Why are you trying to build-in a political mechanism to disenfranchise people, if you want democracy ?
I'm wondering if you are a bad faith actor, this is too obvious.

>ability to "wrangle" individuals by majority voting is empowering the collective decision-making.
No this is not about managing people, this is about society using democratic decision making about what to do with the surplus of society.

>The conference should be a public space and synchronized across all nodes. There is no place for personal preferences here.
That's not acceptable, i need the ability to tune out politicking by psychological torture for example: the Cultural-conflict brigades that want to argue for race-wars, radlib-terror, austerity and so on. I don't want these people expelled or silenced, because i don't want a ministry of political disenfranchisement, i just don't want to have to listen to their bullshit. Could you imagine what happened if the liberals or conservatives were to gain access to that, 90% of the population would get expelled from participating in politics.

Your insistence on tools for exclusion, gives me the impression that you don't want mass-politics by the demos, and you want politics by a privileged minority, which is the same thing we already have, except it's not digital.

My tune-out function is way better, the entire political stage will become more bearable if people can tune out overly hostile shit, because the incentive structure would shift away from the current configuration that rewards maximal antagonism.

>>12012
to vote on something you need to at the very least follow the discussion around the issue

if you don't want to listen to bs then engage and vote down any bs proposal at the prelim stage and vote out any speaker that is wasting your time

>>12014
No thanks. Faggy numales and women thrive on consensus, so I see why this would appeal to you though

>>12015
what is your alternative to consensus?

also, I was just thinking out loud
I guess there is no real incentive for the mass of people to engage in such bad behavior if they don't get paid for attendance

the only person that can benefit from such behavior is the speaker and the minority group which interests they represent

tho if people aren't paid for attendance there is a risk of a politically active minority group hijacking the Assembly

this minority group would need to be large, but it is a minority group nonetheless and the Assembly should be the dictatorship of the majority, not of minority

>>12018
>a politically active minority group
that's also why any and all politically organized groups should be banned and persecuted

that's also why all non state-controlled organizations are suspect and should be overseen by state officials

various religious organizations are especially dangerous
radical democracy can't tolerate any organizations that are not based on the same organizational principles

>>12019
>that's also why any and all politically organized groups should be banned and persecuted
oh, and that also includes communist vanguard parties

>>12018
>there is a risk of a politically active minority group hijacking the Assembly
also maybe high enough quorum would be enough to prevent this if it would not interfere with regular operations of the Assembly

at least with high enough quorum small political organizations can be ignored, tho they are still undesirable

>>12019
>that's also why all non state-controlled organizations are suspect
the danger here is when small organization can be actually a part of much larger organization

tho without big funding such organizations cannot function, so getting rid of paper and various shadow money would cripple them if not nip them in the bud

>>12013
>You want to replace physical spaces with digital spaces.
No, I want to create digital spaces where there are no physical spaces possible.

>But to be honest we do need better computer security, at minimum all the technical components have to be open for inspection, and every part has to be publicly vetted so that we can rule out political manipulation via technical subversion.
Eh, it wouldn't harm, but I don't think it is a hard requirement.

We are talking about hundreds of millions of instances on various hardware.

the critical points are the development platform and update channels

which are problems for any digital solution

>Sure that sounds good if that means that you check for meat-space existence of a person when handing out the tokens.
of course
just like you are issued a passport you would be issued a token

>No there is no democratic which-hunt where we vote on whom to burn at the stake either.
How is it not democratic when majority votes to burn someone at the stake?

>Seriously what is wrong with you ?
Please, spare me your moral outrage.
You seem to think that democracy only means pacifism. When democracy perfectly can be bloodthirsty.

>Why are you trying to build-in a political mechanism to disenfranchise people, if you want democracy ?
Democracy is a dictatorship of the majority. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm trying to build-in mechanisms that would ensure that dictatorship of the majority cannot be undermined by "disenfranchised" minority groups.

>No this is not about managing people, this is about society using democratic decision making about what to do with the surplus of society.
There is no "society"
There is majority and then there are various minorities.

>That's not acceptable
tough luck

there is no natural law, no God's will.
so the law is either what majority decides or what some minority decides
and I chose the lesser of the two evils.

>Could you imagine what happened if the liberals or conservatives were to gain access to that, 90% of the population would get expelled from participating in politics.
why would the majority undermine a majority principle that empowers it?

>Your insistence on tools for exclusion, gives me the impression that you don't want mass-politics by the demos, and you want politics by a privileged minority
I'm pretty sure the demos used ostracism and atimia regularly, among other things

>How is it not democratic when majority votes to burn someone at the stake?
that's a rhetorical question
Assembly generally shouldn't be sentencing individuals, you have courts for that.
Tho in critical moments who is there to stop it? There is no higher entity to appeal to.

>Tho in critical moments who is there to stop it?
tho we can imagine a situation when the minority is a majority in some geographic area, and so decides not to carry out the decisions of the Assembly in this area

In such a case I can imagine that majority would react accordingly to such threat to its authority and use military force to enforce its decision

Anyway, this is just me entertaining the possibilities.

One thing is certain - digital spaces allow humans to go beyond physical limits. To not take advantage of this in collective decision making is foolish. The possibilities outweigh the risks in my opinion.

>>12023
You want to combine both physical and virtual space, i guess that could work, but i think you are taking IT Security too lax.
How do you organize the token issuers, so that it doesn't become a gate-keeper organization that has too much power ?

>How is it not democratic when majority votes to burn someone at the stake?
Are you trolling me ?
If you want the rule by the demos, you can't just burn a part of it to death.

>You seem to think that democracy only means pacifism. When democracy perfectly can be bloodthirsty.
If you mean engaging in warmongering like the neocon-regimes, no democracies tend not to do that because most people loose out in wars.

>Democracy is a dictatorship of the majority. Nothing more, nothing less.
If that's what you want, why are you trying to create a dictatorship of the ostracisers, which are by no means a majority.

>why would the majority undermine a majority principle that empowers it?
Wait a minute you think there's some kind of innate tendency towards majoritarianism ?

Listen it's a lot harder to coordinate large numbers of people than small numbers of people, therefore you get a very strong tendency towards minoritarian political formations. That's basically the default, unless you create political structures that actively seek out to empower the masses. It tends to be very hard to get political outcomes that favor the majority.

Have you not looked at how politics work, it's basically nothing but small groups lobbying for their narrow special interests at the expense of the majority of people. Basically the reason why the super-rich can be more effective at enforcing their interests is because there are fewer of them an they have it easier to coordinate their efforts. It's one of the reasons why socialism needs a certain level of technology, because that helps with overcoming the coordination problem of the masses.

>I'm pretty sure the demos used ostracism and atimia regularly, among other things
I think you are profoundly misjudging the dynamics at play. Ostracism tends to become a divide and conquer mechanism to break down effective mass political organizations with purity spirals. It's not the only trick that's used to convert effective mass politics into an impotent factional war, but one that's frequently used.

>>12029
>you are taking IT Security too lax
well assuming there are hundreds of millions of nodes to compromise the network you would need to compromise hundreds of millions of machines

hardware tokens would ensure authentication tied to real unique identities

open voting means that any results could be independently analyzed and verified for meddling

so that leaves the development platform and distribution channels

development should be carried by some government institution
how you would control this institution is how you would control any public institution that manages critical infrastructure

and there is always going to be critical infrastructure in society

As to your other points…

look man, in any assembly there is a speaker and a public he is speaking to
the public needs to have control over the speaker, which is done through moderation
moderation is usually organized with human moderators, but it is better if we can organize moderation without dedicated human moderators
tho we can't avoid them completely, we can reduce their sphere of operation by using live feedback directly from the listening public to moderate the meeting

It's either the speaker has control, or the public has control, so if you aren't explicitly giving control to the public you're automatically giving it to the speaker

What I'm getting at is that assembly can't just be a rubber stamp organ with passive public who only listens and doesn't have any control over the agenda or the means to punish individual speakers.

>>12031
>well assuming there are hundreds of millions of nodes to compromise the network you would need to compromise hundreds of millions of machines
There is evidence that pretty much all consumer computers are already back-doored.
You can't brush this off, you would be handing over political-power to what ever organizations are able to exploit the backdoors.
There is no inherent security in having large numbers of computers.
You have to assume that all the computer technology you can't inspect is compromised.

independent vote-verification can't fix vote-manipulation on the massive scale that's possible with computers, the verification process doesn't have enough through-put.

>how you would control this institution
You develop all the technology in the open so that everybody can inspect it, we'll be able to make it secure enough that, it'll cost more to break the security than what can be gained from doing so. Additionally we could fund competing security checking organizations.

>look man, in any assembly there is a speaker and a public he is speaking to
>the public needs to have control over the speaker, which is done through moderation

Think about this for a minute. The political moderation team will become a strategic position that has a lot of power over deciding what the acceptable range of politics will be. Do you really think the general public will be able to organize it self faster and better than the big bourgeoisie for stacking these positions ?

You don't want to adequately secure the IT-infrastructure and you want to put in a mechanism that allows for removing political voices.
To me this sounds like you want to replicate the old power structures where the rulers can make a pre-selection of political actors. This allows them to have the ability to remove all the politics that threatens the status quo from the process.

Ruling out plutocratic political pre-selection as a possibility is the very basis for even considering any of this. Also paranoid level computer-security, think about a level of security that pleases the kind of nerd that unsolderers the TPM-chip from his computer motherboard.

>moderation is usually organized with human moderators, but it is better if we can organize moderation without dedicated human moderators
Consider what the present conditions are, who do you think will be able to influence the bias in those algorithms ?

>It's either the speaker has control, or the public has control, so if you aren't explicitly giving control to the public you're automatically giving it to the speaker
There's another option, you give the individual participants the ability to filter on their end.
That means people can decide to only listen to and vote on the proposals from politicians that match their interests.