Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy • Hacker News Board

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#41

Post by unclebucknasty » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 9:44 AM UTC

rabbyte wrote: post #17

sandworm101 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they truly believed, then they wouldn't bother with a license. Someone who truly doesn't care about copyright wouldn't consider they need a license. The irony would be even more should someone break this license and these believers take them to court. I'm reminded of when the Church of Scientology hadn't bothered with registering the copyrights for many texts, only to rush to court once they leaked. They lost, mos…

The counterintuitive bit you're pointing out is an artifact of law, not their political opinion. If you don't care about copyright you use a license that protects you from copyright claims while giving rights to others. Companies that rely on public domain or open source software can't legally use the code until it has a suitable license, the absence of a license being that the owner still holds those rights. So the…

That's a deft read on their objective here and, I think, an accurate one.

But, it does raise interesting questions regarding whether there are limitations to a system that is ultimately bound by the system that it seeks to disavow/displace.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#42

Post by dandare » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #15

The main problem to solve here is legitimacy . It does no good to have a government if nobody thinks it's legitimate. This is why democracy is so hard to implement and protect. At the heart of it, democracy should be simple. You get people to vote on rules, and then whatever gets the most votes, everybody agrees to follow the group decision. But that all gets turned on its head once somebody doesn't want to play ball…

> You get people to vote on rules, and then whatever gets the most votes, everybody agrees to follow the group decision.

Nope, that is not how it works :D. Yes, people vote, but then whatever gets the most votes is enforce with violence on everyone regardless of whether they agree or not. Slavery was legal, criminalisation of homosexuality was (is) legal, sending people to jail for soft drugs is legal. Democracy is a dictatorship of the majority, not a just system. You could say it oppresses the less people than any other system but it inevitably oppresses people.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#43

Post by phs » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 10:03 AM UTC

I am struck by how little attention is paid to the voting system: is it first past the post? Single transferrable vote?

The voting system determines the class of proposals that can be decided without voters needing to model each other's behavior to get what they want. Voters are forced to choose between what they want and what they think they can get; "I prefer candidate/policy A, but I think B is OK and stronger; I definitely don't want C. So I guess I'm voting B."

FPTP is only good for deciding boolean proposals. For selecting from a larger set of alternatives, STV allows voters to be more fearless ("First pick is A, second is B"), and so more honest.

Block chain-style distributed verification is good, but that shouldn't be the killer feature of this app.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#44

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 10:28 AM UTC

dandare wrote: post #42

vinceguidry wrote: post #15

The main problem to solve here is legitimacy . It does no good to have a government if nobody thinks it's legitimate. This is why democracy is so hard to implement and protect. At the heart of it, democracy should be simple. You get people to vote on rules, and then whatever gets the most votes, everybody agrees to follow the group decision. But that all gets turned on its head once somebody doesn't want to play ball…

> You get people to vote on rules, and then whatever gets the most votes, everybody agrees to follow the group decision. Nope, that is not how it works :D. Yes, people vote, but then whatever gets the most votes is enforce with violence on everyone regardless of whether they agree or not. Slavery was legal, criminalisation of homosexuality was (is) legal, sending people to jail for soft drugs is legal. Democracy is a…

That's literally what I spent my entire post explaining.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#45

Post by pyrale » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 10:45 AM UTC

csuwldcat wrote: post #26

edblarney wrote: post #18

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I decl…

I'll describe democracy, and you tell me how comical it sounds: "A group of people, within a geographic region marked by invisible lines drawn by human aggression, all gather once every 2nd rotation of the Earth around the Sun to put papers in a magic box. The people believe once an arbitrarily large number of papers are put into the box, it grants the owners of those papers the right to force their will and ideas on…

> The box does amazing things, for instance: the very minute before all the papers are counted, it could be immoral theft to take something from others without their explicit, individual permission

Why does a significant share of the comunity criticizing the existence of a state uses property as the go-to example of right-that-shall-not-be-infringed ?

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#46

Post by kybernetikos » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 11:31 AM UTC

edblarney wrote: post #16

sandworm101 wrote: post #5

Off deep end: >> I declare the planetary social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. >> Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Funny, rig…

">> I declare the planetary social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." That guy is going to have a great 40th Birthday party as his buddies whip that one out, and make him chug a beer for every time someone laughs out loud.

'That guy' is John Perry Barlow who is currently 69. He wrote it 20 years ago when he was 49.

Regardless of how naive (or even misguided) it seems, it's part of the culture of the internet and it's a bit sad that more people on hackernews aren't aware of it.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#47

Post by kybernetikos » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 11:34 AM UTC

santisiri wrote: post #20

rabbyte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterintuitive bit you're pointing out is an artifact of law, not their political opinion. If you don't care about copyright you use a license that protects you from copyright claims while giving rights to others. Companies that rely on public domain or open source software can't legally use the code until it has a suitable license, the absence of a license being that the owner still holds those rights. So the…

absolutely right.. actually we could've gone with a GPL license, yet we want to make sure the greatest degree of freedom is embedded in the rights to use this software and MIT's simple licensing looks like the most fit for that purpose.

GPL provides greater rights to users, MIT provides greater rights to developers. If your purpose was to have the greatest degree of freedom for usage rights, you probably should have gone with GPL.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#48

Post by qznc » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

dj-wonk wrote: post #24

dj-wonk wrote: post #21

At many levels, we would benefit from better decision-making tools. This includes voting tools with various ballot options and good accountability. Better tooling and awareness around collective decision making is valuable for groups at many levels. Such tooling and awareness does not have to be linked with large changes to country- or world-level governance. It can start with replacing an unstructured Slack discussi…

Do you have favorite tools and algorithms for collaborative decision making and/or voting? Please share. Also, I would appreciate responses and feedback on an old post of mine titled "Better Online Voting": http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/42305919307/better-online-voti... Some areas I've followed include... papers about blockchain technology applied to voting... cryptographic consensus algorithms... I'd like to see wha…

My problem is not to find a good tool/algorithm. I rather experience the problem to get people from unstructured (no tool/algo) to structured decision making (any tool/algo).

For example, finding a date for a meeting can easily keep a few people busy chatting in a WhatsApp group. A link to http://doodle.com/ is ignored. It might help, if WhatsApp integrates a simple pool mechanism into group chat.

Annotation: Please, use a good UI. Not a chat bot, which leads to even more messages.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#49

Post by rabbyte » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #28

rabbyte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything except that first point because legitimacy isn't the problem worth solving. Striking the right balance in governing tools and keeping interdependent systems interoperable as they mature are problems worth solving which this works toward. Arguing on grounds of legitimacy would have failed to see Wikipedia as a citable source or Facebook as an election debate host 15 years ago. So the time from…

Wikipedia has its legitimacy problems like any other political entity. It's legitimate as an informational resource mostly for lack of real alternatives. It fills a need that no other resource does. And political evolution is not political revolution . Sure, the 100th generation after ours won't care how a bill becomes a law, but that doesn't mean the underlying political truths are going to become obsolete. Revoluti…

I'm not sure if you're responding to me or just adding your perspective but each of those points can be summarized as "not necessarily" and ya, this is complex stuff, lots of possibility.

Re: Sovereign Software: peer to peer democracy

#50

Post by santisiri » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

jdormit wrote: post #10

Is there a reason that almost every blog post/platform/organization I've seen that involves some sort of block chain tech invariably starts spouting hyperbolic, overblown rhetoric about overthrowing the social order? Block chains are a really promising technology, but these types of manifestos really hurt the community's credibility.

the manifesto in the README is from 1996, a classic cryptonarchist text. that said: the main thing you want to battle in politics is corruption, and we had plenty of experience facing that when we started the Partido de la Red. In that respect, blockchains can play a huge role enabling not only more transparent administration of organizations but also, opening up new institutional arrangements only possible on the internet itself.