One thing that it is worth re-thinking is our perspective on when, and how, it makes sense to build "democratic things". This includes:
* DAOs and voting mechanisms in DAOs
* Quadratic and other funding gadgets
* ZKpassport voting use cases, incl freedomtool type stuff, incl attempts to deploy it for local governance, etc
* Voting systems inside social media
* Attempts at "let's build and push for a brighter and freer political system for my country"
Lately I am getting the feeling that there is less enthusiasm about these things than before. The "authoritarian wave" (a phenomenon that is often viewed as being about nation-state politics, but actually it stretches far beyond that, eg. see the phenomenon of companies lately becoming less "multi-stakeholder" and more founder-centric, and recent disillusionment with social media) is not just a matter of some malevolent strongmen smelling an opportunity to exert their will unopposed and seizing it. It's also a matter of genuine disillusionment with democratic things (of various types, not just nation-state, also corporate, nonprofit, social media).
Defense of democratic things lately has the vibe of actually being conservatism: it's about fighting to preserve an existing order, and ward off hostile attempts to push the order toward a different order (or chaos) that favors a few people's interests at the expense of others, and not about appreciating positive benefits of the existing order. But conservatism is progressivism driving at the speed limit, and so if that's all that there is, it will inevitably lose, it will just take longer.
There is an unfortunate irony to this, because it comes at the same time as we have much more powerful tools to build more effective democratic things: ZK, AI, much stronger cybersecurity, decades of research and experience. But to do so effectively we need to diagnose the present situation. I will break this down into a few parts.
## Stable era and chaotic era
In the 00s and 10s, it was common to dream about things like: creating a global UBI, moving a country wholesale to a better political system like ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting, building a large-scale DAO that could eventually provide billions of dollars to global public goods that current systems miss (eg. open source software).
Today, all of these dreams seem more unrealistic than ever. I see the main difference why as being that the 00s and 10s were a stable era, and the 20s are a chaotic era. In a stable era, more coordination is possible and imaginable, and so people naturally ask questions like "what would be a more perfect order?", and work towards it. In a chaotic era, the average intervention into the order is not a principled act of mechanism design, it's raw selfish power-grabbing, and so there is much less room to think about such questions. It's difficult to imagine eg. moving the United States to quadratic voting or ranked choice voting, when the country cannot even successfully ban gerrymandering.
What do chaotic era democratic things look like? At a large scale, they do not look like hard binding mechanisms for making decisions. Rather, they look like tools for consensus-finding. They look like tools for identifying possible shifts to the order that would satisfy large cross-cutting groups of people, and presenting those possible shifts to change-making actors (yes, including centralized actors, even selfish actors), to make it clear to them that those particular shifts would be easier for them to accomplish, because they would have a lot of support and legitimacy. Pol.is style ideas are good here, anonymous voting is good, also perhaps assurance contract-style ideas: votes or statements that are anonymous at first, but that flip into being public (and hence publicly commit everyone at the same time) once they reach a certain threshold of support.
This does not create a perfect order, but it gives highly distributed groups *a voice*. It gives actors with hard power something to listen to, and a credible claim that if they adjust their plans based on it, those plans are more likely to get widespread support and succeed.
The Iran war is a good example here. My biggest fear in the ongoing situation has been that while the IRGC is unambiguously awful and murderous, there is an obvious divergence between US/Israel interests, and interests of Iranian common people: while both would be satisfied by a beautiful peaceful democratic Iran, the former would also be satisfied by the perhaps easier target of Iran becoming a low-threat low-capability wasteland, whereas for the latter that would be ruinous. How can Iranian people have a collective voice that carries hard power - not just in some future order that they create, but now, literally this week, while the situation is chaos?
Some "sanctuary technology" is sanctuary money. Other times, it's sanctuary communication. But we need sanctuary tools for collective voice too.
* DAOs and voting mechanisms in DAOs
* Quadratic and other funding gadgets
* ZKpassport voting use cases, incl freedomtool type stuff, incl attempts to deploy it for local governance, etc
* Voting systems inside social media
* Attempts at "let's build and push for a brighter and freer political system for my country"
Lately I am getting the feeling that there is less enthusiasm about these things than before. The "authoritarian wave" (a phenomenon that is often viewed as being about nation-state politics, but actually it stretches far beyond that, eg. see the phenomenon of companies lately becoming less "multi-stakeholder" and more founder-centric, and recent disillusionment with social media) is not just a matter of some malevolent strongmen smelling an opportunity to exert their will unopposed and seizing it. It's also a matter of genuine disillusionment with democratic things (of various types, not just nation-state, also corporate, nonprofit, social media).
Defense of democratic things lately has the vibe of actually being conservatism: it's about fighting to preserve an existing order, and ward off hostile attempts to push the order toward a different order (or chaos) that favors a few people's interests at the expense of others, and not about appreciating positive benefits of the existing order. But conservatism is progressivism driving at the speed limit, and so if that's all that there is, it will inevitably lose, it will just take longer.
There is an unfortunate irony to this, because it comes at the same time as we have much more powerful tools to build more effective democratic things: ZK, AI, much stronger cybersecurity, decades of research and experience. But to do so effectively we need to diagnose the present situation. I will break this down into a few parts.
## Stable era and chaotic era
In the 00s and 10s, it was common to dream about things like: creating a global UBI, moving a country wholesale to a better political system like ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting, building a large-scale DAO that could eventually provide billions of dollars to global public goods that current systems miss (eg. open source software).
Today, all of these dreams seem more unrealistic than ever. I see the main difference why as being that the 00s and 10s were a stable era, and the 20s are a chaotic era. In a stable era, more coordination is possible and imaginable, and so people naturally ask questions like "what would be a more perfect order?", and work towards it. In a chaotic era, the average intervention into the order is not a principled act of mechanism design, it's raw selfish power-grabbing, and so there is much less room to think about such questions. It's difficult to imagine eg. moving the United States to quadratic voting or ranked choice voting, when the country cannot even successfully ban gerrymandering.
What do chaotic era democratic things look like? At a large scale, they do not look like hard binding mechanisms for making decisions. Rather, they look like tools for consensus-finding. They look like tools for identifying possible shifts to the order that would satisfy large cross-cutting groups of people, and presenting those possible shifts to change-making actors (yes, including centralized actors, even selfish actors), to make it clear to them that those particular shifts would be easier for them to accomplish, because they would have a lot of support and legitimacy. Pol.is style ideas are good here, anonymous voting is good, also perhaps assurance contract-style ideas: votes or statements that are anonymous at first, but that flip into being public (and hence publicly commit everyone at the same time) once they reach a certain threshold of support.
This does not create a perfect order, but it gives highly distributed groups *a voice*. It gives actors with hard power something to listen to, and a credible claim that if they adjust their plans based on it, those plans are more likely to get widespread support and succeed.
The Iran war is a good example here. My biggest fear in the ongoing situation has been that while the IRGC is unambiguously awful and murderous, there is an obvious divergence between US/Israel interests, and interests of Iranian common people: while both would be satisfied by a beautiful peaceful democratic Iran, the former would also be satisfied by the perhaps easier target of Iran becoming a low-threat low-capability wasteland, whereas for the latter that would be ruinous. How can Iranian people have a collective voice that carries hard power - not just in some future order that they create, but now, literally this week, while the situation is chaos?
Some "sanctuary technology" is sanctuary money. Other times, it's sanctuary communication. But we need sanctuary tools for collective voice too.
## Egalitarianism and pluralism
One underlying ideology of democratic things is a strong version of egalitarianism: the idea that we are all equal, not just in some Christian metaphysical sense of having equal dignity under God, but in some more concrete sense of all having equally valuable things to say and deserving an equal voice in the world.
It is sometimes considered impolite to disagree with this directly. But at the same time, all major political tribes have their rhetoric for rejecting it. Some believe not in egalitarianism, but in _meritocracy_: inequality that comes from differences in performance, effort and skill is acceptable, inequality that comes from inherited title is not. Others believe in "expertise" and denounce "populism". Years ago, there was an abortive trend to re-embrace credentialism (eg. I remember the attempt to push people to call Jill Biden "Dr. Jill Biden"). And still others don't give a crap about even the pretense of egalitarianism, and seek to build 150-meter statues to ancient Roman and Greek gods and express pride in unbridled domineering masculinity.
I think it is true that some have more expertise than others, and this expertise should be listened to. And even the "second line of defense" comfortable fiction - that people who are higher on some skills and virtues might be lower on other more subtle and immeasurable ones - is on average false. But democratic things are very valuable despite this, for two reasons:
* **Egalitarianism as a floor, not as an absolute**. If you take the above arguments too seriously, you run into the problem that you leave many people with no voice at all. This is a dangerous position: it means that there is no disincentive at all to impose ruinous outcomes on them. Chickens are far stupider than humans. But if I could give each chicken even 0.01 votes on agriculture law, in some way that effectively captures their preferences, would I? Hell yes.
* **Pluralism**. Democratic things (as well as eg. ideas such as free speech) are not just about providing a floor at the bottom, they are also about diversifying the top. A goal is to create space for alternative groups of elites, that are able to challenge existing elites. This is where pluralistic voting models, that focus on finding "consensus across difference" are so valuable: they inherently empower diverse viewpoints, and prevent an intellectual or decision-making ecosystem from being overly dominated by monoculture.
See also vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/0… , where I argue that the Gini is a bad inequality index because it ultimately conflates two very different problems (floor too low, top too concentrated), and actually we need to treat both separately.
Also, see also this piece from Ruxandra: writingruxandrabio.com/p/equality-as-…
## AI
The main challenge in building new institutions of any type, is that people are lazy to change their habits. Even existing nation-state voting only survives because (i) it's only one bit of info per four years, and (ii) it has hundreds of years of historical legitimacy.
This makes a lot of work more difficult. For example, an alternative approach to dealing with the chaotic era is to find "islands of stability", and build more holistic institutions at smaller scales, with the goal of copying or adapting them to larger contexts later. The problem is, even there, getting these institutions to succeed enough that others want to copy them takes too long, compared to a fast-moving world. So what do we do?
One benefit of AI is that it potentially allows us to make much higher-bandwidth provision of input literally zero-cost. LLM "shadows" of ourselves, fine-tuned on our corpus of both public and private actions, can make decisions on our behalf.
This opens the door not just to higher-bandwidth feedback with near-100% participation rates (if done as a software default), but also fundamentally new possibilities. For example, a weakness of distributed decision making is that it cannot take into account secret information. This is often a justification for centralizing key decisions. In a chaotic era, the set of such situations is magnified. But LLM shadows of ourselves *could* make votes based off of private information, thanks to the magic of cryptography.
## Conclusions
Today's disillusionment with democratic things is real. But what is also becoming real very rapidly is disillusionment with the alternative, where various groups of elites visibly and openly don't care about the effects of their actions on regular people. Where "you can just do things" slides into "you can just bomb people", or "you can just openly talk proudly about how superintelligent AI you are building will bring unemployment to everyone", or...
And so we need to start the next round of this cycle sooner. It needs to start on realistic principles, learning from the failures of the previous era, but it does need to happen.
One underlying ideology of democratic things is a strong version of egalitarianism: the idea that we are all equal, not just in some Christian metaphysical sense of having equal dignity under God, but in some more concrete sense of all having equally valuable things to say and deserving an equal voice in the world.
It is sometimes considered impolite to disagree with this directly. But at the same time, all major political tribes have their rhetoric for rejecting it. Some believe not in egalitarianism, but in _meritocracy_: inequality that comes from differences in performance, effort and skill is acceptable, inequality that comes from inherited title is not. Others believe in "expertise" and denounce "populism". Years ago, there was an abortive trend to re-embrace credentialism (eg. I remember the attempt to push people to call Jill Biden "Dr. Jill Biden"). And still others don't give a crap about even the pretense of egalitarianism, and seek to build 150-meter statues to ancient Roman and Greek gods and express pride in unbridled domineering masculinity.
I think it is true that some have more expertise than others, and this expertise should be listened to. And even the "second line of defense" comfortable fiction - that people who are higher on some skills and virtues might be lower on other more subtle and immeasurable ones - is on average false. But democratic things are very valuable despite this, for two reasons:
* **Egalitarianism as a floor, not as an absolute**. If you take the above arguments too seriously, you run into the problem that you leave many people with no voice at all. This is a dangerous position: it means that there is no disincentive at all to impose ruinous outcomes on them. Chickens are far stupider than humans. But if I could give each chicken even 0.01 votes on agriculture law, in some way that effectively captures their preferences, would I? Hell yes.
* **Pluralism**. Democratic things (as well as eg. ideas such as free speech) are not just about providing a floor at the bottom, they are also about diversifying the top. A goal is to create space for alternative groups of elites, that are able to challenge existing elites. This is where pluralistic voting models, that focus on finding "consensus across difference" are so valuable: they inherently empower diverse viewpoints, and prevent an intellectual or decision-making ecosystem from being overly dominated by monoculture.
See also vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/0… , where I argue that the Gini is a bad inequality index because it ultimately conflates two very different problems (floor too low, top too concentrated), and actually we need to treat both separately.
Also, see also this piece from Ruxandra: writingruxandrabio.com/p/equality-as-…
## AI
The main challenge in building new institutions of any type, is that people are lazy to change their habits. Even existing nation-state voting only survives because (i) it's only one bit of info per four years, and (ii) it has hundreds of years of historical legitimacy.
This makes a lot of work more difficult. For example, an alternative approach to dealing with the chaotic era is to find "islands of stability", and build more holistic institutions at smaller scales, with the goal of copying or adapting them to larger contexts later. The problem is, even there, getting these institutions to succeed enough that others want to copy them takes too long, compared to a fast-moving world. So what do we do?
One benefit of AI is that it potentially allows us to make much higher-bandwidth provision of input literally zero-cost. LLM "shadows" of ourselves, fine-tuned on our corpus of both public and private actions, can make decisions on our behalf.
This opens the door not just to higher-bandwidth feedback with near-100% participation rates (if done as a software default), but also fundamentally new possibilities. For example, a weakness of distributed decision making is that it cannot take into account secret information. This is often a justification for centralizing key decisions. In a chaotic era, the set of such situations is magnified. But LLM shadows of ourselves *could* make votes based off of private information, thanks to the magic of cryptography.
## Conclusions
Today's disillusionment with democratic things is real. But what is also becoming real very rapidly is disillusionment with the alternative, where various groups of elites visibly and openly don't care about the effects of their actions on regular people. Where "you can just do things" slides into "you can just bomb people", or "you can just openly talk proudly about how superintelligent AI you are building will bring unemployment to everyone", or...
And so we need to start the next round of this cycle sooner. It needs to start on realistic principles, learning from the failures of the previous era, but it does need to happen.
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