The aim of this essay is to convince you that voting–of any kind–is no longer a valid political mechanism for realising democracy. We can replace it with the costly expression of preference.
This is an outlandish claim. People where I live fought and died for the vote. Voting has been at the heart of all modern democratic movements. I will argue we must develop new means of enlivening democracy as a practice rather than just a theory, with the utmost respect for those who dedicated their lives to voting. This is–strange as it may seem–a continuation of that same work and a means of honouring their legacies.
Costly Expression
The argument is simple: voting cannot be securely implemented in digital media without prohibitive technical sophistication. This was proved in 2018, in a paper called “Onchain Vote Buying and the Rise of Dark DAOs”. Arguably, the Internet Engineering Task Force discovered it long before that.
Most digital voting schemes make unavoidable assumptions about how private keys are handled. However, given that the medium is totally digital, anyone can offer programmatic access to their key to anyone willing to bid for it under whatever circumstances they care to encode. This is called “encumbrance”, and it breaks pretty much everything about voting.
Here is some open source code that shows how voting schemes can be exploited in practice. Here is the latest theoretical work on this topic.
There are ways around encumbrance that generally fall under schemes of so-called “Complete Knowledge”, which is a technique that uses yet more programs to prove that the key you used to vote was not encumbered when you did so.
While feasible, implementing CK adds considerable complexity to the whole affair. Voting ought not create more attention costs than can reasonably be handled by every relevant individual in a population, and it ought not to exclude anyone based on an inability to understand how it works. CK, while impressive, does not meet these requirements.
Irrespective of your political philosophy or how you feel about voting based on historical precedent, the most modern systems we are building for meaningfully distributing power cannot support it. Where does that leave us?
If Not Votes, Then What?
Well, money is the ultimate political tool (only clocks represent similar political power). The reason so much political activism has centred on social coordination, and voting as a special form of that, is because virtually no-one has had access to the underlying money. Now, money is programmable and open source: we all potentially have access to the mechanisms by which it is created and distributed.
Therefore, a contextually appropriate, resilient, censorship-resistant, sybil-resistant, game theoretically stable solution to the death of voting is the costly expression of preference. People must pay in order to influence the polis.
Your gut reaction is likely: “But that just leads to rule by the rich! How awful!” It may seem so, but remember that we now have access to the mechanisms of money itself, that most powerful of all political tools. The costs levied for influencing the polis will be denominated in coins of our own creation.
Thus, the work of governance is no longer persuasive rhetoric. It’s not even inspirational leadership (as difficult a pill as that may be to swallow). It is the design of mechanisms capable of distributing value to a significantly diverse plurality of people such that the preferences expressed by how they spend that money enable increasingly better decisions.
Governance is not different from the design of money. It is exactly, precisely, inseparably the same thing. If you’re doing governance after the money has been designed, or if money moves after decisions are made rather than as a result of decisions being made, then your system will provably become more unequal over time.
The proof sketch is trivial. If I do not need to spend my tokens in order to influence a polis, I can continue to influence it indefinitely at no meaningful cost. There is no incentive for large holders to ever risk their capital. A deeper proof would consider what Peter Norvig calls “the nature of transactions” in any system where governance and the movement of money are designed to be separate things, because how transactions work directly influences how inequality grows.
If there are only win-loss transactions in your polis, it will unavoidably become more unequal over time. If you do not need to spend tokens to express preferences, it is difficult to see how you could ever have anything other than win-loss transactions. However, if I must spend tokens to express preferences about what happens in the polis, then this is–almost by definition–a win-win transaction precisely because those I fund when expressing my preference benefit immediately and–if I choose with wisdom–it is likely that the tokens I have left over will accrue more value over time as a result of ongoing, wise choices.
It is one of the most profound virtuous feedback loops we could hope to bake into politics. What it requires is innovative and democratic ways of creating and distributing value, as well as a polis willing to spend that value in the pursuit of ever better conditions for living well together.
The people need to trust that spending their tokens will generate more long term value: this is the single greatest barrier to the realisation of such a system. Therefore, this is the great political work of our time.
Loving Wisdom
How can we create the conditions for trust to grow in the fact that spending tokens really does represent a win-win transaction? It depends largely on the mechanisms by which we create and distribute those tokens. If we hand them out for free, people value them accordingly and the notion of paying a cost to influence the polis falls apart. If we make them purchasable for some USD-denominated amount, we propagate current patterns of economic injustice.
We’re looking for middle ways. Finding such mechanisms that are appropriate to the context of your particular polis requires realising that the long term value we’re talking about here is not just generated by “stimulating the economy” with spending, but rather having how money is spent directly, simultaneously contribute to the refinement of ongoing decisions such that the value created genuinely compounds.
One such proposal for achieving this can be found here. It is based on earlier work on more fair ranking systems here (implemented here).
It takes courage to recognise that no particular method is essential to the living practice of democratic life. Nor is any ideology sufficient: liberal, conservative or otherwise. John Dewey writes in The Public and Its Problems:
“Get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life, so as to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.”
As such, it is something we are always striving towards, not something we achieve once and then enshrine. We cannot depend on what others have done in order to live a good, balanced, just, wise life. We can always take inspiration from those who walk before us, but we cannot repeat their actions.
Yet, while the methods differ, the essence remains forever the same. What this essay calls you to, if you accept that voting can no longer be central to the living practice of democracy in our technological age, is no different from what Dewey called his readers to in 1927:
“The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.”
That last sentence is the heart of the political work required for us to go on living in democracy. How can we implement mechanisms of free and enriching communion? What are the ways in which we can freely create and distribute value, such that how we spend it enriches us all?