I’m currently reading a book titled Liquid Reign. While terribly written on a sentence-by-sentence level (c’mon, man! stick with a consistent tense!), its non-dystopian/non-utopian vision of a future run on liquid democracy and the blockchain is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read. The intelligence, humor, and cultural preferences of the author shine through the text, as does his clear-eyed, evidence-based understanding of the negative impacts of his vision. I also love how at the end of each chapter he links the reader to whatever inspired the concepts he introduces or explores. Finally, I love that the author published the novel using a Creative Commons license, living up to the novel’s obvious ethic.
In case you’ve never heard of it (as I hadn’t just a few weeks ago), liquid democracy is the radical idea that you should be in charge of your vote.
In the most idealistic version of American democracy, every two years, you are allowed to select from among your neighbors an individual to travel to Washington D.C. to represent your and/or your community’s interests. On every question that comes before the American people for the next two years, you delegate your vote to this representative.
Additionally, every four years, you have the opportunity to influence the selection of the nation’s chief executive. Your influence is minimal though not insignificant (depending on which state you live in), and it allows you to breathe at least some of your preferences into the spirit of our nation’s laws.
Finally, every six years, your entire state receives the opportunity to delegate its vote on every question to one individual who lives in your state but whom you’ve probably never met and who almost certainly will never know your name.
When you’ve delegated your vote on every question to three individuals, two of whom you’ve probably never met and the last of whom you probably barely know, why would you believe you live in a democracy?
To be fair, direct democracy is difficult in small societies and untenable in large ones. We cannot expect every voter to be legitimately informed on every question (of course, when the United States Congress is passing 5,000+ page bills less than 24 hours after they’ve been released, we obviously don’t expect our well-paid, professional representatives to be legitimately informed either).
But a liquid democracy provides voters with the opportunity to vote directly (and participate directly) on every question that sparks their interest or to delegate their vote to whomever they like on any topic or question for which they don’t have the time, knowledge, expertise, or interest.
A quick example. While I care a lot about the corruptive effects of money on our democracy, I don’t have enough understanding of the nuances involved to vote on the low-level regulations necessary to counteract it. However, I’ve listened to enough speeches and read enough articles by Lawrence Lessig to know I trust him on the issue. Instead of directly participating in any of the many decisions necessary to enact meaningful anticorruption laws, I could delegate all my votes on the topic to him.
If, in turn, Mr. Lessig knew someone he trusted more than himself on the issue, he could delegate my vote and his vote and any other vote he controls on the issue to that more trustworthy person. I would be notified of the change and would be able to decide whether to keep my vote with that new person or take it back for myself.
And I could do something similar on virtually every decision that needs to be made in our democracy.
Additionally, because I can retract my vote from my delegates at any time, there is no more election cycle. Delegates must continue to prove their worthiness to carry my vote, and the minute they lose my faith or someone else impresses me more, I can change who represents me.
The idea is so powerfully simple that it seems like a no-brainer, with the only questions being ones of implementation. How private is a person’s vote? How does the system stay informed as to who is delegated by whom and on what range of issues? How does a voter know when their delegate has cast their vote? What issues are available to vote on? Etc.
The book answers most of its implementation questions with “the blockchain,” but not in a way that means “magic.” When it comes to blockchain technology and its potential over the next several decades, the author seems to know what he’s talking about, and he’s nerdy enough to include most of it in his plot, characterization, and dialogue.
I, however, cannot distinguish this sufficiently advanced technology from magic, and so were you to ask me, I’d simply say, “the blockchain.”
One thing that excites me about the book is the level of research and insight it demonstrates. It must have been so fun for the author to look deeply into a wide variety of technological possibilities and threats (not just blockchain, but virtual reality, artificial intelligence, green transportation, resilient communities, and so much more), combine them with a deep knowledge of alternative political and economical models (such as anarchism, socialism, liquid democracy, the military-industrial complex, etc.) and a fun sense of oracality for cultural and social movements to provide a deeply realistic vision of the future, one where the worst of us still lives and thrives among the best of us.
I’d like to do something similar, but concentrate my efforts on my local community. I’ve written an experimental novel that attempts to imagine an alternative future for my state, but it was (and was intended to be) wholly divorced from reality. In its second chapter, it introduces an eight-year-old girl with “a third eye in the middle of her forehead, [a] persimmon-irised, ebony-eyeballed third eye in the middle of the child’s pale, white forehead.” From that moment on, everything I wrote in the book said “Fuck it” to reality (or in the language of the novel, “skrinkle lee”).
I’d like to try again — not to write another novel on the secession of Vermont, but to envision a non-fantasy-based, evidence-riven, activist-driven, hopeful future for my community.
In 2005, our local environmental guru, Bill McKibben, penned a book entitled, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks. The book is based on a long, multi-day walk that McKibben takes from his home in the heart of the Green Mountains to another home he owns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Along the way, he visits with and tells the story of a number of entrepreneurs and activists who call the valley between them home, and he uses what he learns to suggest a reality-based vision of what’s possible.
Meanwhile, for the past 10 years, I’ve been actively working with young people who live at the southern end of McKibben’s same valley, people whose daily lives are filled with trauma and struggle and who can hardly lift their head high enough to hope for something better.
I want to help these people connect with the resources they need to participate in the hopeful future McKibben so beautifully writes about. I want to research the wide variety of ways our local entrepreneurs, educators, and activists can help individuals who are struggling cross the gap between what is and what can be, and like the author of Liquid Reign, I want to use my skills for research and writing to do it.
