User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/consensus
The question of how we make decisions is at the core of... pretty much everything. The nature of the decisionmaking process determines:
- how satisfied individuals are with the outcome of each decision
- how sane the actions of the group are
- ...which greatly affects how well the group succeeds, economically and politically
- how well the decisionmaking process is protected against hostile takeover
The Old Ways
No. 1: Religion
Religion is a powerful force because everyone in a particular religion has agreed, more or less, to support (at least outwardly) certain ideas. When those ideas are ostensibly threatened, the religious leadership knows that they can count on a certain amount of basic support from the membership, plus a core of more zealously active supporters, and little or no dissent most of the time.
Religions, unfortunately, are based on an idea that "you must believe that these things are true, and you must believe them without any real evidence, and any evidence you may present which contradicts them is off the table for discussion" (i.e. dogma).
I don't think any of us here want to do things that way. We may say "you can't be one of us if you don't believe certain things", but we are happy to argue the evidence for the truth of those things -- and to update our belief-requirements if new evidence seems to shift the balance in favor of altering our beliefs. (This is part of why we need the "library" in the Revolutionary Bar & Library: so we have a public fact-base for our beliefs.)
Centralized authority comes with a built-in single-point failure mode: you may not be able to corrupt a thousand people, but you can certainly corrupt1 a dozen -- or one -- if the stakes are high enough.
It also comes with the built-in inefficiency of a few people trying to work out what's best for hundreds or thousands (or more), when often those individuals have been trained not to provide too much feedback (at the risk of being seen as "troublemakers" or "deviant").
No. 2: US-style Democracy
US-style democracy -- which I will refer to here as "democracy" for the sake of brevity -- has two major shortcomings in its design... which might be seen as part of a single design philosophy which might be stated thusly: people are dangerous. I'll come back to that.
Flaw #1 is the one-binary-vote-per-issue voting system we use. If you measure a voting system's effectiveness in terms of the net error between [what people want] and [what they actually get], this is probably the worst system possible. This large degree of error makes it particularly prone to manipulations such as gerrymandering, and seems to be the largest force behind maintaining the "two-party system" duopoly we have now.
Flaw #2 is the "electoral college".
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New Ways
First there came the mailing lists and newsletters and groups with local chapters. The mailing lists became emailing lists, from which came MoveOn and its inheritors, which created web sites that were mostly auxiliary to their main activity.
Then there came the BBSs, which became newsgroups, which became online forums.
Then there came the wikis, which spawned Wikipedia and other reference sites. The wikis enabled new technologies like "semantic markup" which are still being used largely on an experimental level.
Then there came the meet-up/events planning services, like meetup.com and Facebook's "events" feature.
Footnotes
1. I'm stretching the word "corrupt" here to include the idea of replacing a non-corrupt person with someone who is corrupt via otherwise-legitimate succession processes; it's not necessary to posit that good people can turn bad. Maybe the way to talk about it is to refer to the position or role becoming corrupted.