Thread · 17 tweets · 16 Aug 2022

What we have in mind when we talk of "democracy" tends to be bland, abstract, and simplistic. It's a rich and potent space, we've just grown jaded with a small subset of it. We need to re-imagine what is possible. Thanks to @divyasiddarth for driving the way forward! 🧵

I might not agree with some of Divya's preferences, but that's kind of the point: the better the means of collective stewardship, the more we sustain a world of rich plural complexity. And we need to remember that technology can help with that.

Years of domination by a tiny coterie of actors have disillusioned us with the liberation potential of tech. At best we get to speak to Pleasant Bureaucrats arguing that, unlike their competitors, they're the responsible totalitarians.

But that's not inherent in digital systems — it's just how some people decide to build things. Thinking about tech from a governance view opens up alternatives. The best you can hope to get from a client-server architecture is Benevolent Dictatorship, but there are other models.

How and where to look for models and how to approach the problem space are questions I will return to in longer form. But to show that this space is rich, complex, and promising allow me to make a few notes.

First, there are reasons to see the transition from small, kin-centric group to large-scale society involving frequent interaction with strangers as a major evolutionary transition (of the same order as multicellularity). pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Major transitions need to coordinate cooperation and to limit conflict: they're… governance innovations. They're also not sudden, immediate, watershed moments but rather happen gradually over time. In royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs… they list four sub-transitions of ours.

I would posit that there's a fifth sub-transition which we need to handle: the shift to a post-geographic society. Geography has long maintained kith/kin aspects in an otherwise large-scale society; globalisation & the internet are destroying that. We need to govern that shift.

Second, developing the ability to govern a more complex world isn't just a nicety, a way of getting cool stuff and flying cars — it's existential. Let me take a step back. • Societies are ways of solving complex coordination problems.

• Increased collective intelligence is essentially the ability to solve more complex problems or the same complex problems better. • Historically, societies that couldn't meet the complexity of their problems underwent fast transitions to lower complexity: collapse.

• Societal collapse isn't necessarily bad (and it's not Mad Max), in fact it's adaptive: simplify, regroup, maybe some day rebuild. So why not just decomplexify and let things collapse? It might bring good? I believe that it wouldn't:

• Losing complexity would mean losing a lot of our more advanced abilities, for instance medical ones. It would cause a lot of strife. • I think the climate emergency is too advanced for us to address it other than with increased cooperation and therefore complexity.

To conclude, on the path to sustaining better complexity through collective intelligence, three areas interest me more.

1. Commons governance over our entire digital infrastructure. I think it's pretty clear that the private owners are doing a poor job but we need this to work. bookshop.org/books/infrastr…

2. Better cooperation systems. The tools we use to communicate and cooperate often have anticooperative properties. We discuss it less, but the prevention of coordination between actors can be just as detrimental as anticompetitive behaviour. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20…

3. Better discovery. Tools that centre on ranking (eg. today's search) create arbitrary hierarchy in the world, which is epistemically toxic and destroys complexity. This is particularly true of conversational or single-answer systems (eg. assistants). dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/34…

We need to find ways to replace those with smarter tools that empower people, that focus on liberation rather than domestication through convenience. There's a lot to do; I'm excited to see what Divya does with @collect_intel!