Thinks 395

Benedict Evans: “Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion – there are others.”

Julian Baggini on David Hume: “The arguments put forward in the Essays are usually worth our attention, even when, at first, Hume’s point of view seems dated. Though in many ways a political radical, his skepticism towards democracy remains thought-provoking. His fear that in politics, lies might prove more popular than truths, remains all too relevant—as Hume put it, “Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude.” In his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” he sought to find a balance between technocracy and mob rule, endorsing the view that “The people … would want wisdom, without the senate: The senate, without the people, would want honesty.””

Vivek Kaul on how to explain the Indian budget to a teenager. “So, the central government had plans of spending ₹34.8 trillion this year. Of this, ₹15.5 trillion came through taxes. It also earned through dividends and profits shared by companies it owns and through the RBI. Over and above this, it had planned to earn ₹2.1 trillion through disinvestment. The total earnings of the government were expected to be at ₹19.8 trillion, meaning a fiscal deficit of ₹15 trillion. In order to be able to make up for this difference, the government borrowed ₹9.7 trillion. Also, some money came from the small savings schemes.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 9)

Karl Popper

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Popper is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. His entry reads: “He was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed critical-rationalist, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism and relativism in science and in human affairs generally and a committed advocate and staunch defender of the “Open Society”.”

He wrote in The Economist in 1988: “In “The Open Society and its Enemies” I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognised as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory. The new problem, as distinct from the old “Who should rule?”, can be formulated as follows: how is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?.. In theory, however, these modern democracies are still based on the old problem, and on the completely impractical ideology that it is the people, the whole adult population, who are, or should by rights be, the real and ultimate and the only legitimate rulers. But, of course, nowhere do the people actually rule. It is governments that rule (and, unfortunately, also bureaucrats, our civil servants—or our uncivil masters, as Winston Churchill called them—whom it is difficult, if not impossible, to make accountable for their actions).”

Popper added:

In a constitution that does not provide for proportional representation, parties need not be mentioned at all. They need not be given official status. The electorate of each constituency sends its personal representative to the chamber. Whether he stands alone, or whether he combines with some others to form a party, is left to him. It is an affair he may have to explain and defend to his electorate.

His duty is to represent the interests of all those people whom he represents to the best of his ability. These interests will in almost all cases be identical with those of all the citizens of the country, of the nation. These are the interests he must pursue to the best of his knowledge. He is personally responsible to persons.

This is the only duty and the only responsibility of the representative that must be recognised by the constitution. If he considers that he has also a duty to a political party, then this must be due solely to the fact that he believes that through his connection with that party he can do his primary duty better than without the party. Consequently it is his duty to leave the party whenever he realises that he can do his primary duty better without that party, or perhaps with a different party.

…What we need in politics are individuals who can judge on their own and who are prepared to carry personal responsibility.

While Popper is discussing political parties and proportional representation, the key points he makes actually make an argument in favour of independents, the central idea of UVI. What we now need is a mechanism to bring to life his idea that “what we need in politics are individuals who can judge on their own and who are prepared to carry personal responsibility.”

Thinks 394

Phil Spencer: “As we look at the workplace going online, hybrid work environments, where we might have some of our coworkers that are together in one place, others that are on the other end of a call, we look at these virtual spaces and some of the things that we’ve learned in video games of people coming together to cooperate together to achieve tasks. And as we talk about it inside of Microsoft, it’s very much, can we take from learning of that and think about what the next evolution of Teams might be? And the learning that we have over the years, not only with what you’d say is today’s Teams or Zoom users but also thinking about Gen Z, there’s a whole generation that are growing up where their social connection to the world is through video games. It’s not just about the play itself, but it’s about, where do you hang out after school? Where do you meet your friends? What are those shared experiences that you like to go do together? For the generation that’s growing up, that being a natural way to get things done with your coworkers is going to be much more native than it is for my generation of people, who will seem like kind of a bolt-on to the experience that I’ve had.”

WSJ: “In her new book “52 Ways to Walk: The Surprising Science of Walking for Wellness and Joy, One Week at a Time,” Annabel Streets tackles the boredom that might creep into a well-worn fitness routine. Offbeat tips to keep things interesting include walking backward for a bit or inverting your head to see the world upside down. To protect brain health, she cites a study calling for four minutes of brisk walking, then three minutes of easy walking throughout a longer walk. Ms. Streets adds in galloping, dancing or skipping to keep it fresh. Her thesis: Movement is medicine. “A 12-minute walk alters 522 metabolites in our blood—molecules that affect the beating of our heart, the breath in our lungs, the neurons in our brain,” she writes in the book out next month. “Oxygen rushes through us, affecting…our memory, creativity, mood, our capacity to think.””

Thomas Sowell: “Many people who advocate what they think of as equality promote what is in fact make-believe “equality.” In economic terms, taking what others have produced and giving it to those who have not produced as much (or at all, in some cases) is make-believe equality – as contrasted with real equality, which would be enabling the less productive to become more productive, so that they could create for themselves what they are trying to take from others.’ [via CafeHayek]

 

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 8)

Anti-Party

India’s political parties have let down the people. Instead of inner-party democracy, there is the “high command.” Witness what happens when state Chief Ministers are replaced by the national parties and a charade of selection by ostensibly listening to the MLAs is played out. Corruption is a must because there is no other way to feed the organisation. While electoral bonds offer a legitimate route, pressure can easily be applied by those in power for contributions in “white”, even as the bulk of the funding stays in “black.” There is no process for primaries for local candidate selection – diktats come from the top. As a result, the voters have no say in the candidate chosen to represent them. Thus, after winning, the elected representative’s focus is on gratifying the leader, not listening to the constituents. Politics has also become a family business through the decades – with sons and daughters inheriting the mantle from their parents. Defections are still easy to do because ideology doesn’t matter – a politician has to just resign (after being appropriately compensated), switch parties, cause a by-election, and then win on the other party’s symbol. Even after being elected, there is no voice – the whip takes care of that.

Thus, our democracy is built on a fundamentally flawed foundation where the voice of the people is limited to voting every few years in an election where they know their individual vote makes no difference. It is little wonder then that India’s governance model is also a failure – a few know-it-alls make every decision and use Parliament as a cover to provide the illusion of “rule by the people.” India’s politics and government has always been of the few, by the few, for the few.

There is very little to differentiate the BJP from the Congress now. I was jokingly telling a friend that the BJP has become the CJP (Congress Jaisi Party – a party like the Congress). Everything that some of us disliked in the Congress can now be found in the BJP. As they say, you tend to become the enemy you fight. Nehru and Indira may be disliked by the BJP, but they are the inspiration for most political and economic decisions. The mantle of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has been inherited by BJP’s leaders.

If Indians have to become prosperous, they have to get rid of their politicians and political parties. There is no difference between them. This is the real choice we have to make – existing parties or something new. Only when we get past the notion that the BJP and Congress (or the regionals) are our only alternatives can we start imagining a new future for India. This new future – Nayi Disha – cannot be created by a broken political system that only enriches the few. Mass prosperity in India needs an economic transformation, which in turn needs a political revolution.

This is where hope comes in the form of the blockchain which can eliminate the extreme centralisation that is the bane of India’s politics. This is the thinking behind United Voters of India, a decentralised political platform (not a party) made up of independents, chosen by local voters, and united by an agenda to put India on a new path – freedom and prosperity, something most Indians living or dead have never experienced.

Thinks 393

Key Trends from CES 2022. More from WSJ.

Tyler Cowen: “By far the most optimistic feature of today’s world is that there is more mobilized talent than ever before, and by a long mile. A mere few decades ago, or less in many cases, if you were born into India, China, or Nigeria, the chance you could make a positive contribution to the world on a significant scale was quite low. It is now much, much higher, largely because of increases in wealth and also because of the internet.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Because consumer preferences are always changing, and because entrepreneurial ingenuity incessantly creates previously unthought-of combinations of resources, at no time in reality is the market in what economists call “equilibrium.” At no time are all resources being used perfectly – that is, as they’d be used by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity. But so what? In our mortal vale, a standard of God-like perfection is absurd. The best that we can hope for is that the profits and losses that prevail at each and every moment continually prompt improvements in resource use…As long as there is freedom of entry into markets – as long as entrepreneurs are free to experiment in whatever peaceful ways they wish – as long as consumers are allowed to spend their money as they choose – there will be no plausible grounds to suppose that a private firm will secure to itself the monopoly power necessary to inflict harm on consumers. There will, instead, be continued economic growth, and rising prosperity for the masses.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 7)

Five Star Movement – 2

Cecilia Biancalana wrote in a 2017 paper entitled “Reshaping Political Organisation and Participation: The Use of the Internet in the Five Star Movement. An analysis of Rousseau”: “The FSM represents one of the most advanced experiences regarding the use of the Internet by a political party, especially considered its electoral potential. The most relevant example of the power held by FSM’s members is the candidate selection process: all candidates at the local, regional and national are decided by members, in most cases through online votes … FSM’s elected representatives are considered as spokespersons, that have to follow the “volonté génèrale” of the people. So, the online participation platform is the tool used in order to connect “the people” (the FSM members) and the elected representatives and to make members participate to the internal life of the party, exercising the “steering power, usually detained by few”. As stated by Davide Casaleggio on the occasion of the presentation of the new version of Rousseau: “The representative democracy was probably the best model that we could have until a few years ago. But with the use of the Internet and the set of tools that can be used through the Internet, today participation is probably the best democracy that we can have.””

Caroline Stockman and Vincenzo Scalia analysed the success of FSM and Rousseau in a 2019 paper: “The Five Star movement is positioning itself as the morally superior choice in Italian politics and explicitly aims to be the nation’s sole governing force. Its narrative centres on the materialisation of real democracy, one that is direct and unmediated. One of its key tools for this utopian promise is the Rousseau platform, which allows online voting amongst other direct democracy functionalities. It is named after the well-known Western theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proposed the general foundation to which the Five Star movement subscribes, centring on the people’s will, against the corruption of the established government. The party’s programme is based on the disaffection for politics by the Italian voters and their resentment over corruption.”

Enzo Floris wrote in a 2020 paper: “The Rousseau platform fulfils various purposes. It runs primary votes, serves as a public forum discussing salient political issues, and organizes referendums on policy proposals… Arguably, the rise of online deliberative platforms is also influenced by a pervasive democratic deficit. The current systems of democratic representation date back to a time when technology did not allow to overcome space and time distances. As new possibilities open, the public’s expectations of further involvement in the public sphere increase. Indeed, the Italian trend fits into a wider global picture of dissatisfaction with representative institutions, the ruling class and politics as a whole…FSM’s Rousseau aims to answer this expanding need for alternative and better systems of representation and for greater democracy within party structures. The platform offers registered users the right to weigh in on important issues, which traditional political organizations reserve to party elites. The significance of the users’ preferences reflects clearly in recent Italian political history, as several key decisions for the party as well as the country were taken within such framework. Remarkably, in 2018 Rosseau determined the birth of a coalition government between FSM and Salvini’s League, after an overwhelming online vote in favor of it.”

Wired UK provides a summary and update in a June 2021 story:

The Five Star Movement (5SM), wanted to upend Italian politics with its revolutionary plans for digital direct democracy. Over the past few months, instead, it almost managed to upend itself, stuck in a kafkaesque drama that left its online voting platform paralysed.

The anti-establishment party, founded in the late 2000s by comedian Beppe Grillo and digital entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio, prided itself on reconciling with politics thousands of disenfranchised citizens, giving them a say on strategic decisions and in the selection of candidates by means of frequent online votes.

But over the past two months its internal processes have been disrupted by a painful divorce with the association that owns Rousseau, the web platform (named after the Genevan political philosopher and theorist of direct democracy) where the 5SM used to hold its ballots and debates. The end of a long stalemate between the party and the platform, this week, provided some respite – but questions remain on whether the party’s online democracy utopia can ever be revived.

Five Star Movement eventually failed in its utopian ambitions. Can India do better? Can we become a pioneer in going beyond just a digital app supporting a new political party to creating a blockchain-based mass platform for political power and governance?

Thinks 392

FT reviews “The Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby: “The question is, as Mallaby writes, “Did the VCs create the success, or did they merely show up for it?” In the early days, they played a big role. There were fewer investors then willing to stake money on risky ideas, and funds often worked “with entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurial way”, as Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins phrased it. In other words, they dispensed a lot of advice. Mallaby attributes this alchemy to a “combination of laid-back creativity and driving commercial ambition” boosted by “a frank lust for riches”. A key venture capital insight was to invest in founders as much as technology, since the latter was impossible to assess. It was easier to identify individuals, often ambitious immigrants, who would not tolerate failure.”

WSJ, in a review of “Get It Done” by Ayelet Fishbach: “According to Ms. Fishbach, an effective goal should “pull us toward our ultimate desires, energizing us to put in the work we need to do to get there.” It should be ambitious, measurable and, to the extent possible, intrinsically motivating. Suppose you want to start exercising more. To say “I’d like to run a 5k in 30 minutes or less by June” sets a more effective goal than simply saying “I’d like to start running.””

David Perell: “Make One Person Responsible: If you want to get something done, it’s tempting to put a huge number of people in charge. But often, when too many people are in charge, nobody accepts responsibility. This saying is illustrative: “A dog with two owners dies of hunger.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 6)

Five Star Movement – 1

Italy’s Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, in Italian) rose to power on the back of a digital platform targeting disillusioned voters with a fresh new alternative and a vision of a digital model of participative governance. From Wikipedia: “The M5S was founded on 4 October 2009 by Beppe Grillo, a comedian and blogger, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, a web strategist. In the 2013 general election, the M5S was the second-most popular single party, though it was only the third-most popular grouping, behind the centre-left and centre-right coalitions. The M5S subsequently turned down a coalition offer with the centre-left coalition and entered opposition. In the 2018 general election, the M5S became the largest party in the Italian Parliament and entered government led by Giuseppe Conte.”

Wikipedia’s briefing on Five Star Movement elaborated on its use of technology: “The movement bases its principles on direct democracy as an evolution of representative democracy. The idea is that citizens will no longer delegate their power to parties (considered old and corrupted intermediates between the state and themselves) that serve the interests of lobby groups and financial powers. They will succeed only by creating a collective intelligence made possible by the Internet. In order to go in this direction, the M5S chose its Italian and European parliamentary candidates through online voting by registered members of Beppe Grillo’s blog. Through an application called Rousseau reachable on the web, the registered users of M5S discuss, approve or reject legislative proposals.”

Marco Deseriis wrote in a 2017 paper: “Central to [the] shift from politics as a profession to politics as a form of service is the network, which M5S activists routinely refer to as the ultimate source of decisional power.  Although the network of M5S members is dispersed throughout the Internet, Rousseau is the hub where the network coalesces in what the party rule book describes as the “assembly of the members”. In this context, the term assembly is to be understood metaphorically for two distinct reasons. First, as with any Internet-based community, the members do not meet in a physical location. Second, if Rousseau could support in theory the formation of a virtual assembly, the platform lacks in practice any tool for real-time or asynchronous communication among the members. Such choice is deliberate. As Members of Parliament Manlio Di Stefano, Nunzia Catalfo, and Danilo Toninelli noted, Rousseau has been designed to function as an “operational tool” rather than an outlet for extended discussions among party members. In this context, operational means that Rousseau allows members to make decisions via majority voting and to develop a relationship with their representatives that is ostensibly unmediated by party structures … This Web-based parliamentarization of the M5S is in line with the process of institutionalization that the M5S has undergone since 2012. Indeed, the extension of parliamentary processes to the Web occurs almost exclusively via a “crowdsourcing” of bills of law that channels the activism of the party base within specific boundaries.”

Writing in Washington Post in 2018 after FSM’s electoral success, Davide Casaleggio, who conceptualised Rousseau, had this to say:

The Five Star Movement, which launched in 2009, has now achieved a landmark success among Western democracies by using the Internet to play a crucial role in the electoral process. The first major digital political organization in the world, it was born and raised online, supported exclusively by donations from ordinary citizens. Its objectives and priorities are defined by citizens, not the old moribund parties, with a mission to end corruption, fight tax evasion, reduce taxes, protect the environment, improve education and accelerate innovation.

…The platform that enabled the success of the Five Star Movement is called Rousseau, named after the 18th century philosopher who argued politics should reflect the general will of the people. And that is exactly what our platform does: it allows citizens to be part of politics. Direct democracy, made possible by the Internet, has given a new centrality to citizens and will ultimately lead to the deconstruction of the current political and social organizations. Representative democracy — politics by proxy — is gradually losing meaning.

Our parliamentarians who stood for election were chosen through online voting on the Rousseau platform — not inside a smoke-filled room like the established parties. Since it is the citizens who finance us though micro-donations, it’s the citizens who choose our program and representatives. In the last online vote to choose our parliamentarians, 8,000 candidates were picked from 40,000 nominees.

Five Star Movement’s Rousseau was thus one of the most successful pioneering efforts to upend the traditional power structure by putting people, rather than the politicians, at the centre.

Thinks 391

Kelly Dedman on martech and adtech: “Marketing technology and email marketing developed around known addressable customer data — the house file. Email marketing was a logical internet-age successor to direct mail and, combined with e-commerce, created an efficient and measurable direct response mechanism. Email marketers inherited the disciplines and practices of their direct mail maternal ancestors and focused on core tenets required to build, maintain, and optimize the value of their house file – registering subscribers, collecting email addresses, building out progressive profiles, collecting survey data, aggregating data from disparate sources, creating a unified view of the customer, learning how to use past customer transactions to predict future behavior, and calculating customer value through analytical models. Advertising technology emerged to contend with new challenges of targeting vast anonymous online audiences, along with how to attribute response, optimize and measure campaign effectiveness. Much like the pre-Internet form of advertising, digital advertisers were still unable to directly address known, individual consumers due to regulations around the use of third-party data, which was the only way to build targetable audiences at scale.”

Rita McGrath: “Here is the definition I find helpful, following a classical definition of strategy created by Don Hambrick and James Frederickson. It defines strategy as the “central, integrated, concept of how you plan to meet your objectives.”…Strategies are not about iron-clad unchanging five year plans. They are about making the best hypotheses with imperfect information, providing clarity to people and founding an environment in which people up and down the organization are at liberty to make smart choices.”

Brian Caplan: “Free markets are awesome because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad. Governments are awful because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 5)

Blockchain and Politics – 2

A 2018 Wired story about Democracy.Earth: “At the center of the project is the creation of what [Santiago Siri] calls “political cryptocurrency”— blockchain-generated tokens that users of Democracy.Earth’s software can spend as votes … Siri dreams of a new kind of social media platform on which we spend “vote tokens” that can do anything, from electing politicians and passing referendums to enacting the bylaws of a social club or establishing the business plan of a corporation. It’s democracy by click…In this perfect world, Siri argues, the supposedly unhackable and absolutely transparent blockchain will ensure that no centralized election authority is required to tabulate a vote, and no corrupt politician or gridlocked legislature can interfere with the popular mandate. But coming up with a superior form of voting technology is just the beginning; the larger, far more revolutionary goal is to devise a decentralized decision-making process that eliminates the necessity for any kind of central government at all.”

Andrey Sergeenkov on the idea of a DePa (Decentralised Party): “A DePa would essentially function like a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) as the entirety of the protocol relies on predefined rules set in codes and launched as smart contracts. Therefore, the protocol responds to the activities of users or verified party members based on its underlying code. And so, all operations are fully automated and devoid of the influence of third parties or central authorities. Whenever sets of conditions are met, the DePa executes actions that are in turn recorded on the blockchain and open for verification by any member of the party. In essence, DePa is a party that reflects the views of all its constituent members and not just the selfish interest of the few. To ensure that the activities of each party member conform with the unified goals of the decentralized party, the protocol will incentivize positive contributions by distributing its native token as rewards. It is important to mention that the ultimate goal of the protocol is to achieve consensus and at the same time preserve the individuality of each member. The token accrued by each member would also determine the individual’s voting power.”

Comistar writes about tokenising political parties: “While the politics and the social system is a wide topic and blockchain technology can’t fix it all, it could definitely be useful, at least in theory, when it comes to funding and the governance of the political parties. Could we create more transparency in the shady funding shenanigans of the politics? How about the inclusion of the voters?.. The party token could have voting rights. What if the people who own the token could, to limited capacity, of course, have some sort of voting rights on the (important) decisions which the party does? For example, let’s say the party has an important political decision to make and to do that they have to get an opinion of the token holders as well (via token sale agreement or any other type of document highlighting the responsibilities of the party).”

Marta Poblet, et al: “Oracles were trusted sources of knowledge for public deliberation in classical Athens. Very much like expert and technical knowledge, divine advice was embedded in the deliberation and decision-making process of the democratic Assembly. While the idea of religious divination is completely out of place in our contemporary democracies, oracles made a technological comeback with modern computer science and cryptography and, more recently, the emergence of the blockchain as a “trust machine.””

In summary, while the ideas have been discussed, there has been no successful implementation of a blockchain based political party (or platform). The only example of a digital-centric party coming to power has been Italy’s Five Star Movement, but that experiment eventually failed.