A Brief History of The Delegate Network and Its Prospects

General Discussion
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For those unfamiliar with the distinction between “direct” democracy and “liquid” democracy, here’s an introductory video I suggest watching before reading further:

A few years ago I began developing a transitive proxy voting (sometimes called “liquid democracy” or “delegative democracy”) interactive voice application I called The Delegate Network.

I got it to work in time for the 2022 midterms. A brief history:

September 19, 2021:

I demonstrated a VoIP-based touch tone prototype of The Delegate Network at a Republican Party fund raiser, announcing my intention to run for the Iowa 3rd Congressional District seat in the US House of Representatives on the single promise:

“I will vote the way the delegate network for my Congressional district tells me to vote and refer all political negotiations to them.”

I explained, with some passion, the manifest illegitimacy of the political system giving as only one example the 50-year long policy of increasing immigration against the will of more than a supermajority of “We The People”, and described what was happening with social media as something I’d predicted in 1982 in my role as architect of the, then, largest mass-market experiment in consumer networking, further explaining what had happened with the immigration from India infiltrating the US’s cyber security system. It quite stirred the crowd and scared regular “Chamber of Commerce” types (for obvious reasons).

September 25, 2021:

“Global DDOS Attack Campaign Targets Several VOIP Providers”

One VoIP provider not named in that news story, Telnyx, is where I went to get an alternative service. Since I had to rewrite the API anyway, and I’d gotten feedback from my initial demonstrations that people might find using the touch tone interface cumbersome, I decided to go to a speech-recognition interface. I figured I’d have time to get things running before the signature deadlines hit and could use the system itself to a viral networking advantage.

September 29, 2021:

Telnyx is not being affected.

After a few weeks I make substantial progress in a first-of-a-kind voter-interaction system not just in terms of delegative democracy but in general, and start telling people about it. Think high reliability voice activated directory lookup of hundreds of thousands of registered voters, with weekly updates from the Iowa Secretary of State.

November 10, 2021:

“Telnyx is the latest VoIP provider hit with DDoS attacks”

This attack continues and, at the same time, attacks on the original VoIP provider (Twilio) seemed to be abating.

However, shifting back to Twilio was not going to be simply a huge software chore, it was going to possibly be utterly impractical because of the way they handled speech to text services. Nevertheless, I started negotiation with Twilio around Christmas in hopes of having a configurable interface that could fall back to less functionality on Twilio if Telnyx couldn’t defend itself successfully. This was going to be hell on a 67 year old programmer working alone but I’d released the code GPL quite a while before and the supposedly “passionate” world of “liquid democracy” should have been jumping all over it with young programmers to help.

Crickets….

So I blew off much of my normal holiday activities and began to code…

December 31, 2021:

I receive a call from my wife’s remote care facility asking my permission to put her into end-of-life hospice for Huntington’s Disease.

Becoming overloaded, I abandoned the rewrite of the API to escape the DDoS attack on Telnyx in hopes that it would abate.

I don’t mention this last point to garner sympathy—nor to put it in the same class as the other “coincidences”—but to explain that as the “Boomers” age into oblivion there are resources that aren’t being replaced and are quite likely irreplaceable.

Urgency is overtaking priority.

January 15, 2022:

The DDoS attacks seemed to abate somewhat.

The point of this? Aren’t things so far gone that it is hopeless to do anything with the political system at all?

Not if you recognize that a “vote” is, like a unit of fiat currency, an abstract unit of force. As I describe in the github README:

Philosophically speaking, politics and money are the two primary abstractions of government’s monopoly on force.

The Delegate Network’s primary intent is to make public the command structure latent in We The People. It is critical that we expose these structures to each other so we can begin to negotiate with those of us that might otherwise see no alternative but violence in the presence of a virulent Federal Government that has so centralized social policy that we all must become supremacists as a matter of self-defense.

The obvious danger in loss of political privacy was pointed out by Jacques Vallee in his 1982 book “The Network Revolution”: Blitzkrieg the command structure of the political opposition.

During 1982, I was in Miami working with the joint venture between AT&T and Knight-Ridder, architecting the nation-wide rollout of the first mass market home information service. Encountering serious friction with Knight-Ridder editors about freedom of speech in my architecture, which would have been more like the World Wide Web than Vallee’s experience with with France’s Minitel, I resigned. Upon my resignation I visited Vallee at his VC firms’ Embarcadero office to discuss the potential of a startup. While we saw eye-to-eye on virtually everything regarding the societal impact, I had just gone through being betrayed by CDC’s middle management at PLATO thence to Big Media and Big Corp. interests and was, perhaps, too suspicious of the kind of structure that would have been required. But that’s another story.

My point in bringing up Vallee is that I am anything but ignorant of the risk to any command hierarchy that makes itself known to a hostile government – whether foreign or domestic.

My counter-argument is 3 fold:

  1. At present, the latent command structure in We The People is known only to the surveillance state. Machine learning has already filled in gaps in missing data about command structures from the vast data resources of the “private” network effect monopolies. It is naive in the extreme to think otherwise.
  2. Starting with the 2020 election, it has become obvious to the most casual observer that the system of anonymous voting system isn’t auditable – hence We The People no longer trust the outcome of elections. Making things publicly auditable at all times may be the only practical way to recover public trust.
  3. If, as predicted by Vallee, bad actors attempt to blitz the command structure, it will disrupt the current game plan by the bad actors; which is to use machine learning via social media to “gently” pacify the population. This will be a particularly bad idea in the US with its 2nd Amendment if We The People have options other than to just kill our neighbors as happened during the Thirty Years War. If We The People realize the publicly auditable, decentralized command hierarchy, it will permit us to negotiate a stand-down-and-separate revision to The Treaty of Westphalia rather than sparking a Thirty Years War over quasi-religious differences.
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Direct democracy has a lot going for it – but it needs provisions to prevent it being a continuation of today’s Tyranny of the Minority. What if the participants in the Delegate Network dwindle down to a small group of committed activists, for example? Proposed provisions:

  1. Any proposal requires the affirmative votes of 50% + ! of the registered voters to be approved. Thus, people who choose not to vote in the Delegate Network are automatically counted as “No” votes.
  2. In Congress or any other house, a law requires 60% affirmative vote to pass – but can be repealed at any time by votes of 40% of the members.

Basically, we want to make it difficult to pass laws, and to ensure that any proposed law has broad support.

By the way, I agree with eliminating anonymous voting. In the old Greek city states, people stood up and were counted. We should do the same – especially because our votes even now are not anonymous to the government.

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I added a video that introduces people to the difference between “direct” and transitive proxy voting democracy. It addresses your concerns.

That said, holding 90% of the voting public in contempt for decade after decade on the policy of increasing immigration rates has done so much damage that any discussions of reforming the political system must be deferred. It isn’t that “direct” democracy would not have permitted this damage to proceed, nor even that transitive proxy voting would not have permitted this damage to proceed – although both of those are true. The problem now is defusing the stoichiometric mixture (“diversity is our greatest strength”) before it detonates destroying the West.

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Interestingly enough, Bruce Schneier also talks about liquid democracy in his essay:

The second idea is liquid democracy. This is a system where everybody has a proxy that they can transfer to someone else to vote on their behalf. Representatives hold those proxies, and their vote strength is proportional to the number of proxies they have. We have something like this in corporate proxy governance.

Both of these are algorithms for converting individual beliefs and preferences into policy decisions. Both of these are made easier through 21st century technologies. They are both democracies, but in new and different ways. And while they’re not immune to hacking, we can design them from the beginning with security in mind.

This points to technology as a key component of any solution. We know how to use technology to build systems of trust. Both the informal biological kind and the formal compliance kind. We know how to use technology to help align incentives, and to defend against hacking.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2023/05/rethinking-democracy-for-the-age-of-ai.html

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This is how the Continental Congress works in L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy novels, described in the first, The Probability Broach in chapter 28, “Congress Shall Make No Law”. The Congress is in session only when delegates representing 90% or more of the population gather in the capital of Gallatinopolis. They cannot vote by Telecom, as Lucy Kropotkin explains,

“Hives and heatrash, no! This place is supposed to be inconvenient! You wanna encourage more government? What a thought!”

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Schneier is, like Gavin, thinking about how to reform the political system. Since I’ve gone through a lot of this stuff over and over, ever since my 1982 essay on computer networking, all I can say is:

militia.money

That’s the political reform needed since it not only provides transitive proxy voting via conventional stock holder proxy voting, for those that want that kind of “governance”, but it is the only solution to the TFR collapse of economic value (due to the so-called “demographic transition” wherein the economy outbids young men for the fertile years of the most economically valuable young women) that I’ve seen anywhere. I’d really like to see some competition here but there is none.

That said, I brought up delegate.network because it is increasingly obvious to me from my forays into rural America to see what interest there is in militia.money, that Putnam’s documented destruction of social capital by immigration has gone far beyond people “Bowling Alone” to people being so terrified of each other that they’re just withdrawing from life if not killing themselves with opioids. This is the original reason I started considering running for office on the delegate.network platform:

Not because I thought I was going to reform the political system, but because I thought people needed to assort themselves into command hierarchies that may have, perhaps, at one time been provided by churches, politics and/or civic organizations but all of which have been essentially “bought off” by the way Federal Reserve dollars “trickle down”.

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Not the best writing, but I love those novels. Heinlein started me down the path but the NAC pushed me over the edge into libertarianism/ancap.

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Bruce Schneier seems to think that technology makes collaborative “big” systems much more feasible, and that we don’t need the conflict-based market systems of the heyday. Thus, he’s biasing towards the vision of Cybersyn.

I personally think that there’s abundant evidence of big systems going wrong, and that there’s need for ongoing evolution of governance - as well as of the governing. This is such a fundamental thing, which is shared by thinkers in a number of disciplines, and by most of us on this forum.

But we need to bring multiple proposals together, instead of just promoting one of them. It’s too hard to promote just one. One needs to assemble.

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Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them sounds a lot like what you’re talking about doesn’t it? My original motivation for proposing assortative migration under per capita land value market bidding, aka “Sortocracy”, was that I knew that the first and foremost problem we face is the centralization of social policy that is making everyone become “supremacist” as a matter of self-defense, while we’re all being relentlessly tormented with those who call for “tolerance” of this situation. It makes people crazy and will not end well unless some way of reinstituting some semblance of consent of the governed – including those dispossessed of even land value – is discovered. The Great and The Good have made technological civilization far more fragile than all their rhetoric about “resilience” admits – and if you have 100k people offing themselves with Fentanyl every year to escape The Great and The Good, you can bet that a few are going to off themselves in a manner that is more, shall we say, “productive”.

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My hunch is that it will take a lot of centralization to win against the current establishment, and then have the foresight and wisdom of decentralizing for continued evolution and longevity of the system.

Either way, a coherent vision of the future for the common man is needed to bring about any change. Science fiction is not far from prophecy-making of the ancients: it emboldens the kids to pursue it, it emboldens the parents to encourage.

We know the story of Jesus. We don’t know the prophecies that brought Jesus about. Biblical scholars I know tell me that John the Baptist was the sage that coached Jesus.

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There’s broad agreement about big systems going wrong, and many ideas how to make big systems work better. But maybe we should spend as much time thinking about whether big systems are necessary and whether those which are failing might benefit from being chopped up into smaller pieces which can go their own ways and attract those who concur (as @jabowery has discussed as “sortocracy”).

Here are the happiest ten countries in the World Happiness Report for 2023.

image

They’re all small, homogeneous, and developed. Not a single continent-scale, railroad-era, resource-extraction empire in the bunch. Here the the rankings for some big countries.

  • United States — 15
  • Brazil — 49
  • Argentina — 52
  • China — 64
  • Russia — 70
  • India — 126

Harry D. Schultz’s 1999 book, On Remaking the World: Cut Nations Down to Size (now an absurdly expensive collector’s item), made the argument that size itself was the problem and the obvious solution was to reduce the size, not try to design some new mechanism that people haven’t already tried in forty centuries of experimentation.

People are pretty much the same today as when they evolved to live in hunter-gatherer bands of 50 to 100 individuals. Maybe we’re asking too much to try to get hundred of millions spread over a continent to agree on anything.

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I’m not sure I would describe the Finns as happy.

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The methodology of the World Happiness Report puts heavy weight on surveys of representative samples of the population of each country/territory where they rank their own lives on a scale of 0 to 10. This is then combined with “life evaluations” based upon objective factors which can be compared across countries.

The rankings of national happiness] are based on a Cantril ladder survey undertaken world-wide by the polling company Gallup, Inc. Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The report correlates the life evaluation results with various life factors.

The life factor variables used in the reports are reflective of determinants that explain national-level differences in life evaluations across research literature. However, certain variables, such as unemployment or inequality, are not considered because comparable data is not yet available across all countries. The variables used illustrate important correlations rather than causal estimates.

So, the Finns may be dour (especially in winter), but if they believe their lives are as good as it gets, they’ll rank their country at the top.

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Which also explains Iceland. The Icelanders I’ve come into contact with have a real case of reduced horizons.

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Please elucidate.

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This is the function of a Constitutional Declaration of War, even if the essence of the Holy Spirit was obscured from the consciousness of The Founders:

Where there is no vision (of The State of Peace) the people perish (in perpetual war).

The State of War is conflict between nascent group organisms.

The State of Peace must be defined in a Declaration of War, but people are afraid to face what that means as mortal Thoughts in The Mind of The Creator. Any such mortal Thought that lacks integrity is what is meant by:

“I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Individual Integrity consists of Being such a Thought.

This is the theme of the, thus far, only video I’ve made for The Fair Church℠

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War is one of the worst ways to win. Win what though?

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I’ve provided an operational definition of “war” contrasting with “peace” in organic terms of “nascent group organisms” contrasting with “individuals”.

I submit any lesser definition leads to confusion hence perpetual war.

Take, for instance, the document “Unrestricted Warfare”. That document, reflects the Chinese culture of war going back to at least to Sun Tzu. There is nothing in even Sun Tzu’s teachings that define The State of War as essentially applying force. Indeed, the preferred weapon is fraud*.

Don’t be confused.

*Fraud can, of course, be perpetrated by individuals. Question: What is it called when fraud is perpetrated by a nascent group organism (whether or not component members of that group organism are conscious of the fraud being perpetrated)?

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I’m not sure we disagree: you define war as potentially non-violent, which is fine. Some things can be done through wars of memes or even through re-framing and persuasion.

But my question remains: what is the desired outcome? What is the war being fought over? I’m sorry if I should know about it as you’ve probably written it up somewhere already.

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That is the question! Few others are worthy of discourse midst cries of ‘Peace! Peace!’ When There Is No Peace.

We are so far from being permitted that discourse – particularly with the recent subversions of Section 230 by the social media network effect monopoly regulatory capture that is hollowing out the US as a polity – that we’re in danger of blindly killing each other.

That’s why my emphasis has been on things like the Delegate Network, Sortocracy, Militia.Money, The Fair Church℠ and within it, my own preferred way of life in The Berkana Ecclesium – which seem like a grab-bag of incoherent “ideas” but which can be viewed as stages of “Stand Down” from war toward individual moral agency so that people can negotiate their way toward the definition of “Peace” in the aforementioned organic terms.

For instance, a delegate hierarchy under the control of individuals permits group coherence to emerge at a formally declared level, which contrasts with what John Robb calls “The Swarm” that currently rules the West with virulent memes leading us quite plausibly to nuclear war with Russia if not also China. The importance of formal declaration of group allegiance is that it allows discourse to emerge between those that wield formal proxy powers, possibly negotiating what “peace” means.

Sortocracy is what I suspect would be the outcome of such a discourse between members of the delegate network – a change to the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia to dynamically reallocate territorial value on a per capita basis so as to stand-down from what are quasi-religious differences, while revitalizing the Treat of Westphalia’s spirit of self-determination over their internal affairs – including the urgent necessity of dispensing with this mendacious notion of “inclusion” as the universal value which merely evolves take-the-money-and-run virulent cultures.

The Fair Church℠is an attempt to attain present legal standing for Sortocracy.

Militia.Money is a recognition that people are unlikely to join The Fair Church℠or Sortocracy prior to the outbreak of a rhyme with The Thirty Years War, and that therefore some sort of localized contract between young men and property owners is necessary to avert a French Revolution or similar nightmare as part of that outbreak. This is because the World Reserve Currency is the de facto religion of The Swarm, and it has corrupted all established institutions down to and including the local Chambers of Commerce, schools, fraternal organizations and churches.

The Berkana Ecclesium’s fiat monetary system is the original formalization of militia.money, but geared toward my own “hunting pack” of men (mainly but including women, including older single women) that believe as I do, but who recognize we are not permitted to practice our religion under any present government – but may be seen as a halfway-house toward a State of Nature compatible with the biosphere, while the technological civilization finds its destiny in the stars. So it is also a minimal compromise.

Lest people think my emphasis on individual conflict as compatible with “peace” is misplaced:

This thing about MMA among billionaires is cute and all, but it reminds me of what one extremely wealthy individual told me in confidence – so no names:

“The US is a prison for men.”

I had shared with him that the reality is that Western individualism evolved in the crucible of conflict between Paleolithic heads of households – usually consisting of a man, a woman, children and their wolves/dogs – finding themselves starving in the depths of winter because their hunting grounds overlapped. The conflict would not take the form only of close combat but rather a mutual hunt in nature between heads of households. You don’t hunt a bear with MMA skills, nor does a smaller but better man fight a bear man like Mike Tyson primarily with MMA skills.

This kind of selection may be considered a transition from natural to artificial breeding for the attitude of “May the best man win!” that is the heart and soul of the superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The whole question of what is meant by “best” is answered only by The Holy Spirit and any shrinking from that question is shrinking from that still small voice from The Creator.

Ye are gods.

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