{"id":474,"date":"2015-11-12T18:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T02:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?page_id=474"},"modified":"2017-05-10T20:10:15","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T03:10:15","slug":"the-net-party","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/the-net-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Net Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

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How the Net Party aims to create a new UI for democracy in Argentina<\/h1>\n
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by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo<\/a> \u2014 Latin America<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

Assuming his microphone was off and the camera no longer rolling, the Argentine Finance Minister berated the foreign journalist<\/a> for asking questions about inflation. \u201cBut if I can\u2019t ask you about inflation, who am I supposed to ask?,\u201d the reporter wondered. The minister then muttered the words that would instantly became an internet meme: \u201cI want to get out of here<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The #YoMeQuieroIr <\/a>incident and the explosion of online activity that followed says a lot about the current political climate in Argentina.<\/p>\n

Though inflation is popularly believed to hover above 20%, the government\u2019s official statistics department insists the rate is only 10%. Any economist who dares publish otherwise faces the threat of government sanction.<\/p>\n

The Finance Minister\u2019s response to the question on inflation, \u201cI want to get out of here,\u201d sums up how a lot of Argentines feel about the country\u2019s state of affairs.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just inflation that\u2019s getting under the skin of Argentines. Currency controls, spiralling crime, the politicization of the judicial branch and the general malaise with the Cristina Fernandez government has led to protests, partly organized on the Internet<\/a>, of tens of thousands taking the streets to demand better governance.<\/p>\n

It is within this context that a new Internet-based political party has been born: what is unique to this party is that its goal is not necessarily to take power but to change how power is exercised by creating a new \u2018front-end user-interface\u2019 for Argentine democracy. As Santiago Siri<\/a>, Internet entrepreneur and founding member of the movement says, \u201cwe want to weave a bridge between the click and the vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy has stagnated\u201d<\/h3>\n

Based on the principle that \u201cdemocracy has stagnated,\u201d the value proposition of El Partido de La Red<\/a>, in English The Net Party, is to create a hybrid model of representative and direct democracy in which candidates representing the Net Party are elected to the country\u2019s governing bodies but their vote on any given issue is determined by the collective intelligence of the party\u2019s members.<\/p>\n

The members in turn use an open-source software platform to discuss, debate, and vote on the issues before congress. The congressmen, therefore, are trojan horses who are binded to stand by and defend what the party\u2019s collective membership decides.<\/p>\n

Unlike traditional political parties, however, the goal of the Net Party is not to govern. \u201cWe don\u2019t have pretensions to hold power,\u201d notes founding member Flor Polimeni<\/a>. \u201cWe will be happy if any of the political parties want to adopt our system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like true agents of change, the goal of the Net Party is not necessary to ensure its own success but to bring about wide-scale transformation and create a market for an idea where one currently does not exist.<\/p>\n

In this sense success is not measured by whether the Net Party takes over congress, but that the principles of online consultation be infused into all political processes, shifting the balance in representative democracy away from representative and towards democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to democratize democracy\u201d<\/h3>\n

\u201cTechnology,\u201d summarizes Santiago Siri, \u201chas the effect of democratizing everything. \u00a0We\u2019ve democratized access to culture, to knowledge and information, and now we want to democratize access to power. We want to democratize democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite their ambitions, the Net Party still has a number of obstacles to overcome. As the former Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom<\/a> noted in his recent book Citizenville<\/a>, many digital democracy efforts are overrun by special interest groups whose offline organizational capacity allows them to suffocate efforts to engage directly with citizens.<\/p>\n

Should the Net Party threaten to win votes it is without a doubt that the cutthroat nature of Argentina\u2019s politics will be turned on the diverse group of political neophytes who may be masters of new media but who will no doubt have to do battle with the masters of old media.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the Net Party founders remain optimistic and are currently collecting signatures to officialize their status. Though they face much of the usual skepticism that plagues direct democracy-oriented efforts, they remain confident that the flaw is not in the concept but in the design of many pervading systems.<\/p>\n

They see direct digital democracy as requiring the same kind of wave of innovation that has transformed many long-shot ideas into unquestionable parts of our daily lives.<\/p>\n

After all, the precedent for such a radical change in behaviour abounds.<\/p>\n

Online commerce was dismissed before E-Bay and Amazon got it right, and social networking required various iterations before Facebook and Twitter found what appear to be working formulas.<\/p>\n

Just as Bitcoin<\/a> may be a step towards a digital currency even if Bitcoin itself doesn\u2019t become the gold standard (pun intended), so too does direct\/digital democracy need a series of catalysts to find the structures and models that can both enable increased democratic participation and deter abuse and potential pitfalls.<\/p>\n

After a wave of movements and revolutions across the world that were either fueled or accelerated by social media, the Net Party hopes to \u201copen the bandwidth of democracy\u201d by changing not only the people in charge but the structures they inherit. The ultimate goal is to shift political discussions away from debates about people and towards debates about issues.<\/p>\n

Given that our current democratic systems were designed in a different era to solve different problems, the conditions are ripening for democracy to move past what MIT professor Ces\u00e1r Hidalgo<\/a> refers to as \u201cone-bit democracy<\/a>\u201d in which citizens are allowed to contribute one bit of input every four years, to something along the lines of \u2018Democracy 2.0\u2019. Such a system needs to be capable of operating on its own with limited input whilst also sustaining and processing large surges of input when required.<\/p>\n

Politicians such as the Argentine Finance Minister may just be making the case for the Net Party Founders on their behalf.<\/p>\n

After all, it\u2019s hard to convince people that they need politicians to defend themselves from themselves if the political class is regularly failing to provide the type of leadership, planning and policy required to ensure a country\u2019s long term stability.<\/p>\n

Having experienced more booms and busts than Van Halen, and with 89% of 18-29 year-olds in Buenos Aires accessing the internet every day, Argentina may just be the place for a new ripple in the wave of of democratic experimentation taking place across the globe.<\/p>\n

With the Pirate Party making gains in Iceland<\/a> and Partido X<\/a> (The X Party) gaining momentum in Spain, The Net Party may just find itself one of many groups hoping to apply the disruptive potential of technology to breaking up monopolies of power within our governing systems.<\/p>\n

At this point it is hard to say whether or not the Net Party will usher in a new era of Argentine democracy or if it will remain an easily overlooked fringe party. Nonetheless, the opportunity for change is real, and as Rahm Emanuel <\/a>once said, \u201cyou never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n

Partido de la Red Manifiesto:
\nhttp:\/\/wiki.partidodelared.org\/index.php\/Manifiesto_de_la_Red<\/p>\n

Partido de la Red Home Page (P\u00e1gina Principal):
\nhttp:\/\/wiki.partidodelared.org\/index.php\/P%C3%A1gina_principal#Documentos_Partidarios<\/p>\n

Democracia OS:
\nhttp:\/\/wiki.partidodelared.org\/index.php\/Democracia_OS<\/a><\/p>\n

Net Parties: Who they are and how they\u2019re different<\/h1>\n

\"Pirate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How the Net Party aims to create a new UI for democracy in Argentina by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo \u2014 May 11, 2013 in Latin America Assuming his microphone was off and the camera no longer rolling, the Argentine Finance Minister berated the foreign journalist for asking questions about inflation…. Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4923,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/474\/revisions\/4923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}