f{"id":9786,"date":"2018-09-28T10:21:37","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T17:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=9786"},"modified":"2018-09-28T10:21:37","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T17:21:37","slug":"meet-the-man-with-a-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/09\/28\/meet-the-man-with-a-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting\/","title":{"rendered":"MEET THE MAN WITH A RADICAL PLAN FOR BLOCKCHAIN VOTING"},"content":{"rendered":"

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ANDREW LEONARD<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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BACKCHANNEL<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/li>\n
08.16.18 (Wired.com)<\/time><\/time><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
A new movement says that crypto-voting can purify democracy\u2014and eventually eliminate the need for governments altogether.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
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IN A CAF\u00c9<\/span>\u00a0on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a one-time videogame developer turned political theorist named Santiago Siri is trying to explain to me how his nonprofit startup,\u00a0 Democracy.Earth<\/a>, aims to fix the world\u2019s broken politics with the help of the blockchain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
THE CONVERSATION HAS\u00a0<\/span>already covered a dizzying amount of ground. We\u2019ve discussed the emergence of the Westphalian order of nation-states in the 17th century, Russia\u2019s interference in the 2016 US election, the total collapse of Venezuelan society, and Siri\u2019s own experience of political corruption in his native Argentina. But he finally boils it all down to one short sentence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to tokenize the\u00a0like<\/em>,\u201d Siri says. At the center of the project is the creation of what he calls \u201cpolitical cryptocurrency\u201d\u2014blockchain-generated tokens that users of Democracy.Earth\u2019s software can spend as votes.<\/p>\n
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Siri grew up in Argentina, where he saw the effects of corruption on democracy first hand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>SASHA ARUTYUNOVA<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The way Siri sees it, we have traded in the original liberating potential of the internet for sterile corporate serfdom. Our time spent online retweeting and upvoting and clicking on emojis serves mainly to help unaccountable corporations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to better target us with advertising. Siri dreams of a new kind of social media platform on which we spend \u201cvote tokens\u201d 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\u2019s democracy by click.<\/p>\n
The vision is a radical departure from the one-person, one-vote, once-every-year-or-two trip to the ballot box we are familiar with\u2014and by which, in Siri\u2019s view, we are so ill-served. Users of Democracy.Earth\u2019s one-size-fits-all governance platform\u2014code-named Sovereign\u2014would have infinite flexibility to vote on any kind of topic or person, whenever they log on. In the Democracy.Earth future, every day will be election day, and the ballot will include anything that enough of us think should be there.<\/p>\n
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 decisionmaking process that eliminates the necessity for any kind of central government at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not in the business of selling e-voting machines or helping modernize governments with internet voting,\u201d Siri says. \u201cWe want to empower people down to the individual level without asking for the permission of governments.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the dream of bitcoin, the token generated by Satoshi Nakamoto\u2019s blockchain, was to free\u00a0money<\/em>\u00a0from central bank control, then the dream of Sovereign is to free\u00a0politics<\/em>\u00a0from central government control.<\/p>\n
Siri\u2019s complicated, multilayered solution to democratic dysfunction raises a host of questions and paradoxes. There is no shortage of secure-voting-systems experts who believe that radical blockchain democracy could cause more problems than it solves, and is in fact an invitation to gaming and manipulation at odds with the idea of transparent, fraud-free voting.<\/p>\n
Still others question how Democracy.Earth plans to solve the gnarliest quandaries faced by any voting system: How does one simultaneously ensure transparency in the voting process while guaranteeing the anonymity of the voter? How can one enfranchise direct voting without running the risk of a feckless tyranny of the majority motivated by short-term passions making terrible decisions?<\/p>\n
But nothing raises more eyebrows than the jewel in Democracy.Earth\u2019s crown: the vote token. Because\u2014like bitcoin, like Ether, and like so many of the cryptocurrency tokens sold by blockchain startups in initial coin offerings, known as ICOs, to fund their own operations\u2014the Democracy.Earth vote token has a financial value.<\/p>\n
According to Siri, early in 2018 Democracy.Earth raised $1.5 million in a vote-token \u201cpresale<\/a>.\u201d It has plans to mint \u201ca maximum\u201d of 500 million tokens, provisionally priced at 12 cents each, for a company valuation of $60 million. Democracy.Earth employees will be compensated for their labor with tokens. The bottom line: There will be a financial market for the mechanism that Democracy.Earth users employ to vote.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s a headscratcher.<\/p>\n
\u201cAsk yourself,\u201d says Joseph Kiniry, CEO of Free & Fair, a company that provides secure election services, \u201cif combining the idea of an ICO and democratic elections sounds fishy or not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
THE TROJAN HORSE\u00a0<\/span>that rolled through Buenos Aires in 2013 was designed, like its ancient Greek forebear, to catch the unsuspecting eye. Towed down the streets by a car, 20 feet high and exquisitely carpentered, it caused an immediate sensation. Kids ran alongside. An excited crowd gathered when it came to a halt in front of the Palace of the Argentina National Congress, the political heart of the South American country.<\/p>\n
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Argentina’s Partido de la Red\u2014Party of the Internet\u2014used a flamboyant Trojan horse to symbolize its entrance into the nation’s politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>COURTESY OF SANTIAGO SIRI<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
The publicity stunt aimed to spread awareness of an upstart new force in Argentinan politics, the Partido de la Red. \u201cUntil then, we were just the guys from Twitter, the nerds, playing politics,\u201d says Siri, a cofounder of the party. \u201cBut then everyone was like, \u2018What the hell is that?\u2019 People started taking selfies. It became a symbol of the campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
Partido de la Red means \u201cParty of the Net\u201d\u2014as in, the internet. It was founded to represent the interests of an emerging generation of millennial, always-online activists thoroughly dissatisfied with decades of Argentina\u2019s endemic political corruption and spectacular financial crises. Its affiliation with the internet was meant to signal faith in a new kind of collaborative democracy. One of its primary goals was to elect politicians who would commit to uphold decisions made by party members in open, online debates. No more closed-door maneuvering. No more voting according to who delivered the most cash.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had one rule,\u201d Siri says. \u201cObey the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trojan Horse\u2019s symbolism ran deep. Like the original equine that carried hidden Greek warriors into the city of Troy, it represented the idea that the Partido de la Red would sneak its way into the established order and wage war from the inside. But it was also a play on the computer world\u2019s co-optation of the name. This party was a computer virus designed to breach the security of Argentinian politics.<\/p>\n
At first, things seemed to be going well. In its first attempt to contest an election, the party captured 1.2 percent of the national vote, considerably better, Siri says, than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent a new party usually gets. \u201cWe had a lot of followers online,\u201d Siri says. \u201cIt became a movement. We got into the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then,\u201d Siri says, \u201cthings started to get really strange.\u201d<\/p>\n
Provocateurs began showing up at party meetings. Siri\u2019s car tires were slashed. A shadowy character told him that a \u201cdonation\u201d of a million pesos to a federal judge would magically solve his party\u2019s registration problems. He discovered that \u201cchanging the system from within was not going to happen,\u201d Siri says. \u201cThe system was going to change you first.\u201d<\/p>\n
So instead of trying to infiltrate the old system, Siri decided to build an entirely new one. He started putting together his blockchain governance platform. In January 2015, he made his way to Mountain View, California, where he had 10 minutes to impress Sam Altman, president of legendary startup incubator Y Combinator.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t going well. Siri remembers being \u201csuper nervous.\u201d When Altman asked him a question about how many users the fledgling enterprise might eventually have, \u201cI invented a number out of thin air.\u201d The 10-minute window was closing fast.<\/p>\n
Then he showed Altman Instagram pictures of the Trojan horse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were like, \u2018What!? What did you do!?,\u2019\u201d Siri says with a smile. \u201cThey loved us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
DEMOCRACY.EARTH\u2019S WHITE PAPER,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe Social Smart Contract<\/a>,\u201d is a tract that is equal parts crypto-libertarian manifesto and a technology road map for Sovereign. When stripped of its rhetoric (\u201cThe internet is incompatible with the nation-state,\u201d \u201cRepresentative democracies are an accident of the information technologies of the 18th century\u201d), it breaks down into half a dozen major pieces.<\/p>\n
In addition to the blockchain and vote tokens, there is also a flexible ruleset for voting called \u201cliquid democracy,\u201d a complicated system for identity validation involving video selfies and \u201cattention mining,\u201d and even a version of a universal basic income scheme that will regularly \u201cdrip\u201d new vote tokens into the accounts of Sovereign users.<\/p>\n
Fully explicating the potential and pitfalls of any single element of Democracy.Earth\u2019s technology requires a lengthy journey into mostly unmapped territory. Consider, just for starters, the concept of \u201cliquid democracy\u201d\u2014an approach to voting that is radically different from Western democratic electoral systems. In Sovereign\u2019s scheme, users are allocated a stockpile of votes they can use (or spend) in a variety of ways.<\/p>\n
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Siri approaches politics with the mindset of an engineer, meticulously tracking his ideas in notebooks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>SASHA ARUTYUNOVA<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
They can vote more than once on a particular topic, to express a heavier \u201cweight\u201d of intent. They can delegate their votes on a topic to trusted experts who are expected to understand the issue at hand in greater depth. They can even change their votes or retract their votes after the fact, if they change their minds on a subject or if they believe an elected representative has failed to deliver on their promises.<\/p>\n
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Log on to the beta version of vote.democracy.earth for the first time, and you start off with 1,000 votes to do with as you please. A scroll of questions, action items, and ongoing debates occupies the center of the screen.\u00a0Should there be a second Brexit vote? Should Venezuelan opposition leaders maintain dialogue with the repressive Maduro government? Do you think a universal basic income should be granted unconditionally<\/em>?<\/p>\n
Liquid democracy is an always-on mashup between direct democracy and representative democracy. Voters are simultaneously constituents of multiple overlapping organizations: local, international, aspirational. In Siri\u2019s imagination, dipping into liquid democracy\u2019s never-ending flow will fit as naturally into the lives of the smartphone generation as checking Twitter or Instagram.<\/p>\n
Moritz Ritter, managing director of Berlin-based advocacy group Liquid Democracy, which is unaffiliated with Democracy.Earth but has been pushing similar ideas about how elections can be reimagined for years, says the purpose is \u201cto take the current system of representative democracy and make it more responsive and distribute power more equally. In our view, this is necessary, because we see a growing disconnect between political actors and citizens manifested by shrinking numbers of members in political parties, dramatically shrinking voter turnout in elections, and growing mistrust of political systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDemocracy.Earth,\u201d Ritter says, \u201cis a really thorough approach for rethinking online voting and allocating political power without centralized institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
As described by Ritter, it\u2019s easy to see the appeal of liquid democracy for a constituency dissatisfied with politics as currently practiced. But it may be a mistake to try to map what Democracy.Earth is doing directly to our current status quo. Whenever I asked Siri how exactly his technology would affect something like the emergence of Donald Trump in US politics or the authoritarianism of President Maduro in Venezuela or, in perhaps the most formidably dismaying scenario, the total power of the Chinese Communist Party, Siri would change the grounds of discussion away from the political exigencies of the moment and toward the contemplation of more ethereal, long-range goals.<\/p>\n
The internet and the blockchain, he believes, have smashed the old nation-state era to dust. In this new, profoundly globalized, borderless, and increasingly decentralized universe, we are no longer defined by our geographical location in a particular territory. Instead, we are citizens of the world, and in the future we will require the evolution of new, decentralized organizations aligned with the constraints of our new reality. Democracy.Earth, I gradually came to understand, is an ongoing research laboratory and thought experiment in how to design decisionmaking mechanisms appropriate to this new world.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur aim is to provide a token that can be trusted for governance because of the legitimacy we can bring in regarding identity validation and liquid democracy rules,\u201d Siri says. \u201cI think we are discovering the building blocks for creating purely digital institutions\u2014institutions that never need to go through a bureaucracy or a bank or a state in order to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
THE PROPOSITION THAT\u00a0<\/span>new solutions are necessary for our strange new world is hard to argue against. The problem lies in proving that something as complex as Democracy.Earth fixes more than it breaks. Consider the most fundamental piece of Sovereign\u2019s infrastructure, the blockchain.<\/p>\n
The case for the application of the blockchain to voting systems is that blockchains are supposed to be perfectly transparent scorekeepers that can\u2019t be hacked by Russian bots or bought off by Super PAC fund-raising or corrupt Argentine politicos. The immutability of a \u201cdistributed ledger\u201d shared on multiple computers is an article of faith in the crypto community. Using Sovereign, Siri says, voters will be able to track their votes on the blockchain; they will know without any doubt that their vote was cast and counted as intended.<\/p>\n
Herb Stephens, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who serves as Democracy.Earth\u2019s treasurer, says the goal is a system in which \u201ceveryone has a copy and everyone can monitor the things that matter to the public in general.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or, as the white paper puts it, \u201cwith a blockchain-based democracy votes become censorship-resistant and every single voter can audit an election without requiring any kind of access rights to infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts in secure voting systems disagree.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a terrible mismatch for the voting and election space,\u201d says Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research who has spent 30 years researching secure voting systems. \u201cIt seems attractive, until you scratch under the surface. There are so many ways in which blockchains don\u2019t solve the real problems, they just make everything worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dan Wallach, a professor specializing in computer security at Rice University, believes that the crypto-infatuated generation is far too optimistic about what their new toys can achieve.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlockchain people haven\u2019t really been paying attention to the threat models inherent in voting, particularly bribery and coercion,\u201d Wallach says. \u201cThey tend to make naive assumptions about voters\u2019 ability to control the cryptographic keys and software used to express their votes. None of these systems are suitable for use in real-world municipal elections.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wallach and Benaloh both reiterated the classic \u201cgarbage in, garbage out\u201d problem that has long afflicted computer programming. Certainly, once things are recorded on the blockchain it is very hard to change them. (As Harper Reed, Barack Obama\u2019s 2012 campaign chief technology officer, told me, \u201cthe blockchain is great for knowing whether people are messing with your stuff.\u201d)<\/p>\n
But Benaloh is worried about vulnerabilities that occur\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0data is encoded in the blockchain. There could be malware on your smartphone that alters your vote as soon as you try to spend your token. Even worse, there could be an agent of a repressive state with a gun to your head dictating exactly how you vote.<\/p>\n
Or, your vote could just get bought\u2014something that some researchers think will be even easier on the blockchain than at the old-school ballot box.<\/p>\n
Although Democracy.Earth intends for Sovereign to ultimately be \u201cblockchain-agnostic\u201d\u2014that is, it should be compatible with a multitude of different public and private blockchains\u2014right now it is being designed to take advantage of the \u201csmart contract\u201d capabilities built into the Ethereum blockchain.<\/p>\n
These contracts automatically execute transactions on the blockchain when certain conditions written into the blockchain\u2019s code are met. Sovereign\u2019s vote tokens, therefore, can automatically trigger smart contracts. For example, an organization debating whether to spend funds on a particular project holds a vote; if a majority spends their tokens voting yes, the funds are instantly released.<\/p>\n
But in a system where the decisionmaking entity\u2014the vote token\u2014is itself something bearing a financial value, the potential for smart-contract mayhem is enormous, says Ari Juels, a Cornell Tech computer scientist who studies blockchains and smart contracts. In early July, Juels coauthored a blog post pointing out that smart contracts could be equally as effective at \u201cbuying elections\u201d as they would be properly executing the results of an election.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Democracy.Earth scheme offers a clear and simple illustration of the type of attack we\u2019re concerned about,\u201d Juels writes in an email. \u201cVery simply, someone can anonymously launch a smart contract that buys people\u2019s votes by purchasing their Democracy.Earth voting tokens.<\/p>\n
The broader point is that the very transparency of blockchains can be a liability in elections, as it exposes the choices of voters. Smart contracts can automate vote buying, guarantee payment, and otherwise undermine election integrity. The white paper suggests that the connection between identities and cast votes might be broken using new techniques. But breaking this connection when a voter\u00a0wants<\/em>\u00a0it in place in order to sell her vote is hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI hold the same opinion as the rest of the international experts in crypto and elections,\u201d says Kiniri of Free & Fair.^{1<\/sup>\u00a0\u201cThere are nearly only \u2018cons\u2019 to using blockchain technology in the voting process.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n}
THE SON OF\u00a0<\/span>a corporate lawyer and slipper company entrepreneur, Siri grew up in Buenos Aires, idolizing both Steve Jobs and Che Guevara. Before getting involved in Argentinian politics, he carved out a successful niche as a videogame designer, launching two game companies as well as cofounding a game developer association. He dreamed, he tells me, of building a game like\u00a0SimCity<\/em>, \u201conly with actual citizens.\u201d He jumped on the blockchain bandwagon early, although he notes, just a tad ruefully, \u201cI wish I bought more.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I bought enough,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n
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Santiago Siri photographed in New York City in August 2018.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>SASHA ARUTYUNOVA<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
As far as his own politics are concerned, Siri says that he\u2019s been \u201cintroduced in different places around the world as either a revolutionary leftist or a Davos-man entrepreneur engaging in politics. Both are flattering to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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There\u2019s no question he\u2019s hard to put in a box. Every conversation I had with Siri was a roller-coaster: Game theory, the quantum nature of reality, the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, the internet\u2019s responsibility for the polarization of our current information ecology\u2014in real time, you can feel Siri restlessly trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. He\u2019s a big thinker, tackling problems that are as big as they get.<\/p>\n
But the more we delved into the nitty-gritty of Democracy.Earth\u2019s technology, the more difficult it became to evaluate its objective merits. When I pointed Siri toward Juel\u2019s blog post about smart-contract vote-buying and shared Benaloh\u2019s critique of the blockchain as applied to real-world elections, his answers took me further into the labyrinth.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course there are all kinds of concerns as we expand our understanding of how to architect systems built only with information,\u201d he wrote via email. \u201cWe are aware of the diverse set of attacks that can happen. But voting isn\u2019t a uni-dimensional problem. It\u2019s just the name we give to transactions happening within the wider realm of governance. Elections, as we understand them under the traditional sense on how they\u2019ve been held by the nation-state, are probably not the fittest form of governance to be delivered in digital form … That\u2019s why intrinsically understanding how blockchains can scale social consensus is definitely the way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Siri seemed to be saying is that Sovereign isn\u2019t really intended as a replacement for how the United States elects a president or California passes an initiative. Instead, it’s really an exercise in figuring out how to use the blockchain to make group decisions in the crypto-digital domain. Sovereign, in other words, represents government of the crypto-people, by the crypto-people, and for the crypto-people.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, maybe, the crypto-people will soon just be\u00a0the people<\/em>. But we\u2019re not there yet. Underlying everything in the Democracy.Earth platform, and more generally in the whole crypto-libertarian project to remake society into a decentralized utopia free of coercion and exploitation, is a near-evangelical faith in the premise that computer code can solve the messy realities of human life.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe interesting thing about crypto,\u201d Siri says, \u201cis that you can start creating institutional models that no longer rely on the fallibility of human authority but are strictly based on code, mathematics, and encryption; you can start building an institutional reality where the checks and balances are protected by hard promises, by fundamental mathematical constructs that are simply impossible to break due to the intrinsic properties of how information works.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a difficult argument to challenge by picking away at potential smart contract vulnerabilities, or any other objective critique of the blockchain as it exists now, because the answer to every problem is a new technological solution that just hasn\u2019t been discovered yet. And it\u2019s an impossible argument to challenge by pointing out such things as the possibility that a centralized database with really strong security provisions is probably a more efficient way to run an election than by using the blockchain, when the whole point of the project is to avoid having a central authority in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
A PRIMITIVE VERSION\u00a0<\/span>of Sovereign was tested during the 2016 Colombian referendum held to approve a peace treaty between the government and the FARC rebels. One thousand expatriate Colombians who were unable to register to vote in the actual election took part. In a preliminary stab at implementing the flexibility of liquid democracy, the trial group was given the opportunity to cast a symbolic vote on seven different propositions relating to the peace accord, rather than just a binary yes\/no on whether to pass the accord.<\/p>\n
Siri says the approach helped explain the surprise real-world defeat of the accord, because the Sovereign-using voters approved six of the peace-related proposals, while overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal to allow FARC to participate in government.<\/p>\n
As an experiment in how voting could be conducted with more nuance than conventional models, the FARC referendum is interesting. But it still falls short as proof of how a full-fledged Sovereign exercise of vote-token fueled liquid democracy might work, because too many pieces of the puzzle still remain in development. Most critically, there has been, to date, no real-world test of the use of Sovereign\u2019s blockchain generated vote tokens. And that is precisely where the whole Democracy.Earth experiment is most provocative.<\/p>\n
The main reason voting-technology researchers cast a leery eye on the merger of cryptocurrency and voting stems directly from the example of bitcoin, which evolved from means of exchange to speculative commodity. Instead of being used to actually buy things, bitcoin has turned into the digital equivalent of gold\u2014a way to get rich by simply buying and selling when the price is right.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s to stop \u201cowners\u201d of vote tokens from buying and selling them as commodities instead of using them to vote?<\/p>\n
Siri and Stephens both acknowledge that the potential for vote-token speculation is a real concern. At the very moment I was posing them the question in early July, the entire Democracy.Earth team held a one-week retreat to figure out how to guard against exactly such a scenario. After the retreat was over, Siri sent me a preliminary draft of their new \u201ctoken economics\u201d white paper. Along with another dollop of rhetoric\u2014\u201cwe consider token-based liquid democracies to be the most flexible form of democratic governance that can be constructed with digital technology\u201d\u2014the paper made a pledge that Sovereign\u2019s vote tokens would be built with incentives designed to keep token prices stable.<\/p>\n
Like many elements of the Democracy.Earth technology roadmap (and this is a common aspect of ICO white papers) the goal sounded more aspirational than grounded in executable code. But two different academic cryptocurrency researchers with whom I discussed the plan said they were hard put to figure out why a vote token had to have monetary value in the first place. One suggested that the primary motivation was likely \u201cbusiness reasons\u201d\u2014that is, funding ongoing operations or, more simply,\u00a0profit<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Even worse, to participate in this form of voting, you have to be able to afford the vote token in the first place. Someone has to cover the cost of computation on a public blockchain. In the world of old school politics, \u201cpaying to play\u201d is generally frowned upon. Perhaps in theory Democracy.Earth\u2019s outline of a universal basic income scheme could address that issue, but that\u2019s also another example of adding complexity to an already Rube Goldbergian contraption.<\/p>\n
Siri\u2019s rejoinder is that there has to be some real skin in the game to make online voting meaningful. \u201cThe purpose of using a blockchain is for decisions that aim to be immutable, and hence able to trigger cryptocurrency transactions or execute smart contracts,\u201d Siri says. \u201cOur aim is to evolve the experience using social media into something that is effectively able to push institutional change with transactions that are backed by economic drivers brought in by the users themselves.\u201d In other words, paying to play is a good thing.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
HARPER REED, OBAMA\u2019S\u00a0<\/span>former CTO, professed himself a bit befuddled by how blockchain dreams intersect with the kind of door-knocking and phone-banking that modern American election campaigns are built on. \u201cWinning an election is all about committing to a space, committing to a locale, and actually organizing,\u201d Reed says. \u201cI have a hard time understanding how, as a borderless crypto person, you can effect change. By definition, you are standing outside of a space instead of committing to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Siri agrees that politics work best on the ground. \u201cThat\u2019s how politics works everywhere,\u201d he says. But he thinks he is as committed to grassroots organizing as any clipboard-wielding pavement pounder. It\u2019s just that his precincts are all online.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are on a mission to create a \u2018new space\u2019 and breed a sense of global citizenship within it,\u201d Siri says. \u201cIn essence, we want to help you migrate from your political system without needing to change countries. Think of the people in Venezuela: They\u2019re under a tyrannical regime that has a hyper-inflationary currency, and the majority is unable to leave their families and loved ones. Our aim is precisely to work with those communities to provide them a set of tools able to empower them in a way that gives them an exit.\u201d<\/p>\n
What he means by \u201cexit,\u201d however, is not a chance to physically leave the country but a chance to \u201cleave\u201d oppressive financial and political systems of authority. He sketches out a scenario: Imagine there\u2019s an organization that aims to represent Venezuelan dissidents. Some have left the county, some are still inside the country, but all of them have identities validated on Democracy.Earth\u2019s blockchain. The members take a vote (with their anonymity protected) on whether to digitally \u201cairdrop\u201d some cryptocurrency assets on a group of dissidents within the country. A \u201cyes\u201d vote executes a smart contract that releases the funds. Now the dissidents are no longer trapped by the hyperinflating insanity of the bolivar or state controls on currency exchanges. In theory they will enjoy financial security backed up by the blockchain. (Provided, of course, that there are ways to actually spend that cryptocurrency on food or shelter or whatever, which does not seem to be an insignificant quibble.)<\/p>\n
It is precisely in a place like Venezuela, Siri argues\u2014where the politics are irremediably broken and civil society is in such shambles\u2014that people will be most likely to experiment with new ways to exercise their sovereignty. But the goal isn\u2019t necessarily to replace President Maduro with someone else. It\u2019s far more radical than that\u2014the goal is to make the president,\u00a0any president<\/em>, irrelevant to the needs and desires of a self-organizing population taking advantage of blockchain-generated tools to transcend primitive electoral democracy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can effectively build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete, maybe we are worthy of not needing governments anymore,\u201d Siri says. \u201cI know it\u2019s ambitious. But either we build tools that help us adapt to our new weird reality or we go back to the dark ages.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than once, listening to Siri, I found myself inwardly gaping at what seemed like windmill-tilting to the nth degree.\u00a0Getting rid of government altogether? Come on!<\/em>\u00a0But every time I emerged from my daze and took a hard look at the world around me, the prospect that a new dark age was looming on the horizon seemed less fanciful.<\/p>\n
And the notion that our weird times might call for weird measures seemed less quixotic.<\/p>\n
\n
^{1<\/sup>In an earlier version of this story, this quote was misattributed to Ari Juels.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"}
ANDREW LEONARD BACKCHANNEL 08.16.18 (Wired.com) A new movement says that crypto-voting can purify democracy\u2014and eventually eliminate the need for governments altogether. IN A CAF\u00c9\u00a0on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a one-time videogame developer turned political theorist named Santiago Siri is trying to explain to me how his nonprofit startup,\u00a0Democracy.Earth,… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"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=9786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}