Decentralisation vs centralisation, and values, in relation to voting systems.
If blockchains aim for decentralisation then why should we encourage giving our vote to someone else?
It may be useful to add a bit of nuance to the discussion about voting to guide discussion. Because those who want to maximise decentralisation may fear that some of the voting systems may appear to be contrary to decentralised values. There may be conflations that could be unpicked slightly.
We should probably not mistake decentralisation with direct democracy.
Direct Democracy
It’s not controversial that direct democracy is not a perfect system (nor is any system), but especially at scale, with varied types of decisions, it doesn't really work well. This is where everyone has to vote on everything. Here you would have non-specialists voting on specialist topics, which is an inefficient way of making collective decisions. We should probably not mistake decentralisation with direct democracy.
Representative Democracy
The next type of system would be a representative democracy, where you have people or parties representing a group for a term. This of course has downsides to it, such as the lack of options of who to vote for. Parties are also standing ducks, prone to be influenced by lobby groups. These are the type of systems we see in many countries, and came about prior to ubiquitous communication, where parliamentary democracy was more of a necessity, because farmers need someone to represent them in parliament.
Delegated (liquid) democracy
The third way is a delegated democracy (liquid democracy) voting system is one that makes sense in principal, where anyone can delegate their vote — and thereafter revoke their vote — to an agent who does the voting for them.
The design possibilities of all of these such systems are wide and varied. For example you can have a system where you can delegate to people based on different categories, and then you can revoke your vote either instantly or after a certain period.
There are lot of new experiments and academic papers on liquid democracy <insert references>.
Using “decentralised vs centralised” (as vague an idea that is) may not be as appropriate in the problem space of governance, because you can have decentralisation across those three types of agency.
Flow of rights
To add another measuring tool. It may be useful to look at the health of the flow of rights and power of an organism. The term “centralisation” implies that power stagnates to an elite group of coordinators, or a coordinator class. The flow of rights in that case would be not be flowing very well. For example the janitor could never conceivably be the president.
If a janitor could eventually become the president, then the flow of rights, power and opportunity may be healthier.
If anyone can become a delegate and people proxy their vote on something which who are morally upright, skilled, knowledgable and experienced, where votes are revokable, then this may not necessarily oppose the decentralised values that we hold highly within the sphere of decentralised organisms.
Healthy flow of rights is where anyone can become a specialist at something, and then earn agency over decisions related to that speciality.
Grassroots Development
This is where we may value the process of nurturing the young for long term gain over short term success. For example there are football clubs that nurture their youth and offer them opportunity in the first team, rather than buying the best mercenaries.
Decentralised Organism
This is where we view what we are doing from a biological systems perspective, and we view the networks we are building as multicellular organisms, which is not necessarily just an analogy. With this view we can understand and predict behaviour of the network, and we can view each of us smaller systems, collective intelligences and processes each with our own goal areas, that form together to a general collective cognition.
This is more of a post than an article, I will furnish something with links soon.
Kindest,
Ramsey
