Re-Booting & Reforming Democracy With Big Data ~ The Box Carries the Vox

Winston Churchill stood in the British Parliament and spoke the following words:

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

When the American Founding Fathers created a unique concept of Western Liberal Democracy, it was in fact a great experiment enshrining concepts operating under the principles of liberalism.  This includes protecting the enshrined  rights of the individual; fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all persons. (quoted from Wikipedia).

However, the mechanism that they put into place to administer this democracy was very much a kludge or a compromise to best accommodate the will of the people, taking into account, the pragmatic aspects of their place and time in history.

Something has happened between then and now. Nowadays, the will of the people is being subverted and distorted by political partisanship and it is not for the good of the country and the people. The gridlock and dysfunction in the America Congress is a prime example (If con is the opposite of pro, then is Congress the opposite of progress?). And in the American Senate, when they do the roll call, half of them answer "Not Guilty!".  You don't have to go far to find examples of how the mechanism of government fails to democratically represent the will of the people. The idea of thousands of people being represented by a person whose vote and interest can be bought by a business lobby somehow sucks all of the air out of the room of democracy.

Well, times have changed since 1776, but the ways of the government have not. With the advent of technological age, it is time to update, enhance, and empower the forces of democracy through the judicious application of technology, communications and data management.

I still believe that political parties are necessary. As human beings we will always have ideological differences, and no matter how batsh*t crazy some people are, they still have a right to vote and express their opinion. Churchill again once said that the biggest argument against democracy is to speak to the average voter for five minutes. So you will get the weirdos who think that owning an assault rifle will protect them from a drone strike when their elected, democratic government chooses to attack them in their bunker amid the 10 years of rice stocks mixed with prepper gadgets stored on the shelves therein. There will always be the snake-handlers, the wanna-be polygamists, the Ovary Overlords who want to legislate women's reproductive rights, and the folks who want to throw out the science curriculum in schools and replace it with learned treatises on Adam and Eve domesticating the dinosaurs. All these have a right to a voice in the democracy.

Political parties also define policy, which is important in government. Policy the course by which the government steers by. We don't want a rudderless ship, so we still need legislators to debate policy. But when they come up with legislation specifics to policy implementation, I want my direct say.

In the days of 1776, it took a week to get from Philadelphia to New York. There were no telephones. You couldn't track people down on the farm for their views. Times have changed. We have Big Data. We have the technology and communications tools to hear from everyone. We have the infrastructure to empower all voices. With computer data collection, we can collect hundreds of millions of pieces of data in minutes. And we can machine-collate them in real time.

So, what if anyone with a Social Security Number had a private encryption key? Whenever legislation came up for a vote, we all vote on it? Vox populi. The voice of the people can speak and be heard. The legislation would be put to a vote, and we the people would respond. We could all directly vote for the legislation and the laws that we affect us. Being digital in this age has put a voice to the voiceless and nameless. Data Science can be our rescuers and our salvation.

This would make it harder for big business and lobbies to affect democracy. They would have to convince entire populations of their point of view, and it doing so, they would have to make it in the interest of the population. It would be the great leveling ground in the current incarnation of democracy.

Do we have the guts to change the way that we enact democracy? We still have a Digital Divide, where a significant portion of the population doesn't participate, and cannot participate in digital online life. We have education issues. We have a built-in inertial brake for radical change. The people who benefit from the current state of dysfunction want to keep it that way. So it will be an uphill battle, but Big Data can reform democracy and put the power back into the hands of the people, where it belongs.

Back to Winston Churchill one more time to close my argument.  Upon being offered The Order Of the Garter after a particularly humiliating defeat in the election of 1945, he said "Why should I accept the Order of the Garter, when I have already been given the Order of the Boot?"  It is time to give the old tired mechanisms of democracy a boot.

Facebook vs Google+ or Google Circles --Creating the Ultimate Social Network

In a previous blog post, I predicted the eventual demise of Facebook. This article further explains why I think that.

To start with, Facebook introduced a whole plethora of new paradigms in social media. They were innovative. They created new ways of interacting with people. They revolutionized social media.

For example, we can maintain relationships in a lazy fashion by pressing the "Like" button. In that fashion we can "connect" with someone (in some sort of fashion) in less than a second.

We can have more "friends" than in real life. Indeed, Facebook (and MySpace) have challenged the definition of friend. And they have redefined how we interact with them.

But in this ever-changing world, paradigms change over night. A new paradigm is introduced, it goes viral, reaches a tipping point, creates a critical mass and suddenly it makes unwittingly billionaires out of its inventors. Everyone thinks that this is the end of the story. It's not. What was created, eventually dies.

The entire life cycle ends in death. MySpace suffered old age and near-death dropping in value to a tenth of what it sold for. Nothing is forever, and cycles are a lot quicker in a highly inter-connected world.

So, did Google create a better mousetrap with Google+ or Google Circles? I have not seen Google+ or Google Circles, but it seems that it is more closely in line with non-virtual real life social networks.

With Facebook, a friend has full privileges to my online life, unless I undertake an onerous task of specifically blocking specific people for instances of specific things. That's not how real life operates.

The knowledge that I disseminate about myself in real life depends on the audience. For example when I travel on business through my home town, several hours away, I may stop in and see one of my siblings, but I do not want them to tell my parents who live in the same city that I am there on that occasion. My mother would insist of making a meal, and keeping me there for hours when I am time constrained. I prefer leisurely planned visits so that I can take my time and enjoy catching up with my parents. So, for that particular day, I want a certain sibling to see my status but not my parents. At other times, I want my parents to know that I am coming. Connections and statuses are dynamic depending on circumstance and Facebook cannot allow for that easily.

Another example is that a young niece of mine wants me to see some prom pics, and pic of her new boyfriend, but doesn't want me to see comments about him that her friends make.

All of the content has to have the ability to be controlled irrespective of who belongs to what circle. Generic circles with generic privacy settings, of family, friends, co-workers, etc do not work all of the time.

Human nature is such that we are all somewhat egotistical and narcissistic. So even though I know that I am in the circle of co-worker with one of my fellow cubicle drones, I tend to think that I am his/her most important friend, and that person does absolutely nothing to dispel that notion.

The closer that any new social network mimics this intrinsic human behavior, the more successful that it will be, and it will supplant the older paradigms.

So die Facebook die. You have been good to us, but unless you fundamentally change, you are on the way to the boneyard. Is Google+ the new way to go? Maybe, however as a humanist I would like to believe that a bunch of engineers cannot come up with the next best thing since sliced Facebook. It would have to be some unkempt guys spooging code for the fun of it, and not some dark force of dominance who's motto is "Do No Evil".