Democracy for the 21st Century
Democracy has had it's biggest flaws revealed last year, everything from low voter turnouts, to the disaster that are referendums, to other countries interfering in elections. People like to shout all the time about how "Democracy is the least worst option", but it seems that most democracies have become complacent, and incapable of actually changing the democratic process to become better, to adapt to the modern world.
Stay complacent like that for a few more decades, and Democracy will cease to be the least-worst option
But one of the most interesting initiatives to improve democracy is a non-profit called Democracy Earth, and their soon-to-be-released application, and protocol, called Sovereign. Sovereign is a blockchain based protocol(and application) that will enable people to participate in a global democracy, unhindered by borders. The blockchain aspect is particularly interesting. Basically, every voter is supplied with a finite number of votes, that s/he can use to support whatever he wants. It seems tokens themselves are Ethereum tokens, and obviously, every transaction will be recorded by a blockchain.
Perhaps the most interesting, and innovative part of the whole idea is this concept of "Liquid Democracy". So traditionally there are 2 types of democracy:
Direct Democracy(which is what the Greeks used): Everybody votes for/against every decision.
Representative Democracy(which is what modern democracies use): People vote for other people, who vote for/against decisions.
In recent times, an idea of the "Liquid Democracy" has come about, which combines the 2 forms.So you can vote on issues where you think you have the knowledge to make an informed decision. For issues where you think that you can't take an informed decision, you can "delegate" your vote to someone else, who will vote on that issue on your behalf. The Sovereign project uses this model of "Liquid Democracy", where you can use your tokens or "votes" to support issues that you understand, and delegate your tokens to someone else to vote on issues you don't.
I think democracy desperately needs to upgraded to make it more suitable for the modern world. Sovereign, at first glance, seems to be an incredibly ambitious, almost too-good-to-be-true project. If it was adopted as a method for governance, I think these are the big changes that Sovereign would bring to governance and politics:
All drama in politics can be traced to the fact, that for a lot of issues, there is no "true source" out there. Everybody cites studies, and statements that support whatever agenda they have, people deny saying things they said, people say that they said things that they never actually did say, and all other kinds of bullshit.
But with the blockchain, we will have a source of truth. If for example, we recorded and stored politicians' official statements inside the blockchain, then that will stop them from being able to later deny that they ever said those things. This would lead to less drama, and more informed debate, because more people would actually be informed.
A lot of the time, we agree on certain parts of policies, but not others. Politicians use this to pass bills that otherwise would never get passed, by putting them inside other, more favorable bills. This leads to polarization in politics, as people oppose parties because of a specific part of a bill that affects them.
But in this case, with each voter having tokens, and with any voter being able to start a vote for creating a law, we can vote on specific policies instead of broad laws. This will make politics more nuanced.
This is perhaps the most obvious benefit of Sovereign. Representative democracies also tend to be more centralized, and some would say that too few people hold too much power, whether they are politicians or corporates.
While a Liquid democracy will certainly not be completely devoid of corporate influence, it will certainly make it harder for a single person, or even a company to manipulate politics.
As I said above, Democracy desperately needs an upgrade for the 21st Century. Sovereign isn't perfect. The biggest potential issue is that since the blockchain is public, everybody can see what you voted for, which isn't the best idea for governance. But still, this is a step in the right direction, and I hope people try and continue to innovate in the areas of governance and politics.
Thanks for reading this post.I would love to hear your thoughts on Sovereign. If you liked this post, and want more, follow me :-)
