A)Yea, I agree. In order to have accountability and a two-way communication, I think that we'd better split distant trust relations into many strong close relations.
For example, I like the ideas of a person, but i cant communicate with him, nor does he care for my opinion.
That person might have people that work with him and trust him. One of them is trusted by one of my friends. I d better create a link with that friend of mine, than a direct link.
This way, we can turn an impersonal link into a personal one.
What I d like to have would be a personal link to every expert that I need so as that he makes the decisions for me, or that he provides me with information so that I make the decisions.
That ,of course, requires the strengthening of our current social relations.
These are just general thoughts.
B) There are cases where "random" democracy can still work. It depends on the context, ex enterprise department, local business, local community.
One important thing to note is that current politicians are from a technical perspective as incompetent as any average person.
For example, what are the studies of Barack Obama? Does he have the knowledge to decide on economics?
Thus, the funny thing is that even with the current structure of the state, having random people in political positions will be much better than today.
The above discussion only applies when we also want to elect the bureaucrats, the technical personnel that constitutes the state or part of a political party.
2013/1/14 M. Fioretti
<mfioretti@nexaima.net>
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 12:18:51 PM +0200, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
> You give your voting rights to a trusted person.
as long as "trusted" includes "can be replaced easily, if I realize I
made a mistake to give him/her trust", yes, that's a big step forward
What matters is constant, 2-way communication between the voters and
the voted, and and accountability. Some delegation is unavoidable,
IMO, for the reasons I've already written. At the same time, leaving
experts alone cannot work by definition, just because they ARE
specialists/experts. Even IF they are all 100% honest, competent and
100% interchangeable, because sooner or later they lose the big
picture.
> So the way forward in my opinion is this. We build democratic tools
> for society. We analyze their weaknesses and then start all over
> again.
of course, see above. Endless iteration is unavoidable (it's part of
life, some would also postulate that it is part of the very
_definition_ of life, right?)
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis