Human Organization 4.0, part five

The Electoral College has its roots as a very logical and reasonable solution to the issue of national elections during the 1700s when news and people traveled slowly.  It was much easier and more secure for states to send a few people to represent their states’ collective vote for national offices rather than sending vote tallies or ballots.  But if you think it’s outdated, consider that there are plenty of similar examples even today.  Public companies aren’t directed by their shareholders, but rather shareholders elect a small group of people (a Board of Directors) to represent their will and those directors only face re-election every few years.  Religious and civic institutions are often governed by a small group of elected officials.  Even the public pool for which my family has a membership is governed by a small group of people determined through election by the pool’s members.  The idea of representation is so ingrained in our society that it is often overlooked and taken for granted.

Representation (the ability for individuals to assign their authority to another individual) is a core component of the third era of human organization and developed hand-in-hand with the concept of individual sovereignty.  Take a second to imagine life without representation… imagine what life would be like if you needed to vote on every local and national government law and policy, if you needed to vote on accepting audit results for every company you invested in, if you needed to be involved in the maintenance of every civic institution.  Representation frees the individual from the burden of being involved in every minutia, it allows for specialization in governing bodies and, occasionally, aligns organizational incentives with their stakeholder incentives.

However, representation in its current form is not perfect.  Far too often representatives lack accountability and incentive alignment.  The root cause of almost every complaint against politicians rests with the problems of accountability and incentives in today’s representative structure.  Any time someone describes a Board of Directors as an “old boys club” rest assured that there exists a disconnect between that Board and the shareholders they are intended to represent.  Clearly, we can improve on our current systems of representation.

Enter liquid democracy (or dynamic representation), the concept that voters (of all types) should be able to select their representatives based on specific topics and change that representative election at any moment.  Let’s explore each of those from the lens of an elected politician:

• Topic-specific - voters have the ability to delegate their vote by topics to individuals who are both expert in that topic and represent the desires of the individual voter.  In the case of an elected politician this would involve a voter delegating their vote to different representatives for each governmental topic like foreign policy, economic policy, domestic policy, etc, instead of electing one politician to represent the voter’s desires for all topics.  If you think about it in that light, it’s a bit ridiculous that we expect our elected officials to be experts in all areas, right?
• Dynamic representation - this is the idea that any voter should be free to change their representation at any moment.  This means no more election cycles or guaranteed service time.  Instead, any representative could see the number of people they represent change dynamically and at any moment.  From a representative point of view you’d be forced to align your votes with the body of people you represent or suffer a drastic reduction in your vote representation.  From the individual’s perspective you’d have the ability to change who represents your vote at any moment.

Liquid democracy is challenging in a pre-DAO world due to the logistical challenges of providing a real-time, dynamic representation system.  However, DAOs can easily implement liquid democracy in their voting and in fact many DAOs (like the Internet Computer’s NNS) have already successfully implemented it. The inclusion of this tool will drastically improve the alignment of representatives to their voters and increase the decision-making process by allowing representatives to be narrowly-focused experts.  In short, by utilizing liquid democracy a DAO can make decisions far more efficiently, with much more expertise and in a manner much more aligned with the voters.  This structure will be a massive competitive advantage relative to the current representative structures and is another way in which DAOs reduce and remove gatekeepers.

Liquid democracy is a key development in the evolution to human organization 4.0 and will drastically improve the efficiency and accuracy of representative-based decision making.  However, to get there requires a lot of perspective change towards a new paradigm in which a voter should expect their representative to be proficient and true in their representation.

In the meantime, there’s always the Electoral College…

By Kyle Langham, Director of Data & Analytics @ DFINITY Foundation