The Crisis of Collective Decision-Making

The latest catastrophe in America governance-the inane brinksmanship over the Debt Ceiling has finally made it official: our representative democracy is too dysfunctional to handle even routine matters, and lack of confidence in government is spilling out into the economy, diplomacy, national security, culture, you name it. Given how totally FUBAR the situation is, I want to take a step back and talk about what’s underpinning this collapse. Not just the economic or political issues, but the philosophical ones.

The challenge of governance is that of making collective decisions. And before you say that “we don’t need to make collective decisions,” even Libertarianism requires some common agreement on basic property rights. Global challenges demand common action, and even coming to no decisions is, in and of itself, a decision.

There are basically three ways that a group of people can come to a collective decision.

1) Swarm: Everybody acts according to what is best for them, based on the information that they have. In the animal kingdom, these are schools, flocks, hives, and other animal collectives. For humans, this is the Free Market. The decision of the swarm is the sum total of the actions of its members. Swarms are fast and efficient, but they have less strategic foresight than individual members. Schools of fish get trapped by dolphins and eaten, herds of animals stampede off cliffs, and free markets fail in a variety of ways.

2) Consensus: Everybody sits down, discusses their preferences, beliefs, and opinions of the options at hand. No decision is taken if a single member is opposed. In theory, consensus is great, but in practice it breaks down when more than a few people are involved, usually over definitions, mutually incompatible desires, or plain stubbornness.

3) Delegation: The task is divided between several people, each of whom works on it individually. Delegation is the structure of modern society; almost every complex effort involves some amount of delegation. Delegation allows each member to apply their unique talents to the decision, while still being fast and strategically responsive. However, delegative institutions can become highly dysfunction, through the Peter Principle, shooting the messenger, and detachment between decision-making and operational levels.

Now, let’s get back to the real world, and American politics. Congress combines Delegative and Consensus aspects. By voting, we delegate the responsibility to create and enforce laws to politicians. Democracy serves as a check to ensure that leaders act in the interests of their constituents. Once elected, politicians act to create laws through a process of negotiation and compromise to ensure the broadest base of support, a formalized variation of Consensus.

At least, that’s the idea. Now, in 2011, both side of that governing mechanism have broken down. Few people believe that either of the major parties represents their beliefs, yet the same old candidates keep getting elected. Consider a ‘rational’ election. The candidates would be weighed on their performance, and the better one selected. Now try and think of the last time a candidate was fairly evaluated by the opportunities presented them, their choices, and the results of his or her choices. The mechanisms of delegation which are supposed to select the best candidate instead selected for the best advertising campaign.

Most bills are passed on party-line votes, by the barest majority. Rather than Consensus, Congress works on the most fragile of coalitions, leading to unpopular laws which seem to jam together multiple policy proposals. Rather than an attempt at a “best-of” plan, we seem get policy proposals which satisfy nobody.

My time on the Hill was spent as Senate Intern #16, so I can’t claim to speak from any sort of deep insider knowledge, but DC struck me as a town of very hard working, very insular people. Representatives and Senators are surrounded by the staffs, who talk mostly to professional lobbyists and advocates. Conservatives and liberals eat at different restaurants and different bars. I only saw Republicans at Senate staffer softball games. What passes for “debate” on the Senate floor is talking-point laden gibberish directed to an empty room and a few cameras. Committee hearings are for grandstanding and scoring points. Legislative ploys pass for communication. Given the hyper-planned schedules of most professional politicians, I have no idea when they meet with each other to find common ground.

So there’s no consensus in the upper levels of government, and there our mechanism for picking leaders is little better than random chance at weeding out the crazy, corrupt, and incompetent. Where do we go from here? Karl Schroeder at Charles Stross’s blog had an interesting proposal for solving wicked problems.

“Here's my take on things: our biggest challenges are no longer technological. They are issues of communication, coordination, and cooperation. These are, for the most part, well-studied problems that are not wicked. The methodologies that solve them need to be scaled up from the small-group settings where they currently work well, and injected into the DNA of our society--or, at least, built into our default modes of using the internet. They then can be used to tackle the wicked problems.

What we need, in other words, is a Facebook for collaborative decision-making: an app built to compensate for the most egregious cognitive biases and behaviours that derail us when we get together to think in groups. Decision-support, stakeholder analysis, bias filtering, collaborative scratch-pads and, most importantly, mechanisms to extract commitments to action from those that use these tools. I have zero interest in yet another open-source copy of a commercial application, and zero interest in yet another Tetris game for Android. But a Wikipedia's worth of work on this stuff could transform the world.”

It’s an interesting solution. Rather than trying to fix mechanisms of Delegation, which may be fundamentally broken (and don’t tell me to “give power back to the people.” I’m a Californian, I know what kind of nonsense you get out of direct democracy, and I want professionals in charge), we instead move over to a Swarm/Consensus based model. Information technology improves the signals the Swarm uses to communicate, and data mining tools extracts Consensus definition and choices in real time.

Of course, the devil is in the details. Policy-making is a lot of power to hand over to an algorithm, and networks would have to have a way to hold people to account for their choices. Combining the continuous, geographic real world with discrete, protean virtual networks may not be possible. Instead of one political network under the American flag, we’d have dozens or more, all proposing incompatible versions of reality.

America is not alone in political paralysis. Look at the UK, Belgian, Italy, Greece, Germany, Iraq, and so on. Representative democracy is entering a period of crisis worldwide (by the way, if you know of a functioning democracy, please let me know). I’m no fan of the Beijing Consensus of authoritarian capitalism, but it strikes me that society rests on a substrate of technology. Democracy as conceived during the Enlightenment was only possible in a literate society. We are now post-literate, hyper-textual, and we need a new Constitution, that allows us to make effective and wise collective decisions.

What Comes Next

This is a continuation of a previous article.

I won't be breaking any news when I say that the Mubarak regime is done. At this juncture, the momentum of the crowd is only accelerating, the army has refused to intervene, and President Obama publicly has called for Mubarak not to run for re-election in the fall. American envoy Frank Weisner demanded Mubarak step down, and was rebuffed, but there doesn't seem to be a pathway for Mubarak to maintain his grip on power. Asymetric warfare theorist John Robb has laid out the victory conditions for both sides. Essentially, Mubarak wins if he outlasts popular anger. The protestors win if Mubarak is forced to flee the country. With public services decaying, the security police discredited and demoralized, and victory close at hand, the protestors have no reason to stop with their central demand unmet. Conversely, there is literally nothing Mubarak has to offer, not promises of stability, not continued terror, only his departure.

EDIT: As I'm typing this, Mubarak has announced he will step down on the next elections. But I'd bet he'll leave well before then.

So what happens next? I'd like to focus on three different issues, Egyptian politics, Israel, and democracy in the Middle East.

I will freely admit that I am not an expert on Egyptian politics. Consensus is that the best organized opposition group is Muslim Brotherhood, but that Mohamed ElBaradei is best situated to step into a leadership role. An internationally renown diplomat, ElBaradei is compromise figure who's stature is his best asset, but who's long separation from Egypt might hinder his effectiveness. The worry floating around American conservative circles is that the Egyptian revolution is a stalking horse for an Islamist takeover, similar to Iran in 1979. This may yet happen, we can't know, but the faster the transition happens, the less likely religious groups will be able to exert a major influence. The chaos and uncertainty in Egypt right now favors people with local credibility, the neighborhood wardens and citizen-bloggers. The more time the situation has to settle, the more secular forces will fragment and the influence of the superior organization of the Muslim Brotherhood will tell on the elections.

If elections were held today, my prediction would be on a roughly 3 way split between secular protestors, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the entrenched military/intelligence forces of the government. While Mubarak may be discredited, a bureaucracy the size of Egypt's security apparatus is not easily dismantled. While a confluence between the Islamist parties, and the military (the Iranian model) is worrying geo-politically, it's not actually my main concern. Far worse for the Egyptian people would be a situation reminiscent of the French Revolution. As the monarchy collapsed, and the National Assembly took power, actual power devolved into the hands of demagogues, who in the name of “defending the revolution” and “punishing tyrants” committed untold atrocities. Now, the world as a whole has far more experience at democracy than it did in 1789, and the Terror was abetted by the efforts of European monarchies to destroy the new republic. There is no better way to turn a revolution paranoid and violent than by attacking it. The lesson here is that the world should offer its unconditional support to the Egyptian democracy in its embryonic stage, even if we do not like the immediate results.

Israel has suffered a major strategic reversal. Egypt, under the control of a geopolitical realist with ties to the US, was an important, if grudging ally. A return to hot war is unlikely, but ElBaradei has already indicated that he would open the Egyptian side of the Gaza border. Israel faces further strategic encirclement. Clinging to the past is not going to work, Israel should bow to the reality on the ground, and hail a strengthening of peaceful relations with the new democracy. While far from a good choice, taking a hard line now will only force worse choices in the future.

Finally, democracy in the Middle East. From Tunisia, the revolution has swept Egypt, forced the King of Jordan to dissolve his cabinet, and has lead to unrest across the region. Will the revolution continue? I have a feeling that if this initial movement were going to spread, it would have already. The emotional conditions, the heat of the moment, is changing. Potential revolutionaries elsewhere are investing their energies in Egypt for the time being. Social networking, a hyper-oxygenated public sphere, allows the flames of revolution to sprout with surprising speed, but other Middle Eastern autocrats appear to have a better grip on the grievances and mood of the people. In the long run, the example of Egypt (assuming it doesn't immediately and obviously degenerate into a theocracy or civil war) should inspire democrats elsewhere in the region. With revolution as a distinct possibility, tyrants must take the grievances of their people seriously, including opening political freedoms.

The system, as it stands, has benefited America, which receives a cheap and reliable supply of oil. However, long term it was clearly unsustainable. Mubarak's government will fall completely within the week. How many dictatorships will last out the year, or five years? Better democracy now, than chaos in an even tenser world later.

Social Media and the Revolution in Egypt

Revolution in Egypt is the story of the week. Over the past seven days, ordinary Egyptians have come together to oppose the 30 year rule of Hosni Mubarak. The protests are a wonder of civil disobedience, technological coordination, and bottom-up action. But what are the origins, chances, the potential outcomes, and options for US policy?

Revolution is like a fire. All the necessary ingredients can exist independently for years, only bursting into a self-sustaining conflagration under the proper conditions. Fires require fuel, oxygen, and heat to burn. Fire-fighting strategies rely on eliminating one side of the triangle. Wildfires are fought by separating the fire from more fuel, while conventional fires use water to reduce the amount of heat available. The social analogs to fuel, oxygen, and heat are grievances, the public sphere, and emotional intensity.

Grievances are the raw fuel of revolution. In the case of Egypt, three decades of misrule, oppression, torture, and the stifling of economic and political freedom have left the population with an endless stock of grievances. Except for a small class of Mubarak's cronies, few people have benefited from his rule, and a society that was once integrated has become divided into an urban poor, and an exurban elite. The demands of the protestors have become unified into one simple message: Mubarak out.

The public sphere is vital for any protest to organize and gather moment. This includes both the conventional public sphere of streets and squares, and the public sphere of information. From the first, revolutionaries have used the latest in information and communication technology. Printing presses during the American Revolution, tape decks in the Iranian Revolution. The CIA smuggled Xerox machines in the Soviet Union to spread samizdat, the individual distribution of banned books and magazines, while the protestors in Tienanmen Square used fax machines to communicate with the world. More recently of the modern ICTs, text messaging helped bring down the Philipino President Jose Estrada, and social media like Twitter and Facebook has been central in the current Egyptian revolution, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and protests in Iran and the Ukraine.

Conventional counter-protest tactics involve squeezing out the public sphere. Physically, riot police and tanks can occupy strategic areas, with curfews for normal traffic. In the modern era, totalitarian regimes have attacked cyberspace as well. Egypt shut down the internet entirely for a day, while Iran slowed external access to a crawl during its crisis. And China is notorious both for a totalitarian system of internet traffic monitoring and censoring, and also for shutting down telecoms service during riots in Tibet and Xinjiang. While shutting down the public sphere is effective in stopping protests, it is risky, requiring the use of mass violence which might further inflame the opposition, and if continued for too long, can cause economic damage.

But don't be confuse the utility of social networking with the necessity for it. As compared to other forms of ICT, social media plays into the third requirement for revolution; emotion. This is the non-quantifiable element which makes people dare to stand against power, to face batons and teargas and bullets in the name of liberty. Emotion is personal, internal, idiosyncratic, and social networking is about broadcasting your feelings, more than any specific information. A robust internet community can transmit and amplify anger and the demand for change. The sparks of rage can spread from city to city with incredibly rapidity. And once enough sparks have landed, and the crowds have gathered, the revolution becomes self sustaining. Optimism is counter by fear, the longstanding fear of the regime, and fear of future chaos and repercussions. In Egypt, the successful revolution in Tunisia provided the impetuous of hope to counter three decades of oppression. Mubarak has tried to instill fear in the population, by agent provocateurs and the threat of military force, but has so far proven unsuccessful. If the heat of the revolutionaries can outlast the resolve of the military, they will win.

The flame of revolution, kindled in Tunisia, is spreading through-out the Middle East. The authoritarian regimes are like a forest which has not burned for years, with piles of dead leaves and trees lying about. What happens next is impossible to predict, but sparks are jumping, governments falling, and a brave new world may be at hand.

Pt II: On what happens next, will follow tomorrow.