Go Slow and Make Things
How do we resist big tech? By subversion?
While preparing to launch my new novel, We Are Not Anonymous, I went in search of examples of technology that could be used or even subverted for the benefit of our communities.
[for details of London and Bristol launches - https://stephenoram.net/we-are-not-anonymous/]
When writing the novel, and now I’m out and about talking about it, the idea of using technology to equalise and distribute agency in society is fascinating. In this context, what I mean by agency is the perception and the reality that you have traction, you have a say, you have influence.
I know most people are tired of trying to work out how best to vote, who to trust, and are worn down by a seemingly repeated cycle of broken or misleading promises. It’s easy to say we need more agency but when I bring it down to the personal, do I? Does anyone really want to have agency in our society, with all the hassle and hard thinking that requires?
We’ve all heard of Citizen Assemblies but I was drawn towards a slightly different idea by Furtherfield’s Ruth Catlow, and one that’s more in keeping with the novel. She pointed me towards their CultureStake app which introduced me to quadratic voting (QV).
In essence, as I understand it, QV uses blockchain for a decentralised, transparent system, but it’s the quadratic part that’s really interesting; it allows your vote to show the level of intensity you feel about the subject by giving you the choice to back a proposal with 1, 4 or 9 votes from your annual 100 limit. Underneath the headline proposal, there’s also an opportunity to choose why you feel the way you do, giving a more nuanced vote than a simple yes or no. Because you have a limited number of votes over a time period you can’t feel intense about everything, putting the very difficult task of choosing between ‘trade-offs’ in the hands of you, the voters; you can’t simply vote with a 9 for everything, unless you only want to vote on eleven things a year – you must choose your own prioritisations.
There’s a great explanation of quadratic voting on the RadicalxChange website1 with examples from the state government of Colorado, Nashville, and Harlem District 9, mainly on how it’s being used for democratising approaches to budget prioritisation and related decisions. For example, in Harlem they used this method to get the population to vote on their top priorities from a selection of spending proposals.
Now, if this was used across the population on an issue-by-issue basis wouldn’t that simply be too much, an overwhelming sense of being asked about everything when that’s the job of government? I’m not sure. An almost constant barrage of interacting with government when we’ve outsourced so much of our thinking to algorithms does mean that this goes against the tide. However, when I’ve spoken with people who are disinterested in, and distrustful of, the political system, for whatever reason, the idea of being able to spend a small amount of time each week to have a real say in what happens seems to be an attractive option.
That’s why I’m interested in the concept of a ‘working utopia’, where we focus on agreeing how best to enable the community to be its own agent of change, and then seeing where that takes us, always in the knowledge that things will change and keep changing. A system that brings us closer to the reality of running our community where we haven’t outsourced our influence to the politicians for the next four or five years has got be good in the long run.
I’m not pushing for quadratic voting as the solution, I’m using it as an example of what’s possible, to counteract those who say there is no alternative to what we have now. Though, I do suggest that whatever we choose it’s sensible to start small and go larger slowly, increasing the stakes carefully as we all get used to it and trust it. To ‘go slow and make things’.
The counter argument is that things are already crumbling, so we need to shift how we do things immediately and wholesale. But, if we start to the discussion now about how best to change the way we make decisions, then we might be ready for the collapse of the current system without falling directly into an ‘off-the-shelf’ technological solution designed by the tech-bros; we need to imagine the future we want, as well as the one we don’t, and set off in the right direction.
We won’t ‘arrive’ anywhere, but that’s pretty much the point– we need the structure and methods agreed and in place and then we can enter the never-ending work in progress, one that we all buy in to. To me, that seems a lot fairer, a lot less frustrating but maybe a little bit scarier.
To give you a sense of how all this relates to the novel, here are two pre-publication quotes:
“Now that we’ve lived into the future that cyberpunk projected, we urgently need to fight our way out. This book imagines and encourages that fight.” Ken MacLeod, multi-award winning author.“
A gripping near future yarn, We Are Not Anonymous is an inspiring story for those who believe that courage can outmatch control.” Eva Pascoe, co-founder of digital futures think tank, Cybersalon.
We Are Not Anonymous is released on 31 March and is available for pre-order now [https://stephenoram.net/we-are-not-anonymous/].
Thanks for reading Nudge the Future! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
https://www.radicalxchange.org/wiki/quadratic-voting/