Monthly Archives: May 2012

Flavours of Money

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Most people view money as a neutral store of value. They are wrong. There are flavours of money – inherent emergent value systems that are built into the design of the currency. Here we have Bernard Lietaer talking about the design of our current financial system in terms of Yin and Yang.

Lietaer is no light-weight. His CV includes a phD at MIT, and a stint at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium), where he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992. You can check his bio on WikiPedia or here.

Flavours of Money
It is our view that money and votes are just two examples of token exchange games, from a palette of an infinitely more diverse range of similar games. The design of these games, profoundly influences the behaviour of players – games can be individualistic or cooperative, thoughtful or aggressive. Democratic votes, differ from hard currency in only a few minor technical aspects, a fact that you can discover for yourself if you try and code computer systems for online voting or currency transactions – yet we treat them very differently. Liquid Democracy allows votes to flow more freely through the network, and can itself be broken down into different categories of votes or recommendations – reflecting different value systems. Ricardian Contracts can be used to assign entirely new forms of value to conventional currency systems.

 

This is not complex stuff, this is not 3D computer graphics, or rocket science – just simple game design. There are many different flavours of money, and we do not have to be stuck with the one we’ve got.

Space

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The Parliament of Things is a decision making space, in which various stakeholders to a decision, come together (that is interact), in order to reach a decision. This space is better if it is represented in physical space in some form or other, but this does not necessarily mean a “parliament” in the traditional sense, rather it may mean a network of smaller spaces, temporary spaces, public or intimate spaces, that are combined somehow into a single cohesive decision making sense through the medium of the network.

The medium of the network is deliberately vague here. Yes, an obvious way to conceive of such a network of spaces is to use technology, the internet, video conferencing, projection, and software platforms to connect these spaces, but this is not the only way, and indeed high-tech real-time conferencing rarely works well, and is for the present a technology that would exclude rather than include the vast majority of communities in the developed and the developing world. Better, is that we consider, other modes of connectivity, using story telling, recordings, asynchronous communication, SMS, and other low-tech solutions.

“Things” are spacial, decisions are usually multidimensional and can be restricted to specific domains. It is useful, to represent these processes spatially, if only as a metaphor that makes the way we debate issues more intuitive.

Theatre

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So what is the “interface” that best combines the ideas of live (as in alive), and space (both as in physical space and narrative space)? And what human activity is closest to the aspirations and practice of our original experience of democracy? Theatre!

It is surely no accident that the ancient and original sites of democratic debate were also those of theatre. Even today, should you chance on a live community debate on a matter of importance, you will experience first hand, the vitality of real human theatre. For my part this was what drew me first to the political sphere, having absolutely no interest in national party political politics.

Our second inspiration comes from the life long work of Augusto Boal, who sadly passed away in 2009. His work first in Forum Theatre and then finally with Legislative Theatre was always political (in it’s best sense), but never dull.

Brazilian theater director and writer Augusto Boal presenting his Theater of the Oppressed at Riverside Church in New York City.

Theatre in this physical space, political sense, is the ideal interface to Latour’s Parliament of things in the epistemological sense. Theatre is spatial, embedded .  The set of a theatre can incorporate, projection, video, sound, lighting – it is an informational space. It provides context to the debate.

Interactive, or improvised theatre, is also a debate, but more than a debate in the political sense, it captures potent ideas around the notions of expertise, skill, emotive communication, authenticity participation and engagement. It is controversial and playful. It is serious and informative. In the sense of theatrical space, the performance interface is the legal framework of the parliament. It is the written, spoken and unspoken culture of interaction in the space.

Interface

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Discussions, debates, particularly those that involve a need for some sort of formal result (a decision for instance) – all involve an interaction between parties and a system of rules. This interaction is mediated by an interface, that is some sort of embodiment of the elements of the interaction in a design. The “face” of this interaction may be a person (the chair for instance), or the design of a computer screen. It may be a physical space, a room, or a table, or a mobile phone interface.

It is hard to overemphasise the importance of the design of this space, in determining who takes part, and the quality of the discussions that take place. Woody Allen said “the world is run by people who can be bothered to turn up”, and the people who are bothered to turn up, as we know, are those that feel at home with committees, bureaucracy and the written word. If we want new people to engage, then we need to design new forms of decision making space, that are inviting, human, and above all not dull.

There is no more effective way of discouraging the participation of imaginative, creative and disruptive forces than to make the style of the engagement as boring as possible. While we need a certain amount of stability in our processes, this is best achieved by making binding decisions efficiently, and not by excluding new and disruptive ideas and participants.

Liquid Democracy and the Pirate Party

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The Pirate party in Germany won 7.8% of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the most populous state which includes cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Essen. That puts it near the Greens and ahead of both the ex-communist Left Party and the Free Democrats, who are part of Germany’s ruling coalition. If the party enters the Bundestag in next year’s federal election, it could affect the make-up of the government (NRW is seen as an important bellwether for national elections, which take place in late 2013).

Voting at a Pirate Party meeting – source the Economist.

Michael Lühmann of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, fears that without parties to mediate between citizens and the state, small, highly motivated groups can prosper at the expense of the many – sounds like political lobbying to me? Nor do I expect he as analysed the socratic effect of “communicative ascent” on political dialogue over time…

Yet Germany is often said to be suffering from a democratic malaise, with broad-based parties like the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats all losing members. As in other western economies, voter turnout is falling, with citizens tending to mobilise outside party structures. A poll in Der Spiegel says that 83% favour more direct participation.

It all started in Sweden
The Pirate party was started in Sweden by Rickard Falkvinge in the Fall of 2005. In Sweden the Pirate Party received 7.13% of the total Swedish votes in the 2009 European Parliament elections, with Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter taking seats at the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is now an international movement of more than 40 regional Parties.

Not just a flash in the pan
In Germany, the Pirates secured 7.4% of the vote in Saarland, Germany’s smallest state (excluding the city-states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg). “They have their strongholds among young people in cities with universities, with an academic environment,” says Lothar Probst, a political scientist at the University of Bremen. “One of the amazing points in Saarland is that it only has one or two universities. The Pirates were still pretty successful in the countryside.” Their ship came in yet again on May 6 when they earned 8% of the vote in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. Entering parliament in NRW makes them four for four.

Now if someone can translate this properly for me, as I’d like to figure out what they are saying about the use of Liquid Democracy by the Pirates….