In the small Greco-Sicilian city of Nacona during the Hellenistic period, foreign arbiters came to reconcile factions after a civil war. An inscription allows us to imagine how they might have proceeded to restore harmony. “Two lists of thirty names are drawn up, including the most fervent partisans of each of the two factions, inscribed one by one on lots and placed into two urns. Then, pairs of enemy citizens are randomly selected, alternating between the two urns.” To each of these pairs, another three citizens randomly selected from the rest of the population are added. The purpose of the operation is set out in the decree: “Let the citizens brought together by sortition become like brothers, living in harmony, justice and friendship.” These institutionally selected “brothers” are required to eat together, for example. The rest of the population is then divided into groups of five by a similar process, and “let those individuals also be brothers for the same lot, after having been randomly selected as described above.”
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History is written by the winners, which is why Luddite is a slur meaning “technophobe” and not a badge of honor meaning, “Person who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it for and who it does it to.”
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Luddites weren’t anti-machine activists, they were pro-worker advocates, who believed that the spoils of automation shouldn’t automatically be allocated to the bosses who skimmed the profits from their labor and spent them on machines that put them out of a job. There is no empirical right answer about who should benefit from automation, only social contestation, which includes all the things that desperate people whose access to food, shelter and comfort are threatened might do, such as smashing looms and torching factories.
The question of who should benefit from automation is always urgent, and it’s also always up for grabs. Automation can deepen and reinforce unfair arrangements, or it can upend them. No one came off a mountain with two stone tablets reading “Thy machines shall condemn labor to the scrapheap of the history while capital amasses more wealth and power.” We get to choose.
Capital’s greatest weapon in this battle is inevitabilism, sometimes called “capitalist realism,” summed up with Frederic Jameson’s famous quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (often misattributed to Žižek). A simpler formulation can be found in the doctrine of Margaret Thatcher: “There Is No Alternative,” or even Dante’s “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Hope — alternatives — lies in reviving our structural imagination, thinking through other ways of managing our collective future. Last May, Wired published a brilliant article that did just that, by Divya Siddarth, Danielle Allen and E. Glen Weyl:
That article, “The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question,” set forth a taxonomy of decentralization, exploring ways that power could be distributed, checked, and shared. It went beyond blockchains and hyperspeculative, Ponzi-prone “mechanism design,” prompting me to subtitle my analysis “Not all who decentralize are bros”:
That article was just one installment in a long, ongoing project by the authors. Now, Siddarth has teamed up with Saffron Huang to launch the Collective Intelligence project, “an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology.”
https://cip.org/whitepaper
The Collective Intelligence Project’s research focus is “collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group’s capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.” That is, asking more than how automation works, but who it should work for.
Collective Intelligence institutions include “markets…nation-state democracy…global governance institutions and transnational corporations, standards-setting organizations and judicial courts, the decision structures of universities, startups, and nonprofits.” All of these institutions let two or more people collaborate, which is to say, it lets us do superhuman things — things that transcend the limitations of the lone individual.
Our institutions are failing us. Confidence in democracy is in decline, and democratic states have failed to coordinate to solve urgent crises, like the climate emergency. Markets are also failing us, “flatten[ing] complex values in favor of over-optimizing for cost, profit, or share price.”
Neither traditional voting systems nor speculative markets are up to the task of steering our emerging, transformative technologies — neither machine learning, nor bioengineering, nor labor automation. Hence the mission of CIP: “Humans created our current CI systems to help achieve collective goals. We can remake them.”
The plan to do this is in two phases:
Value elicitation: “ways to develop scalable processes for surfacing and combining group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences.” Think of tools like Pol.is, which Taiwan uses to identify ideas that have the broadest consensus, not just the most active engagement.
Remake technology institutions: “technology development beyond the existing options of non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project.” Practically, that’s developing tools and models for “decentralized governance and metagovernance, internet standards-setting,” and consortia.
The founders pose this as a solution to “The Transformative Technology Trilemma” — that is, the supposed need to trade off between participation, progress and safety.
This trilemma usually yields one of three unsatisfactory outcomes:
Capitalist Acceleration: “Sacrificing safety for progress while maintaining basic participation.” Think of private-sector geoengineering, CRISPR experimentation, or deployment of machine learning tools. AKA “bro shit.”
Authoritarian Technocracy: “Sacrificing participation for progress while maintaining basic safety.” Think of the vulnerable world hypothesis weirdos who advocate for universal, total surveillance to prevent “runaway AI,” or, of course, the Chinese technocratic system.
Shared Stagnation: “Sacrificing progress for participation while maintaining basic safety.” A drive for local control above transnational coordination, unwarranted skepticism of useful technologies (AKA “What the Luddites are unfairly accused of”).
The Institute’s goal is to chart a fourth path, which seeks out the best parts of all three outcomes, while leaving behind their flaws. This includes deliberative democracy tools like sortition and assemblies, backed by transparent machine learning tools that help surface broadly held views from within a community, not just the views held by the loudest participants.
This dovetails into creating new tech development institutions to replace the default, venture-backed startup for “societally-consequential, infrastructural projects,” including public benefit companies, focused research organizations, perpetual purpose trusts, co-ops, etc.
It’s a view I find compelling, personally, enough so that I have joined the organization as a volunteer advisor.
This vision resembles the watershed groups in Ruthanna Emrys’s spectacular “Half-Built Garden,” which was one of the most inspiring novels I read last year (a far better source of stfnal inspo than the technocratic fantasies of the “Golden Age”):
And it revives the long-dormant, utterly necessary spirit of the Luddites, which you can learn a lot more about in Brian Merchant’s forthcoming, magesterial “Blood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”:
This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Brisbane tomorrow (Feb 8), and then we’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next are Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!
[Image ID: An old Ace Double paperback. The cover illustration has been replaced with an 18th century illustration depicting a giant Ned Ludd leading an army of Luddites who have just torched a factory. The cover text reads: 'The Luddites. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.']
A New York state man built a 200-pound bomb in his basement and planned to detonate it in Washington on Election Day, according to federal authorities who arrested him.
Paul Rosenfeld, 56, of Tappan, intended to kill himself in the explosion and draw attention to his political beliefs, prosecutors said. They said Rosenfeld is a proponent of “sortition,” an ancient political system in which government officials are randomly selected.
“Rosenfeld concocted a twisted plan to draw attention to his political ideology by killing himself on the National Mall in Washington, D.C — risking harm to many others in the process,” Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “Rosenfeld’s alleged plan for an Election Day detonation cut against our democratic principles.”
In #ancient Athenian #democracy the #offices were assigned by the means of a #lottery (#sortition). Ancient #greeks built a #machine for this purpose - a #klerotherion. Citizens were identified by #tokens called #pinakion and #black and #white #marbles were used to determine the chosen. #device #history #athens #museum #agora #fascinating
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The worst people are in charge of absolutely everything. I always thought this was because being in charge makes you Like That but I'm starting to think it's the other way around. People are Like That and then they get put in charge. Maybe we should go hard for Sortition?
This law stipulates that, when the office of Doge falls vacant, the 500-member Great Council should meet in solemn session. The youngest councilor leaves the hall where it is gathered and comes back with the first child aged between eight and ten whom he meets in the street. A large bag is placed in the middle of the hall containing as many little wooden balls (ballotte) as there are councilors. The word “elector” is stamped on thirty of these. The ballottino, the boy chosen in the street [...], takes the balls and gives one to each of the councilors as they parade in silence before the urn. The thirty who receive a ball marked elector remain in the hall, from which the other members immediately withdraw.
Yves Sintomer, The Government of Chance
I am deeply enchanted by how grabbing a loose child off the street was a load bearing part of Venice's constitutional process. That's kind of political genius that makes your republic "most serene".
"In other places and at other times, however, including our contemporary world, the combination of selection by lot with an innocent child figure is completely absent in politics."
