[p2p-research] P2P democracy?
Samuel Rose
samuel.rose at gmail.com
Wed Dec 1 19:12:13 CET 2010
2010/12/1 Smári McCarthy <smari at anarchism.is>:
> Hi all,
>
> So, the results are in. I lost. The vote was incredibly even for most
> of the rounds - I eventually got eliminated after 377 rounds (out of 509
> total), which put me in the top 25% of the candidates, roughly, but
> nowhere near enough to get in.
>
Well, congratulations on getting as far as you did.
> This just means that I'll have to focus on other stuff. There's a lot
> to do. The 3rd annual Reykjavík Digital Freedoms Conference is today,
> so I guess I'd better focus on that for now... and then there's all the
> other stuff.
>
> I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and now know how not to play this
> game (clean). Of the people who did get in, none can be considered
> representatives of the views prevalent in our community, and a few can
> actually be considered hostile to those views. There are a few glimmers
> of hope, a few members are somewhat oriented towards the ideas we share
> but are very unaware of what's going on in the larger context.
This sounds so much like local politics around here that it's scary....
> It would
> be very useful to make some kind of "p2p constitution package" that
> contains information about how networked societies need to be
> represented in modern governance models.
>
>
> - Smári
>
>
> On 11/30/2010 09:46 AM, Smári McCarthy wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Thanks for your support, it's meant a lot to me. Also, sorry for the
>> late feedback, but I've been waiting too.. read on. :-)
>>
>> The elections were slightly disappointing in a number of ways.
>> Throughout the time running up to the elections, various special
>> interest groups, mostly allied with the old political models, were
>> attacking the idea of a constitutional assembly, and even went as far as
>> to spur confusion about the voting system itself, the STV-PR (Single
>> Transferable Vote) system.
>>
>> The result of this was the smallest voter turnout in Icelandic
>> history, roughly 37% - in comparison, parliamentary elections here have
>> a typical turnout of roughly 85%. However, with 37% of the electorate
>> there's still, ironically, more votes behind each potential member of
>> the constitutional assembly than behind a comparative parliamentarian.
>>
>> An interesting side-effect of the low turnout is that those who did
>> show up are considered less likely to be populistic in their choices and
>> in general better prepared.
>>
>> However, at the current time no results have been made public. There
>> were some problems with the count, mostly owing to poor handwriting
>> analysis software and a lot of manual checking, but the final result is
>> expected today.
>>
>> Judging from what I've heard from people my chances are fairly good.
>> With 25 seats and 522 candidates there's an off-the-bat 5% chance for
>> any given person to get a seat. Factoring in that about 100 candidates
>> did no campaigning and another 200 did only very minimal campaigning,
>> that chance goes up somewhat for the remainder. Also taking into account
>> my relative online popularity (#9 on Facebook "likes", and a lot of
>> YouTube videos that got some viewing), my vaguely defined support bases
>> in Reykjavík city center and in Vestmannaeyjar, and a few other similar
>> things, I'm fairly confident that my chances at this point are roughly
>> 30-40%, that is to say, that I'm in the top 60-or-so canddates.
>>
>> So... there's still a chance. I'll know more in the next 8-or-so
>> hours. I'll keep y'all posted.
>>
>> Interesting times...
>>
>> - Smári
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11/30/2010 07:49 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>>> Dear Smari,
>>>
>>> what's the news on the election, and on your candidacy in particular?
>>>
>>> Michel
>>>
>>> 2010/10/18 Smári McCarthy <smari at anarchism.is <mailto:smari at anarchism.is>>
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> As some of you may know, a lot of things have been happening in
>>> Iceland of late. The collapse has led to a rather invigorating
>>> democratic upheaval, with strong demands amongst the public for greater
>>> transparency, freedom of information, and many other things which, to
>>> anybody who payed attention to the revolutionary ideals of the 19th
>>> century or the enlightenment ideas before them, would seem incredibly
>>> reasonable, but yet for some reason have not become the norm...
>>>
>>> On the 27th of November the Icelandic electorate will vote for 25 to
>>> 31 people to sit on a constitutional assembly, a special assembly which
>>> has the purpose of proposing a new constitution for Iceland.
>>>
>>> I have decided to run for the election, along with about 500 other
>>> people who are all ostensibly independent but many have ties with
>>> special interests, political parties, and so on.
>>>
>>> What sets myself and some of the other candidates apart is our
>>> involvement with the digital freedoms battle, the fight for freedom of
>>> information, the participation in the commons, the understanding of the
>>> new Peer-to-Peer reality. There are a few of us, but in general we
>>> suffer from having ideas which are somewhat foreign and weird to a
>>> majority of the public, and little access to traditional media to
>>> promote ourselves.
>>>
>>> This, while the industrial interests and old guard have vast
>>> resources, they own the traditional media, and the political ideas of
>>> centralized government by the elite, these ideas which they will
>>> espouse, have been taught as fact to every schoolchild here since the
>>> schooling itself became fact.
>>>
>>> So you understand that the opportunity here is great. We may have the
>>> opportunity to change the world. We may have the opportunity to alter
>>> the way the world thinks about democracy forever, by creating a
>>> democratized democracy - a Peer-to-Peer Democracy.
>>>
>>> But only if we win. Not necessarily me, but somebody from this line of
>>> thought must win, and must be put in the situation where the ideas of
>>> the 21st century are put into the new Icelandic constitution.
>>>
>>> The old guard have the media, they have the money. They have the
>>> political clout and the ideological indoctrination. But we have an
>>> immensely powerful and infinitely valuable secret weapon at our
>>> disposal.
>>>
>>> You.
>>>
>>> You're receiving this mail because I have had the good benefit of
>>> getting to know you, and I believe that I can ask your assistance in
>>> making this work. I don't exactly know what it is I'm asking of you,
>>> because I'm not exactly sure what will work; rather, I'm requesting that
>>> we crowdsource an answer to the question of, "given great opportunity,
>>> what can the P2P community do?"
>>>
>>> Specifically, I think these questions need to be answered:
>>>
>>> - How do we make the idea of crowdsourced/participatory
>>> democracy seem
>>> realistic to people who've been taught to think it isn't?
>>>
>>> - How do we make the idea of the commons and collective ownership
>>> palatable to people who associate it with failed communist ideals?
>>>
>>> - How do we show that the models we've seen on the Internet
>>> can apply
>>> in meatspace state governance?
>>>
>>> - How do we most effectively promote these ideas amongst
>>> people who
>>> aren't active users of social networks or are outside our immediate
>>> network's reach?
>>>
>>> ... and so on.
>>>
>>> Again, this isn't about getting me into the constitutional assembly,
>>> per se, although inevitably the two goals are coupled by way of me being
>>> a representative of these ideals. Rather, it's about using this great
>>> opportunity.
>>>
>>> What say you?
>>>
>>> - Smári
>>>
>>> (cc'd is Herbert Snorrason, who is also a candidate.)
>>>
>>>
>>> p.s., at this time I don't think it's prudent to share this line of
>>> thinking on publicly listed/indexed mailing lists, blogs or web pages;
>>> rather for discussion amongst ourselves (not adding people either..).
>>> Reason being that we still haven't identified who is serving the
>>> interests of the existing power groups and other special interests; this
>>> won't be fully possible until the full candidate list is published a few
>>> days from now.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>
>>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>>
>>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>>
>>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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--
--
Sam Rose
Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
skype: samuelrose
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
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