Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy

As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning. Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.<p>This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.<p>This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.<p>This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.

I&#x27;m a fan of Joseph Tainter&#x27;s analysis around organization of societies and issues around collapse being related to diminishing marginal returns. I think there&#x27;s a lot to that position when you look at the general political party agendas. Technocratic solutions trying to squeeze more blood from the stone while providing less and less to participants (I have less of a theory on effectiveness for any given action, this is more of an observation).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;risk.princeton.edu&#x2F;img&#x2F;Historical_Collapse_Resources&#x2F;Tainter_The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies_ch_1_2_5_6.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;risk.princeton.edu&#x2F;img&#x2F;Historical_Collapse_Resources...</a>

The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.

reading about Eno&#x27;s ideas on organization and variety makes me want to share some perspectives directly from my experience with music performance practice, specifically in live coding.<p>For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flok.cc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flok.cc</a>) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own &#x27;space&#x27; or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.<p>This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider&#x27;s client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.<p>Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else&#x27;s track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.<p>A downside is that one person&#x27;s error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.<p>Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org</a>), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.<p>The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn&#x27;t even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn&#x27;t guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.<p>So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there&#x27;s a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn&#x27;t execute instantly. Instead, it&#x27;s like raising your hand – it signals &quot;I&#x27;m ready&quot;. The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal &#x27;ready&#x27; a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.<p>I&#x27;m just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.

&gt; Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.<p>Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I&#x27;ve seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.

Democracy &amp; separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.<p>Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.<p>It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.

Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the &quot;scares&quot; they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.

I really like his talk about basic income and communities role in fostering ideas:<p>”Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals they are nearly always generated by communities.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;brian-eno-on-basic-income" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;brian-eno-on-basic-income</a>

I&#x27;d argue that the instability of our democracies and their tendency to break down into fascism isn&#x27;t an intrinsic property of theirs. Rather, this instability is fueled by growing power imbalances among the economic classes.<p>Unless we ever address the issue of rampant capital accumulation in the hands of the few, we are condemned to suffer fascism, propped-up by an all-powerful oligarchical class, every 80 years or so.<p>Economic disparities were at their lowest after WWII, and have been steadily rising ever since. They have now surpassed what they were at their worst, before FDR and his New Deal.<p>Discontent is rising, and neither party is addressing the real issue. Not the weakly neoliberal democrats, and certainly not the republicans, too busy scapegoating migrants and LGBT people.

Unfortunately, this is a little too simplistic.<p>A democracy doesn&#x27;t exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We&#x27;ve lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.<p>American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.<p>As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.<p>It&#x27;s also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.<p>Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.

&gt; This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of<p>Well I do know he&#x27;s politically active and worked with Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky. So it&#x27;s more than a little cheeky.

&gt; Przeworski’s theory starts from a simple seeming claim: that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”<p>I like this, but a more general point is that at all scales, we need to resolve the tension tension between the singular and the plural, the individual and the group, the `int` and `[int]`.<p>Results vary between Milton Friedman&#x27;s famous pencil to the devastation of war.

without a constitution that is the absolute definition of peoples rights and government power in an easily understood and brief document, you have nothing to govern, there is no law, just deciders, chosen in a popularity contest, each hopeing for a chance at dynastic power. the current situation highlights exactly what you get with an &quot;amended&quot; constitution the fundamental question is do we want a world where indivuals have very strong personal rights to themselves and there property, or do we want to meddle, pick, and choose, deciding this way and that....since the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing, then they can only complain about what they,have done, can do, will do again. It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation. pick a lane......

Cardew&#x27;s score expect singers able to recognize tones, sing them and hear harmony. Im not sure if this analogy could work for general society. Probably most people don&#x27;t even know if they are able to sing a tone they hear.

We need a new game, this one is so full of loop holes by now that practical implementations are the opposite of the idea.<p>Same with Agile in the form of Scrum.<p>Humans are very good at playing games.

Democracy: process of arbitrage of elite interests via contest to capture the mass media propaganda machine.

&gt; This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to.<p>So... clickbait.

Democracy is complicated in practice and has a complicated history. But the theory is simple. Most of my own studies into the subject was learning and conceptualizing the wrong-headed mainstream conceptions of democracy.<p>No useful theory of democracy involves game theory. As a democrat the idea of social scientists maintaining a quasi-mechanical machine offends me. Politics needs less eggheads.<p>Then there’s the part about humility about Trump coming to power. Well by your own admission then your theories were just bad. People ranging from Richard Rorty to Noam Chomsky had predicted that someone like Trump could come to power if the current trajectory of the time kept on going. That was in the 90’s.<p>The quote about parties losing power isn’t true. America has an undemocratic duopoly. But I guess “fear” might be the keyword. Since neither party seem to truly fear it.

Democracy is Regional-Majority-Chauvinism!

For a democracy to make sense, the people need to be educated enough to understand policy that affects them and they need access to accurate and timely information (a functioning 4th estate). If either of those two are false, then full democracy becomes a force of destruction and harm. Partial democracy where local governance is democratic but provincial and national level governance cannot be directed by the voice of the people is more tenable.<p>Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn&#x27;t a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.<p>I won&#x27;t comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn&#x27;t enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.

And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it&#x27;s being replaced by another party, that the ruling &quot;elite&quot; isn&#x27;t really replaced. They know what part of democracy they have to discredit. This is what the AfD in Germany is doing: they say EVERY party except the AfD belongs to the &quot;block&quot; of &quot;Altparteien&quot; meaning &quot;old parties&quot;. There&#x27;s only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the &quot;real opposition party&quot; namely the AfD, and then there&#x27;s the other party, a hegemonial woke block of &quot;Altparteien&quot;.<p>Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.

Ah, so it turns out the solution to the centre not holding is to create as many falconry schools as possible, hoping to yield a dynamic system of falcons in a variety of overlapping gyres, so that at least some remain in hearing distance of a falconer? Big if true.

I came to a conclusion that democracy is not as good as I thought initially. It has be replaced with a better system quickly or else we are going to loose all advancements humanity made so far