"I don’t know if the screamers are aware of the d-word’s meaning, or if they’re even using it that way. The postmodern Left deploys language as a shapeshifting weapon, like the cop-monster from Terminator 2. Maybe they don’t even care what they mean by “democracy” in any given moment. Maybe it all translates to some version of “Shut up.”"
I see your point, but it still has a bit of "real democracy has never been tried" energy.
In our present advanced state of civil collapse it's a recipe for stochastic terrorism, which you acknowledge, but then suggest we try something better next time. There are plenty of ideas about how to mitigate democracy's worst tendencies, and how to fix voting systems in particular, that only work in a "next time."
We could theorycraft those all day, but why do we need a next time in the first place? The last time the world tried various experiments in large-scale/institutionalized democracy it went so badly that nobody tried it again for almost a thousand years.
I think the real solution to dealing with divergent cultures is to allow them to separate into distinct polities, not to look for ways to make their struggles for dominance more "fair" or less violent or dishonest.
We all know what's happening here. We've got multiple groups of people with fundamentally incompatible values, narratives, and visions for the future. They've already self-segregated territoriality, which is a first step in this natural process. The next step is to cleave off into separate political bodies.
This used to be easier when there was a vast amount of unclaimed territory for people to break off into, if a bid for rebellion failed. But we don't have that option now, and won't again unless/until space colonization opens up, so we have to take one of the other two options: allow for peaceful secession and unification as needed so that things can re-balance; or war, whether directly or by proxy through imperial politics. The latter, unless one group achieves a swift and decisive victory, ends with everyone losing and ending up doing the former by default after much suffering and loss. There's no way to make the latter fair, no system that can make the losing party feel less aggrieved.
But after it's done, each new polity will adopt the methods of governance that suit them best, and hopefully proceed in good faith for at least a few generations. No particular system will allow them to recapitulate the democratic empire experiment more successfully. As before, as now, the only outcome when they reach the point of factional conflict will be to break up, either peacefully or destructively.
1) I suspect that the current information/media landscape is more shadow than shape. By that I mean the portrait of distant reality (including the "political reality") that we receive through our various networks is not only distorted, but portions of it may be entirely upside-down or fictional. We are traveling in a fog, surrounded by illusionists.
2) That being the case, our degree of confidence about that picture (i.e. "We all know what's happening here") could itself be the product of an illusion, designed for that very purpose. The friend/enemy calculation isn't so clear cut in a fog. That's one of the fundamental points I was trying to convey. To build a useful theory about our true state of affairs requires *real data* that is currently unobtainable, thanks to secret ballots and other accountability shields.
3) Even if Balkanization is our true course/fate, drawing those new boundaries within our current technological position (i.e. integrated global networks and supply chains, automatized weapons platforms, smartphone zombies, etc) will be an immensely difficult, dangerous and complicated process. While the men featured in the painting at the top of this article faced versions of the same challenges (with international shipping lanes and whatnot), they pale in comparison to the complexities that we face today.
4) Peaceful succession is, somewhat ironically, only possible through strength of numbers and/or arms. The elephant need not stomp the lions to death, but must convincingly show that he *can* do that, if necessary. Or, for another animal analogy, imagine if every zebra in the herd suddenly gained the ability to do basic math and physics. In which direction might they run? Which way might the lion run, in response?
5) The reason elections are stolen is because the thieves know something about the current shape of reality that frightens them. They have access to data that we do not. Now: consider the prospect of what might happen if we had access to even a fraction of that scary data. Perhaps we'd discover that Balkanization and war isn't necessarily our destiny (or, at least, not to the extreme degree some of us think it is).
6) I think modern networks can be a boon to Mankind, no matter what formal and informal societies develop post-collapse. What we preserve of that infrastructure will be highly dependent not only on competence and mutual trust, but on the condition of our souls. Those have been banged-up pretty severely over the past century or so, and particularly over the past 24 years. We need to self-examine, and ensure that we are spiritually prepared and worthy of inheriting the Earth, if not the cosmos beyond. Without that, it matters little what contracts we arrange or what structures we build. We have to be good men to make good things, in other words.
Fog of war is always a problem, and making decisions on incomplete information is an important skill. I don't necessarily see this as a problem to be solved; it may even be to our advantage. Here "us" being not Them. Better information can help decision making, but in an adversarial situation if one side has a huge advantage in processing that information and acting on it, the other side can adopt low-information strategies. We would very much like to have more information, sure, but we could be in a comparatively worse situation if that information was provided and controlled by Them, or even just equally available to all (not that it would be, realistically).
Re: boundaries, the technocratic approach of drawing boundaries based on large models, demographic abstractions, and arbitrary processes gave us an entire century of large-scale warfare between arbitrary administrative pseudo-nations whose demographics and borders didn't conform to real-world culture and geography.
I think the right way to solve this is to let people self-sort and withdraw into their own communities, then determine new boundaries empirically / through emergence. The way they generally do when empires collapse.
We won't be able to figure this out ahead of time or apportion territory to avoid border conflicts. Those are a necessary part of the process. But they're generally a lot less bad than wars of all against all in a bid to dominate the whole territory or control how the breakup happens on a large scale. Disputed and effectively stateless territory still exists all over the world in bits and pieces, and doesn't drive large-scale conflict the way refusal to acknowledge another nation's sovereignty over their _undisputed_ territory does. So what matters is the newly consolidated polities form nations and mutually acknowledge the other nations are legitimate; they can then argue about where the lines go on the map as long as they want.
RE: balkanization, it may not be as bad as it looks, sure. It could be all the red counties are basically one nation, and all the cosmopolitan blue cities are an archipelago of colonies. Maybe if a breakup was imminent, some of the colonists (e.g. in Denver, Austin) would flee back to the coastal megacities and we'd end up with a few coastal clusters breaking away. But less than that? I really don't think so.
Can you imagine forgiving these people at this point and letting bygones be bygones, or what would be expected of them to permit that, or them doing even the slightest bare minimum version of that? Can you imagine them embracing in good faith their rural neighbors 15 miles outside the city limits, and allowing them to live as they see fit? I have a pretty active imagination, but it's not that good.
If I'm right, there's no way for them and everyone else to live together long term without one having boot on neck of the other. As to whether the "everyone else" can still live together, I'm not sure one way or other.
I have a lot of thoughts on networks and data in the technical sense that wouldn't fit here. But like other things I favor a more hierarchical scheme with the bottom tiers of the pyramid being the focal points and less traffic between the clusters. More or less the same way information worked pre-internet, but still facilitated by infotech where possible/necessary.
“I think the real solution to dealing with divergent cultures is to allow them to separate into distinct polities, not to look for ways to make their struggles for dominance more "fair" or less violent or dishonest.”
If I understand you correctly, I humbly and respectfully disagree. The present-day “divergent cultures” gig was planned and orchestrated., as carefully as Beethoven’s 5th symphony. 100%. It’s been choreographed with great precision and intent. For many years now. Perhaps decades. Mark is quite obviously well read, and could no doubt cite specifics, of that I’m certain.
So, separating into 2.7 zillion distinct polities is to simply go along with The Plan. It plays straight into The Plan, which is to separate us, to make us hate—or at least mistrust—each other, and to then DEMAND our tiny, tiny, micro-freaking-scopic sliver of the Intersectional Pie.
The Plan seems to be, to my idiot brain, to make us weaker, speak with weaker voices, champion weaker goals, embrace weaker freedoms. THEIR goal, is POWER. CONTROL. Always has been, always will be. They care about absolutely NOTHING else. Zip. And their CONTROL must come from somewhere.
For them to get stronger, we MUST be made weaker. I’m pretty sure that is a statement of absolute fact. Probably some physical law of the Universe. Maybe the Law of Conservation of Energy. Beats me.
All I am confident of is this: if we become Separatists, we loose. If we allow ourselves to be divided, we loose. If we give up on our Republic, we loose.
And the Jaba-the-Hutt Masters win.
Sadly, it is not clear to me how we win, only that a Path most certainly exists—perhaps multiple paths—where we CAN win. All problems have solutions., given the will to pursue it. That’s why They are desperate to break our will, and wear us down.
I understand where you're coming from here but - the people you're talking about are exploiting our imperial bureaucracy to accomplish what you're talking about. They haven't created division by establishing separate polities in a straightforward divide-and-conquer strategy. They've created division by arrogating more power to the federal government, stripping local and state power and forcing everyone to live under the same set of rules.
This causes tension and division precisely because different cultures and localities require different rules. What is best for a city is not what is best for a rural town; what is best in the Southwestern deserts is not what is best in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest; what is best for Christians is not what is best for Jews, Muslims, or Atheists; what is best for Protestants is not what is best for Catholics and Orthodox; what is best for Baptists is not what is best for Presbyterians; so on and so on.
At its peak the US was a federation of 50 separate states; states here meaning "countries", not a funny word for "provinces" or "counties" or "satrapies". They each had their own rules, and they delegated much of their rule-making to the county and township level. This was a pretty good system. It allowed for a degree of autonomy and boundary formation between different cultures and subcultures, all the way down to the town and neighborhood and estate level. We got along better like this. But this is not what we have now.
What we have now is an imperial bureaucracy. Rule-making happens at the scale of the continent. If the people of San Francisco want their ideas about immigration made into law, they take it directly to the national congress; if the people of Centerville, Maine don't like those ideas, well they'd better hope they can get their congressman to influence 220 other congressmen to fight back. And that's no mean feat, since the people of San Francisco have established colonies in places as far-flung as Phoenix, Denver, and Austin and practically own dozens of congressmen. Centerville meanwhile has a two-digit population and their national congressman doesn't even *care* what they want since they can't threaten his re-election.
Your thinking, the thinking that we need to keep fighting it out at the national level for control of the empire, is *exactly* what the people you're talking about want. They want it because they know that as long as you're playing that game, they'll keep winning.
But they don't even want you to think at the national level really; that's just a stopgap. What they really want is to pass all the rules by UN declaration for all people everywhere on earth. So they slowly undermine the US' own national sovereignty by using their minions in the national legislature to surrender it to treaties and international NGOs. Until they can shake your grip on nationalism they'll settle for you supporting the national-level power they already control, since it's what they're using to dissolve the nation into their international blob.
The only thing they really, really don't want is devolution of power. They'd very much prefer if people like you kept admitting that political power was seated in congress and the white house, if you can't get on board with the blob. But if you start talking about secession, about restoring absolute sovereignty to your regional government or even your local area, they get big mad. Because it's hard to get colonists from San Fransisco and New York to move to places like Idaho, or places like Centerville, and hundred thousand times over for every small town, to make sure they're all forced to surrender their sovereignty to the UN and the WTO and WHO and so on. Not that it's impossible, and they've accomplished a lot in seeding their minions even in small town city councils. But they mainly focus on those with significant influence over congressional districts.
Whatever it is that they don't want is worth looking at in depth. If they're afraid of it, it might be because it's a weapon against them.
Sunshine disinfects as we used to say, before we were told to huddle indoors in fear from viruses.(I don't remember St. Anthony telling us to leave the lights and the heat off but it was implied.) I appreciate the three level thinking: An honest secret ballot is better than a corrupt secret ballot but an open ballot is better than either.
But what would be better than any of the options is just to draw a name out of a hat. Actually, my preferred solution is to draw it out of about 7 hats. I would start with the names of the 50 states in the Federal hat. Then the names of each county or municipality in the State Hat. Then go down to a district or town level or something. Then a street level then a house level. Cheating would require massive coordination. You couldn't just cheat at one level because then you might get completely the opposite result at the next level. But the greatest boon would be that there would be no mistake of being chosen based on talent or likability or any virtue that you might possess. The leader would possess the humility of being unqualified and the confidence and sense of responsibility of being divinely chosen.(we'd also be able to pay off the national debt with what we save in campaigning.)
Elections have never been anything other than a cartel choice. We have simply gone from an educated, intelligent, socially responsible cartel to a suicidal/misanthropic cartel.(as well as the nominal cartel now being run by a shadow cartel) To make elections a good way to run the country the entire cartel would have to be replaced. And if you are getting rid of the cartel the only reason to replace it with another cartel is if you expect to be in it. I don't expect to be so I am agin it.
This is the end result of the game theoretical realities first outlined in David Brin’s The Transparent Society, and is pretty much the only way to preserve the legitimacy of voting.
Anyone with a knowledge of election history knows that EVERY election is stolen when secret ballots are done. It is a sham method that was cracked by electioneers almost as soon as it was invented, and then all those hackery methods were perfected by the CIA as it spread democracy as a way to control the allegiance of vassal governments during the 20th century.
I'm not in your camp politically (I am currently in no camp), and I wish the article were a bit less partisan, but you ar, nonetheless, entirely correct on your main argument, and you make the argument well.
Sorry. I had assumed that a practical technology which would allow "vote naked" to work today in a fully transparent manner with tools that currently exist and would be easy to implement would be worthwhile suggestion....
Blockchain is just a poster that everybody has a copy of. It does all of the same things and nothing else. More convenient/easy to implement? For some people in some situations. It's actually less transparent and easy to access in a lot of use cases than the poster. Though it would facilitate trending and other sorts of analytics. Not sure if that is a pro or a con. It doesn't really add much.
From my most emphatically non-Christian perspective, re. Dominion voting; any local Catholic church has D.O.M. plastered across the highest point of the entrance for dominion (over all), dominus (master) and deo optimo maximo. The latter means 'The Greatest God' which refers to the Christian god Jupiter. Saturn's Synagogal 'Elite' are arguably worse but it tells the curious what they need to know about our dodgy overseers playing games on the global stage until the clock runs out. Voting imho is still a democratic process but the majority is never right (see vax uptake.) Democracy is being dismantled before our eyes in the English speaking world, I'd lay €50 on it.
As for www: Urbit. If it is not *the* answer to the net issue yet, it is at least *an* answer. From what little I understand it's the future of the internet. Happy to be corrected by anyone who knows more!
Urbit has a lot of weird technical shortcomings that probably prevent it from becoming *the* new internet/computing stack. But ask any ten nerds who know something about it which things are flaws and which are features and you'll get twenty answers. I have my own. I think it's an interesting experiment, and pointing in the right direction in some ways.
Some of its flaws (e.g. bad UI/UX) are solvable with sufficient interest and effort, but incentives for developers are lacking and the people getting paid to work on it have IMO made many poor choices. Some can be worked around (e.g. its bizarre naming scheme, which could be papered over the same way we paper over IP with DNS).
Some are more fundamental, e.g. the programming language it's built on, which is an in-house job that is too clever for its own good while being not being particularly powerful or providing any interesting guarantees or invariants. There's a lot of intersection between Hoon and Brainfuck in terms of bragging rights for being able to understand it, but no compelling reason to use it once you do (unlike, e.g. C or Lisp, which are difficult languages that open up a whole world of possibilities generally not possible or practicable in other common languages). Urbit's operating system design is more compelling, but on this I am not sure it's capable of doing the whole job of an OS, and am not an OS/kernel developer so can't analyze in detail whether it can be made to work on a practical level, or whether it makes sense to try.
Anyway I could go on like this. But the short version is: I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of its ideas make it into whatever *does* end up being the post-WWW/post-PC future of computing.
Brilliant, it makes me more determined to get in to it because you've confirmed what I intuited without understanding the technicalities. They've put it in a holding pattern then. A 'stack' so to speak, like air cargo waiting to land, or like us in Substack. This part:
"There's a lot of intersection between Hoon and Brainfuck in terms of bragging rights for being able to understand it, but no compelling reason to use it once you do (unlike, e.g. C or Lisp, which are difficult languages that open up a whole world of possibilities generally not possible or practicable in other common languages)."
The reason I zero'd in to Urbit in the first place is because I 'get' esoteric stuff and the word "Urbit" is right up there in historic/eternal and metaphysic terms - the same people who named things like Windows and Apple are involved. I'd even go so far as to say it was the entire point of the last 3,500 years of dark age human development if I truly didn't give any fux at all.
That you make sense of the flaws being solvable just means the time isn't right yet to smooth them out. "Things aren't bad enough"... And I *would* bet money on it being where we're going. You've made my day. TVM.
Well if nothing else it's a neat little thing and worth the ticket price just for the novelty of it. I don't know what comets are selling for right now, but generally they range from affordable to fairly outrageous depending on how unique/cool their sigil thing looks. Once you've got one the rest is pretty easy.
With open voting records, the regime will know exactly who and where their enemies are!
My answer to this:
They already do.
Stop kidding yourself."
I feel the same way about all the gun world boomers opposed to registration legislation. I've seen what you post on facebook, google knows what websites you visit, and visa knows what you've been buying. De facto registration is already here and your notion of privacy died 20 years ago. They may not know precisely what arms you possess and they may not know exactly which candidates you voted for but you're certainly marked as a person of interest either way.
Accepting that the state and its affiliated organs already know more about you than your spouse seems like a necessary precondition for changing the relationship between those organs and the general population. On that basis I think your idea has theoretical merit but there is absolutely no chance of any of the involved parties being willing to shed light on their manufactured elections system. Forcing that probably means a shooting war and whatever comes out the other side of that isn't going to resemble the current United States in a multitude of ways that are impossible to forecast.
One day voting with paper ballots makes secret ballots OK. Extended absentee balloting, no.
There is a compromise position: secret ballots for those who vote in person with ID on election day. Absentee ballots, not secret.
Also, absentee ballots need to be counted BEFORE election day.
As for the valid address issue, we do have this thing called a Social Security number. The technology exists to make sure the same SSN isn't used in more than one precinct.
One theory of voting is that it is a proxy for military strength, and thus a way to resolve conflicts in proxy without going hot. The victors have to be fairly magnanimous for it work and willing to relinquish power in turn, if the votes turn against them. Under this theory open or closed ballots serve equally well - if you have to act a certain way out of fear, that side would also have power to draft you or compel taxes out of you if civil war broke out.
One of my forecasts is a return to feudalims, largely organized through corporate fiefdoms; which creates the weird image in my head of gangs of Nike-clad young men biting their thumbs at their opponents swathed in Reebok. A bit too weird and jarring even for Futurama; and yet historical forces being what they may, feudalism seems inevitable, and I don't see any other protective force for peasants aside from corporations. Combine it with naked voting, and it starts to make a bit more sense. Not only that, it actually starts to sound pretty fun. Imagine having the opportunity for a street melee with the idiots who support a green tax?
Besides, I've never understood the importance of a secret vote. People really ought to be held accountable personally for whom they vote for.
Right so the same people who constantly try to dox and cancel us for expressing dissident opinions can also cancel people for voting for dissident candidates.
They can't cancel all of us, but even if they could this would just show that its over. Secrets benefit sneaky fuckers most. Honorable people always get shorted by secrecy.
"That the ballot isn't associated with me once I leave the voting room."
How can you be sure of that? And do you have a direct method of checking how your vote was actually counted?
"Are you trying to set up an environment where antifa will be distributing lists of people who voted for "fascists"?"
Obviously not. I took great care in outlining the dangers associated with the method, as well as pointing out that "Naked Voting" alone wouldn't solve the dilemma we currently face. As in when I wrote:
"And just like mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a waste of time and resources until the border is secured, attempting Naked Voting now would be worse than doing nothing at all. If we don’t have a governing body trustworthy enough to initiate it, it will just become another tool of graft.
"Consider that in our current arrangement, we can’t even get basic reforms on the books. For instance, even though the arguments against voter IDs are both illogical and literally racist, we still live in a so-called “democracy” where national voters don’t need to provide proof they are who they say they are, or live where they say they live. They don’t even need to present proof they live in the nation that is counting their votes. And with mail-in ballots, they don’t even need to prove they are currently alive and breathing, or even exist at all."
So, given this is a thought experiment that's absent certain functional prerequisites (for now), what do you think of the actual idea at the core? Should we want to live in a society where people stand behind their opinions? Or is the "secret hat" an innovation we should carry forward into the future?
And given the level of sophisticated fraud that's been exposed by Fractal and Nickson, what would your own prescription be? Should we sit back and hope they won't eek out barely believable, marginal victories forever?
> And just like mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a waste of time and resources until the border is secured, attempting Naked Voting now would be worse than doing nothing at all. If we don’t have a governing body trustworthy enough to initiate it, it will just become another tool of graft.
Then what was the point of writing this essay? All it does is provide ammo to anyone who actually wants to abolish the secret ballot now.
The voting machines would be enough by themselves, but they may or may not be necessary. Take them away and we still are left with:
1. Roughly 80 million unsolicited mail-in ballots(2020). Expect a similar number in 2024
2. Ballot drop boxes in all the major cities, with well documented 2am-4am bulk-drops. See the film 2000 Mules
3. A standing army of highly paid election workers in the swing states, a kind of seasonal work force that is now trained and knows exactly what to do, and when to do it.
4. Voter ID requirements, that, when a photo is actually required, a photo of your dog will do.
5. Voting month not voting day in ALL the swing states and most of the others. This is a crucial feature because it provides the data and the requisite time to make the necessary “adjustments” to the vote tallies when and where required.
6. Voting machines with opaque and demonstrably hackable software that are connected to the internet
My guess would be that even if you dropped # 6 from the list the job could still get done.
As I mentioned in the article, I didn't set out to rehash any particular critiques-of/arguments-for democracy itself (other than to give a nod to its obvious failure modes at the extremes). But I think that the seeds of "voting" are a reflection of our unique condition. We can express our opinions about subjects, draw on each other's advice, etc.
It's true that this doesn't necessitate any particular "democratic" form of governance (e.g. the king has his counselors, the general his lieutenants). But if politics is war by other means, there is also a kind of "democracy" built into strength of numbers (see my response to Fukitol above for my lion analogies). Accurate counts and tallies of opinions are therefore useful no matter *what* system of governance is adopted (just ask Louis XVI).
Therefore quality data collection is a must, particularly in our current situation. The battlefield is incredibly foggy at the moment, and some of our perceptions of it may be highly distorted and manipulated (and in multiple ways; recall those double and triple agents of my example).
As for the next steps to be taken? That's out of my scope here. But no matter what is to be done, I think high quality, reliable data can only help us. And if that can't be obtained via Naked Voting, it will still help us to see the Enemy's size and shape more clearly.
Pure poetry.
Especially this paragraph.
"I don’t know if the screamers are aware of the d-word’s meaning, or if they’re even using it that way. The postmodern Left deploys language as a shapeshifting weapon, like the cop-monster from Terminator 2. Maybe they don’t even care what they mean by “democracy” in any given moment. Maybe it all translates to some version of “Shut up.”"
Thank you, sir.
You're a sharp guy. I like the way you connect the dots.
I see your point, but it still has a bit of "real democracy has never been tried" energy.
In our present advanced state of civil collapse it's a recipe for stochastic terrorism, which you acknowledge, but then suggest we try something better next time. There are plenty of ideas about how to mitigate democracy's worst tendencies, and how to fix voting systems in particular, that only work in a "next time."
We could theorycraft those all day, but why do we need a next time in the first place? The last time the world tried various experiments in large-scale/institutionalized democracy it went so badly that nobody tried it again for almost a thousand years.
I think the real solution to dealing with divergent cultures is to allow them to separate into distinct polities, not to look for ways to make their struggles for dominance more "fair" or less violent or dishonest.
We all know what's happening here. We've got multiple groups of people with fundamentally incompatible values, narratives, and visions for the future. They've already self-segregated territoriality, which is a first step in this natural process. The next step is to cleave off into separate political bodies.
This used to be easier when there was a vast amount of unclaimed territory for people to break off into, if a bid for rebellion failed. But we don't have that option now, and won't again unless/until space colonization opens up, so we have to take one of the other two options: allow for peaceful secession and unification as needed so that things can re-balance; or war, whether directly or by proxy through imperial politics. The latter, unless one group achieves a swift and decisive victory, ends with everyone losing and ending up doing the former by default after much suffering and loss. There's no way to make the latter fair, no system that can make the losing party feel less aggrieved.
But after it's done, each new polity will adopt the methods of governance that suit them best, and hopefully proceed in good faith for at least a few generations. No particular system will allow them to recapitulate the democratic empire experiment more successfully. As before, as now, the only outcome when they reach the point of factional conflict will be to break up, either peacefully or destructively.
Or TL;DR: Balkanization is not a bad word.
Interesting thoughts.
Here's a few ideas for your consideration:
1) I suspect that the current information/media landscape is more shadow than shape. By that I mean the portrait of distant reality (including the "political reality") that we receive through our various networks is not only distorted, but portions of it may be entirely upside-down or fictional. We are traveling in a fog, surrounded by illusionists.
2) That being the case, our degree of confidence about that picture (i.e. "We all know what's happening here") could itself be the product of an illusion, designed for that very purpose. The friend/enemy calculation isn't so clear cut in a fog. That's one of the fundamental points I was trying to convey. To build a useful theory about our true state of affairs requires *real data* that is currently unobtainable, thanks to secret ballots and other accountability shields.
3) Even if Balkanization is our true course/fate, drawing those new boundaries within our current technological position (i.e. integrated global networks and supply chains, automatized weapons platforms, smartphone zombies, etc) will be an immensely difficult, dangerous and complicated process. While the men featured in the painting at the top of this article faced versions of the same challenges (with international shipping lanes and whatnot), they pale in comparison to the complexities that we face today.
4) Peaceful succession is, somewhat ironically, only possible through strength of numbers and/or arms. The elephant need not stomp the lions to death, but must convincingly show that he *can* do that, if necessary. Or, for another animal analogy, imagine if every zebra in the herd suddenly gained the ability to do basic math and physics. In which direction might they run? Which way might the lion run, in response?
5) The reason elections are stolen is because the thieves know something about the current shape of reality that frightens them. They have access to data that we do not. Now: consider the prospect of what might happen if we had access to even a fraction of that scary data. Perhaps we'd discover that Balkanization and war isn't necessarily our destiny (or, at least, not to the extreme degree some of us think it is).
6) I think modern networks can be a boon to Mankind, no matter what formal and informal societies develop post-collapse. What we preserve of that infrastructure will be highly dependent not only on competence and mutual trust, but on the condition of our souls. Those have been banged-up pretty severely over the past century or so, and particularly over the past 24 years. We need to self-examine, and ensure that we are spiritually prepared and worthy of inheriting the Earth, if not the cosmos beyond. Without that, it matters little what contracts we arrange or what structures we build. We have to be good men to make good things, in other words.
Fog of war is always a problem, and making decisions on incomplete information is an important skill. I don't necessarily see this as a problem to be solved; it may even be to our advantage. Here "us" being not Them. Better information can help decision making, but in an adversarial situation if one side has a huge advantage in processing that information and acting on it, the other side can adopt low-information strategies. We would very much like to have more information, sure, but we could be in a comparatively worse situation if that information was provided and controlled by Them, or even just equally available to all (not that it would be, realistically).
Re: boundaries, the technocratic approach of drawing boundaries based on large models, demographic abstractions, and arbitrary processes gave us an entire century of large-scale warfare between arbitrary administrative pseudo-nations whose demographics and borders didn't conform to real-world culture and geography.
I think the right way to solve this is to let people self-sort and withdraw into their own communities, then determine new boundaries empirically / through emergence. The way they generally do when empires collapse.
We won't be able to figure this out ahead of time or apportion territory to avoid border conflicts. Those are a necessary part of the process. But they're generally a lot less bad than wars of all against all in a bid to dominate the whole territory or control how the breakup happens on a large scale. Disputed and effectively stateless territory still exists all over the world in bits and pieces, and doesn't drive large-scale conflict the way refusal to acknowledge another nation's sovereignty over their _undisputed_ territory does. So what matters is the newly consolidated polities form nations and mutually acknowledge the other nations are legitimate; they can then argue about where the lines go on the map as long as they want.
RE: balkanization, it may not be as bad as it looks, sure. It could be all the red counties are basically one nation, and all the cosmopolitan blue cities are an archipelago of colonies. Maybe if a breakup was imminent, some of the colonists (e.g. in Denver, Austin) would flee back to the coastal megacities and we'd end up with a few coastal clusters breaking away. But less than that? I really don't think so.
Can you imagine forgiving these people at this point and letting bygones be bygones, or what would be expected of them to permit that, or them doing even the slightest bare minimum version of that? Can you imagine them embracing in good faith their rural neighbors 15 miles outside the city limits, and allowing them to live as they see fit? I have a pretty active imagination, but it's not that good.
If I'm right, there's no way for them and everyone else to live together long term without one having boot on neck of the other. As to whether the "everyone else" can still live together, I'm not sure one way or other.
I have a lot of thoughts on networks and data in the technical sense that wouldn't fit here. But like other things I favor a more hierarchical scheme with the bottom tiers of the pyramid being the focal points and less traffic between the clusters. More or less the same way information worked pre-internet, but still facilitated by infotech where possible/necessary.
“I think the real solution to dealing with divergent cultures is to allow them to separate into distinct polities, not to look for ways to make their struggles for dominance more "fair" or less violent or dishonest.”
If I understand you correctly, I humbly and respectfully disagree. The present-day “divergent cultures” gig was planned and orchestrated., as carefully as Beethoven’s 5th symphony. 100%. It’s been choreographed with great precision and intent. For many years now. Perhaps decades. Mark is quite obviously well read, and could no doubt cite specifics, of that I’m certain.
So, separating into 2.7 zillion distinct polities is to simply go along with The Plan. It plays straight into The Plan, which is to separate us, to make us hate—or at least mistrust—each other, and to then DEMAND our tiny, tiny, micro-freaking-scopic sliver of the Intersectional Pie.
The Plan seems to be, to my idiot brain, to make us weaker, speak with weaker voices, champion weaker goals, embrace weaker freedoms. THEIR goal, is POWER. CONTROL. Always has been, always will be. They care about absolutely NOTHING else. Zip. And their CONTROL must come from somewhere.
For them to get stronger, we MUST be made weaker. I’m pretty sure that is a statement of absolute fact. Probably some physical law of the Universe. Maybe the Law of Conservation of Energy. Beats me.
All I am confident of is this: if we become Separatists, we loose. If we allow ourselves to be divided, we loose. If we give up on our Republic, we loose.
And the Jaba-the-Hutt Masters win.
Sadly, it is not clear to me how we win, only that a Path most certainly exists—perhaps multiple paths—where we CAN win. All problems have solutions., given the will to pursue it. That’s why They are desperate to break our will, and wear us down.
“Eat your gruel, peasant!”
I understand where you're coming from here but - the people you're talking about are exploiting our imperial bureaucracy to accomplish what you're talking about. They haven't created division by establishing separate polities in a straightforward divide-and-conquer strategy. They've created division by arrogating more power to the federal government, stripping local and state power and forcing everyone to live under the same set of rules.
This causes tension and division precisely because different cultures and localities require different rules. What is best for a city is not what is best for a rural town; what is best in the Southwestern deserts is not what is best in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest; what is best for Christians is not what is best for Jews, Muslims, or Atheists; what is best for Protestants is not what is best for Catholics and Orthodox; what is best for Baptists is not what is best for Presbyterians; so on and so on.
At its peak the US was a federation of 50 separate states; states here meaning "countries", not a funny word for "provinces" or "counties" or "satrapies". They each had their own rules, and they delegated much of their rule-making to the county and township level. This was a pretty good system. It allowed for a degree of autonomy and boundary formation between different cultures and subcultures, all the way down to the town and neighborhood and estate level. We got along better like this. But this is not what we have now.
What we have now is an imperial bureaucracy. Rule-making happens at the scale of the continent. If the people of San Francisco want their ideas about immigration made into law, they take it directly to the national congress; if the people of Centerville, Maine don't like those ideas, well they'd better hope they can get their congressman to influence 220 other congressmen to fight back. And that's no mean feat, since the people of San Francisco have established colonies in places as far-flung as Phoenix, Denver, and Austin and practically own dozens of congressmen. Centerville meanwhile has a two-digit population and their national congressman doesn't even *care* what they want since they can't threaten his re-election.
Your thinking, the thinking that we need to keep fighting it out at the national level for control of the empire, is *exactly* what the people you're talking about want. They want it because they know that as long as you're playing that game, they'll keep winning.
But they don't even want you to think at the national level really; that's just a stopgap. What they really want is to pass all the rules by UN declaration for all people everywhere on earth. So they slowly undermine the US' own national sovereignty by using their minions in the national legislature to surrender it to treaties and international NGOs. Until they can shake your grip on nationalism they'll settle for you supporting the national-level power they already control, since it's what they're using to dissolve the nation into their international blob.
The only thing they really, really don't want is devolution of power. They'd very much prefer if people like you kept admitting that political power was seated in congress and the white house, if you can't get on board with the blob. But if you start talking about secession, about restoring absolute sovereignty to your regional government or even your local area, they get big mad. Because it's hard to get colonists from San Fransisco and New York to move to places like Idaho, or places like Centerville, and hundred thousand times over for every small town, to make sure they're all forced to surrender their sovereignty to the UN and the WTO and WHO and so on. Not that it's impossible, and they've accomplished a lot in seeding their minions even in small town city councils. But they mainly focus on those with significant influence over congressional districts.
Whatever it is that they don't want is worth looking at in depth. If they're afraid of it, it might be because it's a weapon against them.
Sunshine disinfects as we used to say, before we were told to huddle indoors in fear from viruses.(I don't remember St. Anthony telling us to leave the lights and the heat off but it was implied.) I appreciate the three level thinking: An honest secret ballot is better than a corrupt secret ballot but an open ballot is better than either.
But what would be better than any of the options is just to draw a name out of a hat. Actually, my preferred solution is to draw it out of about 7 hats. I would start with the names of the 50 states in the Federal hat. Then the names of each county or municipality in the State Hat. Then go down to a district or town level or something. Then a street level then a house level. Cheating would require massive coordination. You couldn't just cheat at one level because then you might get completely the opposite result at the next level. But the greatest boon would be that there would be no mistake of being chosen based on talent or likability or any virtue that you might possess. The leader would possess the humility of being unqualified and the confidence and sense of responsibility of being divinely chosen.(we'd also be able to pay off the national debt with what we save in campaigning.)
Elections have never been anything other than a cartel choice. We have simply gone from an educated, intelligent, socially responsible cartel to a suicidal/misanthropic cartel.(as well as the nominal cartel now being run by a shadow cartel) To make elections a good way to run the country the entire cartel would have to be replaced. And if you are getting rid of the cartel the only reason to replace it with another cartel is if you expect to be in it. I don't expect to be so I am agin it.
This is the end result of the game theoretical realities first outlined in David Brin’s The Transparent Society, and is pretty much the only way to preserve the legitimacy of voting.
Anyone with a knowledge of election history knows that EVERY election is stolen when secret ballots are done. It is a sham method that was cracked by electioneers almost as soon as it was invented, and then all those hackery methods were perfected by the CIA as it spread democracy as a way to control the allegiance of vassal governments during the 20th century.
I'm not in your camp politically (I am currently in no camp), and I wish the article were a bit less partisan, but you ar, nonetheless, entirely correct on your main argument, and you make the argument well.
Thank you.
Blockchain
Maybe. But even quantum encryption doesn't translate to trusting your neighbor, necessarily.
Right. I mean both the vote and the name/id could be recorded on an immutable public blockchain.
Put it on a big poster and everybody gets a framed copy. what's the difference/who cares?
Sorry. I had assumed that a practical technology which would allow "vote naked" to work today in a fully transparent manner with tools that currently exist and would be easy to implement would be worthwhile suggestion....
Blockchain is just a poster that everybody has a copy of. It does all of the same things and nothing else. More convenient/easy to implement? For some people in some situations. It's actually less transparent and easy to access in a lot of use cases than the poster. Though it would facilitate trending and other sorts of analytics. Not sure if that is a pro or a con. It doesn't really add much.
From my most emphatically non-Christian perspective, re. Dominion voting; any local Catholic church has D.O.M. plastered across the highest point of the entrance for dominion (over all), dominus (master) and deo optimo maximo. The latter means 'The Greatest God' which refers to the Christian god Jupiter. Saturn's Synagogal 'Elite' are arguably worse but it tells the curious what they need to know about our dodgy overseers playing games on the global stage until the clock runs out. Voting imho is still a democratic process but the majority is never right (see vax uptake.) Democracy is being dismantled before our eyes in the English speaking world, I'd lay €50 on it.
As for www: Urbit. If it is not *the* answer to the net issue yet, it is at least *an* answer. From what little I understand it's the future of the internet. Happy to be corrected by anyone who knows more!
Ha! Yes, it is a word with great provenance and "power", isn't it?
I also agree that there isn't a single answer to the problem yet. But certain protocols look promising.
Well... no single answer in "polite society", but fascism has a precedent in nature... which *could* be misinterpreted like everything else, or not.
Urbit has a lot of weird technical shortcomings that probably prevent it from becoming *the* new internet/computing stack. But ask any ten nerds who know something about it which things are flaws and which are features and you'll get twenty answers. I have my own. I think it's an interesting experiment, and pointing in the right direction in some ways.
Some of its flaws (e.g. bad UI/UX) are solvable with sufficient interest and effort, but incentives for developers are lacking and the people getting paid to work on it have IMO made many poor choices. Some can be worked around (e.g. its bizarre naming scheme, which could be papered over the same way we paper over IP with DNS).
Some are more fundamental, e.g. the programming language it's built on, which is an in-house job that is too clever for its own good while being not being particularly powerful or providing any interesting guarantees or invariants. There's a lot of intersection between Hoon and Brainfuck in terms of bragging rights for being able to understand it, but no compelling reason to use it once you do (unlike, e.g. C or Lisp, which are difficult languages that open up a whole world of possibilities generally not possible or practicable in other common languages). Urbit's operating system design is more compelling, but on this I am not sure it's capable of doing the whole job of an OS, and am not an OS/kernel developer so can't analyze in detail whether it can be made to work on a practical level, or whether it makes sense to try.
Anyway I could go on like this. But the short version is: I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of its ideas make it into whatever *does* end up being the post-WWW/post-PC future of computing.
Brilliant, it makes me more determined to get in to it because you've confirmed what I intuited without understanding the technicalities. They've put it in a holding pattern then. A 'stack' so to speak, like air cargo waiting to land, or like us in Substack. This part:
"There's a lot of intersection between Hoon and Brainfuck in terms of bragging rights for being able to understand it, but no compelling reason to use it once you do (unlike, e.g. C or Lisp, which are difficult languages that open up a whole world of possibilities generally not possible or practicable in other common languages)."
The reason I zero'd in to Urbit in the first place is because I 'get' esoteric stuff and the word "Urbit" is right up there in historic/eternal and metaphysic terms - the same people who named things like Windows and Apple are involved. I'd even go so far as to say it was the entire point of the last 3,500 years of dark age human development if I truly didn't give any fux at all.
That you make sense of the flaws being solvable just means the time isn't right yet to smooth them out. "Things aren't bad enough"... And I *would* bet money on it being where we're going. You've made my day. TVM.
Well if nothing else it's a neat little thing and worth the ticket price just for the novelty of it. I don't know what comets are selling for right now, but generally they range from affordable to fairly outrageous depending on how unique/cool their sigil thing looks. Once you've got one the rest is pretty easy.
"I know what some of you are thinking.
But Mark, you’re ignoring the obvious!
With open voting records, the regime will know exactly who and where their enemies are!
My answer to this:
They already do.
Stop kidding yourself."
I feel the same way about all the gun world boomers opposed to registration legislation. I've seen what you post on facebook, google knows what websites you visit, and visa knows what you've been buying. De facto registration is already here and your notion of privacy died 20 years ago. They may not know precisely what arms you possess and they may not know exactly which candidates you voted for but you're certainly marked as a person of interest either way.
Accepting that the state and its affiliated organs already know more about you than your spouse seems like a necessary precondition for changing the relationship between those organs and the general population. On that basis I think your idea has theoretical merit but there is absolutely no chance of any of the involved parties being willing to shed light on their manufactured elections system. Forcing that probably means a shooting war and whatever comes out the other side of that isn't going to resemble the current United States in a multitude of ways that are impossible to forecast.
Excellent article! Agree wholeheartedly.
One day voting with paper ballots makes secret ballots OK. Extended absentee balloting, no.
There is a compromise position: secret ballots for those who vote in person with ID on election day. Absentee ballots, not secret.
Also, absentee ballots need to be counted BEFORE election day.
As for the valid address issue, we do have this thing called a Social Security number. The technology exists to make sure the same SSN isn't used in more than one precinct.
One theory of voting is that it is a proxy for military strength, and thus a way to resolve conflicts in proxy without going hot. The victors have to be fairly magnanimous for it work and willing to relinquish power in turn, if the votes turn against them. Under this theory open or closed ballots serve equally well - if you have to act a certain way out of fear, that side would also have power to draft you or compel taxes out of you if civil war broke out.
One of my forecasts is a return to feudalims, largely organized through corporate fiefdoms; which creates the weird image in my head of gangs of Nike-clad young men biting their thumbs at their opponents swathed in Reebok. A bit too weird and jarring even for Futurama; and yet historical forces being what they may, feudalism seems inevitable, and I don't see any other protective force for peasants aside from corporations. Combine it with naked voting, and it starts to make a bit more sense. Not only that, it actually starts to sound pretty fun. Imagine having the opportunity for a street melee with the idiots who support a green tax?
Besides, I've never understood the importance of a secret vote. People really ought to be held accountable personally for whom they vote for.
Right so the same people who constantly try to dox and cancel us for expressing dissident opinions can also cancel people for voting for dissident candidates.
Seriously, have you been compromised?
They can't cancel all of us, but even if they could this would just show that its over. Secrets benefit sneaky fuckers most. Honorable people always get shorted by secrecy.
Did you read it all?
Yes, and it fails to adequately address my point.
Let me ask you this, then: Who (or what) guarantees the anonymity and integrity of your vote right now, in the present environment?
That the ballot isn't associated with me once I leave the voting room.
Let me ask you this: Are you trying to set up an environment where antifa will be distributing lists of people who voted for "fascists"?
"That the ballot isn't associated with me once I leave the voting room."
How can you be sure of that? And do you have a direct method of checking how your vote was actually counted?
"Are you trying to set up an environment where antifa will be distributing lists of people who voted for "fascists"?"
Obviously not. I took great care in outlining the dangers associated with the method, as well as pointing out that "Naked Voting" alone wouldn't solve the dilemma we currently face. As in when I wrote:
"And just like mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a waste of time and resources until the border is secured, attempting Naked Voting now would be worse than doing nothing at all. If we don’t have a governing body trustworthy enough to initiate it, it will just become another tool of graft.
"Consider that in our current arrangement, we can’t even get basic reforms on the books. For instance, even though the arguments against voter IDs are both illogical and literally racist, we still live in a so-called “democracy” where national voters don’t need to provide proof they are who they say they are, or live where they say they live. They don’t even need to present proof they live in the nation that is counting their votes. And with mail-in ballots, they don’t even need to prove they are currently alive and breathing, or even exist at all."
So, given this is a thought experiment that's absent certain functional prerequisites (for now), what do you think of the actual idea at the core? Should we want to live in a society where people stand behind their opinions? Or is the "secret hat" an innovation we should carry forward into the future?
And given the level of sophisticated fraud that's been exposed by Fractal and Nickson, what would your own prescription be? Should we sit back and hope they won't eek out barely believable, marginal victories forever?
> And just like mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a waste of time and resources until the border is secured, attempting Naked Voting now would be worse than doing nothing at all. If we don’t have a governing body trustworthy enough to initiate it, it will just become another tool of graft.
Then what was the point of writing this essay? All it does is provide ammo to anyone who actually wants to abolish the secret ballot now.
Mark,
The voting machines would be enough by themselves, but they may or may not be necessary. Take them away and we still are left with:
1. Roughly 80 million unsolicited mail-in ballots(2020). Expect a similar number in 2024
2. Ballot drop boxes in all the major cities, with well documented 2am-4am bulk-drops. See the film 2000 Mules
3. A standing army of highly paid election workers in the swing states, a kind of seasonal work force that is now trained and knows exactly what to do, and when to do it.
4. Voter ID requirements, that, when a photo is actually required, a photo of your dog will do.
5. Voting month not voting day in ALL the swing states and most of the others. This is a crucial feature because it provides the data and the requisite time to make the necessary “adjustments” to the vote tallies when and where required.
6. Voting machines with opaque and demonstrably hackable software that are connected to the internet
My guess would be that even if you dropped # 6 from the list the job could still get done.
Thanks for your thoughts!
As I mentioned in the article, I didn't set out to rehash any particular critiques-of/arguments-for democracy itself (other than to give a nod to its obvious failure modes at the extremes). But I think that the seeds of "voting" are a reflection of our unique condition. We can express our opinions about subjects, draw on each other's advice, etc.
It's true that this doesn't necessitate any particular "democratic" form of governance (e.g. the king has his counselors, the general his lieutenants). But if politics is war by other means, there is also a kind of "democracy" built into strength of numbers (see my response to Fukitol above for my lion analogies). Accurate counts and tallies of opinions are therefore useful no matter *what* system of governance is adopted (just ask Louis XVI).
Therefore quality data collection is a must, particularly in our current situation. The battlefield is incredibly foggy at the moment, and some of our perceptions of it may be highly distorted and manipulated (and in multiple ways; recall those double and triple agents of my example).
As for the next steps to be taken? That's out of my scope here. But no matter what is to be done, I think high quality, reliable data can only help us. And if that can't be obtained via Naked Voting, it will still help us to see the Enemy's size and shape more clearly.