Software for Democratic Conversation

Discussions where everyone gets equal time are more democratic

I want groups of any size to be able to talk about difficult topics, in a way that participants are closer to being equal

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. Even in very massive groups where not everyone can talk, everyone can give their right to speak to speakers that resonate with them. As such, here’s a design for a software system to facilitate large-scale democratic discussion.

This is supposed to be ‘microphone on a desk’ but it looks to me like “a moldy orange in an ice cream scoop”. My writing has gotten so much better now that I can add pictures generated by a machine :)

I’m sharing this design to an email newsletter because, hey, this is the box I write things into now, when I want other people to give me feedback. If enough people like this idea, I’ll build it, and let people use it for free.

Why This Matters

The fundamental principle behind democracy is equality. A system is democratic when all participants have equal political power. I understand that there are many arguments against democracy which are gaining credence, both overtly and covertly. I remain convinced that Democracy is indeed, the best system, and that many problems with our current system aren’t problems with democracy, but with the current technology we use to implement it.

Does “everyone has equal political power” really apply to the electoral system today, anywhere in the world? About the only aspect of the American

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electoral system that is democratic is voting. But voting happens at the end of a long, expensive process involving lots of talking.

What if we could make the talking part that happens before the voting, also democratic?

How This Works

The short version is:

• everyone gets divisible tokens that represent the right to speak for a fixed amount of time

• When you speak at the microphone, your tokens get used up. The mic is cut off once you run out of tokens.

• The next speaker is selected by a software queue.

• People can trade their tokens to each other, gifting some, or all of their tokens to a speaker they like

This system could be implemented either via videoconferencing software, or, for in-person gatherings, mobile devices communicating with a computer attached to a PA system.

There are many different ways to vary this system. Some groups might say that you need a certain balance to enter the queue, others might add the ability for people to burn their tokens in order to silence a speaker they don’t like. Some groups might have the queue be a bit more flexible to enable back-and-forth conversation, etc.

If 10 people meet for an hour, and they want to talk democratically, each person should be able to talk for 6 minutes. Wouldn’t that be great? I know i’m often guilty of talking way longer than I ought to, and I’d love a system that made it easier for me to please just shut up already, Mark.

Just in small meetings alone, this would be useful. But what about really big discussions - could this work there, as well? In the 2020 democratic debates, 6.6 million people watched a 2 hour debate run by an advertising business, with unelected moderators that selected who got to speak according to a non-democratic system.

Image from 538, with emphasis added. Sorry for the Y axis truncation; I guess this is the world we live in now. Putting in the full Y axis also raises further questions; i’m assuming poll numbers are only a rough proxy.

The candidates in the highlighted bubble below were all polling at similar levels, but some received substantially more air time than others How is that democratic?

Instead of the current opaque system we could have topics chosen by polls, and speaking time allocated via a system like this. Each viewer could then choose some speakers to share that viewer’s 0.0011 of a second.

Sure, that number seems tiny. To me, that’s what makes democracy sacred: the complex organization of unfathomable numbers of meaningless things into deeply meaningful patterns. To me, what is sacred includes both the aggregate hopes and dreams of millions of people expressed through approximately worthless votes, and the meaningless atoms that form my daughters fingers:

She already loves this toy microphone

The key idea here is that time at the mic in front of a world-scale audience is a form of political power.

Democratically run systems need some mechanism for democratic discussion. Here’s my proposal - let me know what you think! If there’s a positive enough response, and nobody else says they have built or are already building this, I’ll start.

1. I wonder if tools like ML might end up removing the advantages that accrue to people deeply versed in rhetoric, although this raises the question of any idea can be equally ‘dressed up’ by an ML system.

2. Being American, I’ll do the obnoxious thing many Americans do, which is presume that American is a reasonable proxy for the rest of the world.