The Case For Democracy Is Dead

Democracy is dead because of scale failure. Population growth and financial growth were never adequately accounted for in the basic foundation of our Democracy, our Constitution.

Hi! I'm a computer scientist with two such degrees from UC Berkeley. Scale is a topic central to my study of databases during my time. These scale concepts can be applied to Democracy design to prove Democracy is dead and cannot be restored.

There are a couple of relevant scale issues here that can be used to prove Democracy is dead, although there are many, many more.

What do I mean when I say Democracy is dead? I mean to say that it is impossible for Democracy to achieve the many purposes it is designed to achieve and cannot be restored.

The two relevant scale issues that can be used to prove Democracy does not scale are signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth.

Signal To Noise

We do not live in a perfect world. This means that whenever any signal is sent electronically from point A to point B then there will be some signal degradation to noise. Electrically engineers overcome noise by sending signal through various mediums such as copper wire or fiber optic glass. Even then the rate at which the signal can be sent and still retain upwards of 99.999% signal is limited. Copper, for example, transmits at much lower speeds than fiber topic glass in order to retain signal integrity.

We live in a wireless world now because there is just not enough copper and fiber optic available to meet networking demand. This means we use a medium that is terrible at transmitting electronic signal: air. Why is air terrible at transmitting signal. In a word, lighting. In two words lightning and volcanoes. You see in the first few billion years of Earths existence the atmosphere was a much better conductor. Over a few billion years lighting and volcanoes burnt the conducting elements out of the atmosphere turning our atmosphere into the insulator that it is today.

Air is both a heat and electric insulator. Wireless signal is prone to high degrees of noise. We all have noise meters called bars. The number of bars represent the signal quality. If you have no bars you have no signal.

It is important to point out here that the reason we added air as the primary medium for networking today is twofold: capacity and function. We want more capacity and then the additional capability of mobility that cannot be satisfied by copper and fiber mediums. This is a scale of function and not just a scale of bandwidth. In other words as time goes on a system needs to scale in both the functions it provides as well as providing more of them.

On to voting. Voting is a matter of signal-to-noise ratio. Our representatives are suppose to represent our will, what we the people by the people demand as is enshrined in the opening stanza of the US Constitution. Today the US Constitution is dead because there is no signal. Voting is now 100% noise.

The signal value of voting was never initially tested. It was spit-balled, a guess. The original US Constitution pegs the number of people a representative would represent at thirty-thousand. Why thirty-thousand, you ask? No reason. That's right. The very foundation of what our Democracy means is pegged to a representation ratio that have never been tested and had no reasoning. There was no theory behind a minimum or maximum people a representative could represent based on some principle of Democracy. Thirty thousand was chosen simply out of thin air for no reason.

Over time our US population grew. Soon there were 435 representatives that were representing thirteen-million people. I'm not making this next part up. The building that housed the House of Representatives could not scale. So, the worst scale decision was made. They fixed the number of representatives and simply scaled the number people a representative would represent. When this country reaches a population of 435 million then each representative will represent one million people. How can anyone represent one million people in anything?

The votes we the people cast represent the signal a representative is suppose to represent. The problem is people have as many opinions are there are people. How is a representative suppose to pull out the signal?

For example, take modern wedge issues such as abortion or guns. Well, the signal is determined by the party. The party has a platform and the position of the party is the signal. Republicans are pro-life and Democrats are pro-choice. The representative party is the sole source of signal.

But is it? Do we elect representatives to solely represent Americans of the same party or should everyone interests be represented? Imagine if you are a representative today. Every issue will have voters in your district that morally stand on both party sides of any issue. Damned if you do or damned if you don't. Seems the best we can do with a representative determining signal from all the noise is party politics. We the people then is reduced to we the party.

The fundamental problem is there is no noise. All votes cast are signal. Every voter's vote is signal. This inherent flaw was baked into the fundamental notion of Democracy being representative. Remove representation from Democracy and what is left is not Democracy. Democracy is defined to representative government.

So how did the US succeed as well as it has? Well, first you have to consider what came before it, monarchy. Democracy didn't have be anything close to perfect, just better than monarchy. A country split into a signal of two parties that can in theory represent upwards of half the population is much better than monarchy that represents only one person in the population. This is a statement of scale. Representing upwards of half the population split between two-parties is much a better scale solution than representing one. Well, until the George Floyd lynching day it isn't. At some point people are going to point out that "we the people" doesn't mean "we, half the people". We are at that point today and have been for over fifty years.

It is no longer sufficient in America for "we the people" to represent only a subset as one party. We've had much success long out pacing monarchy as a successful civilizing organization, but today we are demanding that we move beyond the party ratio. How?

We can't. Democracy is dead. First, realize no party today represents one half of the US population. Each party only represents about one third. That is because there is another third that we call independents, or the unaffiliated. Further, best case scenarios of any election we only see a sixty-percent voter turn-out. So really each party at best only represents one-third of the sixty-percent voter turnout, or twenty percent.

Assuming that our current parties were dutifully representing the signal of voters perfectly then at best our representative Democracy is representing twenty-percent of the population signal. But we all know that's not true with the progressive movement in the Democratic party and the Tea Party/Never Trump movements in the Republican party then neither party comes close to representing that twenty-percent. Each party represents at most fifteen percent of the country.

Finally, today our political parties run first and foremost as "not noise" rather than as signal. Democrats vote for Democrats primarily because they are not Republicans and visa-versa. This means there is literally no signal, just "not noise". Arguably then "not noise" party votes are less signal today than the monarchy that was deposed in 1789. A king in the US would at least represent the signal of one, the King. This signal of one is still more signal than "not noise" of each party today. So this is why we are starting to see our entire country embrace the cult of personality and other monarchy trappings.

Democracy is dead.

But how did it ever work? Didn't these same arguments apply back in 1789?

Historically voter signal was much easier to achieve because:
1. The voters were of European heritage and male land owners.
2. Communication was extremely limited relative to every subsequent generation.
3. Education is extremely limited relative to every subsequent generation.

Let's go through all three.

Voting initially was limited to land owners. The land owners were almost exclusively males of European-heritage. Why does this matter? Because the more homogeneous in thinking a group is then the more signal a representative can claim.

Communication was extremely limited in 1789. An American family back in those days was limited to one newspaper if they were lucky and one Farmer's Almanac. Books were for the elite. Communication this focused meant that getting every voter on the same page was trivial because there was literally only one page available. Again, the more homogeneous a group is in thinking then the more signal a representative can claim.

Literacy in 1789 is approximately fifty-percent. Of those literate most Americans read at what we call today a second-grade level. Uneducated people are the easiest to hoodwink. Uneducated people are the easiest to fool. Uneducated people are the easiest to homogenize into group think.  Again, the more homogeneous a group is in thinking then the more signal a representative can claim.

When you factor in the limited set of voters to male, land-owners of European heritage, low communication and low education then representative Democracy had much higher signal-to-noise ratio for representatives than representatives have today.

Technology has undermined every single factor that has historically contributed to any sense of homogeneity of the American voter. American is often taught to be a great melting pot of many different cultures from many different cultures. But it is not. It is the opposite. When you melt something from solid to liquid then things presumably become equally distributed. The ideal of the melting pot is that each new culture contributes more to the American identity, an identity we all then share having been melted in the same pot. But the opposite is reality. Technology has hardened us all into ever more distinct individuals. First by opening voting to every larger groups. Next by improving communication and finally improving education. The more education and information a person has the more opportunity a person has to uniquely define themselves. Ever more uniqueness of individuals undermines homogeneity and the signal any representative requires to represent we the people.

There is no signal in representation 2020. Not any more. Our parties are simply defined as not being the noise of the other party.

The lack of any voter signal by representatives today is proof enough that Democracy is dead.

But can Democracy be restored? Well, given Democracy representation requires a certain degree of homogeneity that doesn't exist any more than the self-evident argument is no. Who wants to volunteer to become less unique first?

Bandwidth

Bandwidth protocols have to change as a network of computers scale up. Let's say you invent the first group of computers. Each computer can simply send messages and data as fast as possible over a network and no problem. However, over time ever more computers start to create bottlenecks. This is the same concept as traffic on the freeway. The more cars attempting to merge onto the free slows down all traffic until eventually you get what happens in LA where all freeway traffic is stop-and-go.

How does computer networking solve the traffic jam problem? A new protocol is used. Imagine if you will each car could merge onto a freeway and then pull over any time, including on the merge ramps. The protocol for keeping the freeway moving at max speed is simply to pull off the merge ramp or freeway the first time you slow down. This is called a slow-start algorithm. We can't do this for cars because city streets can't handle the cars pulling off before merging and further freeway lanes and shoulders don't support pulling over anytime someone steps on the brakes.

Scale requires change. Scale requires new algorithms to manage ever larger increasing numbers. Scale demand can also be met with new infrastructure like new freeways. New technology such as  Fiber optic cables replaced copper cables can also meet scale demands.

We have never scaled signal of voting in the US. In fact, we did the opposite. We decreased signal by pegging the number of representatives to a fixed number of 435.

However, bandwidth of voting is not the only bandwidth that matters in Democracy. In fact given that voting for representatives only happens once very two years then voting is the least contributing factor to voter signal.

Money is the more significant bandwidth signal relative to representative representation. Lobbying representatives with money happens every day, every hour, and every second. Voting only happens once every two years.

The bandwidth of money has always been lopsided in Democracy. The rich have always been able to buy legislation that either makes the rich more money or protects the money the rich already have. This was mitigated in the original US Constitution by more-or-less defining the rich as the only voters, the land owners.

Bandwidth of money plays into when a dead Democracy can no longer be resuscitated. Once the rich have a unbreakable stranglehold on the money signal for representatives then it is game over. We have reached that threshold today and have been there since the 1970s.

We are no going back to the original conditions that provided favorable conditions for homogeneous society. We are not going to get rid of education and go back to second-grade levels of reading. We are not going to eliminate the Internet and go back to low-information, low-communication society. This leaves money as the only opportunity for perhaps increasing voter signal bandwidth for representation. Perhaps the middle class can purchase with money the voter signal desired.

That's not possible. In some respects we already tried that. We passed a Constitutional Amendment to enable the Federal government to tax citizens directly. Our tax money then could dwarf rich money in influence. That worked for awhile.

What failed? Well, the rich just took a few decades to figure out how to rig the game, that's all. This is a case of trap meet better mouse. The rich took over party politics to represent rich agendas and not voter agendas. This has gone on successfully for so long there is no voter signal left. Political parties stand defined as "not noise". There is no relevant political platform policy. Republicans call Democrats "socialists" and vote against socialists. Democrats call Republicans "racists" and vote against racists. The rich took over the media and use click bait, reactionary, sensationalism to pit voters against each other to distract while they hog all the money bandwidth in Congress.

Democracy is dead. There is no voter signal for representatives to represent "we the people" with. We are not as a society a melting pot, instead we are hardening every day as ever more distinct individuals based upon ever increasing education and information. Our one opportunity to perhaps induce more voter signal would be to buy the signal with our tax dollars. That game has been rigged by the rich using mechanisms external the US Constitution that cannot be defeated by voting.

It is time to admit reality. Democracy is dead. It is time to upgrade to a governing system that is designed to infinitely scale. That governing system is called Irreni World Scale.

Join an MGO today!

You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:

https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html

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