Zero Dollar Government

There’s an old joke about the Queen: in that ever-present purse, does she really carry money that features her own picture?

Democracy and money are a dysfunctional pair. The schoolbook ideal of parliamentary democracy is that it hangs there like a castle in the clouds, without any visible means of support. The truth is very much the opposite: lawmaking costs big bucks.

In particular, legislators — read ‘partisans’ — funnel tremendous time and money to meta-parliamentary business. They hold endless reviews and inquiries about how their institutions operate internally.

The navel gazing and partisan machinations might be necessary, but, in the digital age, the costs of it all are not.

It’s getting easier to envision “Zero Dollar Government”.

Zero-dollar government does not mean “no taxes”. Zero-dollar government alters the balance of work between legislators/voters and their executives. The aim is to reduce the side effects of the money involved.

Be bold

By executives, think of a legislature’s own captive secretariat, or political parties’ head offices, or the cabinet and policy divisions within the public service proper. These structures refine information and coordinate the members of the democratic body they serve. They are democracy’s interface to the real world.

All three are professional workplaces, with corporate foibles like empire building, cash control issues, evasion of responsibility.

Many of their employees are dedicated, non-partisan true believers in democracy. But whenever they “just follow orders”, they are the enablers of expensive meta-parliamentary machinations.

They are corporations with politics grafted on top. Vote-driven “directors” apply too little control, or too much. Idealists struggle to defend their hybrid nature, while cynics raise the alarm every time our wealth gets redistributed into them.

Why not redistribute their work instead?

Computers have redistributed all sorts of professions to reduce costs; we wouldn’t have practical crowdsourcing without them. “Wiki-Government” already exists in some forms, including experiments in crowdsourcing legislation.

Wiki lawmaking commoditizes bill drafting. If anyone can write proposed law directly, the gatekeeper roles of lawmakers, their office staff, and their institutional staff will change. So will their budgets.

It can give the beleaguered news media new purpose. Editorial boards could turn “there oughta be a law” into concrete bill proposals (or just fragments) the way that third-party legislative councils do. Readers’ enhanced access to lawmaking will increase their appetite for commentary.

These advances are good for democracy. Whether “the people” can write good law or not, fewer intermediaries can do less to make law bad.

$ sudo make law
sudo: command not found
$ wedo make law
Enter your password: _

But group composition exercises or glorified discussion boards aren’t really an innovation. Crowd-rule initiatives only succeed at the pleasure of legislative committees, cabinets, and senior civil servants, people with a high executive quotient. They can shut down or stall.

Wiki lawmaking often ends with a whimper, where, traditionally, democracy ends with a bang: strategically proroguing a legislature is a notorious offence. That’s what’s happening when a crowdsourced companion/surrogate for a legislature gets shuttered.

Legislatures can choose to resist the gravity of executive control, but their computers, managed by executives, can’t do so without help. Current digital security architectures lend themselves to executives. “Root” privileges remain with a few select individuals. The legislative sponsors who approved the purchase and use of digital systems must trust beyond their functional ability to verify.

A democracy-tailored security architecture is possible. It would have the aim of keeping arbitrary technical control from any one person. It aligns technical control to democratic control in a legislature’s interface to the real world. Front-line democratic representatives can retain more functional supremacy. Even average citizens can retain — not “get” — some quantum of control over public digital information systems.

In turn, this architecture influences the legislative workflow. When legislators electronically cast “aye” votes, the votes contribute to an encryption key. This composition continues until the key contains enough information from members’ digital signatures, say 50% + 1 of them, to unlock the relevant resources (this design is a Small Matter Of Programming, to be discussed in a separate article).

• To draft an e-resolution to spend money, the drafters create a text with included computer directives. The directives serve as electronic purchase orders and payment authorizations. Legislators can see and approve them, and the computer executes them without any untoward distractions.
• The policy document governing official records includes similar directives to preserve and purge files within the system, automatically. That regime becomes the only way emails can “go missing” when legislators demand to review them.
• Democratic stakeholders are obliged to take active part in core system administration tasks. The reason? Systems administration impacts the audit controls that ensure the transparency that they and the voters demand. Even shutting down a digital system, an e-adjournment if you will, would require a majority vote.

Is this practical? Some people think democracy itself is impractical. Practical is what we make it. The energy being pumped into usability and user experience research should be good for something more than making apps addictive.

All those in favour…

Zero-dollar isn’t just for legislatures. It’s a general governance strategy for democratic entities that don’t do well as typical corporate bodies.

Political parties seek to win elections and direct public finances. Unions want to improve their members’ workplaces and paycheques. Both share the Queen’s odd predicament: these democratic organizations steward the value of others’ money while carrying purses of it themselves.

They earn scorn, often from each other, for their strong, self-perpetuating corporate structures. As their native work is primarily refining information and coordinating their members, are their executives really necessary?

Only their members can say. They might relish an alternative to strong-executive governance and its proclivities.

Digital technology allows novel redistribution of the structural costs of governance, private or public. Democratic representatives can spread administrative burdens amongst themselves, rather than bury them out-of-sight-and-mind in traditional corporate structures. Digital-specific techniques can discourage centralization the way democracy always hoped to do.

Citizens can increase their role and absorb more of the distributed costs of democratic government into the background noise of our lives. Metaphorically speaking, our democratic edifices can grow so light that they indeed start to float in the clouds with amazingly little conventional support.

Kirk Zurell takes part in the Waterloo Voter Support Committee, Compass Kitchener, and Leadership Waterloo Region Alumni Council. His opinions are his own; reach him at kirk@kirk.zurell.name or @kzurell.