Radical Politics = Experimentation
If you don’t believe politics is broken, look at Twitter, look at the people marching in the streets during the pandemic or look at the dumpster fire that is the American federal government right now. No one is happy and nothing is changing for the better. Not to pile on the bad news, but there’s probably no easy or obvious panacea for fixing our problems. Instead, we need to embrace a spirit of experimentation. That’s what Decentralized Politics DAO aka DEPO DAO is about — let’s experiment with decentralizing politics and returning power back to the people.
“That’s what DEPO DAO is about — let’s experiment with decentralizing politics and returning power back to the people.”
Why Technology feels like part of the problem
Technology bears plenty of the blame for the current mess we’re in politically. The bad influence of technology on politics stems from two underlying dynamics — the quest for profits and partisan intents. While these forces rarely overlap, they have unwittingly worked together to break the democratic system.
The problem with profit driven technology + politics
There’s no problem with trying to make money with technology. The goal of Peeps Democracy is to make money from our technology. Software is eating the world. We want to eat too. Things have gone awry because this technology was designed to capture your attention by allowing you to stalk all your friends’ highly filtered vacay pics. Now, this technology is being pointed at politics and monetized by feeding you content that confirms pre-existing biases, creating echo-chambers, and optimized for views by chasing the outrageous.
Technology like this makes its money by learning more about your subconscious desires and hatreds alike. It’s mission isn’t to create a better society, but to keep your attention so that more advertising can be served to you. When extended to the realm of politics, we’ve seen these technologies spread hatred, conspiracy theories, and even fuel genocides. Many people don’t play into this negative feedback cycle intentionally, they do so as a function of the algorithms designed to fuel clicks, keep your attention, and eventually make profits.
Technology for politics needs to be designed differently than technology for keeping up with your high school friends. Political tech can’t place profits above all else. Creating a more responsive and inclusive political system should be the ultimate goal of political tech.
The problem with partisan funded technology
I don’t know many people satisfied with the two party system right now. People might identify with progressive ideals, conservative values, or libertarian policies, but few people are huge fans of the party insiders that decide how these ideas are translated into on-the-ground policies behind the scenes. Unfortunately, when it comes to technology built for politics, these major parties (or their wealthy supporters) are usually the ones funding things. The end result is technology optimized to keep parties in power rather than increase civic engagement or representative responsiveness.
From a business perspective (and philosophical perspective), the problem with this model is that it neglects to serve a majority of the market. The Democratic Party dominated online fundraising in the early part of the 2010’s because they aligned behind the ActBlue juggernaut. Without a competitor on the right, small Republican donors and campaigns didn’t have the same easy-to-use system for fundraising, leaving small Republican donors at a functional disadvantage when it came to increasing Republican politicians’ focus on the concerns of those small dollar donors. Alternatively, Democrats and liberals found themselves at a disadvantage when it came to leveraging the big data analytics used by Cambridge Analytica, which managed to target and mobilize a new set of voters on the right based on fears of the proverbial “other.” While these two examples negatively affected democracy in very different ways — we should focus on the fact that they both hurt democracy.
Radical Politics → the Solution
At Peeps Democracy and within DEPO DAO we’re fans of a decentralized approach to politics. We think that a form of more direct, participatory democracy is the right place to start experimenting. We think a decentralized model could improve government responsiveness and lead to a more equitable productive society. We could be wrong. And that’s okay with us, as long as we figure out something better.
Our dogmatism only extends so far as we know that the system is broken and we need to design systems where people feel heard and valued. We don’t claim to have the answers and think that anyone who claims to have the answer is probably full of shit. In fact a lot of people have tried to create applications and technology to fix politics and return us to some idealized post-partisan, citizen-focused state. Pretty much all of those projects have failed. But that’s okay.
In fact, we think that we should lean into and celebrate failure. Not to say we should spend time or money on dumb and frivolous experiments. We need to be intentional in trying to solve the problem of our broken democracy. This is what DEPO DAO is all about. Our thesis is simple: let’s get crazy, build some open-source technologies designed to empower citizens, and see if something works. If it does, we all win. If it doesn’t…well, we’re probably no worse off..
*Cough* DEPO DAO
Peeps Democracy joined forces with Govrn to found DEPO DAO, because we share a couple core beliefs.
- We believed there needed to be a space to fund radical politics experiments in a post-partisan fashion.
- We believe that we should be running experiments and proofs-of-concepts in cities and states, which are laboratories for democracy.
- We believe that technology focused first on a positive impact on society and second on profits.
- We believe that the tools to increase democratic participation can’t be restricted to one party, if they’re ever going to reach their full potential.
If you’re ready to be one of the crazy ones…help support us here: https://gitcoin.co/grants/484/depo-dao-decentralized-politics-dao
