Screenshot of Youtube video by Jakob Jochman: http://lab.jochmann.meThomas Fazi's critique of the "Democracy in Europe Movement 2025" satellites around the one big challenge that has been envisioned by political innovators, coming from grassroot, anarchic, socialist or just persistently democratic thinking ever since at least 1968, that only now is becoming realistic to address, the idea of a continental or even global assembly of humanity to work out policy together.
Large scale digital assemblies can work
The Internet was supposed to enhance democracy in unheard of ways, but the majority of the population experienced it for what it is technically best suited for: litigation, manipulation, populism and surveillance.
Only a few small pockets of political activism have pursued a suitable path of research into truly democracy-enhancing technologies, yet their results deserve to receive thorough consideration, rather than spending time on debates about how impossible it is to have a democratically meaningful discourse on a platform such as Facebook.
Liquid Democracy technology has drawn a considerable amount of attention, not only in political parties and institutions in Germany, Italy and the European Parliament, but also from scientists who have studied the use of LiquidFeedback (copy) in Germany's Pirate Party and found it to actually achieve its goals, contrary to a lot of false information that circulated around 2012, given the large political implications in that time period.
A dream older than the French Revolution may now become a reality, thanks to a technology called the Internet — the Pirates have experienced an assembly of ten thousand participants and have reason to believe that even if only half a percent of Europe's diverse population chose to participate in such an electronic parliament it would yield impressive results as it did for them, not only being a lot more representative than the current European Parliament, but also with stronger effects of collective intelligence and a significant resistance to lobby influence.
The art of getting it right
The Pirates also planned the creation of a "euroliquid". A Europe-wide implementation of LiquidFeedback. It doesn't really matter if the formal wrapper of such a parliament of citizens is a suitably constituted political party or takes on another form of organization, as long as it has the necessary structures to assert constructive digital work. So Mr Fazi also has good reason for his scepticism on achieving a supranational democracy, as the Pirates have found it to be indeed quite a challenge to implement successfully.
It's not as easy as Yanis Varoufakis suggested in his opening speech at the Berlin launch event: should any "bad people" want to join the project, the manifesto would exercise its "gatekeeping function". In real life "bad people" will subscribe to any manifesto, then simply not act accordingly. Therefore the manifesto can only be understood as a rule-set requiring a justice system within the project to judge upon "bad people" and expel them as needed. Even more complicated is dealing with difficult people who are acting with the best intentions. And the greatest problem of all is that mostly everyone acts less wisely than appropriate once they are communicating in text form over the Internet. A bad tweet can trigger shitstorms and plenty of bad press. Punishment is an ugly concept, and likely to arrive too late. To address all of these problems, the Italian Pirates are extending the democratic principle of a separation of powers as distinct from punishment dedicated to the prevention of deconstructive behaviours.
