 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Center for Internet and Society. You shouldn't mistake it for the Center of Internet and Society. That is completely different. We are just the Center for Internet and Society. Today we have a talk by an embarrassingly young man, given his accomplishments. He is only 30 years old. When I saw his birthday announced on Facebook, it upset me. As a 40 year old, I have not managed to garner such a significant pool of accomplishments. So it upset me to learn that Smari is finally 30 years old. He is somebody I would like to grow up and become. He is a successful technology hacker. You can give him complicated technology projects and he can get his hands dirty and hack at technology, write code. And he is also an accomplished policy hacker. He has worked on important policy issues and has actually managed to transform the world that he exists in. Unlike my organization. We have tried really hard for the last five years working on the Indian IT Act and we have made almost no progress. So two important things about Smari to remember that he is a technology hacker and a policy hacker. The story of crowdsourcing Iceland's constitution and the future of democracy, that is what the talk is about. So I am not going to focus on that story. I will focus on two other stories that will hopefully give you some sense of the man. The first is a story from spring and summer 2010. And if you watch the film, We Steal Secrets, you will see this story in the film, We Steal Secrets. This is the film of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks project. And over the spring and summer of the year 2010, Julian Assange came to Iceland twice and spent a lot of time with Smari and other activists in Iceland. And they were working around two releases of key documents. The first was the helicopter video from Iraq. That was the first video that they worked on. And the second was the documents. Was it the diplomatic cables? That was much later. You will see Afghan war logs. The Afghanistan war logs which were provided to Julian Assange by Chelsea Manning. Both these documents needed a lot of work before they could be placed in the public domain. And Smari was project manager working with this large team of people including Julian Assange on redacting documents and producing the necessary publicity material. So that's an important part of his introduction. Since then he got on to the FBI's radar and every time he goes to the US, they come and have conversations with him. And maybe he will tell you about those conversations. The second part of his introduction that I want to focus on is that he's the founder of the pirate party in Iceland. He founded that party somewhere in 2012. In the 2013 elections, the pirate party stood for elections. They won three seats in the Iceland parliament. Smari, unfortunately, did not win. The margin was 100 votes. He lost by 100 votes. If he had got 100 more votes, then he would be an MP today. That would be horrible. Maybe we wouldn't have the privilege of listening to him. So he's a dear friend and very envious of everything he's done. And I keep hoping that one day I will become as accomplished as he is. I'm sure you're going to enjoy this presentation over to Smari. Thank you. Thanks for a very long and slightly inaccurate introduction. But I do disagree. The things that you built here are amazing. I've liked your work for a long time. I'm going to try and talk a bit about the future of democracy. But in order to talk about that, we need to start with what's wrong with it. Why does what problems might we have? Let's first paint a picture. It's early on election day. The sun's shining, mostly cloudless sky. And there's lots of voters hitting the polls early. Waking up early, going to the polling stations. And then going for walks in the park afterwards and getting ice cream and whatnot. And many of the older voters are wearing their best clothes. And the younger people just showed up with whatever they were wearing that day. And some of these people look more relaxed. They know that their party is going to win. And in particular those who are more wealthy looking. They look very relaxed. And the season's hair styles are all there. All the attendance. There are a variety of patterns and colors that people are wearing. And really personal choices are there bound in this kind of sea of democratic tranquility. Enthusiastic voters, they're entering the curtain booths. And they're optimistically placing a cross in one of the check boxes on the ballot sheet. And he steps out and carefully folded the ballot to specification by the regulation. And smiles at the polling officer as he slips it into the box. So in religion of democracy, because we do treat it somewhat religiously, pulling the axe in the box is kind of the most sacred ritual. And what the elementary school which becomes a polling station lacks in kind of majesty and splendor, it makes up for with its cathartic depth of significance. In this religion we don't chant except at rallies. We don't pray except on voters. We don't repent ever. But the mathematics, if people look at them, we have to really make everybody lose their faith. Because not only is democracy a system of governance, it's a set of technologies. It includes methods of organizing and operating debates, voting systems and balloting mechanisms. And it includes the bureaucracy and the parliaments and all sorts of trade agreements and things like that. And it includes every aspect of how we make decisions as a society. It's a very impressive set of technologies that affect our lives a lot more than most other technologies that we live with. But we very rarely talk about them as technologies. And there's various versions of these technologies. They vary from country to country, from region to region. There's this wonderful tendency in kind of electoral system design, where if you live on one side of the English Channel, everything, or in the US, the Anglosphere, everything tends towards what's called first post elections. But if you live on the other side of the English Channel, or basically in the smart side of the world, I'm afraid to say, then you tend to go by proportional representation systems. And you have all these kind of variants and all sorts of tweaks and differences in style. And some of them are really massive and other ones are really minute. But what unites all of these technologies is really just two facts. We rarely recognize them as technology. That wasn't bad. And we are very adverse to innovation in it. It's something that people consider to be set in stone. But this isn't to say that innovation doesn't happen in democracy. On the contrary, over the last centuries, and over all the centuries since democracy was invented, we've had these massive improvements about how we run things. Most notably following philosophical arguments between the likes of Hume and Mill and others in the 19th century. But also through other shifts in governments, some revolutionary, some evolutionary. And the underlying models, despite all of this, have remained relatively static. They haven't really adapted to changing situations as fast as the situations themselves have changed. And we have never actually, anywhere in the world as far as I can tell, reviewed the concept of democracy as we do it today on a fundamental level. So modern democracy is predominantly representative. It's a system that you can trace it back 2,500 years roughly. You might be able to trace it further some places, but generally that's where it seems to have started. And it served us really well. It has served us really well, in many regards. But there's a lot of evidence that it's reaching a breaking point. We see this in straining points coming up where the planet's population dynamics or the availability of near ubiquitous telecommunications at high speed are kind of putting all sorts of pressures on representative democracies that we've never seen before. And the sheer speed at which life is happening now is suggesting to us that the technology of democracy is due for some rethinking. You don't have to look very far. The situation in Ukraine right now is evidence of some kind of breakdown, the situation in Syria, the entire Arab Spring, and again and again and again throughout everything. Even here in India, I've been following a bit what's happening up in Delhi with the Ahmadine party quitting and resigning. All of this is kind of evidence that something might be wrong. But if we wish to build effective systems of collective governance, we must be ready to learn a lot of pretty painful lessons about what it is that makes one system effective and another ineffective, right? So we must be willing to delve down into the murky depths and get our hands dirty a bit, build democratic theory and political theory and systems design and try and figure out what's wrong and what's right and what works and what doesn't. And this is where Plato's warning should really stand as testament, right? Where he said, you know, one of the penalties, he didn't actually say it like this, it's a fairly long paragraph but I'll try and shove it together. One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors, right? So as you might see, I like splitting things up into chapters. It might help you and also I camp down. So increasing the tension a bit. But you go to an election, you start off with your hopes and dreams, you pick the party that you dislike the least, right? And it's normally the one that represents about half of all of your hopes and dreams and then you compromise the rest knowing that it's your best option, right? And then you dutifully check that box, you know, participate in a religious ritual. Perhaps because the party, you know, that you really liked and believed in, doesn't span an ice cream's chance in hell of actually getting into power. And then by magic, somehow, the party you voted for wins, right? At that point, some things start to happen. Because, you know, it's a coalition government. There's two or three parties making a government. And they, of course, have coalition negotiations at which point. They start to negotiate away, you know, their agenda, their platform. And suddenly you realise that even before they've actually formed a government, about another half of all of your hopes and dreams have been squandered, thrown away. And, oh well, you know, you've got a quarter left, right? That's not too bad. But then reality kicks in, you know, the parliamentary session. The, you know, the term and all the politicians are arguing and pushing and some are putting this villain, some are putting that villain. And, you know, by the end of the term, if you sit down and do the math on what actually got through that you cared about, you're pretty, you're going to be pretty happy if you got 5% of what you voted for, you know? That would be a pretty good situation. Because the doctrine of modern democracy, representative democracy, is compromise early, compromise often, right? You know, you bargain away your hopes and dreams as if it's a democratic discount emporium. But really, if we analyse this a little bit further, you know, you get one vote and it's allocated to you by your government. It's established to fire. They basically create the vote out of nothing and give it to you. And you're required to invest it, you know, if we think of it as money for a moment. And, you know, people feel very uncomfortable when you think about votes as money for pretty good reasons, understandably. But you have to invest it all on election day. And one of the choices on the ballot sheet, right? And the investment term is for 4 years or 5 years depending on your constituency. It might even be 2 in some cases. And, you know, it's really a hedge on your part that society will improve as a result of you investing in this particular way. But the return on investment you know before you even have to vote, the return on investment is going to be negative because we only get 5% if we're lucky. There's no liquidity. You can't subdivide your votes. You can't make multiple hedges and try and balance the game in any good way. You can't not compromise. And, you know, you must play the game, but you cannot win. You cannot break even and you cannot quit. And, you know, it's really the second law of thermodynamics encoded into our system of governance. But, you know, can we do any better? Well, so let's look at the numbers a bit. I like looking at numbers, forgive me. And actually, if I'm starting to get too technical, you know, yell at me, you know, throw things, it's fine. But, you know, okay, the year 1776 in the US, there were about 2.5 million people total in the US, right? And they had a total of 65 representatives in the US House of Representatives, right? So that meant that there were about 38,600 odd people for each representative. And, yeah, so since then, the population has more than 6, no, than 100-folded, right? It's about 350 million now in that country. And the total number of representatives has gone up, but it's currently 435 members in the House of Representatives. So that means that each of them is representing 721,000 people. That's about 19 times more than they were back when the country was founded. And other countries have similar figures. One of the ones I really like is San Marino, you know, San Marino? It's a little city-state in Italy. And it was founded as a democracy in the year 1243. And they've had the same 60-person parliament. Actually, they've switched up some of the people since then, the same 60-person parliament since that year. And, you know, it hasn't grown, it hasn't changed. But back in 1243, the population was about 500 to 700 people in that city-state. And now it's 32,000 people. So that means you have about, what, a 65-fold increase in number of people per each representative. So, you know, that's quite a big shift. And one of the reasoning, like, when we look at the reasoning for why democracy is done the way it's done, part of it comes down to this line that Thomas Hobbes wrote in book Leviathan back in the 1600s. He warned that, you know, if we did not have strong centralized governance, then everything would split up into a war of all against all, a bellum, onion, contromness. You know, the big fight, because he said humans are too flawed to be able to govern themselves. You know, we are no angels, he said. So, therefore, we must have people who are better than us to control us. You know, so of course we picked politicians, right? But historically, you know, parliaments and political systems everywhere, they're built around the needs of certain elites. These elites were the people who had the money, the workforce was theirs, the property was theirs, and the freedom to exercise the power. And, you know, thanks to the parliamentary system, they had the mechanism to exercise it in any which way they wanted. So parliamentary democracy has very different origin stories in different countries. But the common theme was you had the transition of power from monarchs and emperors and so on down to this kind of upper class. And slowly, slowly it moved down and more and more people were emancipated. But, you know, did it ever actually finish? Because, you know, I mean, okay, I'm from Iceland, right? In Iceland, the parliament was established by the landowners who had settled the country. You know, after having been kind of, they fled the rule, they didn't really want to pay taxes to this Norwegian king. So that's why they fled Norway and settled in Iceland. And it was all wealthy landowners who got to participate in the parliament. Not women, not the slaves. It's kind of similar, you know, in England, where it was kind of the upper class, the landowners, the wealthy farmers who established the parliament there through the Magna Carta where they basically forced King John to kind of accept, okay, you know, I'm not going to be entirely in control of everything anymore. And, you know, wherever you go, if you look at Thailand, Thailand's an interesting example because it's one of the few countries, if it's not the only country in kind of East Asia, that was never colonized by Western country. And, you know, and their parliament was founded in 1932, following the blood of the school. And really, you know, that was the first time they transitioned. But if you look at who represents people in the parliament there today, it isn't the general public, it's mostly the wealthy, the rich. So, you know, everywhere it's the same. You had a powerful upper class of some kind that demanded political rights from whoever was the historical master class. But then they didn't pass the political rights on to the lower classes except in a very small degree and always with a lot of arguments. And the requirement, you know, historically for physical presence in the parliament was an unavoidable property for a deliberative system back in the old days because we didn't have any method of telecommunications. So we had to just say, okay, you know, only those who have the ability to show up can really participate. So that's an exclusionary property because it means it enforced the power of the elites because only they could travel. And it's interesting actually to think about who has the ability to travel today. You know, there is this weird jet-setting upper class, you know, people like me, I guess, who get to travel around the world, you know, whereas most people on the planet, you know, never really get to leave their home village or their city or get to go anywhere. So the entire political system is skewed to benefit idiots like me. Sorry about that. But, you know, distance wasn't really the only exclusionary property. You know, parliaments, they operate on very inflexible schedules. The current mode of parliamentary scheduling is based on agrarian annual cycles, which was very useful several centuries ago because, you know, we had mostly agrarian cultures everywhere. But, you know, the agrarian schedule really meant that the parliament was convened during those times of the year when farmers, you know, the rich landowners in particular, needed to tend the least to their farms when they could, you know, have it managed by other people. And parliamentary sessions kind of expanded to fill the winter seasons, now often standing from very early morning to late in the evening, or possibly all night if you, you know, it's kind of funny. And it's also, you know, very male-oriented. It's very male-dominated even in those countries. Rwanda is an interesting phenomena going on. But, you know, the schedules were originally built around traditionally male roles in Western countries. And, you know, throughout that, they were kind of, you know, even with the emancipation of women, it's been, you know, it's facilitated female presence in the parliament, but only to a very small degree. You know, despite things are getting better, but, you know, the male-dominated parliaments, they, you know, didn't really allow for, or make allowances for kind of the inequality of social obligations, you know. And we, if we look at this, the history of strong women leaders in parliaments, you know, like Elizabeth Domitian, or, you know, even Margaret Thatcher, though many people dislike her, you know, or Han Myeong-soo from South Korea, you know, it's really impressive because not only did they, you know, fight through male-dominated environments to get into their positions, but, you know, it wasn't just the scheduling they had to overcome, it was also the fact that the entire parliamentary process is very aggressive, elitist and exclusionary. So, so some people, you know, okay, so we could go on about all of the flaws of representation, you know, ad nauseam. But then somebody might say, you know, okay, so we don't want to have representatives of representatives representing each other and not us. You know, instead we could look to direct democracy. But the problem with direct democracy where, you know, you have everybody voting directly for whatever they want is that it is also exclusionary because, you know, it demands that everybody be an expert in everything and that they have infinite time to mull overall details. And, you know, this isn't particularly attractive either because, you know, this leads to what I call dictatorship of free cycles. So, dictatorship of free cycles is kind of when certain people in the society are so burdened with problems that they have to micromanage the solution to their problems on an everyday basis. But, you know, and they don't really have any spare capacity to make, you know, to focus on more general societal problems, you know, while other people have such a paucity of problems of their own, they don't have any problems, right? So, they have a lot of free time, you know, what I call free cycles to kind of sit around thinking about solutions to all sorts of problems that they perceive. But not, you know, they're often isolated from these problems themselves and don't necessarily understand what is an appropriate solution to them. So, you know, leading them to hypothesize about them without critical feedback or, you know, often arrive at very absurd ideas or solutions. So, this isn't very good and it also, you know, has this kind of tendency towards minority rule and spoiler effects and whatnot. So, you know, just to illustrate this, so imagine we have four candidates in an election and the people who are voting, they kind of vote like this. But in this election, there are two seats for offer. So, we cast the votes and obviously these two guys win. They get the seats because they have more votes. But, see what just happened? All of these people didn't get anything, you know? So, in fact, it's as if everybody, including the other two candidates, had voted for these two guys in equal measure, you know, roughly equal measure at the end of the day. And that basically means that most people just don't get any access to the kind of democracy we're interested in talking about. But, so, democracies haven't really eradicated oligarchy. You know, they've driven it into secrecy. They've caused people to have to do all sorts of things that we now call corruption. You know, instead of really confronting the problems with the oligarchy, you know, democracy tends to just deny that it exists and while really practicing it openly, we see that, you know, all over the place. So, but at the same time, you know, wherever I go, I talk to people about this and people have very romantic notions about democracy. It's really amazing how people kind of glorify it as a concept. But it's become a very muddled term. When people say democracy, you know, you're hard pressed to find two people who can have a conversation about democracy and be talking about the same thing. And, you know, we don't even agree what the subject is. So, you know, it's overloaded. It's kind of become somewhat meaningless. And the meaning of the word is morphed over the ages from its original purpose of, you know, powering certain elites to this kind of larger notion of being a system of governance where everybody is enfranchised. But, you know, the process is not really helping everybody. It's only helping very few people. And defining the intent of democracy is a very delicate question. So, you know, what was democracy meant to do? What is it meant to be? Who is it supposed to help? You know, and, you know, we have to notice that universal franchise, you know, that everybody gets a vote and everybody gets a say, is historically a very different process from what we call democracy, right? So, we have to make sure that whatever we replace it with doesn't just replace one set of elites with another set of elites. So, I asked on Twitter some months ago, hey, what's democracy for? And just like, you know, I got, you know, several hundred responses. And you can see, you know, I'll just read a couple out for you. You know, it's to ensure the relative absence of civil wars, right? That's a very cynical view. Actually, a lot of them were incredibly cynical. You know, democracy is meant to provide legitimacy to policy in order to prevent violent revolutions by giving everybody a say. Someone says, you know, the most important for my money is the state of development where essential rights can never be unvoted. Democracy turns running a country into a giant popularity contest, one says. You know, I have hundreds of these. Most of them are actually kind of surprisingly insightful and or very funny. But, you know, so, me being a technologist, what does my kind of approach look like? Well, so, technology is really useful, right? We're kind of here in a bastion of technology of sorts, you know, CIS. But, you know, a lot of them have problems, you know. I mean, we have great technologies. Concrete is a really great technology and it very rarely fails. You know, smartphones, laptops, they do tend to crash. They're not very good. And, you know, whatever it is, even if you're very cynical about technology, it's hard to deny that the world has certainly changed as a result of the widespread use of cars and telephones and airplanes and such. Societies have adapted to this more hectic schedule and more extroverts of civil life. You know, people are kind of forced to be more open and public. Everybody has a Facebook profile now, right? And you have the possibility of instantaneously communicating with anybody. But, you know, it's pretty tough because there's this risk that, you know, when we, you know, because the speed of everything is going so fast, somebody is going to say, hey, let's use voting computers and let's use technology to speed up democracy and make it faster and better. But, you know, there is this risk that moving to a more heavily computerized model of democracy will lead to severe problems relating to transparency and confidence in the system, right? There was a wonderful video that Rob Kongreip and some people whose names I unfortunately don't know did on the Indian voting system, the electronic voting system that's used at least in some states here a couple of years ago, just demonstrated three really easy ways to rig and, you know, falsify election results. It was really easy, though, if you're a moderately skilled technologist, admittedly. But, you know, and all these problems can be solved, I think. But there needs to be a very high level of confidence in society, you know, if we're, if we want people to believe that they work, because more than anything else, democracy is this kind of shared illusion. We kind of all agree, you know, yeah, yeah, we're just going to believe in this thing. And if that illusion is dispelled because the technology is crap, then democracy won't work anymore. So, you know, there are technical challenges, but they might be tractable. I think they're intractable. But specifically, you know, we need to find some way to ensure transparency of the elections and so on and protection against fraud. And we need to ensure that any system that's used is independently auditable by anybody, you know, who takes a look at it, and that anybody who wants can verify that it's valid. And there shouldn't be any room for abuse. But, you know, generally when we talk about election systems, we want them to be both verifiable and anonymous. Actually, anonymous isn't exactly the right word. So, you know, here's a bunch of features that different theoreticians and both political theorists, but also economists and others have mentioned. And when we say we want it to be verifiable, we want to, you know, what we mean is when you cast a ballot, when you cast a vote, it should be possible to verify that the vote was actually counted and not thrown away or counted twice or anything like that at the end of the row. So any person should be able to come in and take a look at the system and verify that it's doing the right thing. When we say anonymous, we don't actually mean anonymous because we want to know that the right people are voting. You know, the people who are living in the country have the right credentials. But we don't want, under any circumstances, the vote itself to be linked back. So we call that unlinkability, right? That unlinkability is a property of not being able to link a piece of information to the person who originated it. And you have these other things. Some of them are quite technical, like the term independence of relevant alternatives. It's one of the most beautifully complicated concepts I've ever come across and it just hurts my brain every time I think of it, you know. But, you know, people might agree or disagree with these, but... So I started thinking about this stuff a long time ago, back in 2008, roughly. And, you know, basically got into this mode of thinking, is there an abstract data structure that can represent and model systems of power? So, you know, how can we assume a hierarchical society in this centralized vision and how can we redraw the map? And, you know, of course, being a technologist, you know, the first idea was, hey, let's make a website, because that's kind of what people do nowadays when they have ideas. And actually there were a couple of... I just wrote a blog post and some other guys ran off... I'll tell you about them a little bit later. They ran off and built this really cool website, you know, that was called the Shadow Parliament. And the idea was that, you know, we'd basically copy every issue that comes into the Icelandic Parliament and put it up on this website and allow everybody to sign in and vote for or against it or to debate it or to propose amendments or do any of those things. And the idea was really simple. You know, we can say, okay, either, you know, everybody comes in there and does this thing and either the actually elected politicians will start to follow what the public are saying, in which case they've shown themselves to be redundant and unnecessary, right? So we don't need the politicians anymore. Or they decide to ignore what the public is saying, in which case they've proven themselves to be undemocratic. I'm pretty good at, you know, like, only two options, really. But there is a slight problem, scale, critical mass. You know, it turns out, you know, this website had got about a thousand people using it. And that's great. We got a thousand people having opinions on laws. But, you know, we were several tens of thousands of people short of actually having the influence that we wanted. So it didn't quite work. But in this, one of the core ideas was, you know, when you participate in a normal election, you know, or as a parliamentarian to say, you basically get two options. You select a, you know, you participate, you select one of the options, so yes or no, or whatever it is. Or you abstain, you blank vote, or you just don't show up. And we thought, well, the thought was, how about we add the third option? We add a proxy, right? We say, I am not going to vote against, about this directly, but I'm going to trust you. And of course, it's really important to be able to change your mind. That's something that general democracy doesn't have. You know, I don't think there's anything more human than being able to change your mind. But, you know, you put the ballot in the ballot box and then you have to wait four years before you get to change your mind. That's not very human. But if we do this, and you could do vote boxing either generally or categorically or per issue, right? So you could say, you know, generally, I'm apolitical, but I trust you, I believe that, you know, you're a sensible person here, vote on my behalf, please. Or you can say, you know, I'm really interested in technology, I'm very interested in communications and transportation, public, you know, urban planning, but I really don't know anything about agriculture. You know, I'd love to know more, but you know, don't know anything, don't have the time. But I know this guy, and he's a farmer and he knows exactly what he's doing, and they trust him. Or you could say, well, so I'm monitoring all of the telecommunication stuff, but there's this bill that came in and I'm really busy this week and I can't really read through it and can't build a sensible enlightened decision. So I say, well, you know, I know that you also work on these kind of issues, I trust you. Pretty simple, eh? So what you get is kind of, you know, person trusts a person, or person proxies to a person. And then, of course, you can have this second thing where, you know, this person decides to proxy to another person, and in which case, presumably, this person would have three votes. So one is an original vote, two and then three, because it's transitive, right? And you can get all sorts of weird things, but let's look at a very extreme example. So first off, direct democracy is the most extreme example on one side because that's where everybody chooses to not proxy, right? They vote directly. But on the other extreme, we have this. Everybody proxies to one person, and that's what we call a dictatorship, right? And of course, in reality, most people would never do this, but this is a fairly accurate illustration of what happens when one guy gets all of the votes or has all of the power, right? Then, of course, we can come back to representative democracy and we see that it's actually just a highly advanced form of dictatorship, right? So how about this? So here we have a bunch of people. They're kind of scattered all over the place, and some of them are voting directly. Other people are trusting people, but there is a slight problem here. Do you see the problem? Let's see here. Here we have five people who are voting in circles. And so we need to say, well, we can't allow that to happen. So we have this thing which mathematicians call a directed acyclic graph, right? We say there must not be any cycles. If we were to build this as a software system, we could actually enforce this in the software, either by not allowing somebody to create a link or create a proxy where it goes into a circle or to just alert everybody when such a cycle has been built so that somebody can break it. And until that point in time, all of the votes are basically useless. There's lots of ways of doing this and thinking about this, but who's really making the decisions here? Well, you know, obviously it's the people who are deciding to vote. And some of them are voting for themselves. Others are voting with a lot of influence. Like, you know, all of these votes running over to this guy gets 13 votes while this person has 12, and these people have one. And presumably, you know, this guy and that person, you know, they probably have some merit because a lot of people trust them. But if they, at any point, show that they have lost their merit, if they're caught lying or, you know, stealing or, you know, engaging in corrupt activities, then people can just stop trusting them. That's really easy. You just, you know, take your vote back and they don't get to have a say on your behalf anymore. And so this is kind of the idea that was called liquid democracy. That was not a name I came up with. So what happened was I started talking about this and, you know, ranting at people back in 2008 and lots of people ran off in various directions and started building cool software. And I was like, wow, cool software everywhere. You know, it's great. And one of the most successful systems to date is called liquid feedback. And the guys who made that, they called the entire thing liquid democracy. And I really like that term. It's a pretty cool term because it emphasizes how liquid things can be. But it also makes a nice reference to this economic concept of liquidity, where, you know, as we said, and as I said earlier, you know, if you only get one vote per four years, you don't have any liquidity. And if you think of it as money, you know, the person who has, you know, billions of dollars in bonds and stocks, but has no cash in his pockets, he can't go get an ice cream. But the guy who has, you know, a couple of rupees in his pocket might be able to go and buy an ice cream or whatever it is he wants. And that kind of liquidity really matters because it allows us to make more smaller decisions. And when we're talking about money, we're talking about liquidity in a personal, individual sense of I intend this for me. But when we talk about folks, we're talking about liquidity in the social sense of I intend this for society. And I think that's a very cool idea. So we've done a bunch of experiments. And, you know, thankfully, I didn't really touch a lot of these, but a lot of them are kind of important. So oddly, this is happening again now. So this is the main square in Reykjavik, Iceland. So in 2007, Iceland was a pretty rich country. It was doing really well. And then there was this banking collapse and pretty much overnight, about 17, 18ths of the economy disappeared in terms of the value of the banks. So 2000, well, that happened in 2008. And these protests started and eventually the government fell and there was this big kind of... Some people called the revolution. I wouldn't call the revolution because nothing actually changed except for the names of the people who were running the country. But they did shift the policy somewhat. And, you know, the economy failed. This was kind of one of the slogans. I'm not going to translate it into a company. But a lot of people started to come together and say, okay, can we build better tools? Can we construct better ideas for how to govern a country like this? And, you know, at this point, this idea was already out there. And we said, well, we have this internet thing. And we've learned a lot of really cool lessons from the internet. You know, many of them were kind of obvious in a certain sense. But, you know, the internet has changed the way we do mass media. You know, we know about YouTube and podcasts and blogs and whatnot. And it's also changed the way we do production in certain ways with free software and creative commons licensing and free hardware and free culture material. And, you know, it's also changed the way we do knowledge with Wikipedia and other things like that. But, you know, could we change democracy? So, this Shuttle Parliament really meant it was the starting point for this. And this was the original thing that Robert Gertnersohn wrote working with Gunnar Gunnsohn. And they basically, you know, listed all the things, people could go in. It was a very cool experiment, but it got very little traction. About the same time in Germany, the pirate parties were getting started there. And these guys I mentioned who built liquid feedback built this liquid democracy system that they used for internal organization within the German pirate party. And since then, other pirate parties around Europe have adopted similar approaches. And so, Robert and Gunnar, these guys who built the first version of the Shuttle Parliament, they went and founded this Citizens Foundation as an attempt to try and kind of build an umbrella of some kind for this kind of experiments. And they did a lot of very interesting work. We always had this weird disagreement. You know, they're old friends of mine, you know, I love working with them. But we always had this disagreement where I kept saying, you know, on how pure and functional the system is. And they kept saying, no, no, no, no. We just need to make sure everybody wants to participate. And, you know, we still disagree on this a bit because, you know, there are problems in both directions, but they've been doing amazing work. One of the things they did was this simple bit of Reykjavik. And in a sense, you can see how this is kind of a natural development from the Shuttle Parliament. But what happened was Reykjavik, after the last municipal elections, the best party that got into power with this comedian guy as a frontrunner who loudly proclaimed that he would not go into any kind of coalition in the city with a party whose representatives had not watched the wire. You know, lots of really fun stuff there. There's some interesting political theory in the wire that I think he was referencing. But one of the things they did was, a day after the election, they opened this website and said, we're going to take the five best ideas off this website every month and implement them. Just very simple statements. But, you know, there's some amazing things that came out of it. One of the first ideas that went through was there was this nine-year-old girl who posted this idea that this is all municipal stuff, so it's not quite, you know, country-sized stuff. But one of the things that's dealt with in the municipal level in Iceland is the elementary schools. This nine-year-old girl posted, I would like it if we had more field trips in school. People read it and, yeah, support, you know, and voted it up. And at the end of the month, it went through and became official city policy to try and promote more field trips. A very simple thing. And most of the things were very simple that people were putting in. So, you know, this one here, which is marked in progress, and actually, interestingly, just today, there was news item saying that this project is finished. It says, like, lighten up Terviskada, which is a street in Reykjavik. That's kind of been a bit shambolic and, you know, torn down for many years. Now it's just been renovated and made a lot nicer. You know, most of the ideas were very simple things. You know, clean up this thing, fix this park, change the speed limit of this road. You know, pretty much all these things. So, then, of course, following that success, they went on and built the Eastland, you know, as kind of the country-wide example of this, where they said, hey, we're going to, you know, try to do the same thing on a country level. Now this one didn't take off quite as much. And do you know why? It's because the government didn't show any interest in it. They didn't say, oh, we're going to take the five best ideas here and implement them, you know? If they had, then people would maybe be incentivized to participate. That's really one of the major things that we see in all of these kind of participatory collaborative systems, is if you don't have a real ability to influence policy, then you're not going to participate. And we see this in countries, you know, lots of countries have very low voter turnout. And normally, if you talk to people from those countries, it's kind of like, yeah, I could go vote, but it's not actually going to change anything, right? And once people have that mindset, and often it's because there's some systemic thing that's causing it, then, you know, obviously people aren't going to bother participating when they could be doing other things which are more meaningful, right? So, you know, just adding that little feature of actually taking people seriously and actually doing what people want completely changes the dynamics of how these participatory systems work. And that kind of leads to this weird general theory that in order for democracy to work, you need two things. People need to have access to information in order to be able to make enlightened decisions, and people need to have the ability to actually make those decisions. It's pretty simple, if you think about it, but it seems to actually be the case. So, just, you know, one of the things they set up was your priorities, which is basically the same system but for every country in the world. So, every country in the world has an instance on this and you can just go in and, you know, onto this website and you get the India version and blah, blah, blah. So, of course, we disagreed about a bunch of stuff, and when I was in Morocco a couple of years ago, two years ago, and working with a bunch of activists there, and you know, the King of Morocco was kind of a dictatorial, you know, a pretty bad guy. I was about to say it with words. But, you know, so I was sitting down with these activists and they were like, oh, we want to set up a liquid democracy system. Can we set up liquid feedback? And I'm like, sure, let's set it up and create an instance for you. So we did that except it was really, really hard. And then when we finally got it to run, you know, it's like nobody could understand how it worked. It was just such a bad user experience. And so we thought, okay, let's try your priorities and try that. But it wasn't quite what they wanted. You know, there was no ability to make kind of groups that were self-determining and things like that. So, you know, I said, okay, you know, let's try all the other systems and we tried a bunch of them. And all of them had some problems. Most of them just weren't very usable. They weren't very hard to use. So I said, well, none of them has actually implemented liquid democracy the way I thought about it originally anyway. So why don't we just build a new system? And we called it WASAIL, which is an Arabic word for means. I don't have a screenshot for some idiotic reason. Sorry. But it means means. If you dropped this last bit, then it means liquid. It's very interesting how you get liquid and then add little thing and it becomes capability or the ability to do something. So I like that. So we've been working on that quite a bit. It's used in the Icelandic Party Party. And it's got some good features. But ironically, it's pretty hard to use. We all screw up some of that, right? But alongside all of this thread, there was this other thing going on which was in Iceland in 2008 after the collapse, there was this big call for a new constitution. And people said, well, we need to build a new constitution, a better one, one that actually represents our country because the old constitution was from 1944 and it was actually just the previous constitution from 1918 which would have been written by Danish officials. But the word king had been stricken out when we got independence and they put the word president instead. That was pretty much the only change. There were a couple of things. I think there were six changes in total. But they were very minute. So in 2009, there was this big national meeting. There were lots of people. I've never noticed. I know that guy. There was this big meeting saying, okay, what do we actually want for the country? And then it was repeated in 2010 again. So in these national meetings, the second one, 1,000 people were picked at random from the census and put into a big room together for a day and then worked through several iterations of writing down ideas and cards and debating them and then writing more elaborate ideas and kind of fleshing it all out. And this is a word cloud of the ideas from the 2010 meeting. Now remember, I since a very, very, very small country. So 1,000 people show up in the same place. It's actually 0.5% of the population. So very different statistics. But there's still this interesting thing that you can always subdivide societies until you get to the level of one person. And then you should really stop subdividing because people don't like that. But this led to this constitutional process where 25 people were elected to sit down and actually write the Constitution itself. They did an amazing job. I've read dozens of constitutions because I'm a bit of a crazy nerd. But this one that they wrote was amazing. It was really good. And one of the things that they did was every week they published a new version like just what they had up until that date. And they said, hey, send us comments, send us observations. They were visiting advice through a form on their website and through email and through Facebook and Twitter and whatever. And it was pretty good. Around that same time, we set up this, I mean, on our site, set up the Constitutional Analysis Support Team where one of the things we were doing was saying, okay, can we take the principles of information security, threat modeling and things like that into legal documents? Turns out you can. A lot of it comes down to linguistic stuff. This is actually an incorrect parse tree, but it was a very interesting experiment. And one of the things that we discovered doing this was we found a flaw in the way that the Constitutional Council had decided to set up this Supreme Court that could lead to the parliament actually taking over the Supreme Court in certain situations. So we just said, hey, guys, here's a suggestion. Fix this bug. And that was taken into consideration and fixed. So there's a lot of different ideas. It's a big mismatch. And I didn't go into any of the crazy algorithms. And we do have a draft solution to how you guarantee both verifiability and unlinkability in this kind of direct, liquid democracy system. But it's very heavily mathematical and kind of takes a while to explain. But I think this kind of serves as a bit of a core because going back to our kind of story from the beginning, we can say it's early on election day and the sun shining and mostly cloud the sky. But voters don't necessarily rush to the polls because they turn up when they want. They don't really care because every day is election day. And they log into their intent systems, their liquid democracy systems, whenever they feel like it. And they look at which items are trending and they might see some proposals that they think are daft and they just say, no, no, no, these are bad. And then others say, upvote and say, this is a good idea. And somebody at somewhere are debating with each other about some health care issue. And it's the internet after all. People are always going to be trolls there. But look, somebody invoked Godwin's law called somebody a Nazi there. And you decide, okay, whatever. I'm just going to delegate this to my friend. I'm going to delegate it to my friend who's a doctor. He cares about this stuff. He knows a lot about it. And he'll figure it out. And then I notice that my friend's already delegated it onwards to this other guy. It's a transient chain. And it goes on and on and on. And suddenly the vote that I just delegated onwards ends up with some guy in Singapore who is a specialist in this particular field. And I go, okay, I've never heard this guy, but trust is a form of intent as well. And this is a society where it's not governed by kings or presidents or parliaments, but by social choice, by what each and every one of us decides on a daily basis. And the will of the people should be done on every scale. Individuals use money, but groups use votes. And we can practically collapse these two things into one idea. I intend. Poverty in this kind of mythical world would probably be, used to be a major problem. And this is in part because we find poverty as a lack of money. Now, there's a lot more to poverty than not having money. Ian Banks is a science fiction author. He famously said that money is a sign of poverty. Now, when you have money in a system, it's a signal that somebody doesn't have it. And similarly, I think money is a sign... Oh, no, poverty is a sign of money as well, right? But in a world where everything is governed by intent, where everybody has as many votes as they need, one per issue, of course, but can create as many issues as they want, talk about any ideas they want, then we have these ideas for mediating intent, pushing it onwards through a chain and coming to collective decisions. Then there is a certain type of poverty that at least is alleviated, even if the economic one still takes a while. So personal choice is a bound. But unlike the other method, your hopes and dreams aren't missing. The thing to remember, though, is that societies are messy. At the end of the day, there's all sorts of complexity that gets entered into them. People argue about all sorts of things. Everybody has differing opinions, and when we kind of agree to accept the idea of representative democracy, one of the things we're doing is saying, I am not going to participate in trying to deal with this mess. I'm going to just hope that the person who deals with it, somehow, magically, even if it's by accident, decides to represent some of my ideas, maybe. But that's not a good way of running a society. So I call this a future of democracy, but I can't tell you what the future is. I try to tell you one idea for how we might try to do it a little bit differently, and maybe it's the right idea, maybe it's the wrong idea, time will tell. But the thing that I really want to leave you with is, let's go and experiment, let's figure out new ways of organizing things, because the thing we've got isn't really doing very well, and surely we can do better. Thanks. At this point we should have brief statements from our co-organizers. Do you want to just say hello to everybody? Introduce a tactical technology collector, and Hasgi. Maya, you first. Just say hello. Hi, my name is Maya. I work at tactical tech, and we support activists and advocates to use technology in their advocacy. It's a global nonprofit based in Berlin with all sorts of sleeper cells and other type extensions across the planet. So that's tactical tech. Hasgi. And we are a very local group. We have no branches anywhere except in Berlin. What we do is get people in technology to talk to each other about what they do, probably as a way to learn from each other. So thanks to tactical technology collector and Hasgi for co-organizing this event with us. If we had done this event completely by ourselves, there would be only one or two people in the audience. All of you are here thanks to the outreach that both these organizations are able to pull off. So thanks to Smali for that compelling talk. We can open up for questions. Maybe 15 minutes? Sure. And even after that we can just have conversations amongst ourselves. I'm not ready to go anywhere. We can do it formally for about 15-20 minutes and then take it informally. So as long as it lasts, we have a loan here and as long as you have beer, I'm assuming the conversation will continue. Shall we take a round of questions first or just one at a time? One at a time because I've noticed this is the thing that happens a lot is when somebody accepts three questions, they'll normally only answer one of them and they'll normally pick the most convenient one. So no shortcuts. Okay, one question at a time. Yes, sir. This is one of the reasons I was interested in doing this here because India is very interesting and it's really a special place because I don't think any country is really on as past the trajectory as India and that's going to present very interesting problems, very interesting solutions as well. But the answer is right now the technology divide is too big for it to work on a national level. It's never going to work on a national level until literacy improves, access to technology improves, access to telecommunications improves. And you need it to be pretty close to 100%. You can take certain shortcuts. Shortcuts include putting up public voting stations where basically computers that people can come to and use. There are problems with that, mostly information security problems. There's all sorts of tricks but it's going to be a long way. What you can do now is there are lots of communities in India that can do that right now. Normally slightly more affluent ones where there is a lot of access to technology, cell phones can be the voting system. In communities where you have very high cell phone penetration you can actually do this right now. And maybe that's the starting point to bootstrap small municipalities, small towns, small neighbourhoods and then work your way up and get it on a larger scale. But currently no country in the world has used this for its own organisation and frankly I'm not sure the technology is ready for it. So using it on a small scale for now might be a good idea. We should experiment. Is that good? I should answer more briefly. Sorry. The second question from the gentleman at the back. If you could introduce yourself briefly before you ask your question. So you're thinking of identity systems. Yes. Is this the same as the ID card? Yes. Identity management system. Okay, so I know you've been a pretty harsh critic of that system and it looked pretty terrible when you were telling me about it in Portugal years ago but I don't know if it's improved. Probably not. The question is if we can rig up the nation for biometric identification can we ride on the same infrastructure to do... That's the question. So the answer is partially. It is a very different scenario because you need more technology but you might be able to do it with things like more cell phones and things like that. On the other hand, the identity card scheme is very interesting in this sense because even though the scheme as it was implemented here is comparable from what I've heard identity management is actually one of the things you need to have working if you're going to have a functioning holding system. If you don't have some kind of way of telling who is supposed to vote and who isn't then you can't actually do the thing right. So you can write on part of that you can use the fact that the identity scheme now exists but you're going to need a lot more infrastructure as well. And on the other hand the fact that they could do that scheme is proof that you can probably do the other thing too. Right? Can I go with an outsider's question first? No. That's my sister by the way. My question was about I don't know if I understood it correctly but the proxy voting. So I give my vote to you and I think I'm going to give you the vote for the technology and he knows Julian Assange so he's going to vote in that line I like Julian Assange. What if I can't account that for you changing your mind or you and I actually having differences in very small mind use ways and then you turn around and say I don't like Julian Assange anymore it's not my friend anymore and you split from what I thought your trajectory was or influenced. Well okay, so that's a very good question I was going to address things like that but so there's a couple of ways of doing this. One is one is the kind of most close to the way we think about things now which is you know the issue comes up and you vote on it and then there's a certain deadline at which point you can't vote on it anymore and if it passed passed, if it didn't pass it didn't pass and using that then the problem we were talking about might actually be a real problem but if we say let's just skip this deadline thing let's just say when somebody creates an issue it exists forever if the issue gets enough support like over 50% of the population or something then it becomes law if the support changes then it stops being law and you know it gets lower right and you might put in some kind of rule to stop it from escalating in an out of law if it's close so you might put like there has to be a 10% or 15% change something like that and what you get from that is even if somebody betrayed your trust or something like that that's misapprehended what they stood for then you can always take your vote back and change it after the fact until nothing is forever and you retain the ability to change your mind and pass this deadline so I think that might be an interesting thing but that's a much bigger rethinking of how we do legal structures and things like that and it's a harder sell the other thing that's important there is when a person gets one vote on each issue it is very important that dead people don't get to vote so in Iceland now the oldest law that's still in effect is from the year 1263 I think and as far as I know nobody who is alive in Iceland ever voted on that law like if there is then that person is really old but like don't think anybody like most people have never even read that law and I've read it, it's not that bad but I would really like it if I actually got to vote on it and that brings up this interesting idea of saying okay when you come of age when you're a child you get education in school and you start to learn about all of the laws which are in effect and then at the coming of age when you turn 18 or whatever it is some arbitrary thing that we decide then you vote for each law like when you say yes I support this one no I don't support that one and similarly when you die your vote stops counting and that way simply people dying can cause laws to fall out of effect and if the youth of the country come up and say that was a stupid idea then they can change it and that way the law stops being this kind of historical artifact and starts being something that lives with people who are actually living under the law so there's lots of weird ideas that you can play with like that there's no one solution that's necessarily right but we can do things to make that stuff work you take Maya's question then come to me also thanks but also because it's kind of freaky that Maya was sort of like a person I'm also no surprise if we're both on the social science side I was interested in the idea of just human behavior which is I think what that question is about that you started off talking about this sort of Hobbesian idea contrast human beings and I'm interested in how does that become something in a threat model at the end you talked about that and I really find that very fascinating that you try to threat model things that can go wrong with it so how do you quantify something like people behaving badly okay that's a very long conversation but let me try and really what you do is you try to look at the system the laws or the rules as they've been put out and you try and figure out how they can be like if you take the most evil person or group of people that you can think of how would they abuse this to gain more power than they should or something like that thinking okay this says there might be some condition income tax is a really good example so a lot of countries have this kind of you pay a certain income tax up to a certain point and above that you pay more income tax so what people do is they start to adjust their wages just below the tax bracket or something like that and of course it varies from system to system whether it is actually useful but people always try and find a way to manipulate systems in the benefit and when you're building the system whether it's a system of laws or software or whatever you just have to try and anticipate it and build in tests or will it be abused this way will it be abused that way and I completely disagree with Hobbes I think we can trust people we can trust each other we need to be aware that there might be people who are trying to abuse the system but we shouldn't not build the system in an open and participative way just because there might be some spoils for it you know the bad apples thing you know we shouldn't have to worry about bad apples we should just build against them I think that's the short form but we can go into linguistic parsing and parse trees and you know unbound variable checking and stuff like that if you want later gentlemen in front go first and then you sir the question is not about democracies the question is about the bitcoins bitcoins these days are getting very popular and getting a lot of buzz so is it legal to use a bitcoin and is it legal to accept bitcoins as a business I don't know and in the global perspective as well as in the Indian perspective I don't know Indian law I'm not a lawyer let alone an Indian lawyer but I know that there are lots of countries where they are legal and there's a lot of you know weird things like some countries don't allow personal currencies or stuff that isn't state regulated India has very strict laws regulating the inflow inflow and outflow of currency so like I have a bitcoin wallet on my phone very little in it but it is some amount and there is a question did I accidentally violate Indian law by bringing myself on into the country I hope not I'd rather not violate your laws so globally speaking it seems to be ok and the majority of countries probably are going to be ok with it China has banned it Russia has banned it instantly but that's well from 1944 not 1940 even that's the puns it so I just don't know enough about Indian law however sorry it's mostly legal in India there are only couple of things to watch out for one you still have to pay tax there are only couple of things that you need to be concerned about if you use bitcoin in India one you have to pay tax so you can't escape tax by dealing in bitcoin that's what the law says it doesn't matter if somebody can chase you or not but then you're testing your luck it's not about the law the second thing is you're still subject to the foreign exchange recognition act so if you bought bitcoin by spending rupees it's not your problem but if you bought bitcoin by spending dollars then just make sure you don't mind it fair or loss where do you go so interestingly bitcoin is the answer to the thing that I decided not to go into so the question of how do you have anonymity and verifiability bitcoin is based on this concept called the blockchain and the blockchain you know it can be used more things than just bitcoins it generally can be used for anything where you need a verified guaranteed anonymous public ledger so what's that you know you can use that for votes basically you know if we imagine a bitcoin that we generate for the selection and we give each person one bitcoin and then we allow them to spend it on whichever option they want right that's basically there's a little bit of finessing there that needs to be done especially around what's called zero information groups but that's basically how we solve that problem of verifiability and anonymity so I'm glad you brought it up we'll take the gentleman at the back and then we'll come to you can you speak up the liquid democracy can take care of minority interests since you had an anonymity having an anonymity in proxy voting do you think it can lead to a situation of more specials and people not meeting in terms of relationships and people taking to more specials yeah okay so those were three questions I'll try to remember all of them let's do the minority one last because it's very important and it's kind of complicated so regarding the middle one do we have a central bank well when you do elections now you have a central bank but it's called the election authority or election commission or something like that if we move to the the kind of bitcoin inspired blockchain model then you get rid of a lot of what the central bank quote unquote does but you still have to have this really important thing which is the list of who gets to vote the list of all of the participants in the polity in the society whether it's municipality or whatever and somebody has to maintain that list unless you go for a completely open model and say anybody who feels that they have an interest can participate that might be a bit dangerous there might be threats associated with that but probably what people are always going to go with is some kind of exclusionary model of saying only these people get to actually have votes and hopefully that will also include all the minorities in the society to be done in a fair way we can't really guarantee that so your third question had to do with sorry can you make a word specialization specialization yes the answer is possibly yes but I think what you see in most societies is you already have a high level of specialization whether you will get this specialist driven society where basically instead of elected politicians you get this elitist dictatorship of the specialists I think that depends very heavily on how much public debate there is whether you have a strong independent media whether you have large forums where people can participate and share their views if you have that then I think you'll see more of a trend of generalists and people who just think of things for themselves and actually I really believe that if you give everybody a vote on every issue most people will try to be informed about most things for themselves I can't prove this, this is a hypothesis but I think that would actually be the case as for the minorities people tend to always point at Switzerland and say women didn't get to vote in Switzerland until the 1960s how direct democracy is obviously a failure and you know partially it's true partially the downside of allowing everybody to vote is that the idiots also get to vote and there's not really much we can do about that but if we actually believe democracy is a valuable idea then we're going to have to somehow contract that by figuring out other ways of making sure that minorities aren't just oppressed and in reality I think that comes back to the same point which is if you have a lively public debate and people are well educated and know enough about how the world works to not succumb to kind of extremist views and idiotic ideas about their supremacy over others and self-righteousness and generally what we call the tricks of right-wing authoritarians which is a term really well defined in a book by Bob Altamire called The Authoritarians I really recommend reading it if you have the time or wherewithal but I don't think we should rely on angels in the hopes and sense to come and save the minorities we should really believe in the ability of societies to be smart and work together sorry if I'm an idealist here the gentleman in front so in the proxy model people who are carrying a lot of weight of influence do you think that should be public knowledge because then my question obviously is that they could become part of say having their minds changed or do you think that influence may change many people here because the decisions are on the proxy voting on many short-term issues so the answer is that would depend a lot on little characteristics of the system like we were talking about whether issues become valid when at the deadline or not all the little minute details will change the dynamics of the system that's just one of the what we call a chaotic system there's really no way to predict it but I think it should be public knowledge to a certain extent I don't know how much that's also something different societies will have to decide for themselves some might say if you have more than 5 votes then it becomes public maybe we just say that when I forward my vote to somebody I can see who I forward it to but I can also see the rest of that chain but that's actually equivalent to the entire chain being public because then I can just take a list of all the voters and build a little computer program that changes my proxy to each one in turn and then I just map it out which is a kind of break so the answer is it depends some societies will be more open less worried about undue influence and violence and things like that one of the reasons you add in that rule that dead people can't vote or dead people don't have a vote is literally to protect people because if I can force you to vote for something and then kill you so you can't change your mind and your vote still is valid then that kind of can break down into a really bad thing however if I come to you and say I'll shoot you if you don't vote for this then I need to go off and threaten somebody else and while I'm doing that you change your vote and I'm going to have to have a very large army if I'm going to swing the entire election so there's interesting population dynamics and systemic dynamics so you just need to try and play with and figure out I think one question from Hasgeek and then one question from CIS bring it to a close so Mike so the thing is you said you have been closely following the fed recent panel of the army party in India so I guess you also know that when they were at a particular stage after the election they went out right into the public through the media and asked the general public if they should ideally form a government or not it's like a phenomenal thing in India what is your idea or say about taking the whole thing of democracy on like it's something which I have never seen in my whole life but what are the merits and what are the demerits when you see it right so that's kind of what I've been talking about but there are problems with it primarily none of the systems we have today are good enough and they still need to be developed we have this idea of using the blockchain it's a bit better than the electronic building systems that people are using you know it's going to take a while but even then there's a technology gap that the man at black mentioned that currently not everybody has access to cell phones or computers so we need to take all of those steps very carefully and it's really a societal thing about that idea of a party coming out and saying we want your advice why isn't that what always happens even though we don't have the technology yet we still have the ability to change the way the politicians and the politics kind of work and I understand that I have been having lots of trouble and a lot of that trouble I think comes from the fact that they went from nothing to really powerful very quickly and it takes time to build the little infrastructure trust me I know with the Icelandic higher party a much smaller system but we've had all sorts of problems because it just takes a long time to be uncomfortable with running that kind of thing but I actually see them as kind of an equipment to the higher party in that these parties are popping up all over the world now and saying we need more direct participation from the public and they're coming because the kind of representative democracy system isn't working the way it should so previously it used to be people vote for a person so now the ender scene has been changed instead of voting for a person they're voting for an idea it's actually changing the whole system of democracy instead of putting up people you put on ideas and ask people to vote for ideas so they're bringing democracy to any new level so it's a change in the democratic system it is in the business because sure the general public have always been asked to vote for people but then the people get into parliament and those people vote for ideas and we're not changing anything fundamentally we're just saying that instead of having 63 people who are elected to make all of the decisions let's just grow that group until it's everybody I think that's a sensible idea we'll take the last question from Anil and then bring the formal report for the House so he was talking about how the general public voted for more field trips and that got me thinking one of the most underrepresented majorities in the world are children and this proxy voting system is voluntary in sense but it tends to not be voluntary wherever proxy voting for children has been in place the parents tend to do it now if the justification for proxy voting is lack of pure democracy based on material information then wouldn't it be first of all how do you do it do the parents vote for them and if that's the case wouldn't it be better to have children's rights or children's interest group that represents children instead of parents yeah so I have struggled with this one because on one hand children are very easily manipulated by their parents and if you just say every human gets a vote you know regardless of age then of course the parents are going to use that for whatever they want and that gives people that children a bit more power possibly that's okay possibly people who have children just have a certain right to have a bit more say in the way things work and we have to I at least would like to live in a society with less interests so I hope there would not be a need for children's rights group but we absolutely do need to think about how do we include children in the democratic process and I don't think you're saying oh you become an adult at 18 and then you get to vote or something like that I don't think that's actually a good idea because there's lots of children who are politically knowledgeable and active when they're 13, 14, 15 whatever making that arbitrary limitation on the basis of how many days how many circles you've gone around the sun that seems a bit bad so but we need to think about this a lot of this is just kind of what does each society think for itself and there's always going to be variation but you're right children need to be to have representation I would do that so let me start by thanking all of you for spending time with us thank you and thank you for bothering to listen to granting law and thanks again to co-organizers for all the support on the event thanks in particular to Deniz for my team for all the coordination and finally thanks to Smali for the excellent work I went a lot and I hope all of you did too unfortunately we had coordination challenge so there is no hot coffee and tea waiting hopefully batches will be prepared and you will get some coffee and tea hopefully but there is a snack some samosa and jelly let's call the formal proceedings for the evening to close and I hope you have one on one time with Smali