stimulant

I have a big idea.

And it germinated from a few, basic questions:

1. Why are politics so impenetrable? The political system is shrouded in corruption, money, and law. It is not accessible.
2. What does it take to be a good, effective citizen? Why is this such a hard role to assume?
3. How does an unpopular war make any sense in a democracy?
4. How can I change this? What does it mean to teach/raise an effective citizenry, from a pedagogical standpoint?

For all my thought about social reform and education, I must confess that until recently, politics hadn’t been on my radar. Why not? Because I felt so isolated from it. I felt like trying to fix problems by going into politics was like trying to fix education by becoming a public school teacher. Of course, the problem is that there are alternative avenues for pursuing education reform. Outside of self-defeating initiatives like communes, I didn’t see any “outsider” approach for politics.

Nonetheless, it continued to bug me. And then, when I sat down to read Alex Russell’s blog I happened upon this post detailing his approach to voting:

Despite all of that, however, I vote every chance I get. Jennifer and I study for elections, usually reserving most of a weekend beforehand to pore over the hundred-plus pages of voter information booklets that get shipped to every California voter. We spend time researching, trying to pick the best person for the job, peering through the morass of private interest and political machinations and not always coming away feeling like we really understand all that’s at stake. I’ve never voted a straight party ticket in my life, mostly because I don’t think anyone really has all the answers. I expect my elected representatives to duke it out to a good compromise. I want the kind of slow, deliberative government that leaves everyone slightly bruised and no-one very happy.

and I fell in love with the idea of working toward making effective citizenry a viable goal. I realized that spending a weekend in preparation puts you ahead of 99% of voters, much less citizens. And that’s a straightforward, if not scalable solution (i.e. I doubt a national “Give up a weekend to vote in a rigged election” campaign would go over so well).

So I filed away that interest of mine, and mulled over the problem for the next few weeks. And one day, I realized that being a citizen is awfully hard. But for no good reason. Sure, there are tough decisions and moral quandaries and compromises to weight, but the hard part of being a good citizen for most people me is logistics. I don’t trust the media; there’s a proliferation of candidates; all the candidates tow pretty similar [party] lines; but I know they’re not all equally suited for the job. I don’t have the time or inclination to spend all the time sorting through truth and fiction on my own. And I doubt others do, either. I want a straightforward resource detailing facts, that’s it. Just facts. No commentary, nothing like that. Just facts, backed up by well-documented, well put-together primary sources. Speeches, voting records, financial records, biographies — I want a trusted source of information. I’ve never found a media outlet that cuts it.

With that, I realized I wanted to make a tool to make an active citizenry plausible. And then, the chips started falling in place with increasing frequency:

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They say you don’t want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

“I stumbled into a series of discussions about broadcast media, societal fragmentation (and unification) and the political and technical enablers for that fragmentation.”

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And now, I’ve a big idea: Imagine a tool (and more broadly, a community) dedicated to ferreting out and making accessible political facts. Fact-checking would be based on a network of trust, augmented by scores affected by how often you provide misinformation or well-documented primary sources of information. But this would provide users with the ability to maintain a notebook of sorts, to which they can add issues, proposals, keywords, politicians, courts, cases, etc. All of these elements would have an online presence that would be continually updated and documented. Every fact would be required to have a documented primary source to which could be added a verification process.

Even better, the data that is usually hidden from citizens (voting records, earmarks, fiscal records, financial interests, legal records, pork, noteworthy comments or promises during campaigning or session: there are reams and reams of information from which most citizens are isolated. Putting a good interface on them is the first step towards opening all that up.

Imagine a non-partisan tool to which everyone flocks to get facts — not commentary — but facts that have been checked and re-checked and argued about and pared down until the language is as straightforward as possible and the item as accurate as possible. Finally, a useful conduit for the oppositional tension in government! And, the more important (read: higher-profile) an issue is, the more scrutiny it will receive and the stronger its documentation will become. And even more exciting is the possibility that legalese could become annotatable.

Let me expand on that. Recently, I met with a lawyer to talk about setting up a corporation and/or non-profit. At some point, they made the offhand comment, “That’s how we stay in business, we know a language most people don’t, and work hard to keep it that way.” I wanted to punch him in the face. But he was meeting with me for free. And I doubt that would have fixed anything. And I reminded myself that I’ve yet to find a profession or culture whose repugnant elements weren’t manifest in its practitioners. Teachers, government officials, lawyers — they aren’t malicious. It’s just a fucked up system.

Anyway, given that I have difficulty imagining the effective, retroactive streamlining of our legal system (c.f. the Paperwork Reduction Act), it seems like the key to making the legal system more equitable and relevant is to make it more accessible. Imagine if it were possible for documents in legalese — whether they be acts or bills or federal statutes or municipal regulations — to be annotated so that a user could click on a paragraph, and read a “human-readable” version explaining the content and relevance of the paragraph. This is a much bigger undertaking, and it’s not entirely clear how nicely it fits in with the other features and goals of the system, but there it is…

So I guess those are the broadest strokes: a user interface to the political world pasted onto a decentralized [social] network of trust that makes the legal system and documentation traversable and human readable. Groups could be formed, campaigns funded, information and platforms documented, criticized, and constantly fact-checked. Combine this with the personal value and functionality of a political notebook, and it sounds like we’ve started skirting around the beginnings of an exciting tool to streamline political involvement. Pair that with powerful, social pedagogy…!

What do you think of that, Alex Russell? Maybe it’ll free up a weekend?

1. in reality, I was — and probably am — reading all this context into it, so take this with a grain of salt [↩]