Open Primaries

It is great to see all this new energy coming to political philosophy. Lessig is talking again about the money primary that filters to the candidates that the electorate can choose from. That part is exactly right. We won't get out of this mess without changing how candidates are chosen. Let's take a deeper look at the pragmatics;  determine  what we can actually do, and do quickly.  Lessig suggests legislation, and while in the long run we might want to encode preferences for more democratic processes, we need to act now.  What if we go after this first from the local end?

The system we have is 240 years old, and, as is easily demonstrated, it has been largely captured by monied interests. Even so, it has shown a lot of resilience. We'd better make sure we keep the good parts of the design. The three branch architecture is pretty good, and  the federal system is also good. The fact is that more of the most important things a government does are delegated to the states. Primaries and elections vary quite a bit from state to state because each state has to write laws to designate the how, when and where of elections, and then implement and enforce them.

The fact is, we don't have to wait for any legislation to fundamentally change how we elect people to office, we just have to do it. I really like another one of Lessig's ideas, "code is law." If we plan and execute the open source software for a new social media system designed to serve grassroots democracy, or, to use a fairly new term, grass-tops. By this we mean that we aim to address the needs of the social movers and shakers, the early adopters of social change, the leaders of the networked revolution. The money primary becomes irrelevant with weakened mass media influence. Our network can become immune to the viral fake news racket, because we have the crowd sourced knowledge as each lie is launched. We may even be able to identify perpetrators. False news, generated by profit-oriented foreign enterprises via the worst practices of the news media (cf. the Code Monkeys author (need notes for talks)). The solution is good collaboratively produced new media. This can be crowd sourced by using a new support architecture for the independent networkers doing the most work.