democracy is gamification

sufi

lala
of government or of politics, or is politics itself gamification of government?

It's like a ridiculous game show - it's ineffective and counterproductive - it actually drives people away from politics

In Kenya 2010 1,000s were killed and ethnically cleansed for the sake of their elections

I'm not saying do away with popular involvement in government, but there must be better ways to be consultative
 

sufi

lala
is noone ready to comment on the wider issues in our farcical political system, even during this "brexmas" pantomime? Is it such a taboo?
:eek:
May I take it then that you are all 100% behind arch-scunner colonialist dog churchill's well known morality, ideology and principles-free least worst justification, then?
or is there some better one?
 

version

Well-known member
This is the important bit.

By putting an online platform at the heart of its operations, Five Star was way ahead of other political parties in Italy – many of which barely had a functioning website. As the movement grew, the party seemed to entrust an increasing number of decisions to party members through online ballots and crowdsourced policies. At the same time, many Five Star members treated Grillo’s blog as an oracle of truth. As a result, Casaleggio, who created and managed the blog, could use it to exert enormous sway over the movement [...]

Although Casaleggio designed Five Star to look like a member-led movement, he set the party’s course from the beginning. Casaleggio Associates not only managed Grillo’s blog; today it also runs Five Star’s digital operations and controls the valuable data being generated on Five Star’s online platform by the party’s snowballing membership. According to two recent investigations by the Italian data protection authority, the Five Star digital platform was breaching European data protection laws by tracking Five Star members in individually identifiable ways.

Casaleggio was far ahead of other political parties in using this data to help shape Five Star’s messaging, which he fed back to supporters through Grillo’s blog, and increasingly through social media. The very tools that were supposedly giving members control over the movement were allowing Casaleggio to exert control over them. With a thoughtfully crafted blogpost, he could intervene in the movement’s internal debates, bolstering certain positions and dampening others down.

“This is a long-time project of social engineering, using the web,” said Jacopo Iacoboni, who has written two books on Five Star’s rise. The first detailed how Casaleggio had begun to experiment with manipulating online consensus back in the 1990s, as the CEO of an Italian tech company that sold business tools for managing employees. He believes the way Five Star has used data is far more radical, in some ways, than what had happened in the Trump or Brexit campaigns. “In the UK and with Trump, the campaigns were, at least formally, separated from the web company running their data – think Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ,” Iacoboni said. But the Five Star case is unique, he said: “A web company which creates a party, with the owner directly possessing all the data.”

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the top-down control that Casaleggio exerted over the movement was the way he choreographed the party’s decision in 2014 to align with Ukip in the European parliament. Many observers and even members of the party had assumed that Five Star was ultimately a progressive movement, so when the possibility of allying with Ukip came up, many Five Star members were appalled. “Farage’s party disgusts me,” Giulia Sarti, one of Five Star’s MPs, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. Many vocal Five Star members wanted to ally with the Greens instead.

On Grillo’s blog, Casaleggio responded with a deluge of posts idolising Farage and criticising the Greens. One post rather fantastically claimed that Ukip, too, was essentially a progressive movement, which rejected any form of “racism, sexism or xenophobia” – even though Ukip members with offensive views had poured out of the woodwork in that year’s European elections. Another post argued that Ukip had a “coherent and principled opposition to foreign imperialist wars” in contrast to “the leaders of the Greens and the liberals, who screamed in favour of the war in Libya”. Ukip’s campaign for a referendum on EU membership was heralded as an example of its support for direct democracy.

True to its supposed values, Five Star put to an online ballot the final decision on which European alliance to join. But the post that introduced that ballot left little doubt as to which way members were expected to vote. “It was clearly in favour of the Ukip solution,” Marco Zanni, who had been elected as a Five Star MEP that May, told me. “It’s not a real democratic referendum.” In the end, about 80% of Five Star members who voted opted to ally with Farage. Grillo’s blog hailed the decision as a new milestone in direct democracy. At Casaleggio’s request, said Filippo Pittarello, the Five Star staff member, Farage changed the name of his Ukip-led alliance from Europe of Freedom and Democracy to Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Having just decided to step away from the ridiculous spiteful screaming match that is political twitter until after the election, I agree with you.

It seems incredible that we're having such a mad song and dance about two men who are both manifestly unfit to run a whelk stall let alone the country. The drama attached is next level awful. Yet no one seems to be acknowledging the drama and screaming is because they're both so bad.

What other models of consultation do you see as being workable Sufi? Or even worth thinking about?

Beyond consultation, reading Colin Ward again is making me wonder what areas of my own life could I assume control over and not have to deal with any of this bullshit - are there areas of my life that I and others I know could be more involved in, assert more control over for outcomes we'd want? Rather than wait for one of these two shitheads to do something about it.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Your post reminds me of Thirdform's comment that what we're seeing the decay of the two party system.

Being asked to choose one side or another of this shit sandwich makes that seem very very true.
 

version

Well-known member
Beyond consultation, reading Colin Ward again is making me wonder what areas of my own life could I assume control over and not have to deal with any of this bullshit - are there areas of my life that I and others I know could be more involved in, assert more control over for outcomes we'd want? Rather than wait for one of these two shitheads to do something about it.

That John Harris documentary I posted in the election thread had an interesting segment on this. He went to some sort of community centre and one of the people interviewed said they didn't really care who won because none of them do anything for them anyway and at this point they don't want them to, what they want is to be able to do things themselves.

14:10 - 14:53

 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Cheers for the link. One of the reasons I like Aditua Chakrabortty in The Guardian is because he often does something similar - looks at new models people have come up with for working to improve their communities, workplaces etc. I like his stuff a lot.
 

sufi

lala
What other models of consultation do you see as being workable Sufi? Or even worth thinking about?

.
I wish I had a brilliant answer ready.

I think it's difficult to re-imagine all this, and remarkable to see people calling for the likes of a "Peoples Assembly" when that is essentially what we are supposed to have now.

So I suppose that suggests that what we have now may have structural defects (layers and layers of defects, from lack of proportional representation and gerrymandering, lack of a politically engaged actual head of state etc etc ...and all the flaws inherent in such an entrenched system), so much so that it's hard to see how it could be rescued through piecemeal reform, but there's a deeper issue that the way that the political system is used and the people involved in it, and the parties that make it up, are deeply and cynically corrupt (criminally to some extent, but morally and ideologically compromised through and through).

There's a lack of a real "mission statement" or measurable outcomes for MPs and parties - they just seem to muddle along, so a much more robust set of expectations to get past short-termism and selfishness would be good.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
We live in an age of fake revolutionaries. There is an unprecedented (and largely justified) public distrust in democratic institutions as they stand, but the people who are most successfully capitalizing on this zeitgeist are the very ones who pose the biggest threat to democracy and can least well be said to have the public good at heart.

I don't have a solution except to selflessly offer my services as benevolent dictator for life.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah it's a load of bollocks I agree. I almost never vote but I love Corbyn he's like Jesus so I'm going to vote this time.
 

luka

Well-known member
"The simultaneous rise of the internet broke down the vertical divisions – slowly at first, and then all at once – between different genres of culture and communication. Where once there were newspapers, broadcasts, magazines, drama and light entertainment, now there are platforms where a torrent of undifferentiated “content” spills around. The political troll and fake news merchant exploit a simple truth– that it’s no longer possible to keep spaces marked “satire” and “news” away from each other. This new information ecosystem has given rise to a new type of public figure, who does not belong in any one of the old analogue domains, being at once an actor, a comedian, a politician and a media personality. Look no further than our prime minister."

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ohnson-brexit-britain-politics-media-business

I was explaining this process to you lot months ago
 

luka

Well-known member
Ray Cappuccino
@Ray_Cappuccino
this is another aspect of what i am getting at. the boundaries are dissolving. the rise of trump is emblematic of this. we are not in a newspaper world with different sections for politics, entertainment, culture- it is all one continuous plane.
12:33 AM · Oct 7, 2018·Twitter Web Client
 
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