Fantastic issue - a new weekly addiction. Great work Zach! I'm with you on this - technology will NOT solve everything, but it might allow communities to exponentially increase their leverage on our stagnating democracies. The triennial essay series is highly speculative essays - mostly trying to poke the imagination of non-techy city people. Yes tech cannot and will not solve everything - but it's the only imagination vector that can improve the current condition of cities (i.e. I think your very own coined term "startup" + "cities" is inherently about technology and the future of cities.) Do you envision the possibility of a non-tech startup city in the future?
Further, I think tech can serve as the global connector - an all-encompassing frame of reference that can be qualitatively contextualized by city leaders and professionals around the world. Moving forward, I believe urban action will only become more local.
***But wait a minute! We’re voting on the “morphology of a new art gallery”? This sounds like a digital version of the same localism that breeds NIMBYs and blocks building in today’s cities.***
We do that all the time - an architecture competition has a jury, a public procurement process has a comission, a mayor has an electorate. Thankfully no one is forced to participate in a public hearing, but everyone can. This is similar to how one might "choose" to delegate, vote, or ignore by default voting on the "morphology" of a new art gallery. Whenever I shop for a new product at amazon I look at the number of reviews and the number of starts. That gives me a good enough frame of reference to refrain from doing the research myself. I can totally see this translated in terms of liquid democracy.
***It’s not obvious that “more voting” equals better decisions or even better democracy.***
This might be true, but democracy is about the values inherent to voting and communal deliberation - not about optimizing the efficiency of decisionmaking. Akin to bureacracy being a feature, not a bug in current governance systems. I like progressive disclosure - you delegate or ignore a vote by default, you engage only if you're a voting geek or the issue interests you. That also works. I think NIMBYism is generated by the wrong incentives. There can be a way out of a tragedy of the commons spiral which keeps our current understanding of democracy unharmed.
And about Mayor Neto Bran demonstrating his expertise to voters - I lold! But again, democracy is not about what experts think is right, urban planning isn't about the technical expertise - or the "ability" to plan a city better (which is complex, ephemeral and mostly random) - it's about the ability to negotiate. One issue I have with most wannabe "startup cities" is this idea that the city will be suddenly populated only by ultrasmart nomads looking for a new home - akin to the plans of the technocratic, top-down planned city of Brasilia. But as Scott describes in Seeing like a State, the informal and the non-expert alike make up the majority of Brasilia today. We can't just wish away the Trumps and the Neto Brans.
***Think of all the expertise embodied in a car, a MacBook, or even (as the libertarians like to say) the humble pencil. Sit in a Toyota and rejoice: you just delegated to 10,000 Japanese engineers.***
Is voting with the ballot and voting with your wallet different?
We delegate to apple and get a great product while at the same time ignoring all the negative externalities that are being generated. We get the benefits of technology, and blame the corporation for the externalities. In similar fashion we blame "government" and "bureacracy" but we typically don't want to work neither in government or the bureacracy.
***Baboci cites Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb. Why isn’t this city-scale liquid democracy just a fancy way to encourage people with no (or superficial) skin-in-the-game to meddle in the construction of an art gallery by people who do have skin-in-the-game?***
This isn't mutually exclusive though. A non/for-profit organization can build a gallery - there are hundreds of such entities in every city. The Tate in London, the Triennale in Milan (MoMA being the exception that proves the rule) - the cultural "institutions" in various cosmopolitan world cities - are however mostly funded by governments. This goes back to the tragedy of the commons though - the jury is still out on the best countermeasures against it.
***Everywhere else in life, users want good defaults and simple choices.***
They sure do, but the best things in life have good defaults coupled with infinite customization (legos and MS Excel being two things that immediately pop in my mind)
***My mentor in college, the irreverent economist Mario Rizzo, once told me: “Given enough people and enough time, everything stupid happens.”***
The pessimistic version of the infinite monkey theorem :D. In retrospect, i probably straw-manned harder than you did :D - just trying to make an argument. I think we are fairly aligned in our thinking. And that's the true issue in the urban conversation right now.
Fantastic issue - a new weekly addiction. Great work Zach! I'm with you on this - technology will NOT solve everything, but it might allow communities to exponentially increase their leverage on our stagnating democracies. The triennial essay series is highly speculative essays - mostly trying to poke the imagination of non-techy city people. Yes tech cannot and will not solve everything - but it's the only imagination vector that can improve the current condition of cities (i.e. I think your very own coined term "startup" + "cities" is inherently about technology and the future of cities.) Do you envision the possibility of a non-tech startup city in the future?
Further, I think tech can serve as the global connector - an all-encompassing frame of reference that can be qualitatively contextualized by city leaders and professionals around the world. Moving forward, I believe urban action will only become more local.
***But wait a minute! We’re voting on the “morphology of a new art gallery”? This sounds like a digital version of the same localism that breeds NIMBYs and blocks building in today’s cities.***
We do that all the time - an architecture competition has a jury, a public procurement process has a comission, a mayor has an electorate. Thankfully no one is forced to participate in a public hearing, but everyone can. This is similar to how one might "choose" to delegate, vote, or ignore by default voting on the "morphology" of a new art gallery. Whenever I shop for a new product at amazon I look at the number of reviews and the number of starts. That gives me a good enough frame of reference to refrain from doing the research myself. I can totally see this translated in terms of liquid democracy.
***It’s not obvious that “more voting” equals better decisions or even better democracy.***
This might be true, but democracy is about the values inherent to voting and communal deliberation - not about optimizing the efficiency of decisionmaking. Akin to bureacracy being a feature, not a bug in current governance systems. I like progressive disclosure - you delegate or ignore a vote by default, you engage only if you're a voting geek or the issue interests you. That also works. I think NIMBYism is generated by the wrong incentives. There can be a way out of a tragedy of the commons spiral which keeps our current understanding of democracy unharmed.
And about Mayor Neto Bran demonstrating his expertise to voters - I lold! But again, democracy is not about what experts think is right, urban planning isn't about the technical expertise - or the "ability" to plan a city better (which is complex, ephemeral and mostly random) - it's about the ability to negotiate. One issue I have with most wannabe "startup cities" is this idea that the city will be suddenly populated only by ultrasmart nomads looking for a new home - akin to the plans of the technocratic, top-down planned city of Brasilia. But as Scott describes in Seeing like a State, the informal and the non-expert alike make up the majority of Brasilia today. We can't just wish away the Trumps and the Neto Brans.
***Think of all the expertise embodied in a car, a MacBook, or even (as the libertarians like to say) the humble pencil. Sit in a Toyota and rejoice: you just delegated to 10,000 Japanese engineers.***
Is voting with the ballot and voting with your wallet different?
We delegate to apple and get a great product while at the same time ignoring all the negative externalities that are being generated. We get the benefits of technology, and blame the corporation for the externalities. In similar fashion we blame "government" and "bureacracy" but we typically don't want to work neither in government or the bureacracy.
***Baboci cites Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb. Why isn’t this city-scale liquid democracy just a fancy way to encourage people with no (or superficial) skin-in-the-game to meddle in the construction of an art gallery by people who do have skin-in-the-game?***
This isn't mutually exclusive though. A non/for-profit organization can build a gallery - there are hundreds of such entities in every city. The Tate in London, the Triennale in Milan (MoMA being the exception that proves the rule) - the cultural "institutions" in various cosmopolitan world cities - are however mostly funded by governments. This goes back to the tragedy of the commons though - the jury is still out on the best countermeasures against it.
***Everywhere else in life, users want good defaults and simple choices.***
They sure do, but the best things in life have good defaults coupled with infinite customization (legos and MS Excel being two things that immediately pop in my mind)
***My mentor in college, the irreverent economist Mario Rizzo, once told me: “Given enough people and enough time, everything stupid happens.”***
The pessimistic version of the infinite monkey theorem :D. In retrospect, i probably straw-manned harder than you did :D - just trying to make an argument. I think we are fairly aligned in our thinking. And that's the true issue in the urban conversation right now.