The Probability Broach, chapter 18
The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is about to get underway. Win and Lucy file into the delegates’ chamber, which is half legislative chamber and half stadium, complete with vendors hawking overpriced snack food:
I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Piñons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor.
“Thousands” of desks in a space the size of a football field? I think L. Neil Smith needs to check his math.
An American football field is 360 feet long by 160 feet wide, or 57,600 square feet. Assuming the delegates’ desks are the size of a standard office cubicle, they’d be 6×6, or 36 square feet. That works out to 1600 desks at most, and that’s making the unrealistic assumption of zero space for aisles.
It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society. She’s there in an official capacity as a delegate, so they’re not stuck in the nosebleed seats. They have a reserved desk out on the floor, where the action is.
Her name appeared at the front of the room, among a few others already present, followed by a number: 6076. “My constituency, such as it is, six-thousand-odd people—odd enough t’let me stand for ’em at this quiltin’ bee, anyway. Sure y’won’t have a grasshopper?”
“Ulp!” I shook my head, taking the extra seat. “Lucy, you continue to amaze me. You represent some district in Laporte?”
“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained.”
As Lucy explains to Win, everyone in the NAC is free to attend the Continental Congress, either to participate as a delegate or just to watch. All the proceedings are live-streamed, but only people who are physically present can vote. That’s on purpose, because, as Lucy puts it, “This place is supposed to be inconvenient!”
If you don’t want to attend in person but you do want your voice to be heard, you can assign your vote to someone who is there, and they can cast it on your behalf. There’s no limit to how many proxy votes a single person can have, so any delegate might be only representing themselves, or they might represent a small handful of others, or they might represent thousands or millions. Lucy’s constituents are mostly old friends and fellow veterans whom she fought alongside in the Prussian war.
“Most folks just show up representing friends, neighbors, people in the same trade. Maybe half a dozen are professionals, with a million proxies each.”
“That many?”
“Don’t get sarcastical! Votes don’t amount to much, anyway. It’s what gets said here. Though nothing guarantees anyone’ll listen.” The screen changed again, more delegates arriving, vote-strengths shifting as viewers all over the continent punched in proxies and cancellations. Totals were revised moment by moment; many a politico with thousands of supporters might suddenly discover that, through the miracle of electronics, he was representing no one but himself.
This is the most detailed picture Smith gives of how he thinks government should work, so I want to spend this week discussing it.
Let me start with the good: On paper, I like this idea a lot. It would be tricky to get right, but it has some major advantages.
Organizing government this way would put an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other anti-democratic tactics. Since anyone can show up and vote, there’s no need for expensive campaigns—a chronic flaw of our system that limits political participation to the wealthy. If your representative acts contrary to your interests, you don’t need to impeach them or hold a recall election—just switch your proxy to someone else.
It would mean real choice for voters. You wouldn’t be limited to choosing one of the handful of candidates who are willing to run in your district, nor are you stuck with the person who wins 51% of the minority who vote. No one would be shut out of representation because their preferred candidate loses. Everyone can pick the representative who best shares their views, which would mean a legislature that truly reflects the popular will.
That’s the praise. Now the criticism.
This would never work in the kind of anarchist politics L. Neil Smith favors. It should be screamingly obvious that it would fail catastrophically.
Start with the most obvious problem. Smith tells us that Lucy represents 6,076 people. How do they know that?
Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there’s no census. (In fact, Smith specifically says the people of the NAC would shoot a census taker on sight.) There’s no Social Security list or any other official database of the population. There’s no authoritative record of how many people live in this society, where they live, or what their names are.
So, how do they know that a delegate speaks for the number of people they claim to speak for?
If I show up at this meeting and say I represent a million people, how could anyone prove or disprove that? If I gave them a list of names, how would they know I’m not voting on behalf of dead people, or people who don’t live in the North American Confederacy, or outright inventing people who don’t exist? What records would they consult?
Also, even if I could somehow prove my proxies were real people, how would they verify that those people want me to represent them, and I’m not voting on their behalf without their permission? Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.
There are problems in the other direction too. If I’m a voter who wants to influence the Congress, what stops me from assigning my proxy to multiple delegates to boost my views? Or if I have two Telecom setups at home, can I cast two votes?
You can imagine unethical interest groups setting up bot farms—thousands of servers run by software impersonating real people, automatically casting votes for whoever the person in charge wants. It happens all the time on social media, and you can be sure it would be tried here, where the stakes are higher.
Ironically, this system might work with a centralized authority that maintains a voter registration database. But in an anarchy, it never would.
Smith glosses over all these problems. It’s possible that they never occurred to him. That’s a common blind spot afflicting utopian political theorists of all stripes. They’re so sure that everyone would embrace their system and play fair, they never give any thought to dealing with people who are willing to break the rules.
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Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.
Smith wrote all this in 1980, right? That was a time when many more people, both in and out of the computer-science biz, just routinely imagined we’d have fully sentient computers answering all our questions and retaining all human knowledge, with or without cute snarky senses of humor. (Who was that TV detective with the talking Stingray?) So “it’s all done electronically” would mean there’s a perfect infallible computer that knows who’s really doing what and never makes misteaks.
Seriously, this is one of the more excusable mistakes Smith makes in this hot mess of a novel…
Similarly, I don’t think anyone in 1980 imagined bots the way we have them now.
This system was supposedly set up by Albert Gallatin (d. 1849, our timeline)?
Yes, although it’s not clear how this could have worked before computers and the internet.
Maybe Babbage & Lovelace formed their own company and built steam-driven Analytical Engines? With laissez-faire doctrine all things are possible donchaknow…
I have to imagine an army of telegraph clerks frantically scrambling around with hand-copied messages for/from all the delegates, all getting noisily in each other’s way.
“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained”
Lucy is from the NAC and has been dealing with this system for decades, but she knows exactly what Win means by “a district.” Almost like she’s a mouthpiece for an author from our world.
In a more meta-sense, the problem with this sequence is that although Lucy will *tell* Win repeatedly how much she hates politics and wishes it to go away forever, her actions in this sequence *show* how at home she is in this environment. She’s a politician.
P.S. Warning – incoming cracks at political figures from our world approaching. Raise defensive shields (we don’t have any defensive shields!)
“It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society”
I imagine in an anarchist society, connections would be super-important. I remember from articles I’ve written about “flat” corporate structure (lots of Indians, no chiefs) that hierarchies and groupings form automatically — people who like working together, people who tell Lucy (or whoever) that after the great job she did spearheading their last project, would she like to work with them again?
Another problem with Smith’s system, if votes can shift that rapidly and unpredictably, the result will be more confusion than anything else. Though as votes don’t translate into political influence (or so I gather), that will be less significant than if proxies had any significance — indeed it’s hard to see why anyone bothers unless it’s for the amusement factor.
Not only do hierarchies form naturally, they almost have to. The details of Dunbar’s Number are questionable (see also Cracked’s post on what they called ‘the monkeysphere’), but it describes a real phenomenon: there is a maximum number of people that most people can actually keep as ‘social contacts’ in their head at once. If you know more people than that, it’s hard to really think of the ones you interact with less often as ‘people’ anymore, and you lose track of what your last ‘state’ was with them, what things you regularly talk about, and so on. (The usual number given is somewhere in the range of 100 to 150.)
Basically once you get past that limit, you don’t really know everybody anymore. You can’t keep track of what they’re doing, or keep a mental handle on what they’ll be likely to do.
It’s my personal opinion that once you get past that number, any sort of anarchic system becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. You don’t know everybody anymore, you have to rely on trust, and you have to have some people who are in a position of enforcing that trust between people who don’t really know each other personally. Some way to stop scammers and grifters from just going onto the next mark.
Same sort of thing with Communism. Communes exist, they can work, but the working ones are also generally just farming villages or the like where everybody knows each other and knows they can rely on each other. Anything bigger than that breaks up into multiple smaller villages with somebody trusted to act as negotiator with the others, and voila, you have the start of a ‘government’ forming. (Yes, some of my definition of Communism may be a bit of a ‘No True Scotsman’, but my understanding of the original definition is that it would run into this. Some of Marx’s ideas were good, his criticisms of capitalism were definitely valid, but his ideas of the ultimate end goal were rather utopian.)
… there is a maximum number of people that most people can actually keep as ‘social contacts’ in their head at once. If you know more people than that, it’s hard to really think of the ones you interact with less often as ‘people’ anymore…
This reminds me of Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite, set on a world featuring a unique aristocracy. The elite have ranks according to how many followers they have – but they must, on demand, give not only the names of their followers, but a description of the problems faced by each of same, and a precis of how they (the aristos) are helping them with said problems.
Needless to say, it’s not a very large or high-tech society, and Kingsbury does not present it as a utopia (to say the least).
… Marx’s … ideas of the ultimate end goal were rather utopian.
Downright millenarian (and not in the mode of our contemporary whippersnappers): does the scenario of a final worldwide battle followed by an inevitable universal brotherhood of light and joy remind you of any major local mythologies also present in Comrade Karl’s culture?
As I stated in response to an earlier post, Smith’s biggest issue here is that he’s trying to present an alien society which would require alien mindsets to work, while still having relatable characters, an easily comprehensible plot, and relatively simple explanations for everything. We could handwave away the out-of-universe knowledge because it’s an author tract, which does need to have a “for dummies” aspect to it if one hopes to sway a wider audience… but when you purposefully cut out the basic infrastructure needed to make everything work, you need to show what the alternative infrastructure looks like, how everything emerges naturally without it, or what alien mindset makes that infrastructure unnecessary. Otherwise it’s just magic.
And given that Smith seems to, in typical anarcho-libertarian fashion, just take it on faith that some of the more complex aspects of modern society “naturally emerge” without any prerequisite infrastructure, it really is magic. As I also mention in response to a different previous post, parts of this could be explained by the NAC being a collection of automatopias… which might or might not be technologically possible in the 1980s NAC, but definitely doesn’t explain the existence of the 1790s NAC. Much of the rest could be explained by humans being kind, generous, highly knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects, and honest to an extreme fault, yet able to easily distinguish the outliers and willing to be ruthless towards them. (Lying about who you represent or bot-farming votes is just unthinkable!) This would require genetic modification, cybernetic augmentation, and/or memetic engineering, which again may or may not be plausible for 1980s NAC, but definitely isn’t for 1790s NAC.
And it also brings up the question why such people would choose anarcho-libertarianism as the ideal form of socio-political organization, given that they could easily make nearly any sort of government work as intended rather than how things generally play out in real life. “It feels natural to me” isn’t really an argument, given the wide variety of human mindsets and preferences. (Just gathering some of my previous points in one place and expanding on them a little, because I do think it’s worth giving a big-picture look at the fundamental flaws.)
I could easily see the code duello of the 1700 and pre-antebellum 1800s continuing into the present as an enforcement mechanism. Oh, you lied about your support/your company’s finances/the state of my marriage? My seconds will call! And failure to act accordingly makes you a pariah. I don’t think this is a good approach to society or that by itself it would make Smith’s system workable but it would help plug a few of the logic gaps.
But as you say, Smith wants to show us a society that’s kinder and gentler because of guns, not one where people use the guns on anyone except the worst of the worst.