No, it’s fine.

It’s very hard if you are voting about people because to make one person fully understood by millions of people is no easy task. The person changes every day, but it about policies or priorities of budget spending. It’s much easier because it’s much more concrete, and we can use ...

Yeah, and then even in parts victory budgeting. The whole idea is for people to understand each other’s concerns and not just ranking of where the policy must be made. I admit that it’s much easier to implement the whole circle if it’s voting about policies or about priorities.

I would say it’s a mock democracy if you just do this referendum without all this preparation and current teamwork before and after them.

A full democratic direct‑or‑not system entails a complete understanding of the positions, a nuanced convergence of people’s views, that takes anywhere from probably a year to 30 years if you look at Switzerland before every referendum and without implementation of these transparency accountable and inclusive dialog that the referendum itself ...

Yeah. A referendum, of course, is one example. If you had a referendum, it is the idea that the ultimate implementation of majority rule of the common system. It’s not what I mean by direct democracy. It’s certainly one part of direct democracy, but as I said it’s just a ...

We deliberate. If we vote, it’s just straw votes to make people rank the priority of the agenda like which need to be talked first. We don’t vote in the...

No, we don’t vote. We don’t ever vote. There’s no majority rule.

The GDS in Singapore, in UK the GDS and the PolicyLabs, in France the ETALab, and pretty much everybody that I know who are in this community of bringing the Internet society’s values into traditional governance systems. This loose coalition, I would say, is I think in itself a model ...

We take bits and pieces that we know that works in this model and then try to work in the current political system around a different set of stakeholders. This is pretty much what every other similar units around the world is doing.

I still look toward that, but it’s not a straight adaptation.

We can’t just say it’s for techies anymore, but still its integrity is still somewhat high. There’s no sign of whether we can make this model work in the everyday politics just building a park thing which includes children and other stakeholders who would not necessarily be a part of ...

It does this by including as much as they could as possible and being radically transparent and being fully participatory. There are people who say this is because that the Internet society only deal with techies, but it’s not true because we have activists. We have journalists. We have a ...

That’s a fair question. I still look at the ICANN and IETF as a small dose. I understand that they’re a government only in the sense of a modest stakeholder governance more around how Internet is working. It does work on a radical, transparent, and fully accountable agenda that makes ...

The Taiwan is the forefront of being Taiwan.

We see its most interesting form [laughs] first around US politics and so on before it reaches the rest of the world. I wouldn’t say it’s a weakness. I would say that it’s just a phase in development.

It’s a confusion that’s going on not necessarily just in the US. In the US, I think the polarization and advancement of technology tend to happen first [laughs] just on the virtue of a lot of those new innovations being first introduced by US commons.

These were words that originally only has a meaning on the private sphere and not a public sphere. We then turn it into something of a semi‑public sphere. A lot of those fears gets conflated. Then people tend to take a us‑versus‑them attitude in many of those dimensions. That’s very ...

Right. People reinforce their confirmation bias, which is part of the normal private sphere. Among families there’s always confirmation bias. That’s how families are formed, but because the social media and popular media before that used much of the same words that we use for private‑sphere things like our friends ...

I read that because of the gerrymandering, and even in the Twitter sphere, people tend to choose their messages so that it creates a bubble effect so that gradually people...

After the advent of Internet and even before it had television or radio, there’s a danger of people stereotyping each other and not going through the roots of those values by the symptoms of each other’s values and fragments the public discourse.

I don’t know actually. I haven’t participated a lot in the daily level of political activism in the US. I voted in the Paris participation budget, but I haven’t voted in an US one.

A lot of autonomy, a lot of room for experiments, and a lot of ways for the best experiment to be seen by the other units and by the states so that the federal government plays a role of highlighting the innovations that have been going on in the states ...

Anyway, I think the strengths as I see it is that it’s pretty adaptive. It’s not something that the Constitution itself was seen for much of the history in the US as a living document. There’s a lot of adaptability in each state and even sub‑state governments.

Well I can quote a few observations from Kurt Gödel. I don’t think that would be very productive, though.

Like constitutionally?

Of the American system?

It’s an entire link and the participation that direct democracy is just one link of at least four aspects.

Anarchism in this course much more than direct democracy. I, of course, work on direct‑democracy tools, process, playbooks, and so on. To build a anarchistic collective or so, it requires not just the decision‑making part, which is the direct democracy, but also the transparency, the accountability, the general inclusion, and ...

I wouldn’t say that. What I’ve said is that it’s a more palatable, the more acceptable term for anarchy in this century. People tend to not think you’re weird if you say direct democracy...

Even the states or the largest private sector companies are also saying that, which is why internal collaboration, a startup, or what we call the refactoring or reformation of visible service is happening around the world because even internally this is also in a much more effective way to break ...

It’s showing that collective action is possible and collective distribution of resources ‑‑ cognitive or not ‑‑ can happen without a hierarchical structure to back it up.

It’s a new governance system that allows people to make collective decisions but without a intermediary system. Of course, Google Docs is itself an intermediary, but we also have ways to make it entirely decentralized. That’s the main effect.

It’s a dynamic that allows people to build communities that gives the feeling of being in the same time and in the same space but without having actually to be in the same time or in the same physical space. It was at this coexistence the main application of Internet. ...

Basically continue the time line, personally, and there reflect your inputs into this space.

That’s something that’s unique, I think, around Internet. It gives the idea of belonging to the same space, even if we are apart in time. I join the Google document and I leave it, and you join one hour after. You will still see that it’s in the same space, ...

For example, when we’re typing in the same pool of documents, it’s technically, actually a copy on your side and a copy on my side. But because I see a representation of your cursor and you mine, we very easily fall into the illusion that we are in the same ...

But because the Internet forces pretty much the copying of everything that’s being brought on, people get this feeling that they’re in the same space, by having the same copy of social objects on their personal computers.

Even though, through telephone or through the other communication technologies, we can say, "OK, we’re on the same time." We wouldn’t say we’re in the same room or we’re in the same space.

This also means that, traditionally, humans ‑‑ I don’t know about other animals ‑‑ could perceive being in the same space by seeing that we have the same tangible objects around us. That we’re in between the same space, meaning that we can look at the same table, and then ...

Copying becomes the norm. Then transmission, actually it’s very hard to imagine transmission without copying. You have to put a lot of DRM or whatever to artificially reduce it to the idea of transmission.

The thing with the Internet is that copying something is the only way to transmit that on the Internet. On a border between two networks that speak different protocol, that has to interact through the Internet protocol, the only way for me to still carry your message forward is to ...

Internet is not just a way for bi‑directional communications to occur synchronously. It’s like many‑to‑many television or many‑to‑many radio. In a sense, this is why we call it digital convergence. The Internet is also a space.

That’s right. I remember that.

I read it, yeah.

It’s a pretty enlightened view of the united part. I don’t know that much about individual states around the US formation, so I wouldn’t comment on that.

The united part, I refer to this as the united part, meaning that, despite the different origin, the different states’ interests, the different around position and other relationships for example, the early founding of the US was built on these ideas that people can resolve their different views over time, ...

No matter which culture you’re on, because of this very successful enlightenment project, the world will one day see the same light, generally just from a different perspective.

I don’t have access to public domain work that’s written after the First World War, because it’s still in copyright.

My education is from the Project Gutenberg, which is mostly writings before the First World War, when humanity was largely optimistic. That’s my early readings.