Beyond the Labor Arms Race

So how is my idea different? What does it contribute? It looks just like a regular employees' union, don't you think? Who needs more unions?

Now, that in itself is going to turn off about half of you. People who know business owners tend to sympathize. I guess that's where my sympathies are as well. I worked in a union shop long ago, run by the Teamsters. I ran afoul of them for various reasons, and their first impulse was to threaten me. They also took far more of my monthly paycheck than could be justified by any reasonable person. What could they be doing with all that money? Not only that, they kept my wages low. I knew that people were getting literally three times what I was earning across the river for the same exact job. (If I'd had any brains at the time, I would have taken one of those jobs and bought a car with the extra money.) Are you getting the picture yet? The union was in bed with management. Somebody was getting paid to run a charade union, and shop stewards were being paid to keep people in line. Did I know this at the time? I knew that Rock and Roll is Here to Stay ... and not much else.

How can we characterize such an organization? It was top-down, recruitment driven, parasitic, authoritarian, and probably counter-productive. The company went out of business a few years later. I sometimes wonder what happened to those shop stewards. Companies that specialize in recruiting stupid people and keeping them stupid are not exactly in touch with their Model Modern Business Practices.

I am also opposed to card-check, but not without reservations. We've all heard stories of companies that have been raked over by unions, and we've all heard of workers that have been raked over by management. Privately owned companies will do just about anything to stop a union from forming. They own the business. They don't want outsiders to tell them what to do. It's understandable. I've heard of cases where the owners closed down the company, fired everyone, sold the inventory at a loss and left the state – all rather than accept union representation. People can be very bull-headed – or very principled, depending on your point of view.

Unfortunately, good owners and nasty, rotten no-good owners that really need union supervision all have the same response. I've had managers that qualified for sainthood and others that smelled of brimstone. I was reasonably suspicious that one VP, on that Teamsters job, was actually a Nazi, and not just because of the accent. None of them, the good, bad or ugly, would tolerate real unions.

The tactics that Management uses to discourage unionization are famously deceitful and cruel. So union people – honest union people that is – often come to the conclusion that you have to fight fire with fire. And they are often fired up with righteous wrath, justifiably if you ask me. In those days I knew a real Red communist. He had the zeal, the rage and the knowledge, and remarkable courage. He couldn't get very far with that crowd of workers, or with me either, but he had our respect. He didn't need no stinkin' card-check, though. What he needed was a cultural shift that wasn't going to happen.

In today's business environment, people just accept union and management because they have to. Nobody really likes either. Yet, here I am trying to sell you on my voters' union approach to the world. So what's the difference? What makes me think that it won't turn into some top-down, parasitic something or other?

The organization I'm proposing is home-grown. Recruitment is anathema. You click with your friends. You inspect them for the trust that you share. The only objective is to grow an information entity, starting with a tendril of reliability spread outward into the unknown soil of modern life. It is a worthy effort in itself. Representation is organic, not functional or confrontational. We are simply trying to get things straight here. Anonymity is helpful to keep out the control freaks and the spies and the zealots. We don't need to be manipulated and tricked into our choices. We will make up our minds according to the channels of trust that we construct. It's more of a defense against disinformation and arm-twisting than some power-seeking entity. I want it to become part of life, not part of the job, and I want it to be fun.

Membership is not exclusive to specified groups. Everyone is invited in, union and management if you honestly trust one another, but invited not as agents, only as friends. The idea is to start with trust and build on it, testing and strengthening it. In time we will grow a tree of trust. Things of importance can flow though the body of that tree without arousing animosity or suspicion, without causing polarization.

I'm not pushing mysticism. I'm proposing a calculated methodology conjoined with a shared philosophy, a social algorithm for calibrated connection.

Unions are like the Blob, growing constantly larger by spreading out and moving into new territories, engulfing and absorbing whatever organized relationships already exist. Only the Blob chooses. Well the Blob hasn't been very successful lately because the victims know how to defend themselves. And the Blob is not very happy about it. Voter's unions – I don't really know what to call them yet – are more like Tinker Toy sets, where the toys construct themselves and piece themselves into progressively larger groups, according to fixed rules of node and branch.

Well, OK. But what makes me think it will not degenerate into the Teamsters, or the Pinkertons for that matter? Americans have had nightmares about cabals and secret societies. We don't like to be told what to do. We don't like to defer to others. So how can I square the organization I've described with the individualism of America. I don't know yet, but I've been trying to convey my vision in a convincing way for a couple of years now, a vision still under development, I'm afraid. If you have any suggestions, I'll be glad to entertain them.

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The glimpse of an unintended motion,
The shake of a head, an unexpected shift of the eyes,
Teaches more in a flash than you'll learn
From eight patient hours of listening to lies.

Optimal Mesh

The Swine Flu is spreading very efficiently. It seems like modern society has the ideal configuration for spreading it. So, just as a thought experiment, what would be the ideal organization for spreading the flu? It would not be, I think, like our goods distribution system.

Let's say the flu began with a little rubber duck made in Shanghai. After getting punched out of the mold, it would tumble along the conveyor belt infecting other rubber ducks along the way and get dumped in a box, mostly with those other rubber ducks already infected. Who knows, maybe someone, a Chinese woman, would do some inspection and touch-up. Would she be wearing gloves? Maybe she'll paint on cute little eyes and eyelashes and lick the tip of the brush. I've seen people do that. But our little duck and its friends would end up in a box pretty quickly. The box would be sealed, placed in a pallet with other boxes of rubber ducks, containerized, stacked for weeks in some ship and then in higher stacks at the port in Seattle, then finally shipped to Toys-R-Us in Peoria, IL. From the truck to the shelf is a pretty efficient process these days, but someone in Peoria would have to handle these ducks. Children might play with the ducks. The customer would pick one up and place it in a cart. The cashier would scan it and bag it. And it would find a nice home. Direct customer shipments might be neater, but somebody will still be exposed.

So basically, there would be two growing nodes of infection due to transportation of goods, the one in Peoria and at the origin in Shanghai. Our global system for the distribution of goods is designed to minimize handling and reduce unnecessary dispersion. The rubber duck would have very few opportunities to infect anyone. More importantly, the rubber duck would never move very far again.

Transportation of people is an entirely different thing. Everybody drives to work to be with others where they shake hands, kiss cheeks, pick up the wrong cup, cough on the bathroom fixtures. Then they come home -- where they lick their fingers to wipe bits of jelly and chocolate off of smiling faces. The kids get shipped to school where they have even more interesting ways of uploading their microbial history. The teachers collect assorted papers and projects that have little smudges and sticky spots. Then they take the subway home, and drive to conferences or night school in the next town over. The professors mingle with their students after class, responding to questions by laughing, scratching their heads in thought, borrowing pens perhaps to sign papers. Then they fly to San Diego for their conferences.

I've heard it said that every drop of water we drink has been excreted by a thousand dinosaurs. I think about that whenever I'm breathing the air on an airplane, and possibly sitting next to a large individual. Sometimes when I come up the ramp and pass through the waiting area, there's a new crowd waiting to get on the same plane. Sometimes they crowd around, making it difficult to exit the area. There's a lot of jostling. They seem eager to be on their way. Maybe they're going to Shanghai. Maybe they'll bring some toys home for their kids.

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So how would I maximize the spread of the flu? For a specific pathogen, I think it depends on the mode of transmission. For a virus that requires contact, I think the best environment is the happy suburban shuffle, where kids are carpooled to preschool in the morning, playdates and playgrounds in the afternoon, and then maybe group Suzuki lessons, with swimming on the weekends. Maybe the perfect group size is five or ten.

But for flu, it seems like jumbo jets and stadiums can't be beat. If the guy selling hotdogs is coughing on his customers, things can spread pretty quickly. Bowl games bring people from all over and drunks don't cover their coughs either. The Olympics seems like a potential Perfect Storm of infection. Thousands of sports fans, young and friendly people for the most part, will be meeting and mixing with others from every three-letter national entity that can carry a flag around an oval track. These folks will all go home on airplanes and share their experiences, visiting perhaps, all the schools and churches and arenas in a thousand scattered Peorias.

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Two related questions occur to me: If we organize our networks to optimize the speed of an epidemic, does that have any bearing on the likely severity of the cases? And second, does the pyramidal structure of my proposed league of voter unions strike you as being in itself a pretty good vehicle for disease transmission?

Military Democracy

StrategyPage describes the tensions related to body armor. Soldiers want protection of course, but for reasons of comfort, expediency and local presentation, would sometimes prefer to do without the inconvenient body armor. More convenient models have been designed and promised, but are not currently being supplied. Officers have a tendency to feel that soldiers cannot be trusted with the decision, so the officers make blanket orders. But here's the annoying thing to me. Higher officers don't even want the local officers to make the call. The reason? It would be too embarrassing to them if someone got killed while not wearing body armor. Reporters would wonder whether armor was being provided in sufficient quantities and whether the officers even cared about the welfare of the troops. Well, such publicly aired speculation would not be particularly welcome when the officer was up for promotion.

Many of the troops are willing to take the risk, because they believe, for example, that taking down a sniper when you have the chance, is worth it. If you don't catch the guy, he will be back in action the next day, kill[ing] American troops. All this is another example of the fact that "victory" is defined differently, depending on what your rank is.

My father and his fellow draftees of WWII hated the lifers who filled the peacetime ranks. Those people were rigid, unambitious, ineffective, turf-protecting, self-interested, unsympathetic, actually unpatriotic – simply obstructing what the draftees wanted to do: win the war and go home. I imagine he was exaggerating, but I recognize that there had to be some truth to it. The differential selection processes of the two groups guaranteed different priorities. Unfortunately, that is also true of the filters that always separate good officers from those who move up the ladder. The priorities being fed down are not compatible with those that are rising up from the ranks.

For that reason, I have always been an advocate of more democracy in bureaucracies. It's hard to see how that can happen, but another of my father's stories appealed to me in this regard. Officer trainees were required as part of their training to nominate officers from within their own group. The trainees were then evaluated for their choices. If a large number of trainees chose the same person, that person would be, in most cases, promoted. If a trainee nominated someone that no one else nominated, there could be two outcomes. Were the instructors to agree with the assessment, both the nominee and the nominator could be promoted. If they disagreed, then the nominee would be suspected of having poor judgment and treated appropriately. Good judgment was considered a very important attribute. I'm not sure that is always the case today.

So, in light of my double pyramid model, I propose that soldiers (and worker bees in other organizations) should select some representatives from among their numbers, who would meet and select higher levels of representatives, who could then make personnel decisions regarding the lower level officers. They might not involve themselves in operational decisions, but they would act to clarify goals both up and down and to reduce the likelihood of bad officers moving up. Higher level officers would then do the same thing to influence the selection of their own superiors.

Stardrive

I have talked about 1) the problem of political distance, 2) the customary and inevitable failures of government as structured today, 3) the nature and nourishment of altruism, and 4) the need for re-engineering our human networks. I have also proposed a plan for improving our system of governance, which I'll elaborate on here.

Here are the basics of my argument:

1) Democracy is a great system but it has some failings. It does not always, or even often, generate the best decisions that the people are capable of. It's certainly better than the various forms of tyranny, but it encourages dishonesty and deception in the political class. It tends to represent dollars rather than people. The political distance between our leaders and our citizens is vast and the channels of communication are too narrow, as well as being entirely too public, too impersonal. Progress on important social goals is constantly impeded by political insurgents of numerous types. Distraction and corruption in high places are common. Concentrated power is a constant danger.

What's good about it? Well, it's competitive like capitalism. The best product generally succeeds. The electoral process tends to filter for self-confident, realistic, sociable, energetic, articulate deal-makers, people who can get things done. If you want to be President, you have to fight your way through a grueling, discouraging, seemingly interminable gauntlet. You have to know how to get people to do what you want. You have to be conversant with the practical world and the possibilities of power. There are, of course, other personal characteristics that allow politicians to succeed, but, in general, we end up with the people who have the ambition and skills to do the job. We get good people, but then the system tries to corrupt them, and certainly corrupts the results of their efforts.

2) Modern society is extremely interconnected, but not all connections are equal. There are strong antidemocratic, anti-egalitarian forces endemic to the Matrix. There are enough ideologues, fanatics, control freaks, selfish people, parasites, con artists, crooks, thugs and liars to keep us all busy dealing with unnecessary suffering, inefficiency and unhappiness. Such disfunctional people degrade the network. They are empowered by our credulity, our ignorance, our isolation and our weakness. Our democratic system addresses the problems, but not adequately. Personal development and maturation reduce the impact for an individual and close associates, but the effects are not widely shared. Police discourage murder, but don't prevent it. Food poisoning and embezzlement still occur. Absurd political decisions persist for decades. Networks ameliorate the impact, but they could do better.

3) The major problems that we face are gridlocked by controversy, but are of such severity and complexity that we cannot continue with the ineffective governance that we have engineered to date. No progress can be made in the current social environment. In particular, I would cite Global Warming and population control. Every direction of approach to these problems is suffused with contentious disputation and hostility. If you don't see this issues as problematic, then I could provide many others, and I imagine you could provide many of your own. How about coordination of responses to the global business environment, or to the spread of religious fanaticism? How about the inability of third world countries to shake off endemic corruption and make economic progress? From my own perspective I would include the repressive and irrational approach to Prohibition, the inadequate control of contagious diseases, the ineffective programs of education for the poor (and everyone else for that matter), the unbalanced distribution of wealth and evolutionary indecision.

4) It is possible to design theoretical improvements to our current methods of governance. Whether such improvements can be implemented, I'm not certain, but I do believe that it is our only hope in the face of otherwise unsolvable existential threats to our civilization. The design improvement that I am espousing is this: Institute a fourth branch of government which is essentially a network of voters' unions, linked together as a bi-directional pyramid structure.

Here are the principle characteristics of the proposed structure:

1)Organization is bottom-up. That is, it evolves from the grassroots as a self-assembled entity. Recruitment creates peers, not subordinates.

2)The units are, with certain specified exceptions, intended to be of equivalent size.

3)The goal of each unit is to achieve consensus, shared understanding and a penchant for unified action. The hope is that multiple units will be able to join through representatives, and achieve a similarly high degree of consensus and mutual understanding.

4)Each unit will have multiple representatives, a specified number, selected by a shared decision of the unit. Every member should be comfortable with every representative. For that matter, every member should be comfortable with every other member.

5)It is the assignment of each representative to adhere to another unit, a group of similar representatives at the next hierarchical level. The goal is to share information, ideas, opinions, plans and decisions among the other representatives and all their associated units, and to coordinate such with the representative's own unit.

6)Each unit should send its representatives to different, ideally dispersed, higher order units, if such are available. And each hierarchical unit should elect representatives to perform in the same manner creating still higher level units until the candidate population is exhausted. By this method, any member of the society could, in theory, have exactly the same upward pyramid of representation. Obviously, at the highest levels, the pyramid closes in on itself, but there will be multiple paths of representation from the top to the bottom.

7)In theory, a representative could be a member at every level in the hierarchy – as a result of being elected to each successive level. I'm not sure how to deal with that problem pragmatically.

8)In practice there will be levels at which members of a unit have irreconcilable disputes, Republicans vs. Democrats, Sunni vs. Shia, Blues vs. Greens. I have several suggestions for addressing that problem. First, encourage members to integrate their ranks at the lowest feasible level. Second, provide more encouragement in the form of bonus representation. If a balanced unit can subsume their differences enough to agree on a slate, then we can assume they are contributing something of particular value. Award them with more influence, an extra representative, whatever it takes. The idea is to promote peacemakers and moderates while focusing on disputes at the retail level. Third, develop methods of trading members, particularly more contentious members, with more appropriate home units.

9)In practice, it may be difficult to attain a quorum. In order to encourage units to form as soon as they are ready, smaller groups should be allowed to form with reduced representation, but per capita representation for substandard group sizes should be lower than for complete units.

10)In practice, it will be a challenge to prevent groups and individuals from misrepresenting themselves. Therefore, a supervising organization should be created to provide passcodes and certifications that allow representatives to prove that they are following the rules. This information should be kept as anonymous and untraceable as encryption technology will allow. Management of the supervising organization is clearly an important and sensitive role, particularly in environments that discourage the freedoms of speech and representation.

11)Initially there will be some difficulty in identifying peers in order to form new units at the higher levels. The supervising organization could be helpful in this regard as well, providing suggested contacts. After a substantial network has been established, such intervention may be less important, as connections can be maintained by inter-personal communication, hopefully improving the level of anonymity.

The purpose of this new branch of government would not be to accumulate or exercise power. As I see it there would be multiple purposes: among them the propagation of 1) information, 2) transparency, 3) trust, 4) and wisdom. Furthermore it would provide omnipresent citizen oversight and the ability to exercise unified power when necessary.. The government would still be the government, but the government would be operating in a new environment. We would understand its actions, and good politicians would be able to reliably explain themselves to the people without undue risk of political sabotage.

Non-Caveat

Is this just another form of Utopianism? I really don't think so. It is actually just the opposite. It starts with the idea that humans are fallible, one of the cornerstone tenets of our democracy, but also that most of us are capable of contributing some small vector of wisdom to the collective thrust of our society. The leadership of these network units would be quintessentially democratic. Their duty would involve only the responsibility to pursue truth and represent it to their best judgment. It doesn't sound very dramatic or romantic, but I believe it would gradually lead to profound and beneficial changes.

The spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: "Listen, love. It's complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it." McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.

The author relates to Zalewski how he came to settle on climate change as the background to his novel in progress. He'd gone walking on a frozen fjord in the Arctic, purely, he insists, for the hiking. He was initially sceptical that global warming was the stuff of novels. Then he saw well-meaning people in his group squabbling over their possessions in the confined space of the boat.

"People were losing stuff, stealing things. Meanwhile, we'd be ... talking about how we were going to save the world. I thought, Ah. The interesting thing here is human nature. Global warming suddenly wasn't an abstract issue, because humans had to solve it - untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans."

from the Guardian

Effective Human Network

Now, this guy from NYSE, the one with the Ponzi scheme, he never asked me to invest with him. Did he ask you? No one ever told me about his “system”, if he had one. Nobody tried to sell me. In fact, I suspect that none of his investors even know me. I suspect that none of them even know my name. I'm hurt. Oh, well, I guess I'm better off. ... Besides, I never knew who he was either.

But here's my question. What happened to the Kevin Bacon idea? I know who KB is. I don't think he knows who I am – even though I would be a whole lot more likely to invest with him than with the other guy. But the point is, according to common wisdom, we're connected. And still, he's not soliciting anything from me. He doesn't know me, he doesn't want to know me. He's not interested in my ideas, and sour grapes aside, the feeling is more or less mutual.

Lots of people know who KB is, and some even know every piece of public information that can be found about Kevin Bacon. He's a celebrity, above the crowd, but I have it on good faith that there are six (or maybe seven) degrees of separation, at most, between him and every other Hollywood actor, no matter how ordinary. We could broaden the terms of the connection game and make it between him and everyone else. Do we have to make it eight degrees to get everyone in? The game depends on the fact that connections between Hollywood people are part of the public domain, but for every publicly known connection, there may be thousands of anonymous connections.

Now, if he has kids, maybe they played soccer. My kids played soccer. Their coaches knew a bunch of grown-up soccer players and the league officials (and a bunch of sales reps I bet). Those guys probably know some state officials, who probably know some national officials, who probably know some officials in California, and so on. I'll bet there exists a four-link connection somewhere between my kids and KB's kids. Besides, I know the coaches myself, and I'll bet he does, too. That makes us almost buds. (Coincidence: I saw one of the coaches just this week crossing the street. I also learned a lot about him by seeing where he was. If I pass on that information, he will have no idea where it came from.)

Does Kevin Bacon go to church? Does he travel on commercial airlines? Does he know his congressman? I know a congressman. Hey, I'm not a particularly social person, but I'll bet there are lots of ways, pretty short connections, between me and Kevin Bacon. So, what's the deal? How come he's not hooking me up with a bunch of these Hollywood people?

There are probably short link-chains between just about everyone and everyone else. The world is pretty tightly connected, as the annual wave of flu epidemics should tell you. The flu bug, however, can take advantage of these connections in ways that you or I cannot. Jokes maybe, jokes and flu, that's all we share. The problem is that these networks have rules and filters that prevent and control the traffic. The reason for that is that many people are, like the flu bug, willing to abuse these networks for less than altruistic motives. Memes and viruses can have sharp teeth, and lots of people want to enlist you into their personal Ponzi schemes. If you have anything, or care about anything, then you have to protect yourself, ensconce yourself. So the tribal impulse constantly reasserts itself, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nevertheless, if you want to solve big problems, the barriers are counterproductive.

Fred Smith, who delivers groceries to old ladies three days a week, has some interesting ideas that, believe it or not, would be useful to several congressmen, a certain epidemiologist, and even Bono. Fred has a creative mind but sort of puts people off with some of his outlandish malarkey. In fact, no one but the old ladies will listen to him any more, and they don't really understand him despite their best efforts. The problem is that the filters placed on Fred are pretty suffocating, unforgiving, and judgmental. Since Fred doesn't know how to explain himself, and no one who could explain him is taking the trouble, then those ideas are just going to have to wait until someone more respectable manages to think of them. I know -- innovation is 99 percent perspiration -- but it is also 90 percent luck and it appears in the oddest places. ... Maybe I could get Kevin to introduce him to Bono.

Fred is not the only one who gets marginalized. My daughter tells me about a young lady who invented and patented the windshield wiper. Her invention was never used, as such, and the implication seems to be that automobile makers could not believe or accept that a woman, much less a young woman, was capable of making such a contribution. Or maybe they just didn't like the idea of sending royalty checks to a woman. She wasn't inside their meme-walls. At any rate, we know what they should have done. They should have pursued the concept and the person. It was a good idea, and more importantly, an original mind is not usually limited to a single idea.

So here's my idea. We want networks that help us build collective intelligence and collective wisdom, that allow us to aggregate the strengths and knowledge of all, but that's not what we have now. Our networks are effective as peer-links. They are capable of passing certain types of information, especially among peers, but they are very poor at distributing trust. They are poor at concentrating veracity and intelligence; they are poor at recognizing the potential of specific pairings, and they are poor at producing enforceable collective decisions.

So I suggest that we redesign our networks to remediate those failings.

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There are many organizations that are effective at concentrating power, which is both a strength and a failing. The caucus is one such organization. Despite great pains taken to prevent what they considered the evil of factionalism, the Framers of the Constitution were unable to prevent the development of groups in Congress from caucusing together. What happens is that members agree to hash out their differences and then vote as a bloc. The normal mode of independent voting would dilute their power by allowing minor differences to erode the collective impact. By committing to unanimous voting within the caucus, the members are insuring that their influence, and the influence of like-minded individuals, becomes predictable and potent.

To understand why the members of a caucus are willing to sacrifice their independence and even vote against their own interests, you have to understand that they are participating in a form of iterated prisoner's dilemma. There is a payoff for cooperating: I am with you guys because I trust you, and because my influence is stronger with you than on my own. I trust your judgment and I believe that, though I must sacrifice on occasion to vote with you, sometimes you will sacrifice to vote with me. If you deviate significantly from that covenant, though, I will punish you by removing myself, and though I might lose influence thereby, you will feel some pain yourselves, especially if I ally myself with your enemies. The pain you feel, or the threat of it, might well cause you to consider my positions and my situation more carefully.

I have written in the past about voters' unions. Somewhat like investment clubs, such groups ask each member to contribute research and opinions toward the collective goal of choosing a candidate. They caucus together. Once a decision has been made, the group acts as a unit, casting a unanimous vote.

Each state in the United States is actually a voters' union within the Electoral College. If a candidate wins by one vote within the state, it will be as if the entire state voted for a single candidate. It enhances the power of a state to influence the national election. But the idea can be generalized upward to groups of multiple states, or downward to groups of voters. States today do not cooperate in this fashion. And, except for special interest groups, neither do voters, but they could.

Some couples I know have a sort of voters' union. They argue together about the candidates. If they can agree, they both vote. If they can't agree, then neither of them votes, essentially saving them the trouble of getting to the polls. A group of three [I'm not supporting Big Love here] could settle things more efficaciously, but more coercively by resorting to majority rule rather than consensus. Since they pool their wisdom as well as their power, I would argue that such groups of three, or a hundred and three, are more likely to make the right decisions than a standalone voter, and more likely to influence others.

The catch is that official balloting is secret -- a very good thing in my estimation -- and that there is no way to ensure that the dissenters are cooperating. The conundrum is that small groups could benefit, in terms of power concentration, by committing themselves to a coercive voting protocol, but there seems no way to implement that regimen in the larger arena.

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The Shiite and Sunni religious parties are feeling cheated over the January election results, not yet finalized. It was bound to happen. They have a perception of their popularity based on fear-elicited responses. Basically, sing our praises or we shoot you, or at least punish you. This is also why many managers are convinced that their employees love them. They hold power. The secret ballot removes the kind of leverage that such social power generates.

The first response of these parties, shocked by their loss of stature, will be to take control of the polling stations and consciously reinsert their influence. I expect they will be thwarted this time. Their second response will be to start lying about their motives and intentions. Their third response will be to concentrate on constituent services, at which point they will have raised themselves up to the level of Tammany Hall or Hezbollah in Lebanon, though perhaps not as influential. Getting beyond that is not easy. We tend to underestimate our own accomplishments in this regard.

The secret ballot is a boon to liberty but is insufficient for promoting trust. It allows you to vote for whomever your wish, but it doesn't protect you from making a bad choice. For one thing, there is still partisan gamesmanship, slate management, demagoguery and outright deception. The long and narrow conduit between the constituents and the leaders is a tempting target to everyone who seeks more influence than a rightful allocation would indicate. Here's the problem: you still do not know the people you are voting for. You do not know what they really intend because they are motivated to lie to you. Beyond that, they are motivated to avoid saying anything that might lose votes. We are consequently misinformed, disinformed and uninformed, which is why we always seem to be voting for the lesser of evils. We cannot distinguish the aberrant intentions of the power-hungry scoundrels from the rational political responses of the earnest public servant. Politicians routinely and necessarily cater to our ignorance and pander to our mistaken views. Since there is no trust and no truth, nothing gets fixed.

In order to increase trust in our elected officials, we need them to tell us things that we don't want to hear. We need them to not care about our vote. But we can only receive such messages from those we already trust implicitly, close associates, family and friends. Politicians can't, in general, have such a relationship with us, but we could in theory establish a personal connection chain from the retail voter to the power agent, in which each pairwise link is imbued with the assurance of personal trust. I might not trust the politician himself, but I trust someone who trusts someone who does. At the same time, I believe that such a chain could and should be sufficiently anonymous that no exterior force can be applied to the effect of distorting the information flow. A bucket brigade of trust and appropriate political deference could serve to solve problems that have been beyond us in the past.

So how can that be arranged? How can a forest of such trees be encouraged to grow? First, political distance can be minimized by using a pyramid scheme. Second, factual variance can be minimized by means of redundancy.

Pyramid schemes have a bad reputation because they have been typically used to distribute false hopes and illusion for the purpose of making money. That's because the pyramid recruits the soldiers rather than vice versa.

Consider the so-called Barack Obama 2.0. This program has a lot of cachet, but I don't believe it is any different from your standard corporate or military reporting structure. It's a pyramid, if not a scheme. Top down, tight span of control, one way flow of information, central command, leadership of each level selected by the higher levels. The lowest level members have virtually no influence, no information processing capacity, no caucus benefits. There is some redundancy, however, because the Internet allows for a lot of crosstalk. Nevertheless, it really should be called Barry's Battalion.

America 2.o

I maintain that information can flow both ways, authority can be delegated upward in a democratic and metered fashion, and trust can be nurtured as a rational outcome of a process rather than an emotional response to charismatic leadership. The secret is to have an upward pyramid. There are three requirements: 1) self-assembling units with regulated size and voting power, 2) multiple leaders elected at each level with instructions to represent the group at separate higher-level units. 3) the willingness of members to assimilate discrepant reports from the multiple representatives and coordinate a unified response.

What I'm proposing is essentially a fourth branch of government, a trust distribution network. In my vision, it works like this: People gather together in groups of choice, say twenty (20) people in each group. These would be friends, or members of a club or congregation -- any collection of folks who know each other and can evaluate each other's strengths and weaknesses. In the course of whatever activity they are engaged in, they also take time to select two (2) representatives on the basis of trustworthiness, reliability, honesty and whatever leadership qualities might be interesting. I think people can do this job pretty well. They know their friends. They might have sent Blogojevich to the State House, but he wouldn't stay on their bowling team for very long. Yes, there are exceptions, but for the most part, the groups will serve as a national filter to concentrate trustworthiness.

The next step is that the representatives should seek out other representatives of the same rank to form new groups at the next level up. Imagine growing neurons, dense and overlapping, each reaching its synapses out in hopes of synaptic intimacy.

One important rule is that two representatives from the same level one group should not be together in the same level two group. That's where the redundancy comes in. If there are enough groups, more and more levels can be built up until the whole country is part of the pyramid. Using the twenty-to-two ratio, each level is 10 percent the size of the previous level. We have, what ... eight degrees of separation between me and the top of the pyramid. Yes? But there is an important point to the rule of two. The length of the link-chain is a problem, but there are multiple link-chains that lead to the top, and each link pair represents a bond of trust, a relationship between two people who understand one another, who have a wideband communication interface. I think that could make all the difference.

There's a lot more that can be said about this pyramid scheme, but I'll let the reader digest what I've said here.

Game theory applied to Obama's Iran policy.

It turns out that Kevin Bacon was inside Bernie Madoff's meme-wall.

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