It’s Friday, and this has little (okay, nothing) to do with ecommerce or Asia, but I have an idea I’d like to get out there. We can solve the budget problem, minimize lobbyist corruption in politics, and end the income tax in one fell swoop. Ready? Here goes:
- For the sake of keeping the math easily understood, let’s say there are 350,000,000 people in the United States
- Let’s also put the Federal Budget at $3.5 Trillion (for easy math)
- Divide the budget by the population and we get $10,000 each. It costs each person (you, your spouse, and each of your children) $10,000 each year to power the federal government. Ouch, but okay.
So, there’s the situation. Here’s my proposal:
- Give every person in that 350M population a vote, including the children (because we need to let the future people vote more than the dinosaurs on this stuff). For children’s vote (anyone under 18), the vote goes to the parent as a proxy vote. Mormons and Catholics will love this part. That’s 350M possible votes. These votes are handed out 1 vote per person for free. Kinda like how things are now, with the additional kids’ votes.
- Issue ANOTHER 350M votes, but not to the people. These 350M votes are FOR SALE, at $10,000 each. I don’t care who buys them: Google, the Teamsters, my rich uncle, Boeing, Jimmy Swaggart. Votes go for $10K each. Get ‘em while they’re hot.
- Abolish the income tax, because the feds don’t need it anymore (they’re selling things now, no more compulsory crap).
Insane, right? Maybe, but think about it. I still get a vote. At most, only 50% of the electorate is for sale, so sovereignty still lies with the people. If I want to participate more than my one vote, I am welcome to buy another (which I might, I just got a windfall bonus because I’m not paying income tax anymore). Large corporations will want to buy hundreds of votes, and they’ll open their checkbooks. In the new system, that money goes into the general fund, not some fat senator’s pocket. Speaking of whom, those senators and congressmen will suddenly need to switch roles: from gladhanders who dole out money that they didn’t make as favors to sycophants, into becoming salesmen huckstering for votes. Aha– how has the power now, Quimby?
Won’t corporations buy up all the votes? Yes, I hope so– tell me how that’s different from the current situation. Won’t rich people monopolize their power over the poor? Maybe, but again– how is it different from now? If anything, this would make things way more transparent. If you don’t buy an additional vote, then use your one free vote wisely. If you don’t like the government policies, then either pony up and buy a vote, or shut up and sit down– it’s free for you.
I kicked this idea to Scott Adams, and he said it was a good idea, but likely a tough sell. Help me spread the word.
Is this question on Quora.com yet?
Have you tried Quora.com yet? It’s essentially an open question & answer board, divided out by topics. The usual social media rules apply: you can follow threads, follow people, like answers, vote answers up and down, upload your profile, etc. It’s also growing very quickly, going from zero to thousands of users and tens of thousands of questions in just under a year. For me, the fascinating part is the meta-sociology that is still developing. Quora is the proto-wikipedia, where information is still raw, subjective, and disjointed.
Early on, the site was populated by the early adopters, who by their very nature were authorities in the areas on the site and probably more attuned to the social media scene. They were insiders. Questions tended to be straightforward inquiries as to why an Internet business was doing something or pricing was structured or how many servers are available, and the answer usually came from a VP at that business.
Now, however, the site is full of honest inquiries that are really requests for recommendations, as well as completely subjective chit-chat questions where a “real answer” would be impossible. For example, just from today we see “Which is the Best song by The Cure?” and “Why should I see Tron?” These questions have no answers, they’re the aimless chit-chat (and they don’t even qualify for hipster-idiotication status like “which is more environmentally friendly, disposable razors or electric razors?“). None of these issues would be allowed over at Wikipedia. And they would start a fight on any single-threaded blog or news discussion site like HuffPo or BoingBoing or Fark. How long will that last? Is it only a matter of time (and popularity) before Quora gets swamped with subjectiveness and drivel? Or are there structural elements in place that will contain the slosh-over?
Here’s what I see that’s good so far:
- Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers that get voted up or down. This may keep the crap and joke answers under control, but voting only works to a certain point.
- Users can follow specific topics in their feed, so supposedly it may be self-editing where I don’t need to see questions about celebrity diets or snotty book reviews.
- Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re less likely to act like a goof with your answers.
Here’s what I see that’s not so good so far:
- Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers. There’s no real easy way to build up knowledge incrementally by adding into an existing text (like there was with Wikipedia before the reference zealots took over). Yes, one can edit a previous answer, but the site is geared toward people merely tacking on another answer. In the end, it answers the question, but it doesn’t build up a knowledge-base (yet).
- Users can follow specific topics in their feed, but this limits down the user’s exposure to topics where he/she is likely already an expert. This may increase the quality overall, but it also may encourage showing-off in front of your peers.
- Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re much more likely to act like a goof with your answers.
I’ve answered questions. I haven’t asked any yet. I’ve seen astroturfing (companies asking straw-man questions), I’ve seen shameless self-promotion (people asking themselves questions), and I’ve seen some solid answers. We’ll see how this one plays out.
good luck with that.
Oh, that I could be in Washington DC at the end of the month, to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity sponsored by Jon Stewart. When Jon was pitching for his satirical rally, he stated as one of the deliverables for the conference was for “… everyone to take it down a notch.” I’ve already seen this phrase on Boing Boing twice since then, as well as a few other places. I predict it will be the new meme for Fall, and is certainly welcome and several years overdue.
Social media is fun and interactive and certainly eats up more than its fair share of our precious time (which should be devoted to sitcoms and game shows), but it comes with a sour side effect: all these online threads and discussions reward the polemic, the sarcastic, the zealot, and the crank. No one gets very far in a discussion thread with something like “well, I don’t agree with you, but I can see where you’re coming from, so I guess that’s okay.” It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing politics, restaurants, athletes, or Star Trek episodes (it’s a foregone conclusion that “City on the Edge of Forever” is the greatest episode of all time). Any discussion thread is pretty much dead in the water until someone throws a rock, either decrying some action or wildly praising it, which causes some factionalization.
When someone throws a rock in a discussion thread, participants have four possible fates:
- Some people in the group will oppose the first position with equally violent counter-rhetoric.
- Some people will oppose the opposers. We now have our two camps of douche-bags and assholes.
- A third group will take the sarcastic meta-position of critiquing both groups (which I am doing here to some degree).
- A fourth group will try and come up with some rational explanation or middle ground. Good luck with that.
None of this is new information. We’ve had Godwin’s law for over 20 years now. What has changed is that: a) there are a lot more people in these threads now, and are just waking up to these dynamics (your mom knows about Godwin now). All of these non-geeks used to yell and scream in sports bars over cigarettes, but they’re on your facebooks now, and they’re going through the cycle; and b) Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are trying their damndest to give that fourth group some juice.
I, for one, welcome this new meme. I’m going to make it a point to use it online at least three times this week.
http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/
We’re seeing a pattern, in political town halls, industry conferences, and even award shows: the concept of a “panel of experts” at the head of the grand ballroom dispensing wisdom to the masses’ is dead. I blame mobile phones, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
In August 2009, congressmen and senators scattered out of Washington back to their home districts like so many rats carrying plague. They had to get Health Care Reform passed, and it was time to bring in the proletariat on the deals they had already been cooking. The problem is that the prols didn’t play ball. The quick reaction was to chalk it up to sour grape astro-turfing by the GOP– and once it showed up, I have little doubt they did amplify it wherever possible– but I think that people are just as upset with the Town Hall format as they are with the actual message trying to get preached at them by their “representative”. Thanks to the internet, the masses are much more connected and have their opinions (right or wrong) much more set before they go to the meeting; thanks to social networks, people now have the baseline expectations to participate in a two-way conversation, not get lectured at and told what to think. The worst representatives actually yelled at their own constituencies to “shut up and listen“. Ah, irony.
I saw this same pattern at a recent ecommerce conference in Las Vegas. Each morning had the usualy Big Name Keynote address which was just as much show-n-tell as it was informative, but then the afternoon sessions consisted of smaller breakout sessions with a small (3-4 people) “panel of experts” sitting at the front of a long ballroom pontificating about some facet of ecommerce chellenges (customer usability, mobile commerce, social networks, etc.). Here’s the thing– very few people actually listened, I think. Most people had their heads down checking their email, tweeting out what they were hearing in the meeting, or even tweeting out how they’re not getting anything out of the meeting about how to use Twitter. Ah, irony.
On the flight home, I downshifted with a Newsweek magazine, and saw an article about the Emmy Awards for TV, and how the awards shows seem increasingly out of touch with the will of the people. “That makes sense,” I thought to myself: awards shows depend on panels of experts, and that model is becoming increasingly flawed. Anything that is perceived as a one-way street of information transfer, or has a significant amount of time-lag between the chosen opinion coming down from above and the feedback going back up will lose attention with an increasingly twitchy, real-time community.
So what to do? Here’s some cheap shots:
- For political town halls, obviously not everyone can talk, and even then not everyone has a cogent thought, but everyone wants to participate. What if everyone was handed a chit or poker chip as they came into the room, and each person could either ask their friends for their chips because she wants to speak, or she could hand her poker chip to someone she trusts to voice her opinion. The microphone would then be ‘auctioned off’ to those with the most poker chips, and passed around as time allowed.
- For conference meetings, the panels must absolutely integrate real-time tweets, polls, and feedback. As topics become more tightly defined, the likelihood that smarter people are sitting out in the audience increases. The poker chips might work here as well.
- For awards shows– I have no remedy. They really were just a money-scam from the Big Studio era anyway, it seems, to put butts in seats a second time in November, while allowing actors to negotiate higher salaries because they had won something. With the social networks, rotten tomatoes, and Mr Dynamite, we all have sufficient information to judge they good films, music, and TV from the dreck. Those that cannot discern quality content deserve what they get.
I promise I'm relevant 
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