Breakout Two: The Pre-Forum Government
You must understand, the Founders had very good reasons for constructing the nation as they did. It is all too easy to view the system at its end and assume it had no sense at the beginning. The innovations the Founders delivered to the people they governed cannot be overstated. The principles of the nation were sound and by most reasonable arguments remained unaltered by the Forum. The problem was time. It was as though the Founders implemented a software package on a vacuum tube computer and later generations expected it to function in the same manner when silica chips were invented.
The United States was conceived in a world where information traveled slowly on horse-back, or by ship, and the average person had to spend the majority of their time in labor-intensive subsistence farming. There was also no such thing as telecommunication, so geographic proximity was of enormous importance. This also made news expensive and hard to verify, so that it was very difficult to know what was truly going on in other parts of the world. These conditions gave rise to a world in which it was always a very good assumption that politics would have consistent local impact. A common saying of the time was that “All politics is local.”
Knowledge itself was also limited. Science itself was new. Benjamin Franklin was not only an expert on electricity but on virtually everything then known. Generalists reigned and narrow-focus expertise was only beginning to emerge as knowledge expanded beyond what a single mind could contain. Therefore, in the United States of 1787, when the Constitution was ratified, it made sense to appoint a particular person, for a particular geographic location, to be in charge of basically all decisions for a given period of time. Yet by the time of the Columbus strike, none of these conditions remained.
It had never occurred to any person other than Melvin Sninkle to wonder that if you had gone back in time and asked the question: “What would it take to be able to appoint a representative based on subject, anywhere in the world, and to track their rates of success at forecasting and executing various initiatives in their area of expertise, in an open and clear manner where we can be sure all votes are being tallied appropriately?” that the answer would have essentially been a smartphone and a block-chain network. And because it had never occurred to anyone to ask, no one had ever thought of the answer.
In the last days of what we now call the Alpha United States, the government wasn’t really seen as a tool to preserve rights, settle disputes, or make good decisions for the general welfare. How could it have been? Everything was exploding. Technologies were exploding faster than they could be meaningfully understood, both by those who had jurisdiction or even by those who built them. Population explosion had expanded polities beyond anything a representative could have even pretended to understand. The House of Representatives remained fixed at 435 members, mostly because of the size of the room, and before its dissolution each representative stood in place of almost three quarters of a million citizens, well over three times as many as in the previous century. Even that ratio had represented a loss of signal. At the inception of Congress, each of the sixty-five representatives stood in place of an estimated fifty-seven thousand people. The true death knell was complexity itself. More people interacting in more ways about different subjects meant that no one could possibly keep track of it all on the required scale. Additionally, the fact that governments were unable to behave competently at this scale was also fast becoming a significant barrier for new growth.
News had become ubiquitous and even if the most popular forms of it were for entertainment, real and reliable information still existed. Telecommunication use was also continuously rising and with the advent of social media it was increasingly often the case that not only were individual citizens much better informed than their representative in particular areas they were now able to demonstrate so in spectacular, public, and obvious fashion complete with video clips of their previous predictions. No government of such slow and broad construction could stand up to such scrutiny and yet when people thought such things as “Bob Johnson sure seems to know a lot about Net Neutrality, he’s describing a future I like, and he’s been right about pretty much everything so far” there was no way to empower Bob Johnson to make decisions about Net Neutrality and remove these powers from Congress. What small centralized body, so massively empowered, could not be seen as incompetent by comparison?
Geography had also become far less relevant, so that often representatives would be contacted for matters impacting their constituents over which they had no real authority. Consider also the bandwidth of this process. A single adult human is capable of truly thinking about no more than three to seven items at a time. This was a world that needed thousands of foundational decisions made each moment. The previous form of government bureaucracy was simply not equipped to make decisions at that speed. In fact, it was intentionally created to not make decisions. In their wisdom, the Founders had deduced it was not possible for even elected leaders to make smart choices. They were aware their level of expertise could not meet the challenge. However, this strategy could only ever have been a stop-gap measure as the technological explosion continued. The Founders had not had the tools to do what became possible with the Forum and so they had created the best possible barrier against tyranny. What was needed toward the end of the Alpha United States were excellent, wise choices at a scale unknown in history and a bureaucracy which could manage it all cheaply without trampling on human freedoms.
Political parties sat atop this structure like parasites, their funding models creating strange political bedfellows. If a person ate organic food, it was likely they held a favorable view of abortion and voted liberally. If a man smoked, it was likely he believed it was necessary to own several firearms and voted conservatively. As the nation grew and it became increasingly impossible to make effective decisions to truly govern with skill, the purpose of Political Parties became to conceal the growing chaos. Distraction became paramount. The Parties became ends to themselves, carving unbeatable voting niches that made no practical sense out of the landscape to preserve their own power. The people they governed suffered under these strange party-based tactics that destroyed their ability to form meaningful geographic polities. Quietly, both parties supported the expansion of Corporate power before all else, as Corporations seemed to be the only organizations capable of navigating through the world effectively. All else they did was a form of theater. And so, after a period of severe strain, the Political Parties of the age became, more or less, a type of Sports Team.
The very idea of this was anathema to those who lived at the time -there were true disagreements between parties, however silly they had become by the end- and in fact remained so for decades after the creation of the Forum. The limbic hijacking of the United States citizenry was greatly ameliorated by the Forum, but it was still a long time in the undoing. It is difficult to view the parties at the time in any other manner for parties themselves, as they had been previously understood, ceased to exist in less than fifty years after the adoption of the Forum. When people became free to no longer choose between the best of two bad options, when they no longer had to instill broad authority into a single person, but could choose as they wished whenever they wished, the bad options were out-competed.
Citizens of the Alpha United States attended rallies wearing genital-shaped hats or face paint, cheered mascot animals, bought clothing with their candidate’s name and face, consumed stadium food, and waved flags or posted pictures on social media, declaring their candidate would destroy the other candidate at the moment of ultimate confrontation on debate or election night, etc. When interviewed, attendees from either party could typically say nothing more than that they wanted things to be good and not bad, and if pressed for details could only say their candidate would do better things and the other candidate would do worse things but could not provide any particular example. They were no less smart or able than you or me, of course. They simply did not have the Forum to channel their intelligence productively or provide assurances that matters of concern were being appropriately addressed by true experts. Without visible chains of accountability or easy representation a plumber could not simply content himself with plumbing, but often felt called upon to also voice his opinion on geopolitics. It is the plight of humans that we can recognize genius even when we cannot always reproduce it ourselves.
Politicians of the age made every effort to avoid particulars, or expectations, and it was a common saying that it was possible to tell if a politician was lying if their lips were moving. As their power was broad and encompassing, and they were forced to navigate a world where any decisions made would have enormous ramifications, whose ends they could not possibly predict, they fought to accomplish nothing. They sought instead to be attractive or personable or inspiring. Perhaps worst of all, grotesque to those of us who have lived under the light of the Forum, they took no responsibility at all for their failures. They were checked only by popularity, and so had sought to become popular. Unchecked by reality, they never sought to be wise or accountable.
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