Nepal picks a new prime minister on a discord server days after social media ban
nytimes.comI thought it was super ironic that after the government of Nepal banned almost all social media platforms last week, this week the Gen Z protesters who overthrew the government used one of those platforms, discord, to choose a new prime minister.
The person they picked is 73 year old Sushila Karki, who used to be a Cheif justice of the Supreme Court until she retired at age 65, and is the only woman to have ever held that position. She is also now the first and only female to run the country. The protests that overthrew the Nepali government this past week were started to protest corruption in government, and Karki is known for being fiercely against corruption as a judge. She was sworn in on Friday. Good luck to her. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c179qne0zw0o
I highly recommend anyone interested in these processes read “The Democratic Coup”.
It tries to explain the circumstances where a coup such as this can lead to democracy.
Key interesting example include Portugal in 1974 ... and the American Revolution against the British.
It’s happened before and it could well happen again here. My heart goes out to the protestors. May they fill the power vacuum with strong leaders who can make their country better for future generations.
It's unclear if interim leaders should exist at all
Wouldn't it be best for the country to be leaderless, with no laws being made and all existing government departments continuing their work under the same set of budgets and instructions as before until a new leader is selected by the election department?
Even with no new laws, most countries still have non-automatic decisions to be made just as part of the structure.
But I guess they shouldn't...
Ie. The goal of lawmakers should always be to, at any given point, have a set of laws such that the country will continue for as long as possible with no further laws.
Ie. Perhaps do budgets by percentage of GDP rather than fixed amounts.
It's not just about making new laws, but also running the executive branch institutions such as the police, intelligence, and military. It depends on the country's constitution, but Nepal is supposed to have a civilian authority at the head of these. The alternative would be to have left all this in the hands of the military
I'm hereby announcing my candidacy for world leader. I'll be running on a populist platform of self-enrichment. My first executive order will be to give myself access to unlimited money. Then I will use the money to acquire and/or launch tech companies and use price-gouging and predatory lending techniques to run all major corporations out of business. Then I will proclaim myself "The most cunning entrepreneur in the world" and I will write a book and give inspirational talks about how I did it all by myself without any special advantage. Then I will offer compulsory business advice to all the CEOs of the corporations (which I would have bankrupted) to explain to them that it's their fault they went bankrupt and should have worked harder.
If you politician bastards would just stick to your promises, I'd vote for you.
A discord server with 150k people whose identity or nation of origin are not verified, where only 8000 people voted. This is as illegitimate an election as they come. Come literally just have been elected by Russian (or any other) bots.
You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".
Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.
It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.
Military of Nepal want to make an agreement with the activists, rather than the Nepali.
Therefore activists need suggesting a representative of the groups. IMHO a private voting is fine in this case.
Presumably if people aren't happy about it they'll just continue to revolt.
Just wait until you hear America picked a president because of a TV show...
Would that the country were as simple as electing someone because of a TV show.
As did Ukraine!
A little education would go a long way here
Let's be honest: he had no other credentials when he decided to run.
That has nothing to do with the original statement
i ve been waiting for democracies to go digital for ages. We should be electing mayors like that too. there s no reason for all this gatekeeping and secrecy in politics other than to enable corruption
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two competing issues here:
1) You could make digital elections secure with issued digital IDs, and simply recording everyone's vote and it would be easily auditable.
But no one wants elections where (the contents of) your vote is recorded somewhere.
So 2) You use your digital ID to be able to vote once, but if you're no longer connected to your vote, it would be much more susceptible to tampering if you can't establish a double blind chain of custody of the votes, which is what expensive in person voting is doing very well.
The first option would be great if you could somehow guarantee a corruption free future of your country where no one will come after you for your vote (hint: you can't).
Isn’t there a way to do the first option, but without attaching anyone’s votes to their digital id, except in a cryptographic way such that any individual person can look up their own vote online and verify that their vote has been counted correctly (with their own personal cryptographic key if some kind), but no one without the key can see which person made a given vote? I’m sure I remember watching a Ted talk about this years ago, but don’t remember the specific talk at the moment.
I’m sure there are other obstacles to surmount, but if that system works, you could have a digital id, use it to vote every time, and audit your own vote without anyone else knowing what you voted.
Until someone with the proverbial $5 wrench shows up and tells you to unlock your last election's vote to prove you're one of the good guys?
I don't think we should ever be able to know any individual's vote.
How would you audit that all encrypted votes belong to one and only one other eligible voter?
This is a good critique, and I’ve been wondering the same ever since watching that TED talk. Still. I’m not sure it’s much worse (or worse at all) than what we have right now, at least in the USA. Maybe I’m wrong about that though?
Ballots are locked up and have detailed logs for where and who is handling them, and all critical processes have mutual verification from all (or both in reality) parties.
Ballot reconciliation ensures that every ballot printed is tracked, as well as ballots counted and ballots cast match up.
And as it is spread out over counties and districts, any injection anywhere would fail those checks.
I'm not an expert, and there is likely at lot more depth to this, but I did try to read up on it after the 2020 election and was sufficiently convinced at the time at least, but I'm happy for anyone to correct me.
because there is no safe way to vote digitally
Funny, don't you bank digitally?
I do, but I certainly don't consider it safe.
Bank transactions are not anonymous. A big advance in elections has been the secret vote.
This also makes me wonder what could be done to make discord (or something similar) a better venue for direct democracy. I know the circumstances in Nepal were exceptional, but I wonder if we will see other countries experiment with Discord for similar purposes. It seems like in Nepal they have essentially used it as a caucus, and I wonder if this could be shaped into a better way to elect leaders (or even legislate directly) than what most of the world is doing.
My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
> "in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done"
How is one faction holding an internal vote to impose rule on the rest of the people, who have no representation, anything at all like a democracy?
This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader who will oversee elections. They've gone for a 73-year-old former chief justice who is famous for being steadfastly anti-corruption.
It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join. So not representative of everyone, but obviously more democratic than if the military had just appointed someone by themselves
> "This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader"
They are imposing on a country who didn't vote for it a leader who will rule them.
> "It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join."
Only one political viewpoint was represented on that server—the viewpoint of people who agreed with the overthrowing-the-government politics they were organizing on it.
"Motivated" is the wrong question: people with different or opposed viewpoints, would refuse to participate in that teenager internet poll, because they would not identify it as a legitimate election. (And they'd be 100% right).
No one was made leader by the discord server. They made a suggestion, but it's only because that suggestion was accepted by the military leadership, who were de facto in control of the country, that she's been made prime minister.
Obviously, she will lose legitimacy as an interim leader if she doesn't swiftly organise free and fair elections for a legitimate prime minister. The fact that she's acceptable both to the young protestors and to the military leadership suggests she's a safe pair of hands for this role.
What outcome would you have preferred to see, given the circumstances?
In one sense representative democracy is mob rule scaled up, but yeah this is mob rule scaled way down then applied to everyone else without representation.
(“democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." etc)
Discord is a place you get randomly banned forever and that cannot be reliably linked to your real identity. It's really not a place anyone should rely on for any real world actions. (And I'm even skipping basics like transparency and future audits)
An IRC server or even a mailing list seems far better suited to the purpose than a notoriously closed and proprietary platform.
Absolutely. Discord is a scourge, a completely closed proprietary platform that is impossible to access via any standard compliant mechanism. Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
> Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
Does it currently? I have a couple Discord accounts that never got tied to a phone number and can still use them.
Telegram on the other hand does that, I've never managed to get my own account for it without a phone number... and all the anonymous (pay for temp number) end up giving you a shared "account" that anyone can take from you if they get attribued the same number (and they will).
Do you want people to participate, or do you want to have the moral high-ground for using X, Y, Z? Nobody outside our fringe circles use IRC server/mailing lists. Younger people are all on Discord.
I have no skin in this game, but I get the general line of thought.
You guys are using IRC??
I have, admittedly, used it once last year to get in touch with some people.
Liquid democracy is a total viable platform. But Discord is better in so far as it can be used for all kinds of things and conversations, not just for voting or debates.
Taiwan has been trying to develop web platforms explicitly for facilitating democratic decision-making. Might be something to look into.
Discord is a spectacularly bad fit for that, it was probably only used because the timetable was short and "it was there" and "everyone already had it".
I bet China is excited about that
> My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
I don't see that argument at all. What was so democratic about it? Violent overthrowal of the government may sometimes be justified, but it is not an act of democracy.
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. I didn’t mean the overthrow of the government was democratic. I was referring to the people in the discord server choosing a new leader.
I agree, but I don't know if a closed platform could ever be suitable for this.
I daydream about a open source peer reviewed system, that can process votes, control, manage government at every level through general public and open voting system. Distributing control ultimately.
Same here! But really wonder if we don’t already have all the needed technology and someone just needs to put it together…and convince their society to make use of it.
I really like this kind of conversation because as I read peoples comments I see where some of the obstacles are.
Seems a bit vulnerable to subversion of the host (and/or its government) once they decide to pay attention (or even through negligence; imagine a minister being banned because of some ML false-positive).
If the format is to be sustainable, they will need to find or found a different platform.
IMO, the superflat architecture is the opposite of maximum inclusion. The luckiest kid always wins the debate. Ensuring hierarchical mobility by allowing weaker players bunch of small wins is key.
Well I discussed it with my wife and extended family. We all agreed it was a terrible idea.
Yeah, a mob is a mob. Us human beings are despicable to each other tbh.
Blockchain is well suited for this. Polymarket really proved that blockchain can be useful beyond crypto, especially when trust is at stake.
Yeah my thoughts went to DAOs! I'm so excited for a future where we can use DAOs to harness the power of the people :)
I really hope not in their current form, given how inevitable anything based on smart contracts is to be exploited.