They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The CDS is slowly but surely undermining its own democratic traditions. It is now a marginal democracy where election-rigging is permitted. The CDS has fallen so far from its democratic origins that some of the people elected to the Representative Assembly do not believe that the majority have the right to make decisions; they don't believe in democracy itself. It is turning into a 'Virtual Zimbabwe'; elections take place but they are rigged in advance to support the incumbents. The opposition (who won the election) are routinely abused, personally attacked and hounded from office. Sound familiar? (This is, of course, nothing compared to the punishment meted out to the opposition in Zimbabwe. I'm drawing an analogy here, I'm saying the CDS is like a 'virtual Zimbabwe' to make a point.)
How does a virtual democracy end up taking this road? Well it begins with RA members who do not believe in democracy. At the RA meeting on 16 March 2008, representatives Beathan Vale (Simplicity Party), ThePrincess Parisi and MT Lundquist (NuCARE) indicated that they did not accept that majorities should take decisions. By a contorted twisting of logic they took the position that it is right for minorities to take decisions in defiance of majority opinion! These are people untethered from any sense of democratic politics, whose instincts are undemocratic and authoritarian. The only thing that matters to them is that they have a majority in the RA and that's all the justification they need to pass any laws they please. They have proposed and passed a number of changes to our election laws and Constitution in the run up to the by-elections due to be fought from 5-19 April which are designed to block any challenge to their domination.
There will be a by-election with voting from 19-26 April to fill two vacant seats left when Leon Ash and I resigned as members of the RA. I'm not going to rehash the reasons for our resignation and the CSDF decision not to fill the vacancies and force a by-election. Suffice it to say that after several weeks of personal attacks from ThePrincess Parisi and regular disruption of RA meetings by NuCARE and their ally Beathan Vale, I had had enough.
In the past few weeks members of the RA have either proposed or passed the following:
1. The RA has changed the election rules so that voters cannot eliminate factions they don't approve of. This means the by-election will be fought under different rules from the January election. We do not know who of the incumbent factions will be running in the by-election. We know that the DPU intend to stand and that Simplicity and NuCARE have said they won't. We shall see. The point is that the incumbents have changed the rules and this could benefit them should they choose to stand in the by-election. Sadly, the Scientific Council, the defenders of the Constitution and citizens' human rights, have chosen to allow this to happen.
2. The RA has raised the minimum faction size from 3 to 10% of the population which means the bar has been raised so that the minimum faction size is now 7. (I can't find a link to this on the CDS Forums page so this may have been decided by the RA without any public debate at all.) There's been a ridiculous smoke screen raised around this one. The change has allegedly been made to prevent the CSDF from splitting into two or three 'micro-factions' and gaming the electoral system which favours smaller parties. There is no CSDF plan to do this; it's an invented rumour to build support for this anti-democratic change. What it does though is prevent any new factions from forming on the same basis as the ones that fought the election in January. The incumbent factions only needed three members then, so why should the bar be raised now? There were, apparently, rumours that other people were going to start up a new faction to run in the by-election hence the need to raise the bar and prevent them from being able to stand; the Beathan/NuCARE coalition currently running the RA will brook no opposition. Again, the SC has failed to prevent this and has consequently failed in its duty to protect the Constitution and the founding documents and the human rights of CDS citizens. This is clearly an abuse of the powers of the RA. By sanctioning this change the SC has given carte blanche to the RA to rig this by-election and future elections. Now that they've been given their head I shudder to think what oppressive laws this Unrepresentative Assembly will come up with.
3. The RA seriously considered changing the Constitution to eliminate the two vacant seats the CSDF won in the January election 'for the time being' to pretend that there were 5 and not 7 seats. This would have made it easier for the Rump Assembly to achieve a quorum at meetings and pass further constitutional amendments. This would have completely ignored the January election result and disenfranchised the voters who chose the CSDF in the January elections. Fortunately the RA did not pass this outrageous proposal (I've christened it the 'Zimbabwe proposal') but it indicates the complete lack of democratic temperament in some members of the RA.
4. At the RA meeting on 24 March, ThePrincess Parisi proposed that the CSDF be prevented from participating in the by-elections. The argument is that, if the CSDF has candidates, they should take up the vacant seats and not force a by-election by refusing to sit in the RA. If the CSDF does not have candidates, they can't stand in the by-election. What this position fails to appreciate is that boycotting a parliament, on principle, is a perfectly legitimate political tactic. It is for the citizens to pass judgement on the CSDFs electoral tactic, not our opponents in the RA. This was the most outrageous proposal of all. Fortunately, most members of the RA can see that this is totally out of order and the proposal did not find support.
This Unrepresentative Assembly is out of control. They are passing legislation on a whim and most of it never appeared in their election manifestos. They claim to 'fear the CSDF' despite the fact that we resigned our seats and gave up any power we had. They have moved to rig the by-elections in such a way that the CSDF, and any other opposition, will be disadvantaged. The Scientific Council has, inexplicably, allowed this to happen. In the face of legislative tyranny we have a toothless judiciary incapable of defending the citizens' rights.
The only hope now is that the by-elections will return two representatives who will oppose the tyranny of the minorities and resist the undermining of our democracy. It's vital that all CDS citizens turn out to vote between 19 and 26 April and deliver a firm message in Defence of Democracy.
1 comment:
I fear that this post will make sense only to those who already know a great deal about the inner workings, institutions and people of the Confederation of Democratic Simulators ("CDS"), which is a pity, because it might have been most helpful (to those interested in the wider implications of the problems currently plaguing the CDS) to have explained a little more about the system from the start.
There is much to be learnt by the wider community of those interested in virtual world governance from the experience of the first virtual world democracy, so a more accessible background to the issues raised in your post would be most instructive.
I have been following the various political upheavals of the CDS for a number of years, and think that the following are the most important points to take from it (others' views may differ, of course):
(1) the government must exist to serve important needs that would exist even if the government did not: in other words, the community should come before the government, rather than the other way around (this was correctly identified in an earlier post on this 'blog);
(2) democracy is of very limited value when it is not accompanied by the effective rule of law; and
(3) constitutional safeguards of democracy and/or the rule of law are of little value when the constitution is easily amended by those in power.
Lesson no. 1 is easy to apply in the context of SecondLife: indeed, I am not aware of any other communities that have made the same mistake there. (2) and (3) are harder because they require quite a detailed solution, as well as a thorough grasp on both theory and practice, but it is certainly not so erudite as to be beyond the understanding of ordinarily intelligent people who are sufficiently inclined to attempt so to understand.
Of the other emergent and proto-democratic structures of which I am aware, the Extropians certainly seem to be correct about no. 1, although it is hard to tell whether they will get as far as nos. 2 and 3 being relevant; Al-Andalus again has no. 1 right, and early outlines of the constitution suggest a good response to nos. 2 and 3. The Metaverse Republic, with which I am involved, takes the existing SecondLife community as the community it serves, has a novel means of ensuring that the constitution is not too easily amended by those in power (but can be amended if there is sufficient consensus), and builds on the best traditions of common law judicial systems to uphold the rule of law.
I have certainly found it instructive to follow the developments in the CDS political system to have a good idea of the pitfalls to avoid when designing the constitution of the Metaverse Republic; some of the latest useful lessons include the importance of constitutional prohibitions on early or otherwise non-standard disclosures of election results (the CDS, of course, had the opposite problem to Zimbabwe about election result disclosure timing) and the importance of good rules of order in the legislature.
As anyone who has read "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" will know, it is often true that one learns most about how a thing works by watching what happens when it goes wrong; that is as true for democracy as it is for the human brain. Anyone involved in creating or maintaining a democratic community in SecondLife or any other virtual world(s) might find it most useful to follow the affairs of the CDS and other existing and emerging virtual world governance structures so that they might themselves avoid being the next virtual Zimbabwe.
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