Why Steemit is Not a Good Model for Anarchism (Yet)

When I discovered Steemit a couple months ago, I was very excited about the platform, and I still am. You see, for me, Steemit doesn’t represent just a potential source of income, or STEEM an alternative form of currency, it represents a social experiment. This experiment is not to figure out how to make a bunch of people rich, which it is already well on its way to doing, but for me it’s partially as a model to figure out how to organize a society in a way that doesn’t involve centralized coercive authority.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it’s really possible for Steemit or any other social media platform to be coercive. People who sign up for Facebook are entering into a privately owned media space, and are free to come and go as they please, and this is true of Steemit and other social media as well. What I am trying to say, however, is that the lessons we learn here on Steemit could be the working model for expanding the idea to broader society. In other words, if we can’t make decentralization of authority work here, it will never work in the outside world. I believe that it will, but I see some glaring problems with Steemit as the model, and have some potential solutions.

Democracy

Steemit.com, as it sits, is basically a pure democracy as far as I can tell from reading the white paper and using the platform for a few weeks. Everybody can vote, and if they choose to do so, things they want to get done, well they tend to get done more. One thing about this that is good in my opinion, and a lot of other people have a problem with it, is that the voting is weighted. People who have more Steem Power have more voting power. What this means to others I’ve heard here lamenting about it, is that it’s “unfair” to have so much weight to pull in your voting. I see it in the opposite light. As with free market economics, people who know what they’re doing tend to amass more wealth than people who don’t. In keeping with that theme, they have more “voting” power with their wealth. They pull more weight in society because they’ve got more to spend, and they tend to do it wisely in general. I think that people who are amazingly competent should be the ones deciding how things are done, and so that works for me. That just makes logical sense, so in this respect, Steemit.com is structured well.

The problem I see with it as a democracy however, is that pure democracy is essentially mob rule. Now this isn’t much of an issue today on the Steemit platform because we have a bunch of wealthy individuals (whales and dolphins) interacting with a relatively small bunch of people with some obscure philosophical opinions, which sort of civilizes the community in ways you don’t see elsewhere. But if this thing scales as we’re all hoping it does, that mob will have some serious weight to it, and it won’t have a sound philosophical foundation. This is the masses we’re talking about here. And as with all pure democracies, the problem with mob rule is that injustices, obscenely grotesque injustices on occasion for that matter, tend to occur to people who have done nothing wrong, because the mob is fickle and emotion-driven. People get swept up in emotional firestorms and do rash things. It’s just a thing that happens time and again when people get together in groups and make snap decisions, with no checks on their power to enact these decisions. It’s why people sometimes get crushed to death at rock concerts, there are sometimes vigilante groups that kill and why Socrates was forced to drink hemlock. The mob is a scary motherfucker when it goes bad, and I don’t see any mechanism (may be my lack of understanding here) on the Steemit platform that would counter it in any way. As this thing scales, I think we may not be able to do much when someone is about to be metaphorically lynched by the flagging system. Which leads to my next point.

Dispute Resolution

There is no dispute resolution function built into the Steem platform. The flagging system is useful only insofar as the person doing the flagging is following the rules. The rules set forth say that you should only be flagging people that break the rules, but what about the accuser? How do we face our accusers so to speak, and how do we resolve a dispute if that accuser has erroneously flagged our post on Steemit?

Now I’ve thought about it given the current system, and you could do a couple of things. You could flag the flagger, a sort of anti-flag :). But what if your unjust flagger has much more Steem Power than you? Your flag is going to be a drop in the bucket in comparison, and you’ve got no recourse on an individual level against this person.

Another counter to this problem would be to rally your friends to flag one of this powerful person’s posts to sort of hit him where it hurts, in the pocket book. This might be effective to a certain extent, but it is analogous to war-making in the real world. Like a war, it will end only in destruction. Nothing can really be gained in resolving disputes in this way. It’s sort of eye-for-and-eye, which tends to escalate, and in the real world people get physically hurt, in addition to having massive quantities of wealth destroyed. On Steemit, no one’s going to be able to use the platform to physically assault you, but people may get hurt in real life regardless, because their livelihoods may come to depend on their income stream here. Arbitrarily disrupting someone’s livelihood is a serious matter, and so I consider this a serious problem with Steemit.

When we say anarchic civilization, the operative term here is civilization. Steemit, while a wonderful place to spend some time, lacks an essential component to be considered civilized independent of our current civilized systems (courts, police, etc.). In order to fix this, I think you would have to build a dispute resolution system of some kind in order to make it civilized without interference from government. That’s one of the essential roles that the government fulfills these days (with courts and the police that enforce the laws) that would need to be replaced in an anarchic system. If Steemit is to be a model for an anarchic society, it needs to have a dispute resolution system that will allow your reputation to be restored if you’re damaged by this flagging system unjustly. There is no “due process” built into the system in which an appeal can be made against an accusation that impacts both the user’s near term livelihood and the user’s reputation, representing his or her long term ability to function within the platform.

There’s Hope Yet

That said, it would seem easy enough (being a layperson in regards to computer programming, I’m assuming here), to program in something to Steemit that would fix the problems associated with pure democracies. An application could be built independent of Steemit.com that would function as a DRO, or the Dispute Resolution Organization theorized about by anarchist thinkers that would take the place of courts and the rest of the criminal justice system. A problem with this is that even if the DRO was able to bring resources to bear against an un-repentant false flagger, the damage done by flagging would still be irreversible given the current rules as far as I understand them. We don’t want them to simply retaliate, which is possible now, but to be restorative in nature. Restoring a user’s good name and monetary losses would be an essential part of making dispute resolution civilized, and therefore a good model for broader society. Just being able to retaliate against bad actors isn’t good enough, in my opinion, because it cannot be restorative.

Disclaimer: I did spend a decent amount of time searching Steemit for this subject, and found it difficult to look this type of information up using the platform, and I’m relatively new here, so I may have missed some important posts that have covered this subject in this way, already. As far as I know, however, the above is an original interpretation of the problem, even though some people have talked about the flagging as an issue in a different context. If this has been covered already in this way, please include links in a comment below, and I’d be happy to edit and add them to this post (if we get to it in the next 24 hours of course).

Image source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/app/item/2008661349/