Status of this annex. This is an annex to the document Civic Voice. It establishes nothing and creates no duties: it sets out the cases, the numbers and the sources behind the statements of that document. Where they diverge, Civic Voice prevails; binding force belongs to the Declaration and the Charter.
It is commonly said that people have no way of being heard. That is inaccurate, and the inaccuracy gets in the way of seeing the real problem. There are more ways to pass an opinion upwards today than at any time in history. A petition is gathered in an evening. A letter to a representative takes a minute to send. Public hearings are open. Most countries have a procedure for public comment on draft acts. Social networks carry anything at all to anyone at all. Polling companies measure the public mood weekly. A rally remains lawful almost everywhere.
There is a surplus of channels. What is missing is not the channel. What is missing is the proof.
Everything that travels through those channels breaks against one and the same question, and that question is legitimate:
- "A million signatures" - how many of them were put there by living people? How many people signed twice? How many signatures were sold, generated, or put there in someone else's name?
- "The poll showed 70 per cent" - who was asked, how many of them were there, how did the question read word for word, who commissioned and paid for the poll?
- "Two million comments came in" - from people?
- "A hundred thousand people turned out" - who counted them, and on whose behalf did they turn out besides their own?
Note how this objection is built. It does not argue on the merits. It does not say "you are wrong". It says "it is not known whether you exist". And that is enough to make no reply without losing face: the addressee has not rejected the opinion of people, they have doubted the proof, and doubt looks like caution rather than contempt.
That is why a civic voice can be ignored. Not because those in power are evil, but because the count is broken, and truly broken.
A case worth knowing in full
In 2017 the US Federal Communications Commission was conducting the mandatory public comment procedure on repealing the net neutrality rules. That procedure is not decorative: it is built into the American Administrative Procedure Act, and the agency is obliged to consider the objections received. More than twenty-two million comments came in - an unheard-of number, a triumph of civic participation, one might think.
The investigation by the New York State Attorney General, published on 6 May 2021, established: almost eighteen million of them were fake. A large proportion of them were submitted in the names of real people without their knowledge, using their genuine names and addresses.
Both sides of the dispute forged comments, and that matters more than the numbers themselves. The trade association of communications providers spent 4.2 million dollars and obtained more than 8.5 million fake comments in favour of repeal. On the other side, one nineteen-year-old submitted more than 7.7 million comments in favour of keeping the rules. Half a million fake letters went to Congress on top of that.
Stay with those two numbers. The industry campaign cost millions of dollars - and one person with ordinary programming skills did almost as much for nothing. That was the price of forgery then. It has only fallen since.
The upshot of this story is heavier than it looks at first glance. It was not the eighteen million fake comments that lost their value. All twenty-two million lost it, the four million genuine ones included. After a case like that, any agency in any country gains a legitimate ground for not believing public input at all - and it has that ground now for good.
It will get worse from here, for a reason that depends on no one's ill will. Producing plausible human text in any quantity has become cheap and will become cheaper still. Telling what a person wrote from what a machine wrote, by the text itself, will soon be impossible in principle. The only thing that will remain distinguishable is not the text but its source: whether a single living person, speaking of their own will, is confirmed behind the utterance.
Saying "politics has degraded" is easy but useless: it is unclear what to repair. So let us take them apart separately. There are five faults, they are of different natures, and one tool does not strike at all of them.
The first fault: aggregation
Elections compress the whole variety of a person's views into a single choice once every few years.
Imagine a voter who agrees with party A on health care, with party B on taxes, with no one on foreign policy, and who holds a strong opinion on a question that appears in no programme at all. What can they express with their vote? One of two or three ready-made combinations, each of which suits them a third of the way.
The consequence matters more than it seems. The position of society on a particular question, in this system, is not merely measured badly - it has no representation at all. There is nowhere to get it from. Referendums are rare, expensive, and in most countries are held by decision of those in power, not by decision of people.
The second fault: the horizon
Decisions whose consequences will arrive in thirty years are taken by people whose horizon is bounded by the next election. This is not a defect of character but the design of the incentives: a politician who sacrifices today's well-being for a result a generation away will not survive in office to see that result.
The injured party - those who do not yet vote and those who are not yet born - has no representation in any political system in the world. Their interest by construction has no bearer.
The third fault: territory
The largest questions of our time have no national address. Climate change, the taxation of transnational profit, the rules for artificial intelligence, resilience to pandemics, the fate of the ocean and the atmosphere - not one of them is resolved within the borders of a single country, and not one parliament in the world has sufficient competence over them.
States know this and try to coordinate. Coordination stalls for an understandable reason: every government answers to its own voters, while the benefit of a coordinated decision goes to everyone, including those who did not take part. No one is re-elected for international agreement.
The fourth fault: the collapse of trust in input
This is what was discussed above. Telling genuine public input from manufactured input has become impossible. It is not the forgery that loses its value - it is the genuine article, because it is now indistinguishable.
The fifth fault: the asymmetry of organization
This fault is the deepest and the least known, although it was described long ago - by the economist Mancur Olson in his 1965 work "The Logic of Collective Action".
It comes to this. Take a decision that brings twenty companies a hundred million each and costs twenty million citizens a hundred roubles each. The companies' total gain is two billion. The citizens' total loss is two billion. The forces are equal, one might think.
They are not equal. Twenty companies find it easy to organize: there are few of them, each knows the others, each has a hundred million at stake, and the outlay on defending the interest pays back hundreds of times over. Twenty million citizens find it impossible to organize: they do not know one another, each has a hundred roubles at stake, and spending even an hour of one's own time defending those hundred roubles is unprofitable for each separately, though profitable for all together.
That is why a concentrated interest defeats a dispersed one almost always - regardless of who is right, regardless of the honesty of politicians, and regardless of the form of government. This is not a flaw of democracy but the arithmetic of organization, and it works the same way under any regime.
From this comes an important conclusion: a dispersed majority loses not because it is small or because it is wrong, but because gathering is expensive for it. Anything that makes gathering radically cheaper changes the outcome.
It is the design, not a conspiracy
Not one of the five faults was created by ill intent.
Representation was invented when there was no other way: millions of people could not physically discuss common matters and take decisions without intermediaries, and there was no way of counting their votes honestly. Choosing those who would decide for us was the only way out, and everything was built on it - from the local council to the United Nations.
That worked, and achieved a great deal. One thing it did not do: it gave people no way of expressing a common will themselves.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says in Article 21: the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in Article 25, enshrines the right of every citizen to take part in the conduct of public affairs. The UN Charter opens with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations".
The right is recognized. A procedure by which that right would be exercised directly does not exist. A recognized right that no one can assert remains a norm without application.
We do not hold that anyone is to blame. We hold that the reason why it could not be done has disappeared. Put together the two things said above: gathering has become cheap to the point of nothing - and at the same time worthless, because the count is broken. To repair the count is to give cheap gathering its meaning back, and this is the only one of the five faults that can be repaired by a tool rather than by politics. What comes of that, and why it required constituting a people rather than building a single service, is in the document Civic Voice.
- The investigation by the New York State Attorney General into fake comments in the procedure of the US Federal Communications Commission, 6 May 2021 - report. All the numbers are taken from it: more than 22 million comments, almost 18 million of them fake, 8.5 million for 4.2 million dollars from an industry association, 7.7 million from one person
- Mancur Olson. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1965. This is a doctrinal source, not a norm: the mechanism it describes is verifiable and observable
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21 - text
- The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 25 - text
- The UN Charter, the preamble - text
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