Geographic Political Representation and Hominid Band Brain Functionality in the Internet Age
Thoughts on Distributed Representation in the Age of Connectivity
I have been pondering the changing nature of how the human brain’s primitive hardcoding maps to the modern world, especially how the ape-band or human-tribal association hardwiring get applied in the age of mass connectivity and physical pandemic lockdowns to US political representation. As humanity navigates the great leap to mass addressable two-way connectivity that is the internet age, the systems of political representation systems tied to a physical location will need to be revised to reflect the growth of online communities.
Looking back into prehistory, humanity existed in small mobile hunter-gatherer bands, with a significant portion of the human brain dedicated to tracking and analyzing all the relationships and relative staus within that small group, likely 20 or so, possibly up to a hundred, never much more.
As human civilization grew and cities rose, people passed the level where the relationships and status of everyone within a given location could be mentally tracked, so status markers and forms of sub-location allegiance grouping formed. Gangs, guilds, associations - all were substructures within which humans tracked relationship and status within a larger population of a given location.
Skipping tens of thousands of years forward to around 40 years ago, people lived in vast heavily populated cities or remote sparsely populated rural locations, newspapers were actually printed on paper and delivered by bicycle before dawn, avidly awaited to gain access to daily news and opinion. There were three networks of any note (PBS, then as now, is irrelevant), each network offering a half-hour nightly news program. All phones were fixed on hardline, not mobile, and many phones still dialed with an actual rotating dial. The people with whom you interacted were either physically proximate, you interacted one at a time over the phone, or you wrote them a letter and mailed it in an envelope using a stamp.
Those televised faces on the screen that you brought into your living room every week were seen so often that they were processed by that ape-based brain as friends - you likely saw the faces of Sonny Crocket and Thomas Magnum and Daisy Duke more often than you saw some of your real-world friends. Repeated exposure to specific human faces does imprinty things in that ape-based human brain.
Since your coworkers were nearby for more waking hours than your family, the ‘tribe’ your brain tracked consisted of family, your coworkers, others you physically interacted with on a regular basis, and those TV actor faces.
The representational conglomeration from a political standpoint was obviously geographical - local state and Federal by popular vote determined representation, aggregated by where you happened to reside and thus spend most of your time.
Fast forward to now: Those faces you see on the screen are likely binge streamed for at most weeks until you’ve seen all the new episodes, then you go look for something else, so those faces imprint more like village visitors that you see once a year than family. You spend time (especially in the age of COVID-19) in the virtual company of coworkers, likely distributed around the planet, and your family is likely more around you than anyone else; and you spend your voluntary associative time virtually with individuals who share your interests, again without regard to geographic location.
You may not see faces, but since you “talk” with them so regularly your brain’s hardwiring associates the people you interact with electronically along with your family and your coworkers as your tribe - so a major fraction of your associations are idea-based rather than location-based.
But in a political representation system solely based on geography, that idea-based association of distributed individuals has no political representation - there’s no “representative from [idea]”.
Since political representation is determined by where you reside, whether or not you have anything in common whatsoever with the people who also happen to reside nearby, your local political boundaries, however they may have been gerrymandered as part of that political capture, determine your government representation.
Where I live in Silicon Valley as a voter of other than the captor political party, I have absolutely zero government representation, either at the state government level or in the House or Senate. The California captor party, Democrats with 46.3% plurality of 20.9 million CA voter registrations, has effectively disenfranchised the remaining 53.7% of CA registered voters statewide through the capture of all the mechanisms of power, aided by the naive and underwhelming intellect of a once-and-future steroid-enhanced actor accidentally elected as Governor.
Statewide the large urban Democrat-capture locations combined with gerrymandered geographical district shapes result in that 46% voter registration share Democrat Party owning 75% of the state assembly (60 of 80 seats), 75% of the state senate (30 of 40 seats), 80% (42 of 53 seats) of the California House of Representatives delegation, and 100% (2 of 2) US Senators, plus every statewide office.
So how does this get fixed? How do we bring political representation into alignment with the real-world internet-enabled distributed polity?
Instead of tying political representation to some group of people who happen to sleep in the same arbitrary region, how about some form of at-large system that would let people across geographies self-associate for political representation? Any at-large election process would still allow voters in one location to aggregate their votes by geography, but it would also let voters in the minority in one location use their vote to elect political representatives that share their positions.
Or how about an even more fluid system of reassignable vote proxies? Voters could assign or revoke their proxy votes at any time, using the marvel of instantaneous communication to support votes they care about, or alternately leave their proxy vote in the hands of a representative that they agree with and trust.
Both at-large and proxy systems would provide more attack surfaces for those attempting to change vote totals from reality, but the last election conclusively proved there are already multiple vulnerable attack surfaces exposed to manipulation. And the current geography-based vote aggregation and representation system offers well-proven traditional capture mechanisms that make every voting method vulnerable to interference at politically-captive counting locations.
The U.S. Senate is a bit of a special case – Senators were originally specifically intended to represent the government of the States at the Federal level, given multiple specific responsibilities that ensured the State government’s interests were represented. With the 17th amendment, that direct State Government representation was destroyed, turning Senators into super-Representatives. That damage has been done, though retaining super-Representative Senatorial structure could provide a geographic representation counterweight to an at-large or proxy House of Representatives. Ideally I’d support repealing the 17th Amendment, but a statewide direct election of Senators combined with an at-large or revokable-proxy based House of Representatives could work.
The best answer is not clear. Pure-geographic representation clearly does nothing to represent the interests of major political blocks that are not geographically concentrated, and it never has. But internet-age communications could clearly enable a better representation model if sufficient security and transparency could be included at the base layer level. Both at-large and revokable proxy systems would also have downsides, but both do seem to me to have the potential to retain both vote integrity and the representation of minority political constituencies better than the current capturable geographic system of representation.