Bionic Democracy

Here is one sentence to summarize the five sections of this post: 1) Democracy is in poor health 2) because power has shifted from governments to businesses 3) but there is a way we can reclaim power 4) and we have built a solution 5) that helps democracy evolve as fast as the world evolves.

1) Democracy is in poor health

I love our US democracy like I love a feeble grandparent hobbling down the hallway, proud of everything they have accomplished, rich with masterful wisdom about a world which no longer exists.

All things considered, our democracy has lived a long, healthy, robust life. And yet today we have cataracts, arthritis, memory loss, and more. Here is a partial list of our current ailments:

• Money in politics (corruption, SuperPACs, donor influence)
• Lobbyists against the public interest
• Voter suppression/disenfranchisement
• Lack of civic engagement & low turnout
• Voting system vulnerability to hacking/fraud
• Lack of choices/parties
• Lack of ranked-choice voting
• Gerrymandering
• Horse race journalism
• The electoral college

The list goes on. This post isn’t about the people who currently lead our government. It’s about the systemic sickness that enabled those people to metastasize. The diagnosis looks grim, but it’s no time for hospice care. We can’t let this old bird pass away. We need our best doctors keeping American democracy alive. For example, I recommend the good doctors Represent.us and Equal Citizens, who are mainlining the proper medicine.

But no matter what we do, it’s hard to imagine this body returning to the level of strength and fitness it once enjoyed. If we want to see a full recovery, we need to accept that some body parts that worked well in the old body must now be replaced by new, different parts. That hip bone from the late 1700s? It’s time to take it out and replace it with titanium. If democracy’s ears are bad, maybe the replacement will be Change.org’s expansive vision for enabling a responsive government. If democracy’s voter fraud immune system is weak, maybe blockchains will replace it. It’s time to get to the operating room. We must emerge with a bionic body that maintains all the irreplaceable humanity of our system, while upgrading core democracy infrastructure to be strong, resilient, and future-proof.

There’s something else. I’m afraid that an entire arm of this body will need to be amputated. The regulatory arm, which used to exert power over businesses. It’s paralyzed, atrophied, unable to lift a finger. The good news is that we have a small team of people who have been designing a bionic replacement arm that will ultimately have greater power to influence businesses than the old arm. Let me tell you a bit more about what went wrong with the old arm, and then I’ll share why we’re working to build this replacement arm, and what it can do.

2) Power has shifted from governments to businesses

Why has our democracy become so broken? Did we get lazy and take our system for granted? Was it a failure of education? Of the media? Maybe we simply ignored the words of Benjamin Franklin: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”

While all of those reasons may be true, I have been thinking a lot about another major reason that is worthy of more discussion: There has been a major shift in who actually holds power in the world. It used to be that the vast majority of the power over how the world worked was in the hands of governments. But every day that power shifts more and more away from governments and into the hands of businesses. Yes, governments still have legal authority over how businesses behave, but it no longer feels like governments are really pulling the strings. Whether because of corruption or shifting ideologies, politicians have largely abdicated their power, and passed the baton to businesses. The “arm” which has become paralyzed is the arm that used to impose the will of the people on businesses. Now, businesses impose their will on government and people alike. Yes, our democracy still has a regulatory arm, but corporate lobbyists have filled it so full of cancerous corruption that it can no longer effectively act as a counterbalance to business interests.

Think about who really defines where you live, what you spend your days doing, what you eat, what you read, what you watch, your medical care, your transportation, what things you own, how you communicate with friends, and so on. These things make up your experience of life. Many of them used to be defined by the government (and still are in some countries), but today these things are increasingly defined by businesses.

Huge multinational businesses didn’t really exist when the US government was designed. No one could have anticipated how we would need to manage them today. Now we must attempt to manage them with the democratic system we have, but even if we succeed at fixing every aforementioned problem with our democracy, that legacy system may still prove to be ill-equipped to govern big companies. If I really stretch my mind I can imagine the US government as a well-oiled machine full of highly-effective, honest leaders who unwaveringly ensure that businesses only act in ways that serve the public interest. But even if that dream were to come true, we would only have jurisdiction over that business within the United States. Companies are global. Manufacturing, trade, financial markets, and supply chains are all transnational. So are the environmental, economic and cultural externalities of these systems. If our democratic power really stops at the US border, then it will prove totally ineffective at changing the way global capitalism actually works. That is why I worry that our democratic system may be approaching a point of obsolescence at which democratic governments (and by extension, voters) will no longer rule the world. Instead, businesses will.

The idea of a global corporatocracy is frightening because we know that businesses are motivated by money, and we have already seen how their behavior is often sociopathic, by design. Even though corporations are full of humans who want to do good, management must obey the board, who obeys the shareholders, who obey the inhuman algorithms. We cannot allow humans to be demoted from the role of governing humanity.

How, then, might we preserve all the beauty, innovation, and usefulness of capitalism, while building a new people-powered governance system capable of imposing our human values and preventing businesses from indulging in the unfettered destruction they are so prone to?

3) How we can reclaim power

I’m about to reveal plans for democracy’s bionic arm. This is a plan to take over the world. You might anticipate a dramatic story: “Businesses have seized power from global governments and now the people must launch a daring global counter-offensive to reclaim power!” But in reality the task at hand may be pretty easy. Honestly, I don’t think businesses will even put up a fight. The reason we have such an easy opportunity to take the power back from businesses is because businesses don’t actually care about having power.

Think of a business as a computer. You give it a bunch of data, and it decides what to do to make money. You can control its decisions by controlling its data. Financial analysts decide what a business should do based on many sources of data, but the most important source of data is consumer demand data. Every successful business is obsessed with learning what their customers want. Today, they look closely at what we buy, but they don’t actually know what we want, what we feel, or why we make purchase decisions. One reason they don’t do what we want is that they don’t really understand us. How could they? We almost never tell them what’s really in our hearts and minds.

Now, some may doubt that businesses will ever really listen to us. Perhaps we have tried to make our voices heard before, and failed. Perhaps we wanted McDonalds to use more sustainable ingredients, so we asked them to do that in a Yelp review, or on Twitter, or with a petition. We were ignored, and we concluded that businesses don’t care what we think, and we have little power to change them. But perhaps the only reason our voices didn’t have an impact was because we failed to give the computer what it knows how to process: financial data. When decision makers at McDonalds are deciding whether to invest in more sustainable ingredients, they are looking for financial data. No one is saying, “Hey guys, we should research petitions so we know what random people on the internet have to say!” It would be totally irrelevant.

To get through, we must speak the language of financial analysts. For example, decision makers will pay close attention to a report like this. These investment bankers know how to talk to McDonald’s about sustainable ingredients. First they get their attention by saying, “we will tell you why consumers do what they do!”

They give the reader several pages of financial context and then BOOM: Numbers that show the relationship between sustainable ingredients and purchase intent…

This report does what Yelp/Twitter/petitions can’t do: It allows financial analysts, product developers and marketers to build a business case for increasing sustainable ingredients. Decisions are made based on reports like this. Furthermore, that little chart is based on surveys of only a couple thousand people, and those people aren’t even verified customers at any particular restaurant. And yet analysts want this sort of data so badly that they are willing to pay researchers lots of money to see it.

So imagine how obsessed analysts would be if they could actually get a spreadsheet of raw data like this from millions of people. Imagine if those people were verified customers. Today, customers like us have no voice unless we are one of the couple thousand people in the world chosen to participate in some lame survey. We can’t effectively communicate what we want to these decision makers. But imagine we could actually create this sort of data any time we wanted, and push it to these analysts instantly. Imagine we could send them data that proved to them they would make more money by doing what we wanted.

If we could do that, they would do anything we wanted, because that’s what they are programmed to do. If we could do that, then every time we sent a little packet of this data, it would be a direct expression of power, capable of changing business behavior. It would be a vote for what the business should do. What if there were a more powerful way to reimagine the age-old idea of “voting with your money”?

4) We have built a solution

Allow me to share the product that our company has built to let you vote with your money. It’s called MoneyVoice. MoneyVoice gives you the right to vote at businesses where you spend money. Every purchase earns you one vote at that business, and you can vote for what you want them to do.

When you install our app, we pull transaction data from your payment card and show you the businesses where you have spent money. For each business you see a list of short feedback that has been written by other verified customers. You can either vote for what you agree with, or add your own feedback. It’s a new way for us to express what we want, and every single vote is tied to verified financial data — our values are translated into the language that businesses understand.

It’s probably already clear why, if MoneyVoice becomes wildly popular, this unprecedented type of data would become indispensable for businesses. But could this sort of voting system also begin to change how people exert control and influence over the world? Let’s imagine the implications for democratic governance.

A voting system like this is only a bionic arm… it could obviously never replace our regular democracy, because of some big drawbacks. First, you have to have money to vote, so voting rights would not be equitably distributed. Second, it’s limited to businesses, so you couldn’t really vote on topics like tax policy, public educational standards, etc. Third, the results of voting have no legally-binding power. MoneyVoice lets anyone vote on pretty much anything, so there will be a lot of silly requests that are unreasonable or make no sense. There can be no expectation that this voting system will reliably result in whatever we vote for actually happening. However, when a business is actually evaluating a certain decision, this voting will go from fanciful to extremely powerful very quickly. Whether or not voters get what they want will depend on the data they generate.

Imagine that McDonald’s is considering a switch to sustainable ingredients that will cost them $50 million to make. They can look at MoneyVoice to understand how many customers want them to take this action, how loyal those customers are, and how much they usually spend. They also know that when they take action and message these customers about their big improvement, there will be additional value they can measure in terms of marketing and branding. MoneyVoice makes the existing financial opportunity visible, and also generates new financial opportunity. So ultimately, if enough McDonald’s customers vote so McDonald’s anticipates a $60 million return on their investment in sustainable ingredients, they’ll do it. If they anticipate only a $40 million value, they won’t. This voting system exerts power in a completely different form, but that power is real nonetheless.

There is a reason why they say “the customer is king.” Businesses are slaves to consumer demand. We control consumer demand, so we actually do have all the power. It just hasn’t felt like we have had the power because we haven’t had a tool to get organized and explicitly use that power. The next evolution of democracy will make that power real.

5) Helping democracy evolve as fast as the world evolves

If we put a voting layer on top of all commerce are we essentially creating the first global direct democracy? More and more of our biggest problems (the climate crisis, human rights, etc) are transnational problems. Individual nation-states are less and less equipped to solve them, and the UN is insufficient. None of these institutions are evolving fast enough to keep up with the problems. But global businesses are already designed to operate on a transnational basis, and they can make very big changes, quickly and effectively. Is now the time when we need to build a voting system that doesn’t acknowledge national borders and bypasses governments entirely?

A moment of respect for our aged democratic body. Designed by people with flesh and hearts and brains, the longevity of its “checks and balances” system has been rooted in its brilliant understanding of people with flesh and hearts and brains. But today, power itself is bionic, and becoming more so each day. It is still expressed by humans, but increasingly it is also expressed digitally by financial markets, computer algorithms, smart contracts, distributed autonomous corporations, and artificial intelligence. The old checks and balances don’t work. Power is expressed through many interconnected networks and systems. The government alone cannot solve our problems. Capitalism alone cannot solve our problems. We must use our influence over both of these worlds. We used to elect people to represent us in the smoke-filled room where decision-making happened. Now, the room where it happens may just contain a financial analyst with a cup of coffee and a couple computer monitors. We need a new way to get into that room.

We would love to hear your ideas about this. How might a “customer democracy” unfold? How should it unfold? If you think this is an experiment worth pursuing, join MoneyVoice. We chose the name MoneyVoice because we want to give your money a voice… our spending has so much power, and rather than remaining silent we want that power to sing. If we can unlock the power we hold as customers, we can get our hands back on the steering wheel of capitalism. We can bring the imperatives of business more in line with human imperatives, and make sure that businesses are delivering to us the world that we want. You could argue that “getting what we want” is the shared purpose of both democracy and capitalism, so perhaps there is some logic to the increasing convergence of these two worlds. Ultimately, I believe our body politic can enjoy perfect health once again if we vote in more ways than one. Our democracy will be halfway healed when we get money out of our politics. But to fully reclaim power we must also get politics into our money.

Brent Schulkin is the Founder/CEO of MoneyVoice. Follow him on Twitter.