Pinchbeck talks with Benjamin Knight, a New Zealand-based co-founder of Loomio, the open-source platform for collective decision-making and collaborative governance. Knight describes how the project came out of Occupy, where in-person general assemblies proved constrained by having to gather everyone in one place, a condition that selected for the loudest voices and produced what he calls informal dictatorships. He cites the essay on the tyranny of structurelessness on how unacknowledged power structures emerge in movements that reject formal structure. The tool, then in late-stage beta with roughly fifty thousand users, had spread beyond activists to local governments, parent-teacher associations, permaculture projects and community currency groups. Knight points to Podemos in Spain as evidence of appetite for decentralized decision-making. Pinchbeck jokes throughout about New Zealand as a lifeboat nation for wealthy foreigners.
Guest: Benjamin Knight
In brief
- Knight argues that social media has been effective at mobilizing large numbers around causes but poor at converting that energy into sustained collective action, which is the gap Loomio was built to close.
- He says the requirement that participants be in the same place at the same time was what degraded Occupy's assemblies, favoring those able to dominate or intimidate.
- Knight invokes the tyranny of structurelessness to describe the accidental power hierarchies that appear when a group refuses any formal structure.
- He reports that the platform's users are mostly not activists, spanning local governments doing citizen consultation, parent-teacher associations, permaculture projects and alternative currency groups.
- Knight cites Podemos, which grew out of the indignados and 15-M movements and won 1.25 million votes and five European Parliament seats within roughly six weeks of forming, as a case of decentralized organizing translating into political power.
- He argues democracy should be reconceived as something practiced daily in schools, neighborhoods and communities rather than monopolized by a professionalized governing class.
Full text
hey everybody we are here with the trues please subscribe to the trues down at the bottom of the little thingamabob and i'm very delighted today to be here with uh benjamin knight uh who comes from new zealand which uh people don't really talk about new zealand very much but the my understanding is if you want to survive the upcoming apocalypse new zealand is like the best place you could possibly be possibly it's definitely seen as a lifeboat uh a lifeboat nation which i probably shouldn't be talking about much to an international audience well exactly it's like a secret thing everybody knows that's why like they've got this like secret sauce in new zealand where they're anticipating they're going to make it and everybody else is going to go down the tubes and we we are getting this influx of a progressively minded i mean during the bush regime we got an influx of basically like people escaping conservatism in the u. s so we tend to get a some progressive super wealthy people from like the tech world and whatever marketing and they're they're figuring out they're buying huge tracts of land and building kind of echo utopities utopias just like the apocalypse yeah so progressive and not progressive actually we have this interesting mixture of like the james cameron's and then the shania twain's coming in and buying up nice nice okay cool so that's a little tip for you guys and but ben himself has been actively engaged with building a new thingamabob to help people do what a thingamabob so it's an open source tool for collective decision making collaborative governance and democratic organizing so to you know an online tool called lumio lumio what's the name from the name comes from this concept of alone like weaving diverse perspectives together into a cohesive hole that's like stronger than any other parts so it's a space for sounds a little hippie it sounds a little heavy when you explain it and it's a you know a url that was easy to get which is also nice but it's you know it's just an online space for groups of people to come together make clear decisions that can be put into action so social media has been really good at mobilizing huge numbers of people around social causes but it's been really challenging to translate that mobilized energy into sustained constructive ongoing action and i mean the in-person you know general assembly collective decision-making that's practiced and lots of social justice movements and you know popularized in the occupy movement in a big way it's really constrained by needing to be in the same place at the same time so it was that experience of being involved with occupy that lid right a bunch of us in new zealand and you saw kind of occupy disintegrate or degenerate from idealism and everybody working together to angry white men trying to like take over the discussion and you know just the selection pressure that having to be in the same place at the same time puts on a social grouping like selecting for the the loudest voices and like people who are able to intimidate other people and the dominant demographic just ends up you get this sort of emergence of informal dictatorships and so there's a term the tyranny of structurelessness there's a really nice paper written about the emergence of these these sort of accidental power structures these informal dictatorships that come out when there is just a total lack of construction got it okay so much potential for like genuinely distributed decentralized democracy and such strong limitations when you have to be in the same place at the same time so you're like passionate and inspired about what you're doing somewhat you're feeling good about it right now and so tell me so like um all right so you started this thing a few years ago after occupy now you have like 50 000 people roughly using it and something's happening in spain like people got a little interested yeah so i mean it's this crazy mixture of diversity of groups so like it was very obvious early on that it's not just activists they need to make decisions together so it got picked up in you know local governments using it for citizen collaboration through to like parent-teacher associations making decisions between meetings and are you saying like anybody watching this if they want to create a local group today they could go to lumio. com and they could like start a local group and start making decisions together and like anything they want to decide about yeah absolutely so that's pretty rad i mean we're still in a beta stage of development so it's still you know it's a late stage prototype what about really nasty people like white supremacists like what do they want to decide on who they hate most so we haven't we haven't seen that happen and it's not to say that it won't but we haven't had to deal with that situation yet and i think a lot in large part it's because it's a purpose-driven space for productive respectful you know people who just want to get things done together in a collaborative way white supremacist groups don't tend to place much value on inclusion and participation i mean the whole premise is based on exclusion and top you know command and control so the group so it's more like more like nice people so it gives you this really rosy view of the world working on a project like this because you're every day you're contacted by you know like 200 people working on permaculture projects like community you know community alternative currency groups and then the social movement in spain that you mentioned the podemos movement podemos what does that mean again podemos translates to we can we can my spanish is a little bit rusty in in spanish it's a it's a little less corny than we can sounds in english like it's much more action oriented but they i mean they're this huge grassroots social movement that came out of the the indignados and the 15 am movements in latin america and spain which predated the occupy movement and really inspired a lot of the tactics employed in the occupy movement and now they've started a political party at the start of this year and after a month and a half they got 1.25 million votes in the european election and got five seats in the european parliament right now they're polling first in spain so they've they're using more than what do you mean after like a month and a half i mean afterwards enough of a party existing they ran in the european election and just got this like really really impressive like likes groundswell of popular support because i mean there's 50 youth unemployment in spain and real mistrust of the established political system and the monopoly on politics that the two major parties have had for like the last 30 years so to see this like decentralized social movement that really understands the internet as a tool for you know now that everyone's exchanging information every day through this decentralized infrastructure we need to decentralize decision making so the way that people turn that information into collective action uh so they've mapped their in-person organizing structure onto lumio as a digital infrastructure so you know using it in more than a thousand groups for local community level decision making and working group small purpose-driven working groups and then they use tools like reddit for the really large scale public deliberation um so you know when any citizen in spain can come in and talk through issues and upvote and downvote so they really get the internet and they also really get the importance of in-person grassroots organizing so they understand that they need to go around doing leaflet drops they need to build capacity in their communities for people to come together and they're finding lumio to be a very uh useful tool for them right now um yeah well it seems that so this just started happening we hadn't talked to anyone in the movement we just started noticing that wow all of a sudden you know 60 of our traffic's coming from spain and 80 of our support support requests are in spanish right so let's say like you know lumio does better than you could possibly imagine and all these groups all around the world start using it and what happens like five years from now what's happening well i mean the vision driving the thing right from the start has been about you know the internet is this decentralized infrastructure that's great for massively blowing open access to information what it hasn't done is blown up in access to decision making access to power access to influence so lumia is really about building you know open source public infrastructure for decentralizing power through the internet which sounds you know it's a it's a lofty goal but having an ambitious you know just well you're a lofty guy likewise um so it's i mean the long-term vision is absolutely to build something that's as easy to use as possible that can be used by i mean it's already been used by twelve-year-olds in their schools making decisions with their parents and their teachers so if you're a twelve-year-old uh watching this yeah learn to learn how to do democracy in your community fight for better school lunches and stuff like that yeah well and just reconceiving of democracy not as this thing that needs to be monopolized by governments as this professionalized class but as something that we can do in our communities every day in our schools in our neighborhood groups it's about you know politics democracy what we really mean is you know it's about people coming together to make decisions about how to live together how to govern resources how to do conflict resolution how to get along on the planet cool and if that doesn't work we just go to new zealand we buy a huge tract of land we build an eco utopia surrounded by high-tech uh military hardware well you you'll be sad to know that we have this quite awful uh conservative government at the moment that is moving towards i mean i don't know if you know the australian government's stance on immigration but we seem to be moving in a worrying direction well they would like me i'm charming they might like you if you're an investor if you can fit into the investor class of of migration to new zealand then maybe you can buy your way in but yeah we're moving in a worrying direction politically everybody is right now except except for those using lumio perhaps well listen ben thank you so much for joining us and it's great to have you on the trues you can subscribe on the bottom here and you can join lumio today and start your first group thanks for having us
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.