Explainer #6: How population growth forced democracy to evolve

Last week, I connected Magna Carta to the future of platform governance. Establishing that there is a “law of the land” separate from the law of the king is the foundation of our rights. In just the same way, online communities are more than the platforms that host them. Platform law should be in service of the community, not above it.

There are many ways that the England of Magna Carta was different than the online world of today. In particular, it was much, much smaller. England in 1215 had only an estimated 3.8 million people, about the size of modern Uruguay or Croatia; and London was only 30,000, about the size of Beverly Hills today. Today, Greater London alone is over twice as populous (9 million) as all of England was then.

History looks a bit different from this perspective. We are taught about kings and emperors as towering figures, but many of them were small-time bosses by modern standards. Even the biggest names don’t loom quite as large by comparison. Consider that the United Kingdom has more residents today than the Roman Empire at the time of Augustus. Ave Starmer, morituri te salutant.

I am dwelling on this because understanding the history of democracy helps put new ideas for platform governance into context. The evolution of democracy has been driven by population growth, and the massive size of modern platforms presents a new challenge.

But first, some background. Historians generally identify three phases of democracy.

In Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Cambridge-affiliated social scientist Luke Kemp claims that early bands of humans followed a sort of democracy in the form of consensus-based decision making. We can’t know this for sure because it was long before the invention of writing, but Kemp points to (limited) archaeological evidence and comparative studies of modern tribal societies. He suggests that this was driven in part because of the ease of exit: in a small nomadic community, if you didn’t feel like your voice was being heard, you could literally just walk away.

Regular readers of Platformocracy will know that I am fairly obsessed with Exit, and wrote a lot about it late last year. See these past issues for more:

In The Decline and Rise of Democracy, NYU political scientist David Stasavage distinguishes between the early democracies of ancient history and the representative democracies we live in today.

Histories of democracy in the West usually start with ancient Greece, but Stasavage presents strong evidence that early democracy was widespread around the world (often preceding the Athenian example) in places including Mesopotamia, India, North and Central America, and central Africa.

Early democracy developed wherever rulers couldn’t impose top-down control. This meant they needed to get consent for their actions from some sort of council or assembly, often including the choice of ruler in the first place (as opposed to inheritance).

These councils often had fairly broad participation by the standards of the time. The Athenian model of free adult men still fell way short of modern standards, since it excluded women and slaves. At 10-20% of the population, however, it was still much more than just a tiny cabal of advisors to a king.

Early democracy required constant participation from as much of the voting population as possible, so it was more common in smaller communities where people could make the time to attend assemblies and deliberations. For example, the jury at the trial of Socrates was 500 people.

As collections of fiefdoms and city-states grew in population and started to cohere into modern nations, direct democracy stopped working. It took too long to get to the capital and even with limited suffrage, there were too many potential voters to assemble at one time. Citizens needed to start selecting representatives to attend centralized assemblies on their behalf.

The first elected representatives were only authorized to communicate their community’s fixed position on an issue. If debate at the assembly pointed in a different direction, the representative would need to write or travel home for new instructions. This was brittle, so successful democracies required communities to give their representatives freedom to make independent decisions on their behalf.

This changed democracy profoundly as it shifted from a constant practice (as in the Paleolithic and early democracy) to a much less common event - annual elections. Along with the move to universal suffrage in the early 20th century, this gave us our modern world of parliaments and congresses that govern vast nations with tens of millions of people.

[Note that this is a massively oversimplified version of Stasavage’s narrative. There were other factors influencing the rise of early democracy and the transition to modern democracy beyond scale. And there were autocracies alongside democracies at every stage of history, with different forces driving them.]

These three phases of democracy are useful for thinking about potential governance models for online communities.

Modern democracy has spread dramatically in the past century, with big jumps after World War II in 1945 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, to embrace around 60% of the world population. At the same time, the continued growth of world population has strained the model. The classic example is the US House of Representatives. In 1790, each member represented 30-35,000 people, but this is now around 780,000 each - more than the population of the largest state (Virginia) in 1790. Getting back to the original ratio would mean a congress with almost 10,000 members. That would be almost a mini-Athens in its own right.

The math gets even more boggling when you compare the population of the world’s largest countries with estimated monthly active users of the largest social media platforms [see chart below]. Taken at face value, this suggests that the platforms are so big they represent a fundamentally new form of human society. If the largest countries are challenging the concept of modern representative democracy, how could it work for a social media platform with many times more active users?

This is what I find interesting and important. Even if modern democracy as invented for the age of the medium-sized nation-state won’t scale up, that isn’t a reason to throw democracy out the window and impose bureaucratic autocracy. The vital challenge for anyone who believes in democracy is to figure out a new evolution that can work for global communities of billions of users.

I will be exploring a few ideas about this in the weeks to come. Which means, sadly, I’m going to have to talk about Mr. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” himself, Peter Thiel, at least a little. Stay tuned, I guess. Ugh.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].