Applied Appliance Applications

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. 
- Brendan Behan

Most of the effective technology in use today is that which can be employed without necessarily understanding how it works.

F'rinstance, how many would understand the inner workings of radio, the internal cumbustion engine that drives their car or even the computer with which they are reading this?

Yet political technologies - the technology of making and changing public decisions - require a sound understanding of how they work before they can be used.

Political technologies? Put simply, it is the technique of organising a group of people to achieve a commonly desired outcome.

At the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century this technology (or 'the craft of politics' if you prefer) is a rare skill.

Governments and political parties of all hues rely strongly on the disorganised community. It allows then to govern by executive fiat; internally within their parties and at a cabinet level within government.

The community - the household community - is increasingly disempowered as decisions are made that are either illiberal or directly act against the interests of the household sector. A cursory glance overthe history of electricity privatisation in NSW shows this.

Social organisation needs to work in such a way that people can organise without necessarily understanding how they do so.

This already happens to some degree. It's called society. The problem is that it is ineffective in the face of the organised demands of an increasingly authoritarian state.

So, how can politics be applied in a way that gives people control over decisions that affect them, without them necessarily understanding how those decisions are made?


How we informally organise needs to be examined. How can political structures be built that do not require an understanding of how they work to be effective?


Such structures would radically alter how society is organised. Would it simply be mob-facism by another name?


The great beauty of Liberal Democracy is the protection it provides for the dissident. Democracy is not the rule of the majority - that is populism - it is the right to dissent.


Liberal Democracy increasingly looks like the 'Democracy' of Greece and Rome. A system that benefits an elite few and is made to work by an army of slaves. For now the 'slaves' have the vote, but given that elections have degenerated into little more than beauty contests where issues seldom see the light of day (or if they do, they are ignored by the political elite that benefit from them), this 'right' held by the slaves is viewed by many as an imposition rather than a benefit. As the Anarchists say of the democratic political class: voting only encourages them.


In the face of such cynicism demand for the innovation of a user friendly politics may appear to be wanting. This is probably true, but as Lord Bowden once attributed to Douglas Hartree:

"...in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."

 So, who knows what the future will bring? It is doubtful if it will be party political.


What would a society that applied such an innovative political technology look like?


The various incompatible values of humanity would need to be accommodated, as well as the ancient Siddarthian conundra, and the age old economic question.

Currently we are drifting into various flavours of totalitarianism, with little practical solace for the professed dissident, apart from being able to hold a belief. Outside of this the dissident is held as a crank or a nutjob, as effective and more insidious (if more comfortable) version than being locked away in a gulag or concentration camp. Totalitarianism has got smart.


Most political debate in this country is predicated on who can tell the better lie. No doubt the progenitors of these debates believe what they are saying or doing to various degrees, but that they are fundamentally untrue is a demonstrable (if more complicated than a sound bite will allow) fact.


Rather than lies that work we need to accommodate various competing and, at times, incompatible (or, dare I say it, inconvenient) truths. Not to build a global hegemony, world government or hand power over to some manifestation of conspiracy fantasy, but to make sure we get enough to eat and keep warm when we are old.