The Arbiter
Administration

RIRE

I confess to being unduly influenced at a young age by Plato's Republic. My philosopher kings are about 10% of the population, and not born to the job but obliged to meet standards to qualify. People move between societal classifications over the course of their social careers, depending on their priorities. To maintain the status of Voting Citizen (which is someone who devotes most of his or her time to governance via direct democracy) a person must demonstrate a base level of competencies set and updated by the broader society. So the qualifications are "elected", then people enter into government as they meet them.

The rules are legion, and could not possibly be managed without the complex automation system integral to procedure. The machines concerned are non-sentient AIs called arbiters. People who hate city council meetings would not like to live on Rire (although they wouldn't have to attend and listen to things that weren't of personal concern). Jurisdiction is an endless wrangle, fought through adjusting the priorities of complex sets of interlocking legislation. There is no party system on Rire itself, although the model accommodates parties of a sort on allied worlds where the technology has been exported in a sort of compu-political imperialism. Works on the drug addiction syndrome -- hook 'em on the free administration angle, then let 'em find out they have to swallow the political system to keep it.

[Annotation, ljw, summer 2001: Preventing an arbiter's 'corruption' is so high a priority for Rire that they place it above even their usualy top priority, which is preserving human life. This comes out in the novel Far Arena on Ann's Kali Station where her nationalistic Megan co-conspirators attempt to short circuit due process to usurp control.]

The basic idea is that there are no CEOs or ministers, but triumvirates -- a three person executive which chairs and manages the business of any sufficiently large or important council. To have a single "chair" would be symptomatic of a Mickey Mouse operation on Rire, which can't be terribly significant. A club or private organization, or some non-governmental affair.

Triumvirates have some executive powers, provided they act within existing policy set by their council, and broader jurisdictions. For example, in our own system a parks board cannot impose a death penalty even by unanimous vote of its members, because that falls outside its jurisdiction, but it may be able to set the fine for littering, build fences or lobby for resources to install a caretaker. The triumvirate sets the agendas and "steers" the council, but just like boards, many issues require majority vote. Issues are not raised at meetings, but managed by asynchronous (and sometime synchronous) discussions enabled by the supporting computing system.

Any single council is constrained by higher priorities, broader laws, and its own rules and policy. The latter may be changed by the counil only if a threshold majority approves. Thresholds themselves may be complex, set and agreed upon by stake holders at sometime in the past. A council or any other body or individual may attempt to launch a lobby to pressure any voting body to review its policies or to challenge jurisdiction on a particular issue. The computing system [Arbiter Administration] acts as score keeper, recording secretary, and parliamentarian.

[Annotation, ljw, summer 2001: Arbiters also screen lobbies, disallowing any that fail by the criteria it is authorized to apply under the terms claimed. If in any doubt, it passes the lobby up to one of those citizens currently assigned to assist it in value judgements, and if the uncertainly persists, the lobby gains validity and moves up to an appropriate next step. What that is, exactly, may vary with the issue or jurisdictions.]

Anything over which the triumvirate disagree must, by definition, be submitted to the whole group. In large groups there may be a second level executive which such matters would devolve on.

[Annotation, ljw, summer 2001: The groups involved became known as "expansions". First expansion is the first stage after the triumvirate. In a small council that would be the whole group. A group with a second expansion has at least three levels of authority - decisions made by the triumvirate, decisions made by the first expansions and decisions made by the second expansion. The terminal expansion is the council as a whole. In the case of a council with two possible expansions, the 2nd one would be terminal. Strictly speaking, however, the terminal expansion of any council is the entire population. Even that can go in stages, first including Responsible Citizens, for example, or first including those within light speed communication range on a response time basis. Once an issue exceeds the bounds of its originating council, it is called going to referendum.]

Any broader or higher priority policy which the council agrees to protest can result in a lobby "flag" raised with the council that does have the power to change the policy. Inter-council jockeying is probably the most complex and common jurisdictional wrangle.

Beyond the jurisdiction of a singel council, there are two sorts votes in which a council and/or its members may participate: council votes, in which each council is counted Yea or Nay, and popular votes, in which councils [temporarily] amalgamate [meld] to function as a single unit. In such superset functions, the triumvirs of each council included function as coordinating executives.

Lobby mechanisms for popular ground swells can also upset apple carts, but work only on gross issues which can muster strong popular support. Political scientists, forever at work on refining the system, might be leery of this mechanism as possible only in circumstances of mass hysteria -- which is exactly when they should not be allowed. In practice lobby pressure (from the bottom up) tends to be met half way by council melds coming down, and both flow into wider and wider referenda until the necessary level of threshold consensus is reached.

[In Far Arena, we also see an example of remarkably quick correction of a lot of strained, 'special case' reasoning surrounding a key definitional problem. Once the indentifying terms of reference for the issue are corrected (by Erien), arbitorial administration generates a quick cascade through to a core issue that expands spontaneously, through arbitorial check points, to stop at planetary referendum for a human judgement.]

What constitutes a threshold differs for different issues. A change in core human rights requires far greater support than a decision to reallocate community resources from teaching safety in the use of communal scooter bikes to litter pick up in a park.

There are five classes of citizenship, which people move in and out of depending on their level of contribution to society.

If you will not or cannot contribute in an accredited way, you become Dependent. You are entitled to care and/or rehabilitation. Reetions tend to view any able bodied adult sufficiently unmotivated to settle for Dependent, as disabled in at least some regard. People we might consider disabled may not be Dependent, even if they require care, because they may be able to contribute in an accredited manner. Children and the unemployable are both Dependent.

If you are a danger to yourself or others, you are Supervised. Criminals and the mentally ill would both be Supervised. Big brother watches you.

Lawful citizens mind their own business and do what they have to do to contribute socially. This is equivalent to paying your taxes but nothing more. They let others set rules for them. Some highly self-absorbed people, like artists or scientists, might be Lawful. Their sole social contribution would be their work. Lawful does require you to demonstrate a basic grasp of issues prior to budget votes, and contribute to most of those, as well as votes which go to the full populous level (rare). If you can't cope with that, you'll dip into Dependent and get counseling. The "grasp" notion would be roughly at the level of the sort of "grasp" one must have of driving to pass a driving test.

Responsible citizens participate on councils, but are also productive citizens outside government bodies. They may serve on the same councils as Voting citizens, but triumvirs would nearly always be Voting citizens. A typical Responsible citizen, for example, might be a nutrition counselor but be on a parent's group for the neighborhood youth committee and a general member of a planetary environment management counsel.

Voting citizens must demonstrate exceptional knowledge, interest and expertise while Responsible Citizens. They probably have taken advanced study of some sort, or made a major contribution in their area of interest. Their whole contribution to society is in the government or public sphere.

Exempts can be Voting or Responsible. Usually they are Voting. This is like being on a period of sabbatical from a university, during which the Exempt is employed wholly in his or her special research, outside the political system. An ambassador appointed to a foreign post is Exempt for the duration. A research scientist too absorbed in a project to participate on councils, can be Exempt for the duration. Exempts retain the privileges of their prior citizenship. Exempt status can be awarded only by councils of planetary or better jurisdiction, and imply official sanction backed up by communal resources as well as access to the "exempting" council's agenda for direct support if called upon. Someone who wanted to indulge solely in a project of his or her own would become Dependent until and unless the work produced was acknowledges as creditable.

Some other tidbits I've sketched ideas about:

Revision comments summer 2001, by Lynda.

It surprised me that Rire's social transparency is barely hinted at in this 'first take' on the Reetion political system. While Alison and I have both had this rather lengthy e-mail of mine in mind, while writing about Rire, our sense of how Rire works has clearly evolved. In particular, I confess to sticking words like "arbiter" and "Arbiter Administration" into the text where I had originally referred only to a computational system capable of decision making. But the only suggestion in the 1997 version of the article that Reetions live and work under the eye of arbiters at all time, is by implication - and in the reference to "Big Brother" with regard to Supervised Citizens.

I will provide an article on Social Transparency Indices some other time. For now, to salvage this one, I merely want to mention them and point out that the transparency of Reetion society evolved from two sources. First, the need to account for how everyone could be kept honest and all the totting up of credits and debits kept track of without consuming every waking hour - and second, from a binge of reading I did on egalitarian societies which convinced me they only worked on a very small scale because only then could every action be more or less certain to be subject to acute public scrutiny. Rather like living in a highly functional family where swiping little brother's lollipop is immediately addressed by removal of one's own candy privileges by a vigilant adult.

If on Rire, expect to be monitored. But everyone is, and abuse of the fact is also monitored and filtered by arbiters apt to report you to a counselor if you do it too much. Attitudes to being 'watched' are very different. Reetions are as unlikely to be disturbed by it as you or I are about the prospect of bathing more than once a year, or getting vaccinated. (There would always be, of course, those who aren't comfortable. Just as there are Canadians who refuse to fill out their census forms.)

Monitoring of the 'ephemeral' sort is filtered only by arbiters and all but transactions germaine to one's status discarded. People with the authority to do so can make requests to track others more closely - a parent setting a 'watch dog' on a child, or a citizen asking for a sweep through ephemeral data to compile a report for a council, etc.

Throne Price, the first book to see print (but the fourth in the series), ETA Spring 2002 for general release, is set on Gelion. There is more of an opportunity to see the Reetion system in action in the novels Courtesan Prince and Far Arena (publication dates still unknown as of Summer 2001) - perturbed, of course, by some ill effects due to collision with a culture as alien to open, egalitarian Rire as elitist, superstitious Gelion.

(based on original e-mail from LJW, to AS, c. 1997)

Page last updated: 14-Nov-2003

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