IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 5

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Editorial
The Principles of Cyber-Anarcho-Socialism
Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London, SW7 2BT, U.K.
 Functional democratic governance has
five fundamental preconditions: civic dignity, confluent
values, epistemic diversity, accessible education,
and legitimate consent.
Civic dignity, as defined by Ober [1] in the theory
of Basic Democracy, is a condition of the body politic
that both defines and constrains collective agreements
on self-governance. As a value, it is a " coin " with two
sides: on one side, civic dignity is created and preserved
by the explicit affirmation of citizens (as legally
recognized personae) as socially accepted and equal
participants worthy of contribution to public deliberation
and action. On the other side of the coin, civic dignity
is undermined and diminished if the citizens are
infantilized or humiliated, e.g., by distraction through
spurious or specious confected " wars " on fictitious
threats such as drugs (except tobacco and alcohol),
" woke, " or just " others " ; by policy making about public
health during a pandemic focussing on an individual
" saving Christmas " rather than the state saving
lives; or by gaslighting citizens with conflicting and
scarcely credible explanations for blatant rule-breaking
during the same pandemic. Moreover, civic dignity
is deeply and dangerously diminished if the citizens
are tricked into making decisions that, had they been
fully appraised of the facts or the proponents' agendas,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3148509
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
March 2022
they would not otherwise have made (see, for example,
the Athenian expedition to Sicily [2], or the 2016
" Brexit " Referendum in the United Kingdom [3]).
The precondition of confluent values is the
requirement that citizens share a set of values that
are essentially inseparable: to diminish one is to
diminish them all. Ober [1] identifies the key value
at the root of Basic Democracy as the avoidance of
tyranny: the thought experiment of Demopolis begins
with an assumption of a normal distribution of people
according to their preference for tyranny-avoidance,
and then selects the founders and original inhabitants
of the city (Demopolis) from those most strongly
opposed to autocratic rule (literally, but also legally,
the citizens). However, Ober also argues that the
founders should have two other non-negotiable values:
prosperity and security. Prosperity is valuable to
the city in order to ensure that it remains competitive,
attractive and a source of civic pride; and is valuable
to citizens to ensure they are free to pursue objectives
of self-fulfilment and constitutive human capacities
without excessive cost of investment in socially
productive purposes (i.e., civic participation). The
interdependence of the three values can be observed
by one of the most insidious insider threats to basic
democracy: the degeneration into minority rule with
self-interest rather than the common interest as the
primary goal (i.e., the iron law of oligarchy [4]) or
into majoritarian tyranny, with the populist's false
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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