Liquid Democracy
FADE IN. EXT. OPEN OCEAN - DAY
Distant elevator music fades into the image of an open
ocean. As we hear the waves and the music come together, we
can imagine what it’s like to be out on the beach, bathing
in the ocean, under the sun, while looking at our phone,
turning the camera lens towards us.
Pause that moment.
Right there, before the snap.
Right before the wave hits.
Take a selfie.
INT. OCEAN AND SPEECH ROOM - DAY
The ocean is still in the background of the screen.
A new frame enters, slowly increasing in size, while the
ocean is calmly moving behind. In it, a podium with a yellow
flag. It only partially fills the screen, allowing us to see
the ocean behind.
JOHN, an unidentified man, enters the set, with the ocean
behind him. He is wearing a green body suit, and dressed in
elegant attire.
JOHN
(In an inspirational,
presidential tone)
Thanks for being here. I’m the
president’s new press secretary.
Today we will be addressing the
shift of our political arrangement,
which lies between direct and
representative democracy. In direct
democracy, participants must vote
personally on all issues, while in
representative democracy
participants vote for
representatives once in certain
election cycles. Meanwhile, our new
system doesn’t depend on
representatives, but rather on a
weighted and transitory delegation
of votes.
The people in the audience, all 3D modeled attendees, scroll
on their phones.
JOHN
Liquid Democracy is the term we
have assigned to our new system,
which generically describes either
already-existing or proposed
popular-control apparatuses. Voters
can either vote directly or
delegate their vote to other
participants; voters may select a
delegate for different issues.
An array of issues comes up in bright lists on screen:
marriage equality, affirmative action, free trade
agreements, war, peace, tax reform...
JOHN
We have mostly experimented on a
local level or exclusively through
online platforms. That’s why it’s
absolutely crucial that we bring
the digital revolution to everyone,
everywhere!
People in the audience enthusiastically clap, and reporters
take photographs.
A big title that reads "Liquid Democracy" appears on screen,
as it melts into the ocean.
EXT. PÁRAMO - DAY
A peaceful landscape of the Páramo highlands in Colombia,
surrounded by a mysterious fog and mist.
A disembodied voice speaks to us, as if from a loudspeaker.
It is the voice of THE CLOUD, this time reading off from
Wikipedia.
THE CLOUD
Páramos are known to be "water
factories", since most of their
vegetation is capable of capturing
the moisture in the air, and
turning it into water droplets,
which due to the force of gravity,
find their way to the ocean,
forming crooks and rivers on their
way.
Images of rivers, caves, mist, and fog in the Páramo appear
on the screen, as they dissapear and fade into the Páramo
landscape.
THE CLOUD
They are tropical, since they are
located close to the Equator. That
doesn’t mean they are warm.
Actually, most of the time they
reach very low temperatures since
they are located 3.000 meters above
the sea level. That is why Páramos
are like frozen islands in tropical
zones; a geographical paradox of
boisterous beauty.
The images of the Páramo are suddenly disrupted by two
frames that appear from above, like projector screens rolled
down from the roof. They partially fill the screen, allowing
us to see the Páramo behind.
John appears in one of the frames, while his MOM appears
in another. We can only see their hands; they are talking
to us in sign language.
JOHN
Hello friends! Welcome to the
e-census, my name is John, and you
are few steps away, very few, from
being one of the first Colombians
to fill out the electronic form for
the national census of population
and housing. Mom... come!
MOM
Tell me son.
JOHN
Look, participating in the e-census
is very easy. Just follow the
instructions.
MOM
OK, what do we have to do?
JOHN
Just click on the button, look,
this one, which says "create a new
account and user name."
MOM
Let me do it...
Clicks sound all over while the Páramo image repeats itself
infinitely behind John and his mom, like a fractal. While
the click sound grows in intensity, and the images go into a
mise-en-abime (like an error window in a computer), we start
a journey through the Páramo of Chingaza, located close to
Bogotá, on google maps. We see it behind John and his mom.
MOM
OK. JOHN
Then you have to enter your
information in the ID fields.
MOM
OK, I need my ID. Look, here it
asks for a password and a username.
JOHN
Remember that the username and the
password will be the same ones
you’ll be using to access the
e-census from now on. You can also
use it to vote in our new liquid
democracy. All the information of
our home is confidential... No one
can see it...
Fill-in boxes appear on screen, being filled out with random
information that isn’t legible; name, last name, address,
phone number, favorite meal, work, authorization for GPS
location and face recognition, access to microphone and
camera...
JOHN
The form is divided in 4 sections: 1. Location, 2. Housing, 3. Home,
and 4. People. Fill in all the
sections.
The e-census turns into an app, using the regular questions
these do, and storing our private information in the new
Liquid Democracy cloud.
MOM
Is it very difficult to fill in
these fields?
JOHN
No mom. You’ll find definitions
that will guide you. Always review
if the information is correct. It
was never this easy to count us
all!
John and his mom wave goodbye enthusiastically as their
frames disappear into the google maps tour of the Páramo.
We hear the water from the Páramo, flowing through the
mountains.
Water is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly
colorless chemical substance that is the main constituent of
Earth’s streams, lakes, and oceans, and the fluids of most
living organisms.
EXT. PLANET MARS - WEDDING DAY
A dusty day on the surface of Mars, at the Hellas Plains.
A frame appears within the image of Mars, where a wedding is
taking place. There are no clouds in the sky, as it shines
in its full darkness.
Picture your wedding day, cloudless, without any words, any
information.
Picture how you would look like viewed from a satellite
camera. How many clouds would form in the Martian skies just
from pictures of your wedding day?
John appears dressed as a priest, officiating the ceremony
that is about to take place.
JOHN
We can now offer our customers a
’cloud-bursting’ service that can
100% guarantee fair weather and
clear skies for your wedding day!
People in the audience clap incessantly.
JOHN
We’ve been working on this perfect
day for almost 3 weeks. Yes,
success can be guaranteed!
Wedding rain-free day ads appear on screen, as we are taken
on a virtual tour of Mars.
Images of clouds and of the Páramo, foggy and rainy, start
appearing on screen and gathering on top of each other.
JOHN
However, if a natural disaster such
as a hurricane were to occur, this
cannot be controlled.
The images of the clouds and Páramo, start forming a visual
storm on top of Mars, slowly filling out the screen.
The páramo disappears.
The clouds disappear.
We continue on a tour around Mars, as another frame appears,
taking us on a tour at the desert of La Guajira, in the
north of Colombia. The tour takes us across the desert,
looking for one of the largest open-sky coal mines in the
world: El Cerrejón.
As we look for the coal mine, John’s mom appears on screen,
speaking to us in sign language.
MOM
(quote from Jean Baudrillard’s
"Simulacra and Simulation")
Abstraction today is no longer that
of the map, the double, the mirror
or the concept. Simulation is no
longer that of a territory, a
referential being or a substance.
It is the generation by models of a
real without origin or reality: a
hyperreal. The territory no longer
precedes the map, nor survives it.
Henceforth, it is the map that
precedes the territory - precession
of simulacra - it is the map that
engenders the territory. It is the
real, and not the map, whose
vestiges subsist here and there, in
the deserts which are no longer
those of the Empire, but our own.
The desert of the real itself.
The tour on Mars and La Guajira start to zoom out into
space, revealing that both images emerge from a phone screen,
held by John in a T.V. studio with a green screen behind,
and several lights.
We see the apparatus behind him; cameras, lights, crew, and
a stool where he is sitting.
INT. T.V. STUDIO WITH GREEN SCREEN - UNSPECIFIC
A strong studio light showers John’s face, dressed again in
the same suit that he used while giving a speech in front of
the ocean.
Where is the ocean?
John is holding his phone.
JOHN
(through a text that appears
on screen as he types on his
phone)
Become a universal user of our new
democracy. Our digital agora is
more lively than ever; just get
your new smartphone and get
connected!
A series of words and concepts appear on-screen, as pop-up
ads on T.V. : Cybernetic assembly, digital agora, virtual
parliament, liquid democracy.
The Colombian national anthem begins to play, faint on the
background. We see a green flag, with a fan making it wave,
on the same side that we saw the yellow flag initially.
Behind John, a series of images start replacing the chroma
key.
A computer voice enthusiastically starts speaking, as if
from a loudspeaker.
THE CLOUD
We use clouds for everything in our
lives. To search for information,
places, entertainment... literally
everything. Unfortunately many
regions in Colombia are so remote
that a lot of people still have no
access to the Internet or to
smartphones. That’s why many of
them are still using legacy phones.
How could we get those people
closer to all the information
they’re missing?
We begin a tour through the Cauca river, starting at the
location where Hidroituango appears on the map. Some parts
of the map are more visible than others; resolution in
sattelite maps defines our visual access to these
territories.
THE CLOUD
Introducing: my line, powered by
Google. A traditional telephone
landline everyone can access no
matter the moment or the device. My
line brings the power of Google
assistant to anyone with access to
a standard phone line. This
inclusive technology makes search
and artificial intelligence
available to people without a
smartphone or a computer. Using
my line is incredibly simple; after
placing a call to a regular mobile
telephone number, the caller can
ask Google assistant a question, in
just a second or two we process the
question in our custom software and
connect with Google systems in the
cloud. My line receives the
response and speaks it back to the
caller by phone.
The tour arrives at the Caribbean Ocean, through the entry
port of Barranquilla, the golden doors of Colombia.
We hear people calling from their phones, asking questions
to My Line: Where is Hidroituango? What’s the weather in
barranquilla? How cloudy will the sky be today?
THE CLOUD
Now people can access information
on the internet without having
internet!
Electronic reason and computational reason, as Achille
Mbembe argues, makes us ponder on "digital borders as
biopolitical spaces".
Dataflow can also be called stream processing; the cloud is
a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet and used
to store, manage, and process data in place of local servers
or personal computers.
Water.
Information.
Internet.
Democracy.
When colonial languages were imposed by European countries
on the entire world, each region appropriated this new
technology to its own context. Regionalism, accents, and
variations of the original colonial language, created the
diversity of understanding in a postcolonial world.
Could this happen with digital technologies? If virtual
space is increasingly a homogenizing tool - accessing
Facebook in Bogotá or in San Francisco, despite the
different contexts, is the same experience at a design level
- how could accents and regionalisms be developed out of
these technologies, especially in the global south?
We still believe that single-crop systems are development;
whether it’s an agricultural or an ideological system, we
think that controlling the flow of water is progress.
The control over nature is the control over information.
The control over information is the control over nature.
EXT. OPEN OCEAN - DAY
The open ocean moves, flowing back and forth, on a sunny
day.
From the ocean’s horizon, a series of definition appear in
order. They are read by John.
JOHN
1. A LIQUID is a nearly
incompressible fluid that conforms
to the shape of its container but
retains a (nearly) constant volume
independent of pressure. As such,
it is one of the four fundamental
states of matter (the others being
solid, gas, and plasma), and is the
only state with a definite volume
but no fixed shape.
2. FLOW (of a liquid, gas, or
electricity) move steadily and
continuously in a current or
stream.
3. STREAM transmit or receive
(data, especially video and audio
material) over the Internet as a
steady, continuous flow.
4. TORRENT a strong and fast-moving
stream of water or other liquid.
5. CLOUD a visible mass of
condensed watery vapor floating in
the atmosphere, typically high
above the general level of the
ground.
The elevator music slowly fades in, as the definitions
dissolve into water.
We hear the computer voice of The Cloud, as the image slowly
fades out.
THE CLOUD
(reading off Yoko Ono’s poem,
which appears on screen)
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
JUAN PABLO PACHECO is an artist and curator with a degree in film and cultural studies from Connecticut College (USA), and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (USA). His research and artistic work are marked by reflections on the construction of images and knowledge, especially in relation to the digital era. His work has focused on inquiries about the materiality of digital space, and its impact on the political, social, and cultural systems of today’s world. He has developed research, as well as artistic and cultural projects in the United States, Senegal, France, Spain, and Colombia. He is currently a professor at the visual arts department of the Javeriana University of Bogotá, and an advisor to Plataforma Bogotá, an interactive media lab for art, science, and technology.