The Case for a Technocratic Doge

What techno-monarchism can learn from the Venetian Republic

As a sortition activist (sortition is the use of random selection in government), I've encountered fellow supporters from all over the political spectrum, though most of them seem to lean center-left in my experience so far. However, I truly believe that sortition is an ideologically neutral political mechanism that could fit into nearly any mode of governance. It would be useful under liberal democracy, anarcho-communism, libertarian minarchism, modern CCP-style market communism, corporate technocracy, and myriad other philosophies of governance.

So I figured I'd take a moment to make the case for that last one. I've always been highly skeptical of the monarcho-technocratic vision put forth by people like Thiel and Yarvin. My skepticism stems from the fact that I have never seen a proposal for how to actually implement such a system while actually aligning the incentives of the rulers with the ruled, whether directly (the rulers act in accordance with the preferences of the ruled) or abstractly (the rulers act in accordance with their own judgement for how to promote flourishing among the ruled). Now, the cynical interpretation of this failure is that there was never any interest in the well-being of the ruled, and that Dark Enlightenment thinkers simply want in-group privilege for themselves like any other aspirant oligarchy. I am willing to be charitable however and assume at least some significant portion genuinely believe that their vision of technocratic corporate libertarianism will lead to the long-term betterment of humanity. For what it's worth, I don't dismiss the possibility that it would, under the right circumstances. Therefore, my intention is to bring about those circumstances by proposing some potential political mechanisms that could make such a model of governance more likely to succeed.

Before I begin my proposals, I must first offer some background, and for that we must turn back the clocks to the Republic of Venice. Specifically, the period from 1268-1797. The institution of the doge actually starts well before 1268, in the late 600s, but the early period is not important. The doge was the highest authority in Venice, elected by the oligarchy, generally meaning high ranking members of noble families. The process for electing the doge starting in 1268 was fairly convoluted, quote the description from Wikipedia:

Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.

The point of such a system was to reduce the influence of the most powerful noble families. Those familiar with the concept of selectorate theory will understand why. When the size of a ruling coalition is small, the incentive to extract wealth from the population and distribute it among the ruling coalition is strong, since each coalition member will get a large amount. This type of extraction reduces economic growth, but because the individual results are large, the rulers still come out on top. The larger the coalition though, the more the available wealth must be divided. At a certain point, the scale tips, and the rewards even to ruling coalition members from increased economic growth outweighs the rewards from pure extraction. This is why it was important to keep control over Venice from resting in the hands of just a few of the most powerful noble families. Now, after the Serrata (1297-1323), admission to the nobility, and thereby access to the Great Council and the election of the doge, became restricted, and wealthy families could no longer simply buy into the nobility. At the time, there were about 200 such noble families, however the opportunity to buy into the nobility would still be opened intermittently, typically to raise funds for wars. Despite such limits to admission, this mechanism would end up being responsible for the Venetian Republic's regional economic and military dominance for the subsequent centuries, until its eventual conquest by Napoleon.

The randomness is key to the process. By forcing each set of nobles to select a pool of candidates by supermajority consensus, from whom only a fraction would advance, the expected value of favor trading is reduced. Even if a potential ally of yours is on a selection committee, the return on any deal you offer them will be diluted by the possibility that you won't be selected for the next pool even if your nomination succeeds. And your prize, even when you are selected, is merely to nominate another ally who would not be guaranteed to serve on the next committee. Therefore, the incentive of the participants converges on selecting nominees who would rule in a fair and evenhanded manner.

If you're going to have a corporate libertarian technocracy, you need some mechanism to keep it actually technocratic. To clarify, since the word "technocratic" can be quite nebulous, I simply mean "rule by skilled experts." In the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of somehow putting scientists and engineers in charge of governing began to gain some amount of popularity across the ideological spectrum. More recently, the term has become more general and is typically associated with economists and lawyers. The naive assumption that competition and free exit alone will create a market incentive for competent leadership has a number of significant problems, including that it fundamentally misunderstands the speed at which market adjustments operate. In ecological systems, maladaptive features can remain for dozens of generations if they don't exert strong enough selective pressure to be weeded out quickly, some can remain in a population seemingly indefinitely. The pace of memetic evolution in corporate culture is hardly breakneck. Anyone who has ever worked at a large corporation could tell you that. I don't doubt that evolutionary pressure has improved corporate management culture to some degree, or that it will continue to do so, but this is a force that works on the scale of decades. I could write an entire piece just about my various criticisms of this governance model, but that is not my purpose here. I aim to propose improvements rather than merely criticize.

Maintaining a meritocracy is not an easy task, as people have strong incentives to subvert it. Humans are political animals. We are good at forming strategic alliances. Dominance in human societies isn't about who is the biggest or the strongest, it's about who is the best at gathering and retaining allies. The principle of meritocracy requires us to suppress this impulse, which is both instinctual and rational, and assign status instead by some sort of impartial measure of merit. Unless someone believes that skill at politicking is highly correlated with skill at governing (I would bet they are anticorrelated if anything), this is a problem. Without some mechanism to alter the incentive structure, any attempt at instituting meritocracy will fail. To an executive, the small personal gains of a marginally more efficient society will never outweigh the large gains of having allies who owe them favors in positions of authority. Those allies will then attempt to secure allies of their own, and the cycle will continue. Attempts to defeat this process through objective performance metrics will simply be Goodharted like they always are. Metrics are no substitute for human wisdom.

This is why we must draw inspiration from the Republic of Venice. For hundreds of years, Venice thrived under a system of proto-capitalism thanks to a political mechanism which reduced the efficacy of politicking as a means of obtaining power. A similar mechanism could be employed in a corporate technocracy. Consider this a draft proposal:

Stage 1: Randomly select 50 executives at the VP level and above from the top 500 corporations by market cap. Convene them to a deliberative assembly tasked with nominating and confirming potential electors. Any member may nominate an elector. Sixty-seven affirmative votes are required to confirm them. Two-hundred electors in total must be chosen. The assembly will follow a process typical of modern deliberative bodies. Delegates will be split into breakout groups of 10, who will discuss among themselves and present their ideas to the group at large, after which people will be reshuffled into new breakout groups so that most members interact. The discussion will cover not just potential nominees, but criteria for selecting nominees as well. The assembly will have the ability to call on nominees to be interviewed as part of the process. Approximately six months will be allotted for the assembly to complete its selections. The presentations made to the group at large will be made public. Breakout group discussion will remain private.

Stage 2: Randomly select 40 of the 200 elector candidates to serve on the assembly to elect the doge. This assembly will follow a similar procedure of rotating breakout groups. Anyone can be proposed as a candidate, and must receive 10 votes to be formally nominated. Nominees will then be called to testify and submit to vetting by the assembly. For a nominee to be confirmed as doge, they must receive 30 votes.

The doge will serve for a term of 20 years. Every 4 years, an oversight board will be convened by selecting at random 20 of the 200 elector candidates that were originally selected by the Stage 1 assembly. Elector candidates who pass away from natural causes are not replaced, but those who die of unnatural causes are replaced based on the initial selection criteria of the Stage 1 assembly (random VP from a top 200 company). The oversight board will review the performance of the doge and will have the power to subpoena the doge's administration and compel testimony. 12 votes will be required to remove the doge from office, at which point a new Stage 1 assembly will be convened to start the process from scratch.

To be clear, this process I have described is not what I personally would consider an optimal political mechanism. It is merely an attempt to propose a model that I believe would be compatible with the ethos of DE thought. It would be difficult to game entry into the Stage 1 assembly. Companies could potentially alter their internal hierarchies to influence who is eligible for selection, but it would not be difficult to mitigate such efforts (for example by capping the number of eligible executives per company and vetting those selected to ensure they have actual responsibilities). The selection process would of course take important executives away from their duties to some degree, though the assemblies would not be full-time affairs and members would not necessarily be expected to attend every session. Ultimately, I believe such a mechanism would be effective at creating an assembly pool of individuals with relevant real-world skills and experience. It would lack the grossly misaligned incentives of election-based systems that reward the generation of attention-grabbing headlines over practical everyday performance. The Stage 1 assembly members' competing interests would serve to converge their criteria on selecting wise, capable electors.

The Stage 2 elector assembly would likely need additional oversight, as they are closer to power than the Stage 1 assembly. While the Stage 1 assembly has a natural incentive to select electors who would be resistant to bribery or influence, the possibility would remain and would need to be policed. Nevertheless, it would be quite difficult the coordinate the bribery of 30 electors whose identities are not confirmed prior to the start of the assembly. It would take only one defector from a set of 40 individuals selected in part for their integrity to unravel a subversive scheme.

The doge would rule with broad executive authority, comparable to a CEO. Except instead of accountability to a board of directors elected by the shareholders, it would be to the aforementioned randomly selected oversight board. Here, there is also a risk of subversion. While the doge would not know exactly who comprises the oversight board ahead of time, the candidate pool is only 200 or so, albeit 200 individuals who were theoretically selected at least in part for their integrity. Some degree of constitutionalism and legalism would of course remain necessary to prevent violent coups, but overall this system would still be far more conducive to agile, decisive leadership than a typical republican system of government. The specifics of the draft procedure I outlined above are just that: a draft. I have no doubts that further optimizations could be made.

While I don't personally believe such a system would be the most optimal form of government, I suspect it would manage to perform well compared to the current status quo for developed countries. That said, I would like to make some criticisms of the system I have proposed. In practice, I believe breadth of knowledge is more valuable than depth of knowledge in a deliberative system. The process of structured deliberation with expert consultation as it is currently practiced in citizens' assemblies has proven surprisingly effective at rapidly educating the delegates on fairly complex topics. The value random selection comes not just from the breadth of life experience among the delegates themselves, but also their social networks. Executives from top companies are likely to have not only a narrower range of life experiences than a random sample of citizens, but also a far narrower set of experiences among the totality of their social networks. If I were actually designing my preferred system for selecting a doge, I would select the Stage 1 delegates by stratified sampling from the entire citizenry, along a set of demographics predetermined by another citizens' assembly. I'm also not sure that the multiple layers of selection are truly necessary; citizens' assemblies—or “elector juries”—could probably appoint and oversee officials just fine. Furthermore, I believe citizens assemblies could likely be trusted with direct authority over policy in most areas of governance and could perhaps even enable some utopian form of decentralized minarchism, though that is a subject for another essay. Regardless, I imagine even the somewhat plutocratic vision I laid out in my proposal would perform substantially better than elections at selecting wise and capable leaders and holding them accountable.