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A Digital Direct Democracy For the Modern Age
New submitter lordofthechia writes "Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any petition that reaches 25,000 signatures (5,000 originally) is promised an official reply. This weekend the first petitions will be closing, and already many have far exceeded the required number of signatures. Is this the way for the voice of the electorate to gain more weight in modern politics, or is it the web version of a placebo button? Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"
Yup, there is also a paper I wrote a while ago on delegated voting. Essentially you form a decision tree. Voters can delegate their vote to other people based on topic, with a "catch all" delegation of their local representative for anything that they don't take themselves or delegate to anyone else. It has the nice property that it can be implemented in a basically backwards compatible way - for people who don't care about politics nothing needs to change, but decisions have far more democratic legitimacy. Nobody can ever say their voice wasn't heard.
To answer your last question first: Yes, absolutely, and even more than that it certainly would be.
Consensus is not a good thing.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.
I imagine that an overwhelming majority of people would agree that Fred Phelps should shut up. That's already a consensus. They're also wrong. He shouldn't shut up. Some states have passed laws so that the ways in which he was exercising his free speech are prohibited, but he's still allowed that free speech -- just not at the time and in the place he'd prefer, because how he was doing things was getting him the most attention. Even if the majority decides and agrees to a thing, it still may be a violation of someone's rights.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.
We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.