Virtual Democracy

Many years ago I bought a game called Civilization: Call to Power.  It was a knock off of Sid Myers Civilization and it was better.  It had several differences including a slaver unit that allowed you to steal citizens from other nation's cities and put them to work in your cities and later an abolitionist who freed slaves and brought them to your nation.  The other great aspect of that game was that it had a future tech tree that allowed you to build tubes across your empire, cities in Space, cities underwater.  Force fields.  Orbital bombardment.  Orbital invasions.  Space elevators.  Virtual Democracy.

Virtual Democracy.  Think about it.  We are so close.  I had this thought again today because of something from Facebook.  The idea of a virtual democracy comes from everyone plugging in their own ideas for every vote in government.  Legislators would only be needed to propose legislation and to explore the nuances of all aspects of the legislation, then informed citizens punch in their yeas or nays and the legislation is passed or fails.  

The problem is getting people to inform themselves and participate in the governance of themselves.  People would rather not, which is why we have people who do that job for us and we elect them.  Democracies are not really democracies, they are Representative Democracies.  And they are flawed.  As people quote, Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.  

So today, I saw a post from a friend on Facebook and it said she participated in one of those online questionaires and her results were posted on her profile.  What kind of Hair Style is yours.  I said to my self, sure I have a few minutes, let's see what they think I would like.  And I did not answer a single question.  It looked at my profile and told me what my Hair Style was best for me.  I then clicked Best Career and My Hashtag.  Three wrong answers, but then my Facebook is carefully censored by me, there is not even a picture of me on there anywhere.  But then I started to think.  What if?

What if everyone had a profile and there were a set of questions, thousands of questions and you could answer as many of them as you wished to answer.  Your answers formed a profile.  It could be something like Facebook, except where when you write comments you assign a strength of agreement ratio to the item: love, wow, like, sad, angry, and hate.  Every question you answer, every post you comment on gets added to your profile and then, when a law comes up, the government submits it to the program and the system votes based on everyone's profiles.  A Virtual Democracy.

Problems would be many, some profiles could be ambiguous, so like on other social platforms like OkCupid, Not Sufficient Data would be a possibility.  Also there would need to be an email sent to each profile each day to show them how they voted each day, and allow them to call into question the vote; this would be a measure to prevent outside manipulation of the data.  Participation would not be dependent on one platform.  Facebook is the preferred social media platform of most 30+ year olds, but the younger crowd prefers other things.  Pinterest and Instagram and every other platform can be integrated into one general platform.  

People change as they age.  People change as they get new information, as they meet new people.  Someone who never met someone from a Muslim majority government, might be against immigration from those countries, but upon meeting one or more of those people, they could change their mind.  This could be reflected upon when they get the email about how they voted and they decide that they want to change their vote, the profile shows them why they voted that way and offers to allow them to alter their answers on these questions.  Their former profile is saved and can be accessed later.

Change is coming.  The election of a majority government in Canada with only 27% of the eligible voters.  The election of a president in the United States with less than a majority of voters.  It is coming.