Election day in the USA is fifteen months away. Every citizen is braced for the onslaught of bickering candidates, obsessive media attention, vicious advertising, and billions of dollars raised and spent to persuade us to pick a Leader.

A commander-in-chief of the military, a vetoer of bills, an appointee of judges, a figurehead, a symbol, an ambassador to the world - an instant super-celebrity that we will scrutinize and hate on and wonder what pets they’ll pamper in the White House and where they’ll take their kids on vacation.

It’s Boring and It Belittles Us.

Can’t we do better? With the technology that we have today - does America’s 310 million population really require a lone individual to Represent All Of Us? Why silence our voices, why give away so much of Our Decision-Making Power?

Do we really need politicians? Congresspeople, Senators, the President? Can’t we Represent Ourselves?

Can’t we have Direct Democracy?

Seeking answers to these questions, I contacted Nicole Sallak Anderson, a science fiction novelist and IEET Advisory Board Member who blogs frequently on futurist ideas.

Below is our conversation:

Hank Pellissier: Hi Nicole. I am so weary of this tedious election process. We could strive for election reform, but I’d prefer changes that are more radical. Let’s move absolutely all of the political power back to the average citizen - away from the “representatives” who don’t actually represent, anyway. To get elected, “representatives” have to be either very wealthy or indebted to whoever gave them their campaign funds. What’s your opinion? Do you want to just scrap all these people, too?

Nicole Sallak Anderson: I agree that the process is tedious. However, the system itself can be seen as the most efficient way to run a government—in the 18th century. Ideally, the system was created to both prevent a monarch from taking hold in our nation, as well as to prevent the uneducated class from creating a government of chaos, i.e. mob rule. Thus our representatives would be those public servants in the middle, men of means who were educated and above passionate response, but not able to hand power down to their children.

I would say that this process worked fairly well, until the advent of the media. First radio, then TV, now 24/7 cable news and YouTube, each one effectively undermining the election process and actually creating the exact conditions our Founders were trying to avoid.

First, the media allows mob rule by manipulating us into voting for people for reasons of passion, not for their qualifications. Second, it convinces us that we’re actually two nations, one blue, one red, and that our choices actually divide us, instead of uniting us. Which makes us vulnerable to not necessarily a monarchy, but certainly an oligarchy. Think Clinton v. Bush in 2016 and you see we’re not that far off. What has changed in the past 200 years is the technology to bring messaging into the home combined with psychological techniques that were completely unheard of in the late 1700’s. Thus we have an very out of date political system.

Hank Pellissier: I think maybe there’s a way every citizen could vote on every bill, via smart phones. All decisions could be made via quick referendums, with voting conducted by text messages. It would be like voting for the best singers on The Voice. If we did that, we could get rid of the ridiculous partisan games that our representatives play, the refusal to work across the aisle. Voting would be anonymous, no one would know how you voted and use it to keep you from getting re-elected. Congress is often stalemated. I am so bored with the filibustering and arcane games they play. What do you think? Vent if you want to.

Nicole Sallak Anderson: Ideally in a direct democracy, we would no longer need a representative sitting in a building, debating laws on our behalf. Leadership would still be needed, but a leader’s job would be to craft laws that are then put online to be debated by the public. The law could be refined as comments roll in, and then presented for a final vote. All citizens would be automatically enrolled in the process at 18. They don’t have to participate, but they’re allowed to create an account and be a part of the process.

Stalemates could happen, but the bill authors would have authority to move things forward. Ideally, the leadership would be trained in various open-dialogue techniques such as Appreciative Inquiry, or Non-Violent Communication (NVC.) In the end they would be responsible for creating the law, posting it in the forum, taking input, revising, and then putting it to a vote.

Hank Pellissier: Voting online might be better than texting; I am always losing my cell phone. Maybe the government could just have a Facebook page, where policy is proposed by anyone - if the idea gets enough “Likes” it gets implemented. I think that would be fun. What do you think?

Nicole Sallak Anderson: Whether linked by text or upvoting, yes, the technology will be online. Any device, from PCs to phones, to the wearables of the future - would be granted access. Direct Democracy must include as many people as possible, thus voter restrictions need to be kept to a minimum. Social media is incredibly powerful and full of potential. However, this would need to be a separate social media site, maintained and secured by a government body that is also audited by the public. It can be designed to be user friendly as well as secure in all the ways you mention. I do think hacking will be an issue, the technology would need heavy investments and the encryption scheme top-of-the-line and changing regularly. The government hub can’t be something that we ignore once it is implemented, like our roads.

Hank Pellissier: I like reddit. There are smart redditors. Mean exchanges, but its usually much smarter than Facebook conversation. Maybe reddit could have a subreddit like /USvotehere where policies get proposed and we upvote and downvote the ideas, and insert comments, and ridicule people that disagree with us. If a policy suggestion gets 50,000,000 upvotes, we could adopt it, immediately. Making decisions that way would be wonderfully fast. We could hire or fire generals or Supreme Court Justices overnight, if the upvoting went viral. What do you think?

Nicole Sallak Anderson: Yes, Reddit with true leadership in the form of paid moderators. Key here is to avoid internet trolling, which leads to mob control. Rather than moving us forward, the anger and hostility seen on many subreddits, and the internet in general, could completely destroy us. Mob rule online is more of a danger than hacking into the system because the security can be built to be redundant and protected and traceable, but the minds of the people have no such protection. Look at the show we call the Republican Primary and how the leading candidate has effectively used his Twitter feed to derail any journalism and reporting of importance. He completely controls the narrative, and his fans adore it. Take that attitude and put it in the hands of 300 million+ people and we will find ourselves wondering whose rights are we protecting?

If we were to create a Government Hub, in addition to the leadership needed to create laws and shepherd the process, we’d also need moderators for every thread discussing the law, in addition to the authors. Moderators who are also trained in NVC and who can create the space for intelligent dialogue and keep it respectful. In addition, users, or citizen voters, would also need to agree to discuss with logic, reasoning and empathy. Anger, violence, sexism, racism, death and rape threats and berating others would lead us to nowhere. Thus leadership doesn’t go away, it just changes from being representatives for the people, to leadership empowering people to participate in the creation of their democracy. This is no small task.

Hank Pellissier: Can you explain some other ways that Direct Democracy could work in the USA? There must be some technological options I haven’t considered.

Nicole Sallak Anderson: Technically, Direct Democracy already exists. From the website www.ballopedia.org,

“...the seven generally acknowledged forms of direct democracy are the legislatively-referred constitutional amendment, the legislatively-referred state statute, the initiated state statute (direct or indirect), the initiated constitutional amendment, the veto referendum (sometimes called the citizen referendum or the statute referendum), the statute affirmation (available only in Nevada), and statewide recall.”

Here in California we have most of these things in place. What we’re discussing now is taking it one step further, to every citizen participating. Until recently we did not have the enabling technologies to do such a thing. But between network connectivity (IoT) and social media apps, we can now see how perhaps the next step can be taken.

I like what Zoltan Istvan, the Transhumanist Party presidential candidate, says about this:

“Myself and the Transhumanist Party advocate for something called “real time” democracy, where you can use all the technology available to not only easily vote, but also influence politicians in Congress as they are actually discussing and making decisions for the country.”

This is very similar to direct democracy, but it implies getting us started now with the influence aspect. We have this within Facebook and Twitter, citizens just need to be more vigilant. Rather than posting picture of cats, we can spend time on our local representative’s FB page or submit proposals via their websites; that would be a great use of our online power.

Hank Pellissier: I really wish all of the Presidential candidates would offer to “give their power” back to the citizenry. The Presidential position has steadily gained more power, especially in the use of military force. Congress hasn’t declared war on anyone since 1942, but still — we’ve been incessantly at war because Presidents can just issue orders to bomb Grenada or Panama or Serbia or a Sudanese factory. That is too much power. Do you think any current candidates - besides Istvan, who you already mentioned - can be persuaded to move our political process towards direct democracy?

Nicole Sallak Anderson: At a minimum, we already have the power to let our government know that we’re not happy with various decisions and we can put issues on the state ballot when the Federal Government fails us (for example, marijuana legalization in the states.) Twitter has been powerful at outing dirty political dealings. However, there is no amendment that requires our legislators to listen to us. Thus it would require a constitutional amendment that gives voters the power to make legislative decisions, and puts the politicians into the place of being information providers, not decision makers. I honestly can’t see a single establishment politician embracing such a move. Perhaps Dennis Kucinich, but no one else! It would completely upend the system of power they’ve come to know and love.

Hank Pellissier: There are arguments against Direct Democracy. What are they? And what is keeping it from happening?

Nicole Sallak Anderson: The first argument is always safety. Look at what just happened with the Ashley Madison hack. How can we be sure that the technology we choose to be our Direct Democracy hub is safe? It will require elegant engineering both at the back end as well as the user interface and every point in between. It will require full time technologists and engineers who are funded appropriately to invest in the latest servers, encryption, processing technologies. They will also need to be nimble and empowered to make changes as needed. In addition, independent auditors that regularly sniff the data for signatures of attack.

Perhaps this is the first place a friendly AI could help us! The all-seeing eye that reports back when someone is tampering with the data in any way. Honestly, I think we’re well on our way to designing such a system.

The real threat is us, the people. That’s what will keep us from moving forward in this way. In order for Direct Democracy to work, we need educated voters. And I don’t mean educated as in the three R’s. The education of our ability to weigh information would be needed. From the youngest of ages, we’d need to teach techniques for listening and empathic dialogue. We’d need to educate the mind to be resistant to media messaging and instead of being consumers of information and ideas, we’d need to be producers of information and ideas. To ask questions and be able to weigh both sides of an issue. Debate would need to be an essential subject, as well as rhetoric. Non-violent communication and empathetic listening. Imagination and inquiry. Can you imagine such a curriculum that would encourage civilized behavior, as well as a desire to be politically active, right from the start? It would look much different than today. Educating the public to become participatory in a healthy, rational and innovative way would be necessary in a Direct Democracy.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is the core issue. Again, Zoltan has pointed this out in his campaign:

“...some stop measures would need to be in place to make sure that mob decision-making didn’t take effect while people were uber passionate about something. The media has too much control over people, and knows how to manipulate the public. So perhaps a rolling decision making process of direct democracy would be soundest.”

Nothing can replace the need to invest in the education of the people.

Hank Pellissier: Thanks for talking to me about this, Nicole. Anything you want to add? I really appreciate this.

Nicole Sallak Anderson: Personally, I think we’re in a race here between humanity’s ability to adapt rationally and embrace one another, and our technology’s ability to destroy us and the environment. These two things go hand in hand—the evolution of consciousness and technical development. Right now technology is advancing. The question is, what will we do with this? Sit back and let our country go into decline, or take responsibility for ourselves and begin to question the system, not as a bunch of apes fighting for the last banana, but as a group of humans united for a better future?