| The main problem to solve here is legitimacy. It does no good to have a government if nobody thinks it's legitimate. This is why democracy is so hard to implement and protect. At the heart of it, democracy should be simple. You get people to vote on rules, and then whatever gets the most votes, everybody agrees to follow the group decision. But that all gets turned on its head once somebody doesn't want to play ball. In a weak regime, they simply ignore the decision and do whatever they want. Example here might be a group of friends playing tag. A slightly stronger regime might be a role-playing game. Here if someone doesn't like an outcome, there's a bunch of rules you can fall back on, but if they still don't like that, then they can make enough noise and kill the game altogether. Skipping up a few levels, a still stronger regime would be something like an HOA, where legitimacy is granted by contract law and precedence and the broader housing market. If someone doesn't like it, there are escalation procedures in place, and if all else fails, they can try litigation. On and on all the way up until you get to heads of state wielding hard and soft power backed by nothing more than the threat of extreme violence or trade sanctions and such. Technology can't solve the legitimacy problem. You can't force people to play by rules just because people voted on those rules. Without something to give those decisions teeth, a would-be democracy platform is really nothing more than an overblown webforum. Unless you are the head of state of your regime, willing to give up power to let your peons make decisions on their own, the pathetic rubes, then nothing like this will be seen as legitimate. Maybe an HOA can use something like this as a platform for owners to make their preferences known. But everyone's going to know where the real power is, and it won't be with the app. It's not government if it doesn't have the power to compel. |
edit- Also, keep in mind there are billions of new humans coming behind you that have no deep feelings about any of the things you think about. Good or bad. They hold none of the complexity of this world in their minds that you use to navigate now with minimal effort ("How does a bill become a law?"). Some revolutions are born from the generations that see leap frogging as an easier and better way forward than repairing the old model built for a world that doesn't exist anymore.