The idea is that the representatives of yours only do things against your wishes when they don't know what you wish for or you are in too tiny a minority for them to care. So, you make it clear what you want (or don't want) and get lots of people on board, especially ones that can influence even more people, and that causes you to be heard by the representatives, and then they (well, at least some of them) change their agendas to align with whatever it is you want (or don't want).
At least that's how I understand the idea.
It obviously doesn't always work, and in some cases simply cannot work. It does work sometimes, to an acceptable degree, but often it doesn't.
It's like gambling. You win a bit and you start overestimating your chances to win more. Here, too - you petition local authorities to put a speed limit on a road near an elementary school, you "win", the speed limit is introduced, and now you think you can do the same to influence the massive, incredibly complex system of hundreds of millions of people, the machine that's steamrolling through geopolitics and history full-speed ahead. Of course you can't - that's work for decades, generations, thousands of leaders, millions of supporters. But, nobody wants to put their whole life behind what they want (or don't want), sacrificing their well-being for uncertain result 40 years down the line. Nobody wants to be a Stallman - he reads web pages by sending an email to home server which cURL-downloads the page and sends it back to him to read... in lynx. How many people are willing to go through so much inconvenience just to state a point? And do so for decades?
So, instead, people go protest a bit, virtue-signal their discontent (or support) on social media, get into heated discussions at family events - and then go on with their lives.
The basic premise is good: people don't change their views easily, so to make a change, you need to exchange people. It's good on a local scale, but it totally breaks above that level, in multiple well-researched scenarios, most of which happen to currently, and concurrently, play out almost everywhere. Normally, we'd have a war - a serious war with tens of millions of casualties - that would cut off the bloat and really reset (though leveling it would take some work, given all the bomb craters) the playing field. We don't, and won't, because of nukes. I honestly have no idea what's next - I just hope that I'll die before the more dystopian future arrives.
At least that's how I understand the idea.
It obviously doesn't always work, and in some cases simply cannot work. It does work sometimes, to an acceptable degree, but often it doesn't.
It's like gambling. You win a bit and you start overestimating your chances to win more. Here, too - you petition local authorities to put a speed limit on a road near an elementary school, you "win", the speed limit is introduced, and now you think you can do the same to influence the massive, incredibly complex system of hundreds of millions of people, the machine that's steamrolling through geopolitics and history full-speed ahead. Of course you can't - that's work for decades, generations, thousands of leaders, millions of supporters. But, nobody wants to put their whole life behind what they want (or don't want), sacrificing their well-being for uncertain result 40 years down the line. Nobody wants to be a Stallman - he reads web pages by sending an email to home server which cURL-downloads the page and sends it back to him to read... in lynx. How many people are willing to go through so much inconvenience just to state a point? And do so for decades?
So, instead, people go protest a bit, virtue-signal their discontent (or support) on social media, get into heated discussions at family events - and then go on with their lives.
The basic premise is good: people don't change their views easily, so to make a change, you need to exchange people. It's good on a local scale, but it totally breaks above that level, in multiple well-researched scenarios, most of which happen to currently, and concurrently, play out almost everywhere. Normally, we'd have a war - a serious war with tens of millions of casualties - that would cut off the bloat and really reset (though leveling it would take some work, given all the bomb craters) the playing field. We don't, and won't, because of nukes. I honestly have no idea what's next - I just hope that I'll die before the more dystopian future arrives.