A Strong Democracy Is a Digital Democracy

I think a digital democracy has the potential to be more direct and less representative. Ancient Athens was a direct democracy, where citizens would vote almost every day on a huge range of issues. Representative democracies take citizens out of the day-to-day process, and up until now that has made perfect sense. Nation states got too big, and we needed representatives who could travel to the capitol and vote in our interest on little issues that we didn't understand.

Now we have the ability to do things radically different. What if everybody's personal device had a secure way to vote directly on things? What if we could vote weekly on the various levels of government - city, county, state, federal? What if citizens could sign up to be "micro-delegates" for whatever issues they are interested in, and you could have distributed voting committees for different issues like education, environment, etc. on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of people? We would still need representatives to write the bills but we could even have more granulated voting on particular sections of bills, on alternative wordings, etc. And it would all happen fast because it's on the internet. No more stopping the legislature for two weeks because representatives have to fly home and take a shower.

If our digital economy has as much powerful potential as we all pay lip service to, then these should be some of the things we are discussing in order to make democracy truly democratic again. We have to ask ourselves (in America), how would the constitution have been written differently if everybody had a smartphone in the 1790s?