A procedural point about this democracy debate, and then a substantive (hah! didn't think I knew that word, did you?) one. It's in line with the idea of this list to keep up with possibilities and developments like electronic direct democracy ideas, and to serve as a way for people who are into things like that to get in touch with each other. But at some point the purely political aspect of the disagreement isn't especially a cypherpunk issue. I hope everybody cools off or takes it elsewhere (I don't know where) before that point. Robin Hanson's Alternative Institutions list seems like a good place for that. That said, I want to throw in my bic lighter... Democracy is bad; smarter democracy would be worse. The system we have is ravenous and stupid, but we're adapted to it. There's nothing "good" about representative democracy except that it's relatively slow-changing and we know some ways of dealing with it. If we made democracy able to respond to events more quickly, it might be smarter and better at what it does best-- prey on us. It might break past our defenses. I feel the same way about calls for efficient government. No-o-o-o-o thanks! This has nothing to do with respect for the common man. I think people are basically decent and reasonably smart. But no one has a right to take part in the crime called government, including the parts people are playing right now, much less more active parts. I think democracy evolved from standoffs in multi-way wars. Wars used to be won by body count, and at some point someone said, "Okay, we'll compromise and make peace for now, but I'm still keeping track of who's on my side, just so you don't get out of line." Voting is a way of predicting who would win a war. Which is nicer than real war, and all respect and rights are ultimately based on what other people can do, but there's nothing inherently right about democracy, and it keeps people in a sort of tense standoff, unable to trust each other. Nothing in democracy itself lets the sides make agreements and structurally keeps them from changing their minds the next day. Cumbersome, procedure-bound setups like we have actually allow those sorts of things somewhat, but not in an up-front and reliable way. Democracy doesn't hold individual voters responsible for the effects and costs of their votes. Even in our "unresponsive" democracy there's little reason for the statistical will of the people not to be flighty and untrustworthy. Technology can help somewhat in replacing the systems we have with better systems. Better would be anarchic. To me, anarchy means shifting from overarching systems for regulating and taking care of people, to ways for people to take care of their own interests. Democracy sounds like the latter, but instead of taking care of your own life, you have a sort of metaphorical surrogate--a minute influence on what happens to everybody. As usual, I would have stopped, but I thought some things I hadn't before. I'll post the body of this to AltInst and then shut up about it on this list. -fnerd quote me