At dinner in NYC with Koen and Ann, we had a very interesting discussion about democratic processes. Belgium, France and the USA were obviously great material, respectively with their deliquescent state, banana republic, and polarised politics. Add to these a declining participation to the voting process, and it really looks like there is an opportunity to do better than these old democracies.
It should probably not surprise us, as our political representation systems date back from times when the fastest one could travel was on horseback, when most people lived tilling the soil, and few could read and write. The state then had much less complexities to manage, and the pace of change and decision making was measured in months, years or decades.
Isn’t it time then to move to more direct systems where citizens with access to immense amounts of data and analysis can directly participate in dialog, express their opinions, and take decisions without having to vote for “representatives” ?
This of course would be a huge shift, one that will be resisted by the current professional political class. It is also a complex one, which will require to reinvent all the safeguarding mechanisms, the checks and balances that took centuries to evolve.
But isn’t it already happening ? The political class in France recently showed how out of touch it was with the public opinion during the DSK sex scandal. They initially made statements supporting DSK, hinting that aggressive sexual advances was nothing to be fussy about, really an expression of French Don-Juanism. Within days or hours of their first reactions, they adjusted their stance, no doubt as their political advisors decrypted the online forums… The real-time data mining and analytics around social networks is already shaping the actions of politicians. We should probably take control of that process before they learn how to subvert it.
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Superegos for the digital world