An independent research project
What if citizens voted on the decisions —
not only on the people who make
them?
Intelligent-Democracy is a proposal for a next-generation political system: a technological extension of representative democracy in which the public can take part in the decisions that govern it, at whatever level of detail it chooses.
“It is a degree of citizen participation unthinkable today.”
Simon Ramo, 1961 — on many people connected together through computers
Sixty years on, the technology is ordinary. The political system built on top of it is not.
The argument in brief
- 01
Representation was a compromise
Hierarchies between citizens and decisions existed because eighteenth-century communication could not carry everyone’s voice. Rousseau’s objection to referenda was practical, not principled. That constraint no longer holds.
- 02
The failure modes are structural
Asymmetry, latency and forgery of the information passing between citizens and decision-makers are not accidents of bad leadership. They are properties of an indirect mechanism.
- 03
The tools now exist
Blockchain, IoT, big data, data science and network science make transparent, verifiable, near-real-time participation technically possible — for the first time since the Greek assemblies.
Start here
Part A
The New System
What Intelligent-Democracy is, how legislative power would move to citizens while the judiciary keeps its independent guard over fundamental rights, and which technologies the system rests on.
Read →Part B
Why It Is Necessary
The case for change, traced from the Greek assemblies through the Roman republic to the present — and the five fronts on which the current mechanism is failing.
Read →The five perspectives
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B.1
Economic
Concentration of wealth, collapsing social mobility, and intermediaries that stand between citizens and the services they pay for.
-
B.2
Political
Populism, invisible oligarchies, and an election mechanism too coarse and too slow to register what citizens actually want.
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B.3
Ecological
Planetary boundaries are being crossed on a timescale that electoral cycles are structurally unable to respond to.
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B.4
Scientific
Blockchain, big data, and artificial intelligence will reshape governance whether or not it is designed for — and AI in particular cuts both ways.
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B.5
Humanitarian
Attention-optimising recommendation systems are fragmenting shared reality — and with it the common ground democracy depends on.
This is a work in progress
Parts A and B are written. The chapters on principles, mechanisms and implementation — the social citizenship score, the election mechanism, basic income, and the literature review — are still being drafted, and are not published until they are.