Re-Inventing Democracy for the 21st Century
Empowering Voters to Exercise Political Sovereignty
The Direct Democracy Global Network Story
Welcome!
By way of introduction, I'm the story teller. My name is N.J.Bordier, founder of the Direct Democracy Global Network, and citizen of Switzerland and the US.
I've spent many years exploring pathways for blending the acclaimed virtues of Switzerland's Direct Democracy, in which Swiss citizens exercise political sovereignty, with those of the US proclaimed government "of, by, and for the people". The network has the potential to fulfill this vital objective by expanding the repertory of Switzerland's direct democracy tools using modern technologies.
The story I want to tell revolves around two conflicting political perspectives and their proponents. They have shaped history for centuries and continue to do so today, often by intermittently cancelling each other out. In various forms, one champions and advocates popular political sovereignty, while the other opposes it. What I will argue is that their opposing views and actions often deadlock democracy preventing vital laws and policies from being democratically debated, enacted, and implemented.
What I find most remarkable is an unusual agreement that has spontaneously been emerging among the proponents of both sides during the first two decades of the 21st Century, including influential people, groups, interests, and parties that usually disagree with each other. (Hapless voters are typically excluded from active participation.)
What the adversarial proponents tend to agree about is the failure of the representative forms of government governing them to address and resolve critical issues and dangers. Many proponents on both sides blame each other for the failures. They insist the solution is to elect different lawmakers who favor their side.
But repeated elections putting into office different lawmakers typically have little if any effect in overcoming chronic failures to resolve critical issues and dangers that can threaten almost everyone's lives -- especially the large majority of populations and electorates lacking influence and power to effect change.
I argue that the root cause of these impasses is their systems of governance and their myriad, disconnected chambers of decision and actions that tend to paralyze the whole system.
On the downside, looking into future prospects, what is most alarming is the lack of effective system-changing mechanisms to overcome these failures. Piecemeal reforms rarely have system-changing impacts, and can even aggravate and increase existing failures.
On the upside, it is my objective in this essay to provide evidence of my workable system-changing solution -- the Direct Democracy Global Network. It will exist outside these failed systems of governance, while empowering voters to fundamentally and democratically change their operations autonomously.
Click below for a video overview of the network:
Table of Contents.
1. Architects of Popular Sovereignty
II. Opponents of Popular Sovereignty
III. Competing Visions of Political Power
IV. The Great Reversal: Erasure of Democratic Gains
V. Symptom: The Global Retreat from the Ballot Box
VI. Anatomy of Alienation: Why Voters Distrust Elections & Lawmakers
VII. Global Antidote: Swiss Direct Democracy Digitized for the 21st Century
VIII. Voter-Driven Consensus Building
IX. Shifting the Locus of Power
X. How Voters Can Distinguish Fact from Fiction
XI. Circumventing Gatekeepers: Crowdsourcing Political Power
XII. The Consensus Engine: Creating Shared Solutions
XIII. Beyond Sovereign Borders: A Digitized Global Town Square
I. Architects of Popular Sovereignty
The American Republic was founded on the bold claim that ordinary people, not kings or aristocrats, hold ultimate authority over how they are governed.
“We the People” was not a literary flourish. It was a constitutional declaration that political power flows from below — from citizens — and that any government worthy of legitimacy must continually answer to them. Two and a half centuries later, the gap between that declaration and the way modern politics actually works has grown impossible to ignore.
Voters cast ballots, but laws keep moving in directions most of them did not choose. Confidence in elected institutions sits near historic lows. Around the world, regimes that maintain the form of elections drift toward outcomes that look very different from what voters wanted.
This essay argues that political sovereignty — the right of the governed to set the terms under which they are governed — has been quietly transferred away from voters and lodged in the hands of donors, party leaderships, organized interests, and entrenched bureaucracies, and that the technological means now exist to put it back.
The argument follows the structure of the analytical framework developed at reinventdemocracy.net and the Direct Democracy Global Network. It begins with the philosophical foundation of popular sovereignty, examines the ideologies that have always opposed it, surveys the current global retreat from the ballot box, and concludes with a concrete description of the digital architecture — protected by U.S. Patent 11,935,141 — by which voters can recover continuous, binding influence over their governments.
The doctrine of popular sovereignty did not begin with the American framers. John Locke, writing in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), grounded the principle in consent: government authority derives strictly from the consent of the governed, and when government fails to protect citizens’ natural rights to life, liberty, and property, the people retain the sovereign right to alter or abolish it.
In the Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted in 1762 that sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible, residing solely in the general will of the citizen body, and that laws are legitimate only when they directly express that collective will. A citizen who must obey laws he had no real hand in making, Rousseau wrote, is not a citizen but a subject.
The American framers absorbed all of this. James Madison declared in Federalist No. 46 that “ultimate authority … resides in the people alone.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 22, described the people as “the pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” James Wilson, the most vocal advocate of popular sovereignty at the Constitutional Convention, argued that the entire Constitution depended on “the supreme authority of the people alone.”
Benjamin Franklin put the doctrine in a single sentence: in free governments, “the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.”
Half a century later Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people” was the starting point for every political law in the United States.
These were not theoretical claims with no working precedent. The Swiss Alpine cantons had practiced direct citizen lawmaking for centuries before Rousseau wrote about it. The Landsgemeinde — the open-air assembly of all enfranchised citizens — was, and in two cantons still is, the literal architecture of self-government. The Enlightenment doctrine of popular sovereignty is, in part, the philosophical articulation of a working Alpine institution.
II. Opponents of Popular Sovereignty
As soon as the principle was articulated and spread, it had powerful opponents. They have not disappeared; their arguments have only changed costume. Five families of opposition recur across the centuries.
■ Monarchists and absolutists. The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings held that authority descends from God to the monarch and never resides in the populace. Thomas Hobbes, in a more secular register, argued in Leviathan that to escape the war of all against all, citizens must surrender their power irrevocably to a single absolute sovereign.
■ Theocratic regimes. Traditionalist religious states locate sovereignty in a deity or sacred text, with political power administered by a clerical elite rather than by the will of the laity.
■ Totalitarian and fascist regimes. Mussolini and Hitler explicitly rejected liberal democracy, asserting that the State — or a single vanguard party — embodies the national spirit better than individual citizens ever could.
■ Authoritarian communists. While speaking the language of the people, Lenin’s vanguard party doctrine reserved actual decision-making for a small revolutionary elite, removing direct sovereignty from citizens in fact while invoking it in rhetoric.
■ Elitists and technocrats. From Plato’s Philosopher King to modern technocratic policy elites, this tradition holds that the public is too uninformed, too emotional, or too short-sighted to govern, and that an intellectual or expert class must rule on its behalf.
These traditions disagree on much, but they agree that ordinary citizens cannot or should not be sovereign. Whenever popular sovereignty has gained ground, one or more of these traditions has organized to take it back.
III. Competing Visions of Political Power
The contest between proponents and opponents of popular sovereignty can be condensed into three competing visions.
■ Source of power. Opponents locate it in centralized elites, divine right, or a vanguard party. Proponents locate it in the consent of the governed and the general will.
■ Governance model. Opponents prescribe top-down dictates, justified as necessary to prevent societal chaos. Proponents prescribe bottom-up creation of laws that reflect collective choice.
■ View of the public. Opponents see the public as uninformed, emotional, and requiring strict management by experts. Proponents see the public as the original fountain of all legitimate authority, capable of self-determination.
Almost every concrete reform debate — about referenda, about expert commissions, about emergency powers, about who selects candidates — is at root a debate among these issues.
IV. The Great Reversal: The Erasure of Democratic Gains
Today the proponent column is losing. The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report finds that what political scientists call the Third Wave of autocratization now dominates global politics. The democratic gains achieved between 1978 and roughly 2010 have been almost entirely eradicated; the share of the world’s population living in democratizing countries has fallen sharply, while the share living under autocratic or autocratizing rule now constitutes a clear majority. Independent indices monitored by Deutsche Welle — V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and IDEA — have reported steady declines in liberal democratic quality for nearly two decades.
The Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way describe a specific trajectory in their 2025 publication The path to American authoritarianism: What comes after democratic breakdown a regime that retains the formal apparatus of competitive elections while hollowing out the institutional checks that make those elections meaningful. They call the destination “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which voting still happens but no longer constrains power. A New York Times analysis has independently documented how, even in established democracies, structural minority rule has become the rule rather than the exception.
The historic opponents of popular sovereignty are winning. The architecture of checks and balances is being systematically dismantled in favor of executive aggrandizement.
V. Symptom: A Global Retreat from the Ballot Box
The most visible symptom of this reversal is voter participation. Global average turnout has fallen from roughly 78 percent in the 1940s to about 66 percent today. The decline is steepest in Europe — once the stronghold of high turnout — with post-communist states losing as much as twenty percentage points and established western democracies losing roughly ten. In the United States, FairVote’s data show participation hovering between 55 and 65 percent in presidential elections, falling below 40 percent in midterms, and often below 20 percent in primaries, well behind peer democracies that routinely turn out 75 to 85 percent.
Low and uneven participation is not, on its own, evidence that voters have stopped caring. It is evidence that the system has stopped giving them sufficient reason to believe that voting will translate into outcomes. The cycle is self-reinforcing: the fewer who vote, the less representative the result; the less representative the result, the less reason to vote.
Low rates of voter participation are not just apathy; they are a direct indicator of deep democratic ill-health.
VI. Anatomy of Alienation: Why Voters Retreat
The US.based non-partisan Pew Research has tracked public trust in the federal government since 1958, when about three-quarters of Americans said they trusted Washington to do the right thing most of the time. By the 2020s, according to a Pew publication, this figure had collapsed to roughly one in five. Decades of complementary survey research and analysis of distrust, discontent, and partisan rancor make clear that this is not partisan grumbling. Across both parties, across age cohorts, and across every region, the conviction that government is responsive to ordinary people has eroded.
Four mechanisms drive this alienation:
■ Negative partisanship. Voting is increasingly driven by fear of the opposing party rather than positive identification with one’s own. Citizens vote against rather than for, and lose belief that any positive alternative is possible.
■ Special-interest dominance. The political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed roughly 1,800 policy questions over more than two decades and found that when the policy preferences of ordinary citizens diverge from those of economic elites and organized business interests, ordinary citizens have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on what government does. Their conclusion is blunt: the majority does not rule.
■ Perceived extremism. Party leaderships, selected by primary electorates and donor networks, drift away from the median voter and become viewed as decoupled from public sentiment and ideologically extreme.
■ Systemic barriers. Winner-take-all electoral rules suppress third-party viability and force zero-sum culture-war gridlock at the expense of material problem-solving. Layered on top are deliberate efforts at voter suppression — restrictive identification, polling-place closures, purges of registration rolls — that fall most heavily on poorer, younger, and minority voters.
Underlying all four is what the German sociologist Robert Michels called the Iron law of oligarchy: every complex representative organization, no matter how democratic in origin, tends over time to evolve into an oligarchy that serves elite leadership over its members. Parties, legislatures, and even reform movements are not exempt. Without deliberate counter-design, organizational drift toward elite control is the default — and the modern American party system is drifting on cue. As scholars of winner-take-all politics have shown, the rules of the game now reliably reward concentrated wealth and punish dispersed citizens.
VII. Global Antidote: Swiss Inspiration Digitized for the 21st Century
It is sometimes said that direct citizen control of government cannot scale beyond a New England town meeting. The empirical record says otherwise, and the Swiss provide the best counter-example.
■ The roots. Eighteenth-century Alpine practice and Rousseau’s philosophy together established the conditions for direct political sovereignty — empowering citizens over partisans.
■ The historic tools. More than a century of Swiss popular initiatives, referendums, and binding mandates demonstrate that ordinary citizens, given the time and information, can govern themselves competently. Citizens can force a binding national vote on any federal law by collecting 50,000 signatures and propose constitutional amendments with 100,000.
■ The digital transformation. The Direct Democracy Global Network (DDGN) digitizes these time-tested tools into a globally scalable software network, drawing explicitly on economist Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for self-organized governance to empower citizens and circumvent elite capture.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA ) documents dozens of variants on this idea: citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, deliberative polls, mandatory referenda. Some have been used at the national level (Ireland’s citizen assemblies on marriage equality and abortion), some at the city level (participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and now in hundreds of municipalities). What they share is that they make the voter’s role more than the periodic ratification of a candidate slate. They turn citizens into policy makers, with structured deliberation, expert input, and binding outcomes. Scholarly histories of populism and constitutional reform show that the appetite for this kind of direct citizen power is not new — it is recurring.
https://reinventdemocracy.net/
VIII. Voter-Driven Consensus Building
For skeptics who argue voters are an inherent source of political animosity and confrontation, recent research indicates that mainstream voters are inclined to compromise and build consensus.
Critics argue that voter empowerment will lead to more conflicts. But voters-- especially mainstream voters -- tend to oppose polarizing actions that engender legislative stalemates.
A research project was conducted by Professor Beau Sievers and colleagues at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Their findings demonstrate settings can be devised that are conducive to consensus building among diverse groups of people who did not previously know each other.
These consensus-building settings are virtual opposites of the closed, conflict-producing political enclaves created by politicians and political parties attempting to corral voters into accepting their priorities rather than determine their own. Below are excerpts describing the research: How consensus-building conversation changes our minds and aligns our brains.
"A few years ago, Dr. Sievers devised a study to improve understanding of how exactly a group of people achieves a consensus and how their individual brains change after such discussions.
"The results showed that a robust conversation that results in consensus synchronizes the talkers’ brains — not only when thinking about the topic that was explicitly discussed, but related situations that were not.
"The study also revealed at least one factor that makes it harder to reach accord: a group member whose strident opinions drown out everyone else.
“The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found.
"Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not by pushing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to take the stage and then adjusting their own beliefs — and brain patterns — to match the group. . . Being willing to change your own mind, then, seems key to getting everyone on the same page."
What I find encouraging is that recent discoveries about consensus building opportunities and environments are complemented and facilitated by emerging technologies. One of them is a decision-assisting patent that can facilitate consensus building that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently granted me.
U.S. Patent 11,935,141 describes a Decision Assisting Artificial Intelligence System for Voter Electoral and Legislative Consensus Building (DAAIS). Earlier patents on voter-driven coalition building — U.S. 7,953,628 and U.S. 8,313,383 — laid the groundwork. The DAAIS system organizes the architecture into three interoperating components.
■ Component 1 — Data processing. The system continuously evaluates a living corpus of electoral laws, legislative proposals, and intra-network voter interactions, building a structured representation of the political landscape that any participant can query.
■ Component 2 — Machine learning. Natural-language processing learns from successive rounds of voter queries, mapping overlapping priorities across divided populations and surfacing the issues on which broad cross-partisan agreement is in fact attainable.
■ Component 3 — Voting utility. A cryptographically secure environment lets self-selecting aggregates of voters propose, debate, and vote on binding legislative agendas, producing auditable outcomes that legislators cannot ignore.
Researchers working on crowd-scale deliberation have published complementary models for resisting manipulation, weighting underrepresented voices, and making the entire process auditable end-to-end. Earlier observers of networked civic life, including Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (Penguin), argued long before this generation of tools that lower coordination costs would make collective citizen action more, not less, feasible — if the platforms were built to that purpose.
In reference to my work and patent, I have described a number of steps voters might take in using the Direct Democracy Global Network are described here:
IX. Shifting the Locus of Power
The change wrought by AI-assisted direct democracy is best seen by setting the current representative model and the DDGN model side by side along four dimensions.
■ Power source and agenda setting. Today: top-down, dictated by party elites and closed-door platforms. With DDGN: voter-led, using natural-language AI to crowdsource cross-partisan, shared priorities.
■ Consensus building. Today: partisan gridlock and unresolved zero-sum stalemates. With DDGN: AI-assisted cross-partisan reconciliation built on fact-checked deliberation.
■ Candidate selection. Today: pre-selected party loyalists on restricted ballots. With DDGN: crowdsourced consensus-builders funded and nominated by digital voting blocs.
■ Post-election action. Today: voter passivity until the next election cycle. With DDGN: continuous accountability through online petition drives, referendums, and recall mandates.
Each row of the matrix is, in effect, a description of where political power lives. The shift the network proposes is not the abolition of representative legislatures but the addition of a continuous channel through which citizen consensus shapes what those legislatures do.
X. How Voters Can Distinguish Fact from Fiction
The strongest historical objection to popular sovereignty has always come from the technocratic and elitist tradition: the public, the argument runs, is too uninformed or too easily misled to be trusted with binding decisions. The architecture of consensus answers that objection directly.
Voters submit raw priorities and partisan debate — the chaotic noise of any open political conversation. Machine-learning and natural-language processing then act as a filter, drawing on broad bodies of evidence to identify and remove demonstrable falsehoods, and to surface the evidence-based legislative options that actually correspond to citizens’ stated goals. The output is not a popularity contest but a set of fact-checked common agendas. The same digital tools that have been used for micro-targeted manipulation in election campaigns can, when built as public-interest infrastructure, be turned against the very disinformation they once amplified.
Voters build their common agendas strictly on the basis of accurate, evidence-based legislative options — effectively neutralizing the modern technocrat argument against popular sovereignty.
XI. Circumventing Gatekeepers: Crowdsourcing Political Power
Once a fact-checked common agenda exists, the next problem is organizational: how do dispersed citizens, who agree on substance, become a political force capable of acting on it? The architecture of consensus prescribes a three-step process.
■ Step 1 — Connect. Voters link with like-minded individuals based on shared, AI-fact-checked priorities, using the most fundamental crowdsourcing principles.
■ Step 2 — Form blocs. Flexible, self-governing digital voting blocs are created and hosted natively on the DDGN, operating independently of traditional geographic boundaries.
■ Step 3 — Merge and scale. Blocs aggregate into formal, registered political parties and cross-partisan electoral coalitions capable of challenging the established two-party duopoly.
This is how the gatekeepers — party leaderships, donor networks, and the closed primaries that select “electable” candidates — are circumvented without ever being attacked head-on. The blocs simply produce alternatives the gatekeepers did not authorize, and voters fund and elect them.
XII. The Consensus Building Engine: Creating Shared Solutions
Underneath the political mobilization sits a continuously running deliberative cycle that discovers where the genuine common ground actually lies. Mainstream voters, surveys consistently show, prefer compromise over stalemate; the system’s job is to find the compromises that they themselves will recognize as such. The cycle has four phases.
■ Phase 1 — Input. Voters submit divergent priorities and needs without being forced into pre-existing party categories.
■ Phase 2 — AI fact-check. The system removes misinformation and surfaces evidence-based legislative options that respond to the stated priorities.
■ Phase 3 — Rank and debate. Self-selecting aggregates of voters dialogue, rank, and vote on the AI-provided options.
■ Phase 4 — Common agenda. A unified, cross-partisan legislative agenda is established and the central database is updated, ready to be fed back into the next cycle.
Because the cycle never closes — it iterates indefinitely as new information and new participants enter — the common agenda is not a one-time snapshot but a continuously refreshed expression of the considered will of the network’s citizens.
XII. Continuous Sovereignty vs. Episodic Voting
The deepest flaw in conventional electoral democracy is that voting is a singular event. Citizens act on Election Day and are then expected to wait, passively, for the next one. Candidates dictate platforms; voters ratify or reject them; everything else happens behind closed doors. The architecture of consensus replaces episodic voting with a continuous Action Wave. Between elections, authorized users can compose and issue a regular sequence of binding citizen instruments — petition drives, popular initiatives, referendums, and informal recall votes — each anchored to the common agenda voters have set using the consensus engine.
According to this design, the voters build the platform and hire candidates to execute it, rather than the reverse. Representatives who ignore the consensus run a real risk: a coordinated, well-funded primary defeat in the next cycle, organized through the same network that produced the mandate they ignored. The threat of recall — not merely the ritual of a future election — becomes the operative discipline.
Sovereignty has to be exercisable continuously, at the scale and tempo of modern policy-making, with tools equal to the task.
XIII. Beyond Sovereign Borders: A Digitized Global Town Square
The deepest crises of the present century — climate disruption, global pandemics, transnational conflict, the governance of artificial intelligence itself — do not adhere to electoral district boundaries. National legislatures, even at their most responsive, are structurally mismatched to problems whose causes and consequences are global.
By design, DDGN's activities are not focused on any geographic location. Voters can freely gather on its web-base platform and autonomously assemble self-organizing groups, voting blocs, political parties, and electoral coalitions. They can work collaboratively to forge cross-national electoral alliances to formulate and implement solutions to unmeet needs and life-threatening emergencies. Their transnational coalitions, and the voting power of their member, can motivate disparate national lawmaking bodies to enact synchronized, collaboratively devised survival policies. In effect, the network serves as a Global Town Square — a venue where voters can set and implement the terms of cooperation on the issues that will determine the future.
The strongest objections to a digitally enabled architecture of consensus do not come from authoritarians. They come from thoughtful democrats who worry that the proposed remedy might compound the very ills it claims to cure. Each objection deserves a direct, evidence-based answer rather than a rhetorical deflection. Five recur with particular force.
■ Digital exclusion. Not every citizen has reliable internet access, and digital literacy is unevenly distributed across age, income, and geography. A network that operates exclusively online risks reproducing — perhaps amplifying — the very disenfranchisement it claims to end. The architecture answers this with three design commitments: low-bandwidth web and SMS interfaces alongside the full application; integration with public-library, civic-center, and post-office terminals (a model already used by Estonian e-voting and the Indian Aadhaar civic stack); and continuous auditing for demographic representativeness, with weighting protocols that surface, rather than mask, gaps in participation.
■ Deliberation quality. Critics from the deliberative-democracy tradition — most prominently James Fishkin and Hélène Landemore — have argued that mass online voting collapses into popularity contests because it bypasses the slow, structured exchange of reasons that genuine deliberation requires. The architecture of consensus answers this with the four-phase Consensus Engine described in Section XII. Inputs are not unmediated polls; they pass through fact-checking, expert briefing, structured ranking, and iterative refinement. The model is closer to Ireland’s deliberative citizens’ assemblies — which produced workable national consensus on marriage and abortion — than to a social-media trend.
■ Manipulation and security. The same digital tools that lower coordination costs for citizens also lower them for hostile state actors, troll farms, and well-funded disinformation networks. Cryptographic protocols, end-to-end auditability, and verifiable identity credentials are necessary but not sufficient. The architecture pairs them with three additional defenses: differential treatment of anonymous and verified participation; algorithmic detection of inauthentic coordinated behavior modeled on the open-source tooling developed by the Stanford Internet Observatory; and a transparent appeal process by which contested results can be re-deliberated. Security is not a one-time guarantee but a continuously operated public utility.
■ The populism risk. A frequent objection holds that majoritarian decision-making, un-tempered by counter-majoritarian institutions, can ratify the suppression of minority rights. This is a serious concern, and the network’s design treats it as such. Constitutional rights and entrenched protections remain reserved to courts and to the supermajority procedures of national constitutions; the consensus engine produces inputs to legislation, not constitutional override. The architecture is additive, not substitutive: it strengthens what representative legislatures do, and it does not abolish the rights-based judicial review that protects minorities from any majority, whether that majority is expressed at the ballot box or on a screen.
■ Legitimacy and jurisdiction. A non-state, transnational network has no formal constitutional authority over any sovereign legislature; critics ask, fairly, why elected officials should heed it. The answer is the same one that justifies the influence of the press, organized civil society, and any other extra-state actor: legitimacy flows from the demonstrable representativeness, factual accuracy, and procedural integrity of the output. A common agenda assembled from transparent, auditable, broadly participated deliberation carries political weight that an unelected donor class or a captured caucus cannot match. Legislators are free to ignore it; they are not free to ignore it without explanation.
None of these objections is trivial; none, taken seriously, fatally undermines the architecture. The argument for popular sovereignty has always required answering them, and it has always been able to.
Even though significant portions of this essay are discouraging, there are many good reasons to be encouraged. They stem from the digitally enabled coalescence of scalable self-selecting and self-organizing voters around the world to act together to surmount the challenges they face in everyday life. This seemingly spontaneous coalescence is due in large part to technology! Yes, technology that enables hundreds of millions and even billions of people to keep in touch with each other on a minute-by-minute basis 24/7/265!
The Global Brain
In 1982, British intellectual Peter Russell published an unusual book. He was a University of Cambridge graduate in theoretical physics, experimental psychology, and computer science, and his book was entitled The Global Brain. Few people at the time grasped the meaning of the book's title, or the future impact of the connections Russell foresaw between technology and people. I had the pleasure of meeting Russell at that time, but I did not realize how prophetic his concepts would prove to be.
Many years later, informed proponents of the global brain hypothesis assert the following:
"The Internet increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system that functions as part of the collective nervous system of the planet"
"The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more information, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a brain for the planet Earth."
This is reassuring news in the face of increasing divisiveness and polarization that is preventing once robust democracies from taking actions needed to protect people's lives and ensure bright futures.
It is also reassuring that experts at prestigious academic institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), followed Russell’s conceptual lead and created organizations dedicated to taking advantage of the possibilities Russell described:
"The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence explores how people and computers can be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before."
One of the Center's research scientists, Mark Klein, addresses cogently the challenges facing us:
"Humanity now finds itself faced with pressing and highly complex problems – such as climate change, the spread of disease, international and economic insecurity, and so on - that call upon us to deliberate together at unprecedented scale, incorporating the input of large numbers of experts and stakeholders in order to find and agree upon the best solutions to adopt."
"While the Internet now provides the cheap, capable, and ubiquitous communication infrastructure needed to enable crowd-scale deliberation, current technologies (i.e. social media tools such as email, forums, social networks, and so on) fare very poorly when applied to complex and contentious problems, producing toxic inefficient processes and highly sub-optimal outcomes."
On the personal front, I had the pleasure of getting to know Klein and his work years ago, which I found to be inspirational with respect to my own work in developing the Direct Democracy Global Network. I especially appreciate his goal statement:
"My research mission is to develop technology that helps large numbers of people work together more effectively to solve difficult real-world challenges. It seems that many of our most critical collective decisions have results (e.g. in terms of climate, economic prosperity, and social stability) that none of us individually want, suggesting that our current collective decision-making processes are deeply flawed. I'd like to contribute to fixing that problem."
"My approach in inherently multi-disciplinary, drawing from artificial intelligence, collective intelligence, data science, operations research, complex systems science, economics, management science, and human-computer interaction, amongst other fields."
Whew! I find it immensely encouraging that forward-looking members of the world's scientific community are focused on researching and resolving technologically the global challenges I've described in the preceding sections.
Truth-Telling-Technology and Large Scale consensus-building
Many of us are familiar with reports of the negative impact of social media misinformation and disinformation generated about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biased and divisive AI-based algorithms. However, astute analysts, especially Oxford University's Polonski, dismiss this bad news and replace it with good news, by emphasizing the positive impact technology can and will play.
"It is easy to blame AI technology for the world’s wrongs (or for lost elections), but there’s the rub: the underlying technology is not inherently harmful in itself. The same algorithmic tools used to mislead, misinform and confuse can be repurposed to support democracy and increase civic engagement. After all, human-centred AI in politics needs to work for the people with solutions that serve the electorate."
"There are many examples of how AI can enhance election campaigns in ethical ways. For example, we can program political bots to step in when people share articles that contain known misinformation. We can deploy micro-targeting campaigns that help to educate voters on a variety of political issues and enable them to make up their own minds. And most importantly, we can use AI to listen more carefully to what people have to say and make sure their voices are being clearly heard by their elected representatives."
These findings enable me to conclude this essay on a positive note. They also encourage me to again draw attention to my own work and invention of political consensus-building technology, which have generated core premises of the Direct Democracy Global Network.
Encouraging Evolutionary Trends
Skeptical readers of this essay might question whether contemporary mainstream voters have the capacities and proclivities to take a leap across centuries and follow the advice and admonitions of world-renowned philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin. While they were keen observers of positive and negative character traits and behavioral influences on human behavior, and their evolution, can it be assumed that their advice and admonitions will play a transformative role in protecting and supporting individual liberties in the 21st century? Will the capabilities of ordinary people to exercise political sovereignty over elections and legislation survive hardened opposition?
Affirmative support is provided by the extensive research conducted by Dacher Keltner, University of California/Berkeley Professor of Psychology. His findings demonstrate the evolutionary strengthening of cooperative, mutually beneficial, humanitarian traits within societies around the world.
Akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's basic premises, Keltner's emphasizes inherent "pro-social" behavior patterns. These centuries old patterns indicate human beings possess inherent capabilities with respect to collectively caring for others. He expresses his views in The Power Paradox: The Promise and Peril of 21st Century Power’ | Talks at Google (YouTube. October 14, 2016.) and Survival of the Kindest (YouTube. July 15, 2015.)
Keltner's research illuminates positive evolutionary trends showing that human nature is fundamentally "pro-social," characterized by compassion, empathy, kindness, and caring -- a "compassionate instinct" that has evolved to ensure species survival through cooperation and power sharing, rather than competition and subjugation.
What I infer from Keltner's findings is that the self-serving, aggrandizing behaviors and conflict-producing interactions of competing groups and parties may well be a passing, retrograde blip in the forward march of humankind toward greater cooperation and collective problem-solving capabilities for the greater good.
The numerical preponderance of the world’s 8.5 billion people is a number that dwarfs the comparatively small numbers of power-seeking politicians, political parties, lawmakers, special interests, and autocrats endeavoring to increase their power, status, and wealth.
Far more people will be sharing mutually supportive values, cooperative behavioral norms, and altruistically oriented interrelationships than the political actors seeking to aggrandize their status by weakening the control ordinary people exercise over elections, their governments, and lawmakers.
By joining the Direct Democracy Global Network when it becomes fully operational, everyone -- and especially intrepid voters exercising their political sovereignty - will have unique opportunities to apply the altruistic and socially benevolent lessons humankind has been learning for centuries. They will hold the keys to the future. Yes, the best is yet to come!
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Voter suppression in the United States
Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA)
“Direct democracy is one of the special features of the Swiss political system. It allows the electorate to express their opinion on decisions taken by the Swiss Parliament and to propose amendments to the Federal Constitution. It is underpinned by two instruments: initiatives and referendums. “In Switzerland the people play a large part in the decision-making process at all political levels. All Swiss citizens aged 18 and over have the right to vote in elections and on specific issues. The Swiss electorate are called on approximately four times a year to vote on an average of fifteen such issues. “Citizens are also able to propose votes on specific issues themselves. This can be done via an initiative, an optional referendum, or a mandatory referendum. These three instruments form the core of direct democracy.”
Popular initiative
“The popular initiative allows citizens to propose an amendment or addition to the Constitution. It acts to drive or relaunch political debate on a specific issue. For such an initiative to come about, the signatures of 100,000 voters who support the proposal must be collected within 18 months. The authorities sometimes respond to an initiative with a direct counter-proposal in the hope that a majority of the people and the cantons support that instead.”
Optional referendum
“Federal acts and other enactments of the Federal Assembly are subject to optional referendums. These allow citizens to demand that approved bills are put to a nationwide vote. In order to bring about a national referendum, 50,000 valid signatures must be collected within 100 days of publication of the new legislation.”
Mandatory referendum
“All constitutional amendments approved by Parliament are subject to a mandatory referendum, i.e. they must be put to a nationwide popular vote. The electorate are also required to approve Swiss membership of specific international organisations.”
Swiss Confederation: Political System
“Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland.” “Since becoming a federal state in 1848, Switzerland has expanded the opportunities it provides for democratic participation. Various instruments are used to include minorities as much as possible — a vital political feature in a country with a range of languages and cultures. The country’s federal structure keeps the political process as close as possible to Swiss citizens. Of the three levels, the communes are the closest to the people, and are granted as many powers as possible. Powers are delegated upwards to the cantons and the Confederation only when this is necessary.”
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