This sketch, vision, dream (however we want to call it at this stage) is about a relatively simple, decentralized software-aided system that I've been carrying around with me for many years now, on how to run politics.
I'd be interested in participating in the realization of the system envisioned here at sufficient scale. Since I already had a couple of conversations about it, I'm putting the idea into the public domain under a copyleft license before it can get locked away by copyright claims.
Wouldn't it be great if anyone could participate in political processes without the priviledge of investing much extra spare time, contributing to specific topics and debates at the depth familiar with?
Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could eliminate the inefficiency of making decisions based on electing representatives, basically projecting an N-dimensional space of possible opinions on each of the topics and/or debates onto only a couple of discretized points?
Wouldn't it be totally amazing if that could be done in a decentralized fashion, that is, without centralizing too much political power in one spot, on the same hand preserving privacy of the political opinions of the participating population?
The actual underlying debates can easily be organized as a hierarchy of topics, subtopics and decisions. At any level, there could be discussion forums attached where people who are currently politically involved would find their new homes: Discussions need to be moderated, information needs to be organized, experts among the population need to be identified and authenticated (currently, so called "experts" are often from large-scale corporates evangelizing services of that very company) and sometimes new decisions emerge from this process.
The topics at the top level may include "social equality", "employment", "environmentalism", "public health care", "gender equality", etc. As long as countries exist, topics may vary in geographical extent.
Picking up "climate change" as an example, you may not have an opinion deeper than that level, like that counter-measures seem generally important to you; you may find it a dangerous gamble to bet our fresh air on controversy among researchers.
If, however, you are more knowledgable about details, you might want to delve deeper into subtopics, such as e.g. research subsidiaries for figuring out sustainable nuclear fusion (possibly also listed under "invest into renewable energy") or growing meat without the need of animals, raising taxes on CO2 emissions, planting trees, etc.
Wouldn't it be great if we could put these into an app and anyone could participate in an efficient democracy as an ongoing process at any few spare seconds?
Ideally one that preserves your privacy / anonymity, running locally on the device.
As a sidenote: I believe that many hacker stories are glorified and/or have to be read between the lines - this is not Hollywood: The minds of politicians holding centralized power and/or sensitive information are much easier to break in general (as long as those politicians have any love in their lives, anyways).
As another sidenote, with a system like the one described in effect, I see potential for unifying world politics and economy by extending the geographical scope on a per-topic basis beyond currently established national / political borders, for example merging similar discussions in neighboring countries.
Steering this discussing towards the implementation of the envisioned system, let's assess the current situation:
Social media has taken the world by storm. People are willingly giving away previously considered private information for the purpose marketing their own personae. Furthermore, consumer behavior is analyzed in e-commerce for more targeted placement of advertisement and query results from search engines.
Effectively marketing everyday products, that is finding unique selling points, is difficult in today's developed economies. We see developments such as fair traded food and groceries (this means that fair working conditions for the producers are taken care of, for instance no involvement of child labor under the age of 14). Organically farmed groceries are another example for products that are placed on the market based on a specific production process important to the consumer.
Currently, behavioral consumer data is fed to AI in order to find out how to "make people buy", effectively building an addiction machine.
Now letting producers position their products in the N-space of political topics and debates discussed earlier by investing otherwise taxable profit, we get plenty of USPs (for just three debates with three choices each; yes, no, abstain, we'd already have 27 unique positions!). Analog to social media, this marketing opportunity should provide a strong motivation to see a domino effect of producers exposing how products are made and which political values and opinions they stand for. Shopping (e.g.) groceries, a smart phone app would locally pick among competing products the one that matches the consumers values and opinions!
Also data science on producer and consumer data (PCA) could give us the axes that are actually relevant for forming interest groups, rather than today's political parties and representatives competing somewhat randomly, that may or may not find backing in the economy and/or the population.
I'd like to thank several people for influential discussions here, but I don't know whether they want to be listed by name. If you are one of them and do not mind being publicly credited, please just let me know.