Abandoned South Dakota Town on Sale for $250k

Oh, and you've overlooked how readily people are led into supporting positions directly contrary to their interests. It happens all the time. Tribal social structures and group identities make it easy and common.

Nothing about this ends well.

Have a nice day.

Right, let's look at this.

Corruption exists because people are driven by their own self interest, and that self interest can be guided by those who can shift the personal priorities of the individual. If a person is 'bought off', their actions may change to be in line with those that bought them off.

How many people need to be bought off in order to corrupt the decision making process? Enough to have a majority of the decision makers under control. Compared to a representative democracy, is the number of decision makers smaller or larger under direct democracy? It's larger. That would suggest corruption is harder to maintain.

There's a little bit more to it though. Corruption can take different forms. Corruption based on material wealth may be effective with representative democracies, but even if it doesn't scale, the more insidious form of corruption is corruption of the mind. To guard against this, you need 'inclusive, informative' news media, as it's vital to be able to expose lies and misinformation.

Direct democracy with an effective news media is more resistant to corruption than the representative democracy with corporate media that we have now. If you disagree with that statement, let me know.

> "You're replacing an explicit set of power structures with equally explicit rules with a set of implicit structures with no explicit rules."

> "Consider how Digg succumbed to organized influencers. Ask yourself how your system is immune to such things. Hint: it's not."

So your argument is that implicit power structures are just as problematic as explicit power structures as you can still have a small number of actors who seek to game the system to their own advantage?

> "Excuse me. An identical balance for all individuals. What is good for one person is incredibly bad for another. You're imposing uniformity where uniformity is unsuited."

You've just repeated what I said with different words.

> "Apologize to the dead created by people like you first."

I find that insulting, quite frankly. As I've said before, none of those societies you're referring to were communist societies, nor did they start out as communist societies and devolve into something else. They were never communist to begin with, and did not make efforts to become more communist as time went on.

Here's an analogy that should help explain why that statement is misguided. Imagine I'm a Muslim, and this is just after the Paris shootings. I can state that Islam is a religion of peace, and so state that the people who carried out the attacks were not true Muslims, regardless of what they claim to be. Would your response still be 'Apologize to the dead created by people like you first.'?

Basically the type of person willing to give up current access to family, friends and job to go there are predominantly weird.

The exception is young people chasing jobs and education ie college towns, San Francisco, SoHo

Or tax havens.

This is only true if you make a series of very large assumptions about the people involved. Such as that voters individually choose to consume an inclusive variety of media, instead of filtering to just the media that caters to their tribe.

This is the sort of assumption that seems easy if you are utopian and don't really understand tribalism in nearly-hairless primates. Suffice to say it's not nearly as simple as you think and far from the guarantee you clearly believe.

> So your argument is that implicit power structures are just as problematic as explicit power structures as you can still have a small number of actors who seek to game the system to their own advantage?

Implicit power structures are worse. This is because they lack accountability mechanisms and centralize power, making corruption easy while also making it difficult to get rid of. This is in no way an improvement.

Frankly, it's becoming painfully clear to me that you simply don't understand power.

> I find that insulting, quite frankly.

Bully for you.

> As I've said before, none of those societies you're referring to were communist societies, nor did they start out as communist societies and devolve into something else. They were never communist to begin with, and did not make efforts to become more communist as time went on.

I imagine you think it's just a coincidence that without exception, every single historical case wherein sincere attempts at Communism were made the result was a dictatorial bloodbath. You think the examples aren't relevant.

After all, they were not true Scotsman.

I'm afraid I'm done with this conversation. If I believed in God, I'd be praying very hard that you never find yourself near levers of power. You have no conception of how much your naivety terrifies me.

If the population has been taught critical thinking and given plenty of chance to practice this in their formal education, then I don't see how it can't mitigate against the damage that "influencers" could do.