Everyday Authoritarianism Is Boring and Tolerable

TL:DR; screw basic income, let's talk direct democracy.

I think the article presents a valuable point of view, but most "democratic" choices in countries involve very low fidelity choices between largely indistinguishable parties in a way that is not particularly different from long term autocratic rule.

This might be due to "flight to the centre" in terms of major party policy, but I like to think of it in terms of the fact that essentially 1 bit every few years is not really enough input into the whole system. There is a lot of "bundling" in terms of policy which means that in the process of choosing the least worst thing amongst the available options, you are forced to legitimise a status quo.

Worse than that, you think you're voting for something and then the thing you get turns out to be something else. The customer service is pretty bad too unless you have a lot of money.

I think it's time technology caught up with "democracy". We have the technology to do things which look a lot more like direct democracy. Eftpos and credit card terminals would work fine as mini voting systems. And they're everywhere. If we determined that we could keep fraud to less than say, 4%, that's accountable for by setting thresholds conservatively.

There are a lot of issues (media capture, short term horizons, moral panic, lack of big picture / inability to budget if people have too much control over laws)...

But while basic income gets debated all the time, I hardly ever see anyone proposing modifications to "democracy". Which is weird, because I see all this big picture stuff on HN all the time but it seems to me there's not much questioning of the larger order of things.