Hyperarchy: Democracy for the Digital Era

On the other hand, openness of course leads to transparency, and transparency prevents corruption and lobbying (to a considerable degree, at least). Interestingly though, this is also due to social pressure.

My vision would be a system that combines techniques such as the ones deployed in BitCoin and NameCoin (Public Keys) to ensure unique identities but still preserve anonymity. In a such a system, everyone could freely speak their mind anonymously, yet still be accountable (in this case meaning he or she can be identified as some individual, but not as a specific person). This would also lead to reducing debates to facts and arguments, by effectively completely depersonalizing it. It would no longer be about people, it would be about problems, ideas and solutions.

I don't really know if this technically feasible (I'm not even sure if it makes sense to anyone but me), but I think it would solve many of the problems with real democracy.

I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance. Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the space now.

(There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)

How many of us are actually wise enough to delegate a vote, when we think ourselves wise and others foolish?

And how many of us are actually qualified to decide public policy, when we can barely manage our own affairs?

Just imagine what sort of absurd tyranny a vast mob of common humans could accomplish if the power were truly given to them.

It would be surreal.

( A minimal republic, and a system of full-on social darwinism, to me, appears to be ideal. )