It'd Be Nice to Live in Less of a Gerontocracy

If society had more of a safety net, had more surplus capacity & safety, I think more people would get involved with government & try to run.

As largely software people, we're intimiately familiar with customer funnels, where X people see a thing, Y people click in and Z people sign up. The funnel winnows. The issue here just seems deeply personal & deeply simple: most people will not have the spare capacity to try to stake in to government. They won't make it to the first step.

It's bad for society that so few people can afford to try. There's a host of other factors about what on-ramps are available, what support there is, figuring out how to find & grow a base of constituents to represent... but before all these other factors, I feel like democracy is too expensive to even start to directly aid, requires such enormous sacrifice of time & energy.

Right now it seems absurd & ridiculous to imagine, but I hope some day we can dream up & experiment with participative online information architectures to such a degree where we feel like maybe democracy could or should start seeing if it can lower the entrance barrier some via online-mediated engagement, see if we can find ways to distribute power out better & more such that we can bring people in.