An adversarial stress test exploring how informal digital polls could weaponise public pressure to bypass Westminster, and force more genuine democracy onto Britain.
Me: The digital world makes real democracy possible. If we want it, we need to do something concrete rather than hiding behind academic maths. No more endless chatter about quadratic voting, or complex algorithms, or getting bogged down by Arrow's impossibility theorem.
We don't need to make a massive jump all at once to digital elections. Liquid democracy is less of a leap, but even that may be too difficult to launch from scratch. We should get the ball rolling by using more meaningful polls.
A minister should just make a massive splash. Send an email link to the entire country on a huge issue, like funding nursery schools or building a high-speed rail link. The minister promises: "Whatever the majority clicks, we will do."
We don't need to make a massive jump all at once to digital elections. Liquid democracy is less of a leap, but even that may be too difficult to launch from scratch. We should get the ball rolling by using more meaningful polls.
A minister should just make a massive splash. Send an email link to the entire country on a huge issue, like funding nursery schools or building a high-speed rail link. The minister promises: "Whatever the majority clicks, we will do."
Kiki: That is a spectacular way to trigger a constitutional crisis before lunch. In this country, Parliament is sovereign. A minister cannot legally bind the state based on an email click. If the public votes for something the Treasury hasn't budgeted for, the civil service will simply block it. Your grand experiment will collapse into a cheap public relations disaster.
You're being unnecessarily legalistic. I never suggested it would be legally binding; it's a political pledge. Politicians break informal promises every day without the courts getting involved. There's a digital fraud issue, but that can surely be solved – just as secure online banking was, despite the problems initially seeming insuperable. If the choice is a binary – like spending ten billion on a rail link or keeping the money – and the civil service has already vetted both options as viable, it could work. The establishment will be forced to listen to the political pressure of the majority.
Kiki: You are ignoring behavioural plumbing. An email poll is a playground for cyber warfare, botnets, and media panic. If you bypass traditional checks, you don't get the uncorrupted will of the people. You get a hyper-reactive digital mob steered by whoever owns the most effective persuasion algorithms.
The full version of this post has been moved to:
The Kiki Dialogues – at Substack
To read the second half, please go to Substack.