I went to see Arj Barker last night with my brother and a few friends. He was pretty funny, but not outright hilarious. He tends to take a long time to set up jokes, but the dividend is usually worth it. In the middle of his routine it was a little unfunny, but towards the end he was funny again. So overall I would give it about 3.5/5.
There was one part of his routine that really made me think though. He has this theory Always Question Unjustified Authority or AQUA for short. I think for the sake of this discussion we could ignore our 10 foot tall reptilian overlords or the fact that Arj thinks we should take a dump in public to demonstrate our rejection of unjustified authority.
Arj does have a point though. We are told what to do almost every waking minute of our lives. We are told what to believe, what to eat and what we can and can’t do. But who gives these people the authority to tell us what to do? We live in a democracy, but how often do we practice it? Someone is always a designated leader we never work out what we should do as a group and do that.
I think the major criticism of democracy is that it is only every three years that we get to make a decision about our government. And then we are only selecting among a bunch of people we don’t even know. We don’t even have a say about policy. Yes we do have a stable government, yes they do a reasonably good job and we have the rule of law. But essentially we still live in a dictatorship.
For example the majority of Australians believe euthanasia should be an option for terminally ill patients. But will that ever get through the Australian Parliament or any Parliament? The federal government even prevented the Northern Territory from exercising its euthanasia legislation. The majority of Australians probably believe that homosexuals should be allowed to get married – with a christen as prime minister that will never happen.
With the Internet becoming a large part of our culture it is time to think about using it to make democracy work better. Countries such as Switzerland already have a limited form of direct democracy where the populace can decide on legislation through referendum. E-democracy is the use of electronic tools through the Internet to participate in the democratic process.
I think it would be great to be able to propose legislation and decide on it electronically. Of course there are some potential risks everybody following some demagogue or tyranny of the masses with minorities being seriously screwed over. But with an educated population and, hopefully, with ignorant fools not bothering to vote it could work.
It is about bloody time we exercised some control over our lives.
Over the next few weeks I might start work on writing my own constitution that uses direct e-democracy and who knows maybe I could use it in one of my science fiction stories.
