Ross Mayfield has an intriguing blog post on the role of representation in “emergent democracy.”
The more technoutopian visionaries of “emergent democracy” imagine a world where representatives go away, and citizens vote on all of the business of government.
Ross is notes that any population significantly larger than 150 is going to have a variety of groups with disparate interests and opinions, and there will need to be intermediate layers to negotiate those differences.
The fascinating question is how that structure might be different than the current system of representation.
This discussion is similar, by the way, to the “disintermediation” conversation in the early days of the commercial internet. Visionaries speculated that the internet would disintermediate transactions; customers would buy everything directly from the manufacturer. Didn’t happen. The role of the intermediary changes, but there are still middlemen in the picture.
People will always need the human touch of the intermediary–but the intermediary had better be wired.