2067: Majority Rules
What if the desires of the many, of the mob, were given free rein? What if we had total democracy?
What if our descendents shook their heads when showing their children round the Lincoln Memorial at how little democracy we had?
“You see, honey, they only had the elections back then. They didn’t have the polls. Not even the weekly ones! Well, not really. They didn’t really have any force. Back then, legislatures like Congress actually, by tradition, did what they wanted. But people realized that simply meant rule by the corporations. And they realized they had to do something. They created the first nationwide Smart Mob, called Majority Rules. It was open to anyone to join. There was no cost, and it had great benefits. It wasn’t controlled by any one person. There was a small team of administrative staff that replaced itself every year; all they did was make sure the smart mob machinery ran smoothly. Anything contentious within the group was decided by, you guessed it, majority rule. Every single item of legislation considered by Congress came up for a vote. They put Congress on notice. Every one of them started the session with twelve karma points – votes of conscience, we now call them. Any Congressmen who voted against the will of the majority as recorded on that day would loose karma points on the Majority Rules website. Anyone who sponsored a bill that the majority disliked would also loose karma points. Anyone whose karma points were in the negative come election day – well, they wouldn’t be around much longer. It kept working, and as it kept working, more people joined, which ensured that it would continue to keep working. How could it fail? It was too simple. Sign up online, take part in at least one vote every day to keep your membership current. Win prizes for participating. And you don’t have to agree with each and every result. Anything even close to a 50-50 split meant no karma points would be lost. Even natural loners, outsiders, freethinkers, the minority, were drawn to it. After all, as the ads kept telling them, if you’re dissatisfied with a Majority Rules vote, change it next time around – by joining in the conversation! There was a kind of herd instinct about it, which Majority Rules played on. The machinery was set up so it was a real insider’s club. They handed out free PDAphone headsets with a heavily discounted service plan for members – which, because of the vast amount of chatter over each vote, paid for itself. They did anything to keep that conversation going. The media started to pay a great deal of attention – some of it negative, at first, until Majority Rules passed an internal vote creating a voluntary boycott of newschannels and sheets who refused to give MR “proper consideration.” Then, of course, they swung the other way. They became cheerleaders for the organization. After all, it was cheap polling. And easy newsgathering. Every lead story became a “gimme” – as in, just give me the Majority Rules numbers on this. MR was not unreceptive to the media, either. They allowed each news organization a chance to feed one question into the MR system every day, and trumpet the results on their front pages and at the top of their broadcasts. Instead of circulation or viewership, media orgs started to boast about their MR turnout – that is, what percentage of the total organization deemed this question interesting enough to vote on it? High turnout figures almost became a story in themselves, especially when you had large-print numbers on the first page/screen.
“So the media was neutered. Congress was effectively neutered. And they were happy to be neutered, most of them. The media had a smorgasboard of easy stories and a sense of facilitating the national conversation, which was all they ever really wanted. Congress got their faces on every national news broadcast – because MR worked, people were actually interested in the process again – and a self-righteous sense of doing the people’s work, which is all they ever really wanted, too. Occasionally you’d get a maverick Senator coming perilously close to his 12 allotted conscience votes – but often, if he was doing this, it was a gamble that he could change people’s minds by being forthright. He’d certainly stand out, receive a lot of airtime for his views, and quite possibly swing public opinion close enough to the 50-50 field to survive. The President was rated too, of course, on his executive actions. Out of deference to the office, he received 24 karma points. But if he so much as spoke an unpopular opinion, you could almost feel the laser-like attention focus on the next day’s media polls. Had he lost – or gained – his bully pulpit touch? Could he move the numbers?
Corporations were kind of neutered, kind of empowered. After all, many majority votes were in favor of less regulation, and there was nothing preventing them spending on advertising to sway opinion. But they couldn’t fool all the people all the time. When they did something wrong, when they stepped out of line, when they bullied other companies and fiddled their accounts and despoiled the environment, they were punished. Big time.
“The system worked. Ten years or so after the founding of MR, the politicians made it official with the Benson Act, which standardized the conscience vote system. Karma points were no longer necessary. True democracy had come to America at last.
“What’s that, honey? Do I think there’s any danger of a charismatic MR administrator persuading the public to change the rules that administrators have to step down, thus starting a whole new dangerous politics? No, I don’t think that’s at all likely. Do you?”
