SMS Voting In Parliament
Image from Collected Works of Geoffrey Bawa, one coffee table book fully worth buying
Sri Lanka’s government is way too big to ever get smaller. The worst example is the Jumbo Cabinet, which will be politically impossible to shrink. The only solution is to make the Cabinet bigger. Make every member of Parliament a Cabinet Minister. And make every citizen an MP. Let them have cars, just let us vote. Give common people the right to vote on some bills via SMS or whatever. Maybe let the people vote on the Emergency Bill which suspends our Constitution every month. The political phrase ‘small government’ is as dead as Reagan, but the future belongs to technological empowerment.
There needs to be a new model of democracy beyond representative. Average people should be able to vote in Parliament. The votes don’t even need to be binding, they just need to be public to start. Let Parliament be for the people. At least on a billboard in the corner, to start.
I suppose it sounds weird, but Technological Democracy is the obvious step beyond Representative Democracy. When modern democracy was founded you needed to get everyone on a horse and into one room to actually talk to each other. Now we have videoconferencing and SMS. And in 5 years we’ll have holograms (YouTube), with teledildonics. As a small digression,
For home use, the Interactive Fleshlight is where it’s at. The Fleshlight is a standard, sleeve-style vibrator for men, with a twist: It’s also a transmitter. It measures the speed and force of each thrust and communicates those metrics to the software, which translates them into vibration and pulse on the other end.
In other words, a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle, and the cybersex experience gets one step closer to the holodeck. (Wired)
But I digress. Ronald Reagan is dead, and his trustees are idiots like Rush Limbaugh. So is the ideology of ‘small government’. We have Barack Obama and SMS and I think the world has to start thinking about democracy differently. Representative Democracy is too easily corrupted by warlords and the underworld. Karuna and Mervyn Silva are cases in point. We need to dilute the tyranny of titles and maximize the voting power of the people. We get millions of SMS votes for Sirasa Superstar. Why not let people vote directly on Emergency Law? So we can have our freaking Constitution back?
I think democracy is a work in progress and it can be improved by technology. Pretty much every Sri Lankan has access to a mobile so we could empower them that way. Right now it’s all signed hard copies and people traveling to one fancy building, but that’s obviously going to change this century. The point of democracy is to empower people. So we should be able to vote on stuff like Emergency Law, even if the vote is just displayed on a billboard in Parliament.
Of course, you can start by voting in the upcoming Provincial Council election. If you’re not registered talk to your Grama Seveka. A vote is a good thing to have. You can always sell it.
we are very very far from direct democracy. technology does not solve every problem and especially that of being an inclusive democracy (see what happened in Florida in 2000). democracy is a system and technology may be an enabler but is not a system of its own. for democracy to work here and elsewhere – people need to be engaged and the leadership needs to reflect that. Obama as President is a product of GW Bush being in power for 8 years – change was inevitable but the constituents wanted a radical departure from the path they had been on…
the Sri Lankan chattering classes are not as apathetic as you make out nor probably as engaged as you would want with sms voting – they are most probably just trying to get by. the Swiss are probably the closest to direct democracy of any country that i know. check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland but this system also has its faults: people only vote on what they care about. parlimentarians are meant to be there to represent us minions and to vote on issues our our behalf. they – the elected representatives should be brought to task for not being present and instead attending a colleague’s child’s wedding – but this is our culture and we put a greater priority on being socially adept than socially or morally responsible.