The End of Political Theatre

A Manifesto for Digital Democracy

In the year 2025, on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, the United Kingdom Parliament still votes by having grown adults physically walk down stairs into corridors. A Yes corridor, and a No corridor. Count the humans. Democracy achieved.

This isn't quaint tradition - it's a perfect metaphor for everything that's wrong with our so-called democratic systems. We're still on Democracy 0.5 and selling it as the pinnacle of human governance.

Tom and I spend most of our podcast episodes eviscerating the failures of government. We're pretty good at pointing out what's broken. But an uncomfortable question recently surfaced: Do we have the right to criticize if we can't offer alternatives?

So we embarked on making something better. What we discovered is quite possibly the most important conversation about democracy you've never heard.

The Theater of Representation

Here's what we call democracy: Every few years, you choose between a handful of people who've proven they're willing to lie, gaslight, and sell their souls to get elected. Once in power, they make decisions based on what keeps them in power, not what you actually want.

It's called "democracy," but we've confused the label on the tin with what's inside it. Inside the tin, this isn't democracy, at least not the way the Athenians thought of it.

Ancient Athens - the birthplace of democracy - was actually participatory. Citizens gathered, debated, and voted directly on issues. No representatives No political class. No one claiming to speak for you while doing the opposite.

What we have now is what Plato predicted democracy would become: demagogues promising dreams they never intend to deliver, controlling the masses through fear and false hope.

Prime Minister's Question Time isn't governance- it's performance art where nobody answers questions and everyone jeers like school children.

The political class has become a priesthood interpreting the will of the people while serving entirely different gods.

The Adapter Pattern

I'm a software engineer, so I think in design patterns. When you have two incompatible systems that need to work together, you create an adapter - a thin layer that translates between them without changing either system's core functionality.

What if we applied this to politics?

We can't revolution our way to a new system. We can't abolish Parliament tomorrow. But we can create a political party that functions as an adapter between true participatory democracy and the existing political machinery.

Here's the radical part: our MPs would be USB ports.

No personalities. No opinions. No names - just numbers. Shaved heads, identical clothing, complete anonymity. Their only function is to physically walk into those voting corridors and execute the will of their constituents. After their term, they grow their hair back, and we thank them for their service as a vessel.

Sounds extreme? It has to be. These people cannot have egos. They cannot interpret or extrapolate. They cannot decide to know better than the collective wisdom of their community. They are living adapters, translating digital democracy into analog political machinery.

A Practical Plan

Here's the step-by-step strategy for making this a reality:

Step 1: Create a Political Party

Form a political party - name it the Apolitical Party, the Consensus Party, or whatever indicates its real function. This party is nothing more than an adapter between participatory democracy and the current political framework.

Step 2: Find the Vessels

Identify people willing to be anonymous MPs. They enroll for four years of political obscurity - same appearance, numbered IDs, no personal agenda. They are human USB ports with no other function but to implement the collective will.

Step 3: Build the Consensus Engine

This is where AI becomes essential - not optional, but fundamental. Without AI-driven consensus synthesis, this entire model collapses. The AI does what humans can't do at scale: processes thousands of voices, identifies genuine agreement, surfaces productive disagreements, and synthesizes nuanced positions from complex input.

Step 4: Define Membership as Responsibility

Party membership isn't about power - it's about commitment. Members pledge to spend 2-3 hours a week on deliberation: researching issues, engaging in structured discussion, providing voice input rather than typed responses. This creates an informed deliberative body, not a passive voting base.

Step 5: Start Grassroots - Anyone Can Participate

Launch local consensus processes immediately, before any elections. Put leaflets through doors with QR codes to apps where people can voice their answers to questions like "What future do you want for our community?" Anyone can participate - Conservative voters, Labour supporters, Greens, whoever. The consensus process is non-partisan. We're not recruiting party members; we're discovering community will.

Step 6: Represent the Consensus, Always

The party's MPs vote exactly as the consensus directs, or they're immediately replaced. No interpretation, no "reading between the lines," no personal judgment calls. They are bound by the collective decision-making process.

The Technology of Consensus

The technology making this possible at scale is AI-based consensus. Here's exactly what the party AI does.

On every single issue, every single person gives us their input - just raw stream of consciousness. They do not have to give a rational argument for or against something. They just say what they are thinking. And they can also think out loud. That is one of the nice things about AI consensus processes: you can think out loud. It is better not to self-edit. It is better to do it by voice because when you write, you will self-edit and second-guess yourself. It's okay to spend five minutes stumbling and starting and just finally give your point. It's really like interviewing every single person on every single subject - just taking everybody's raw inputs.

Then the AI synthesizes everybody's ideas and spits out three things: what does everybody agree on, what does everybody disagree on, and what are the outlier opinions.

Then you can have meetings to discuss the disagreements and outliers face-to-face if you need to. Record those meetings and feed them back into the AI, which again brings to the surface what you agree on, what you don't agree on, and the outlier positions. You do it over and over again until you reach actual consensus or until you identify the precise points where consensus is not possible.

This isn't just helpful technology - it's the foundational requirement that determines whether this entire model succeeds or fails. Without AI capability to process thousands of voices and synthesize genuine consensus, you'd need armies of human facilitators and years to reach agreement on complex issues. With it, communities can engage in meaningful deliberation and reach authentic collective decisions in weeks or months.

Instead of electing representatives, you elect to participate.

Most importantly, we start with vision, not problems.

• "What future do you want for your community?"

• "What does success look like in 10 years?"

• "What values should guide our decisions?"

Only after establishing collective vision do we tackle specific issues. The AI can then evaluate proposed solutions against stated values, asking: "Does this move us toward the future you said you wanted?"

This isn't some distant sci-fi scenario. The technology exists today. Small-scale examples of digital democracy platforms are already working. Taiwan's vTaiwan platform has facilitated consensus on complex policy issues like ridesharing regulations and online alcohol sales, while Madrid's Decide Madrid has enabled participatory budgeting with hundreds of millions of euros and hundreds of thousands of citizens.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Tom and I got excited mapping out the details. Transparent algorithms, open-source platforms, weighted participation based on engagement rather than wealth. We could see how this could spread - different countries adapting the same core system to their political machinery.

Then we hit the wall that all government reform eventually hits.

Even if this was entirely successful, even if millions participated and reached beautiful consensus on major issues, there is no guarantee that anyone would follow those decisions.

The banking system could crash the economy if they didn't like the results. Corporate interests could simply refuse to comply. The civil service could drag their feet into oblivion, claiming technical impossibility for anything that threatens existing power structures.

We realized that government could be theatre itself. Real power - the power to say "computer says no" despite democratic will - could be entirely beyond any system we might devise.

The Paradox of Change

So we are left with a paradox: we have to do something impossible to make visible how broken everything actually is.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe the value is not so much in fixing democracy as in holding a mirror to how little democracy we actually have. When thousands of citizens participate in genuine deliberation, reach considered consensus, and have their collective will ignored by unelected centers of power, the illusion can no longer be maintained.

Power, ultimately, is an illusion that requires our collective belief. When enough people stop believing - when they see behind the curtain - amazing things become possible that currently seem impossible.

Building this adapter isn't about creating perfect governance. It's about creating perfect transparency around who actually has power and why the current system serves everyone except the people it claims to represent.

The question isn't whether we can fix government. The question is whether we're ready to see how broken it actually is.