Desktop/Direct Democracy (DD): this novel approach aims to displace the ‘hardware’ of permanent institutions, composed of state machine, bureaucracies, & remote representatives. In its place comes a ‘software’, a constantly adapting & reforming network, as people en masse participate in self-government. There is no final form, no ideal end-state prescribable for this. It is a living, dynamic process, not a ‘system’ to which people try, or must, conform to. The people, bottom-up, decide both form, content, & evolving nature of DD. The people end government by dissolving the ancient dichotomy of government & governed. It is the Athens ‘agora’, made universal by IT.

Communities/localities (whatever or both) are self-governing, using volunteers & co-opted experts, as required. IT in DD provides the means for preparatory discussion, decisions & organization. Against most anarchists, organization is NOT the same as a state or central government.

A (preferably) living wage is available to all, community-provided. It’s up to the latter to decide how to handle those who want the hand-out, but volunteer for no necessary community work. I’d hope a large measure of tolerance would be extended to the lazy & un-motivated, who prefer to loaf, fish, watch daytime TV, &/or take dope. I feel they would naturally eliminate themselves. But that is my take only. The community decides in all cases, but avoiding heavy-handed authoritarian, one hopes (bad mistake; the dreamers are not uncommonly also the innovators).

The philosophy behind is to increase human happiness, welfare & sense of worth, by allowing the great mass of people the devolved POWER to run their own lives. Eg., if the hiways or education system are a mess, the people & experts get together to solve the probs. They don’t sit on their butts complaining to ‘someone’ in authority. They get together, discuss, then get out & fix things, together. The inept & hopeless are revealed quickly. They can’t hide in offices of an alien state machine.

I hope you also grasp the underlying, radical, idealist philosophy. It recognises & promotes into foremost position the supreme principle – the immaterial but life-renewing talents, will & enterprise of ordinary people. Opposed is the old materialism that saw even mass-democratic government as an objective ‘thing’ which dominates all aspects of life. Evidence, proof, how the whole hotenanny has been suborned by brute money power of banks.

Difficult to comprehend the entirely new, but try to see how ‘radical’ Marxism & capitalism tend both tend to end looking the same, since both discount & downgrade idealism – the role of the immaterial. Neither can even u/stand it. Both have been undermined & bypassed by the rip-tides of INFORMATION. Info & knowledge are themselves nebulous, invisible & indeterminable, but they utterly changed the world, just as printing did.

The thing is, to use the limitless power of IT info flows for humanity. That DD attempts to do.

Karl Marx offered the most muscular & influential analysis, yet it embodied a fundamental error that vitiated its promise – Marx embraced the materialism that was a mere passing scientific fad of his mid-19C times. After, most leftist programs & policies were premised on materialist economics: all economistic ‘isms’ of some kind or another, prescribing redistribution of ‘stuff’ – why the left has been so markedly inept at u/standing the political implications of the IT revolution, & the New Physics that began with the Quantum Revolution; that buried classic physics & materialism, not long after Marx died.

The left flounders in a new world where the richest profits are from psychic production (of ideas/innovations). A world where economic activities are buoyed by invisible streams of immaterial information. Somewhat paradoxically, history has proved Proudhon right & Marx wrong; ownership IS a legal abstraction. It relates to substantive property, but is ITSELF immaterial & abstract. Ownership (so money/currency) is at deepest base-level, a fleeting, mutable, part of the network of relationships amongst human beings.

Hence, Marx erred badly. He failed, could not, firmly nail his value system to ‘ownership & control’ of material things. The dynamic realm of human relations is ideal, not amenable to such crude carpentry. Hence in the USSR & further West, ‘the masses’ were often nominally in ownership of state powers & resources, over which their ‘control’ was purely an abstract mockery.

The future is Direct Democracy. For the first time in history, IT offers the practical means for ordinary people to take the control of lives into their own hands, from the grassroots, bottom up. With the powers of democratic decisions so devolved downward, the state & its vast, top-down power structure of bureaucracies, can indeed now ‘wither away’.

It will be difficult? Lots of trouble, dissent & strife? Of course! That is the nature of living, dynamic, human relations. You want peace & stability, there are always prison camps & graveyards.