What is actually broken? The system is working as intended. It is giving the government plausible deniability, we didn’t know that is what you wanted. Our only real form of informing them is organised protest, but that is ineffectual. You say your piece, feel good because you did something, you are making a difference. Then you get back to your life because rent is due, you need food on the table, you have a life to live. Just as intended. You are satisfied that you are doing something, they can pretend to care by allowing the protest, and then life gets in the way. Just as intended.

So the issue is they have plausible deniability. They can say we didn’t know that’s what you wanted, Chevron told us they want to pay less tax, we did that, all you have to do is tell us. So what we need is a way to make it impossible for them to deny they don’t know what the people want. We need a way that we the people can, without much effort, check if they are even acknowledging the issues. We need to be able to see the responses.

They use tech and the internet to control or distract us every day. We have access to those same tools and with the advent of LLMs we are primed to use those same resources to demand they listen to us. We build an Agora, a Forum where each member of the nation can have a cry about what they don’t like. We collate those tears and rank them, not by what makes us the most money, not by what is most likely to get us elected again next year, but by majority. We create a list each week and send it to every sitting member of parliament. We show the same list on the home page of the site. Now they know what we want, and better yet, we know they know.

We build a publicly accessible site. Each person over 18 will be able to create an account using a government ID, used as a way to stop bots or companies from flooding the site the way they flood the politicians’ ears. On the site you will be able to have your cry. It will be taken without your ID and collated using an LLM, which will create a list of the most cried about topics, what people want changed. And then we have it — the list the government fears. What the people actually want.

We still have the power, even if we have forgotten. Their job isn’t to control us, it isn’t to make life easier for the large companies who dislike paying tax. Their job is to listen to the people and do what they want, for better or worse. If we are actively telling them what we want, we record their responses to the issues we raised. We track those issues over time, and if they don’t do the things we want, we have a visible track record. Do what we ask, or we know you are just lining your pockets. They can no longer hide in the ambiguity of time. We wrote it down. We kept track.

While this might not be a cure-all for corruption inside our governments, it serves as a register, a log of what’s wrong, what we want fixed, and what they have promised to do about it. It will force them to acknowledge that we are the arbiters of their power. They are only there while they satisfy the majority, and we now know what the majority want. Not in a vague way, not “this is what the 6 o’clock news told me the majority want” — we asked, and this is what they said. With nowhere to hide, they will have to do better.

Anyway I have to get back to work.