Democracy as we know it is on the way out.

The Gutenberg era is closing, according to Jeff Jarvis. An era that started with printing books, publishing papers continued with radio broadcasting and end with the Internet — the period where ideas spread by a few to the mass is now gone. Starting with www popularization and spreading social networks adoption, everybody can become a publisher in an instant. Amazon allows you with a single click to print and delivery a physical book around the globe.

In almost 600 years, we changed as a civilization because of the new way of spreading ideas. We accelerated from the technological perspective and how we organize ourselves as a society and build our states.

Democracy was here for thousands of years but in the form of micro democracy. It existed only for small groups of people where information about each other spread quickly.

Then humanity found another way to scale and build bigger states with the feudalism model. It’s a top-down form of ruling based on trust, from king to peasant.

Democracy returned to us as a better solution for bigger communities with an easier spread of the information. From books and paper publishing to radio and tv broadcasting. New and faster transportation accelerating the adoption of democracy. In the last 80 years, we have exponential growth of democratic states.

Now we are a society built on information, and that information until today was curated centrally by big actors like a government. We have a voting system where we choose the “least evil” from a limited list of candidates. What if everyone is not what we want? During the last hundred years, rulers became knowledgeable in manipulating information with media. Usually, politicians buy media and media magnates became politicians. You have to read more about “Twidism”. It has mutated a lot and spread like an epidemic.

With the rise of the Internet and social media, this system is buggy and eventually fails. People are disappointed with how the system worked and became political ignorants. They do not follow the political debates and do not go to vote. Only a few of us decide the rulers.

Politicians are puzzled, and most of the time, they act chaotically. Some try to influence the new system by collecting data about voters and target them with specific ads. Some of them invite tech giants to answer to the rulers. They try to force Facebook, Google or Twitter to censor. It’s an impossible task to solve even with Artificial Intelligence.

Francis Fukuyama proposed three solutions how to deal with this situation. He assumes that democracy has a strong link with the central distribution of information. And all ideas rely on controlling this single piece of democratic structure. But we can not solve the problem of failed democracies only by taking care of this part.

Let’s think differently.

What if we make the central distribution of information, the Internet and social networks irrelevant to democracy? It’s straightforward but requires quite different voting rules. It’s sound crazy only until you see in practice how it’s not.

Imagine a voting system with no limited list of candidates. All members of the community are at the same time options to vote. You have no restriction for whom you can vote. You may choose someone you know or distribute your trust between two or more candidates. This small iteration is fixing a range of problem in “informational” democracy where you can buy attention. In this way, you decrease populism, and information bubbles will blow off. Central distribution of information will become less relevant. Democracy can make the transition from the nowadays informational top-down brainwash to genuine bottom-up voting based on trust.

An alternative voting system will emerge relying on people’s trust, not on the power of media that knowingly or not divide people. Trust can not be inherited like in feudalism but gained by serving and collaborating with your peers in communities for years. Political ignorance will decrease when people can vote for someone they trust instead of voting not to admit someone else winning. Does it sound familiar?

This model of societies had never existed before because it was impossible to realize without computers. We are using this algorithm for more than 20 years to organize the Internet. It’s called Page Rank, and it inspired the “Open Vote” to choose the right people in VoteMeApp based on trust.

We offer classical voting systems, including rank choice, and we give communities the freedom to choose between the old-established forms of voting and the new “Open Voting”. In the long run, communities with a better voting system will become stronger, better organized, and faster.

The new technological developments bring new challenges. Democracy is an unsolved problem yet. We have to solve it and prepare for the uncertain future.