In order to promote [[Democracy|DTECHCON]] tomorrow, I have written a small Manifesto. Excerpt:

It is not a single man who created this world. It is not even a few hundred. It is all of us who create it and have done so for millennia. The great inventor is nothing without the resources to implement his idea. His implementation is worthless without the people who use it and refine it. Even then, many inventions cannot function if society does not accommodate or even opposes them.

The collaborative nature of modern civilization makes it quite resilient. Take one human out, and it still works. Take ten thousand out, and it still works. Take a million out – it still works. There is no single person you can kill to kill society. Collectively, we have achieved greatness — while individually, we are extremely fallible. So fallible that one of the biggest health problems in modern societies is obesity.

Yet, given the complexity of even just a single aspect of our economy — how does the apple get into the supermarket? — and the fallibility of individuals, there appears to be a rather glaring flaw in our social design:

  1. Our world is created by the actions of the many, not of the few.
  2. Yet our society still solves its problems through representation of the many by the few.

I have submitted it to Kuro5hin, but I enourage you to edit the wiki version.