Thursday, October 18, 2012

It was better than cocaine, more rewarding than the lottery and more popular than any current reality show.

More than 30 years ago, I started writing a book on the Internet. We did not call it the Internet in those days, we called it electronic bulletin boards, which were clumsy ways of sending message between computers. Despite the base nature of the mechanics, the principles were clear. Electronic communications were inevitable.

I wrote more than 700 pages. I have lost them all. But I think about them every time I hear a POTUS debate or a poll or a conversation about voting. For electronic voting was the theme of the book. But more than that, the theme was the pavlovian impact on American culture of electronic voting-which I will refer to in this the 21st century, as voting via the Internet. I presume that I am not smart enough or have enough natural serotonin to understand or act on that future forecast or I would have been a Google founder or founder of any of dozens of other Internet companies. I did a bit, but my impact was small.

But back to the book for a moment. In the story, voting became the most important element in family entertainment. When a child reached the voting age of 16, the child was given their own voting wand, which when waved at a display terminal, with the nay or yay button pushed, a vote was cast. Families did not watch TV except for the evening voting show. Voting occurred every day from 6 PM  to 9 PM in the evening.

Votes were cast for sending money to a foreign country, helping a country that had just experienced a disaster, salaries for firefighters, public officials salaries, salaries for teachers, cabinet officials, and so on. We voted on everything. It was fascinating. It was instantaneous. And the feedback was immediate. If we voted to send food to a disaster area, we saw the results the next day. If we did not like the way the money was sent, then we voted that night to stop further financial support. We voted on what medical treatment was affordable and what treatment was not. We saw the impact the next day. Some people lived and some died. We voted on what issues to vote on, and lacking agreement, nothing got done. Sound familiar?

And like a diverging integral, the more we voted the more we wanted to vote. We did not need senators because we voted  ourselves. It was individual democracy in action. It was more addictive than cocaine, more rewarding than the lottery and more popular than any current reality show. If we did not like the job the president was doing, we simply voted him out on Wednesday and voted a new president in on Thursday. It was all great fun.

You can imagine how the story ended. Can't you?

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