Fixing American Democracy

This song from Traffic has this very interesting line. Steve Winwood clarified that the high-heeled boys were musicians wearing cowboy boots and leather. The interview describes it as a kind of street vibe in a world of music industry exploitation. It wasn't the industry making them successful; It was their own exceptional abilities, and that is our path forward here.

A list of problems to solve​

The first two problems described in this model are the most critical and where we must begin. The two main problems it describes are:

• Evaluating the output of The Republic
• Stopping the flow of incoming propaganda

Before we can start on those, however, we need to implement The Court of Public Opinion.

Implementing the Court of Public Opinion​

The Court is an Independent Media Platform at its core. It has professional journalists to define and maintain quality standards for news content acceptable to The Public. It will be the one-stop shop for government officials to determine public opinion on specific policies and functions of government. Some of these data points will be tracked by request from agencies, and others by request of The Public.

The Court must be structured to resist all forms of internal and external corruption.

• It should operate independently of the government itself similar to The Fed.
• It must resist pressure from external actors.
• It must resist pressure from internal actors.
• It must be self-funding.
• It must be protected from Lawfare.
• It must be fully functional when The Republic is in tyranny.
• The platform must principally be supported by the readers rather than through advertising.

This would suggest some kind of non-profit organizational structure with a board of directors. We must protect against board member corruption. Something along the lines of The Federal Reserve, but even more resilient, since the members of our board may be more vulnerable to influence from monetary bribes. This is a rough idea of the things that need to happen, but I would need to speak with an attorney to work out the details.

Features of the Platform​

1. Realtime reporting of critical government measures such as inflation.
2. Realtime reporting of elected representatives and their bills/votes.
3. Community forums to discuss news items. Public participation is encouraged.
4. A fair media marketplace where individuals and small businesses can host content.
5. Develop and maintain objective standards for News content and the ability to designate content as such.

Measuring the output of The Republic​

Would you drive a car without an instrument panel? Why are we driving a government like that? We need to objectively measure government's performance from The Public's point of view.

Bills and Laws​

The Court has an opinion on every bill and every law. It forms this opinion by first breaking the bill down into something understandable to The Public, probably with an AI-based LLM. We discuss it in our forums and convert the firehose of individual public opinion into manageable information that legislators can work with. The Court seeks to deliver public feedback on bills before going to a vote, but early enough in the process that legislators can act upon the feedback. Laws would be monitored on a continuous basis, and The Court reports on ones where public opinion has changed since it was initially implemented.

Reporting on government key statistics​

These measures are typically implemented by other agencies who own the metric. The Court's role here is to publish the key indicators that the General Public looks at for overall health. Public debt, inflation, and unemployment figures would be some such measures. Discussion forums exist for these as well. We would also want to include agency links for detail data that we don't ourselves display.

Community discussion forums​

An actual moderated community to discuss news content and government performance. The general rules here is discussion must focus on actual issues and not people or groups. I would go so far as to ban discussion of political parties and organization entirely, or at least make it an option. You have to be respectful or get banned. As much as a smack-talk Congress, I think The US Senate has the right idea of how to conduct debate. I would insist it even be more polite.

Stopping the flow of propaganda​

Our current process for evaluating content requires each person to be educated at bachelor's degree level or so and having above average intelligence. It also requires every person to invest significant time in performing this work. Just one hour of time of every citizen collectively costs The Public billions, so clearly we need a better system.

We need a system that delivers timely and accurate news on demand. It needs to connect the dots between our representatives and their actions. We need the ability to follow issues through several sources and discuss them with others.

A fair media marketplace​

Corporate News Platforms cannot function as news platforms. The media section section has details on why this is so. We need a fair Independent Media Platform hosting many creators to ensure that an actor can't control the media with a large checkbook. The Court would provide tools for readers to classify and filter based on whatever they need. I think a kvp-based tagging system would be fine here. As always, there will be discussion forums that encourage participation.

Elections and candidates​

This section of the site would have our current sitting legislators showing their votes on every bill. They can leave comments explaining their positions and their justifications for them. Candidates for office can show how they would have voted and what they would have done differently. It filters down to individual districts so that people can follow their representatives easily. Ideally, the government should implement a US Digital Identity Provider for the General Public so that we ensure ONLY citizens of a particular district can interact with their representatives. Such a system also opens up the possibility of online voting.

Standards of news content​

Controlling news content by restricting content creators simply doesn't work. While I believe it is perfectly fine to disallow organizational speech on government candidates or legislation (campaign finance stuff), individuals have a right to free speech. We relied on the good faith of media organizations to deliver accurate news, and we ended up with propaganda networks instead. Mainstream Media is fired, and I have a better solution.

The system works like this:

1. The professional journalists on the platform develop standards to evaluate content for its news worthiness. I would expose this as an overall score, and if The Court can train AI to do this work it would be nice. Content scores above a set number can be designated as "News".
2. News content can be displayed with a certified "News" sticker that easily identifies it as newsworthy content to any viewer.
3. Displaying the certified news sticker on content that has not been certified, or otherwise implying that your content is news when it is not (for example, having News in your organization name when most content is propaganda) has criminal and potentially civil consequences.

You can still put anything you want on The Internet, but it has to pass certification if you want to call it "News". With this, we have a fast and reliable way for any person to separate news content from garbage. It works the same for Independent Content as it would for Corporate Content. It opens the news ecosystem up to competition and produces much better results.

Corporate Media doesn't like this? You had your chance, but you instead decided to exploit the American Public and betray our nation. You have demonstrated why we need Independent Media and objective news standards more than ever.