“As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entirecommunity in the central acts of decision.” Are we there yet? Will we keep going in that direction? Do you foresee a time when we might totally change the system of representation?
Homework from Andrew McLuhan’s Understanding Media intensive, quote from UM
The Vice President showed up at the Capital to his duty in maintaining representative government: certifying the election results. As the check to the balances, the Vice President (#2 in the executive branch, which gets votes from the country as a whole) is also the president of the Senate (#1 in the legistlative houses, which has a finite set of Senators from each individual state in the country.
On January 6th, 2021 – The Vice President was almost killed in a violent coup de’tat to prevent his certifying of his and his superiors’ defeat. This of course, was considered unacceptable to the almost half of the country who had voted to keep them in office. So problematically unacceptable that they completely shit on the holy religion of American administrative succession — with costumed protestors literally defecating in the offices and desks of Congresspeople (#2 in the legislative house, which had a proportional set of representatives for each “district” in the various states of the country).
Despite the certifiable facts, the truth, the honor vindicated by the certified loss of Donald Trump in the 2020 election, thousands of people showed up to violently fight back. They had learned about it on twitter, reddit, whatsapp groups and video game chatrooms. They hid nothing, except maybe their most violent and seditious intentions, because they believed they were restructing the power of government in our country around their immediate participation.
Lucky for those of us who didnt vote that way, they failed to prevent representative government for enacting its truth. I cant imagine anything other than representative government, and I can understand and believe in the emergence of action of the people separate from that. Surely the structure of respresentative governments will appropriately evolve with social increases in technological dissemenation and intellectual enlightenment, but violent coups that can embody half the population will continue to occur. We haven’t figured out another story yet.