Below is a writeup of my sortition based political system theory that has continued to be refined over the past 6.5 years, and while long, eases you into understanding (hopefully, maybe) this newer variation of sortition that can easily be misinterpreted as a crazy version of a more centralised model, but is actually a new way to distribute state authority. It gives what sortition promises in cleaning out influence and turning down the pressure on the decision makers, but in the process of solving the lack of mandate issue, that allows monied interests to whip up the public and weaken it over time, I discovered a way to fix it that also revealed a new way to transform how all governments work, for the better:

I’ve been trying to work out why governments can get dramatically more sophisticated, employ more experts, collect more data, write more regulation, and still keep producing the same category of stupid problems.

Not necessarily the same problems. The same type of problem.

Something everyone agrees should be fixed somehow survives three governments.

A company technically complies with the rules while obviously violating their purpose.

The government fixes one loophole, creating two new ones.

An industry becomes important enough that the regulator starts depending on the same people it regulates.

A policy gets designed around an imaginary average citizen who, as far as I can tell, has never actually existed.

We usually explain this as corruption, incompetence, capitalism, socialism, bureaucracy, voter stupidity, political polarisation, whatever.

I think there’s something underneath all of those.

The government has a scaling problem.

And I don’t mean there aren’t enough politicians.

I mean we’re trying to run a massively parallel society through a comparatively tiny, linear, decision-making system.

That distinction leads somewhere quite strange.

Bear with me.

Think about how your body works.

Your brain does not have a committee meeting every morning and issue Regulation 2026/418 explaining how much insulin every cell is permitted to use today.

There isn’t a 900-page Heartbeat Act covering the approved response to every possible combination of temperature, fear, exercise, disease, dehydration, caffeine and the dog suddenly barking at 3am.

Your body is doing an insane number of things simultaneously.

Local signals. Feedback. Correction. Prediction. More feedback. Different systems pushing against one another and settling into something workable.

Society looks much more like that than it looks like an organisation chart.

Millions of people and businesses are making decisions simultaneously using information that often exists only locally.

Then sitting above this giant parallel thing is government, which mostly has one basic tool:

Come up with a general rule.

Apply it to everyone.

Come back later and change it when reality finds an exception.

That seems normal because we’ve been doing versions of it forever.

But imagine actually designing governance from scratch for a society of many millions of independently acting people.

Would you deliberately funnel most corrective power through several hundred elected people, a collection of departments and regulators, then ask them to anticipate enough circumstances to write rules for everybody?

I wouldn’t.

My journey led me to a result that someone might arrive at eventually when asking:

What would democracy look like if democratic decision-making could happen in parallel too?

Not referendums on everything. That would be horrific.

Not replacing elections with randomly selected politicians.

Not an enormous parliament.

Something else.

Take one of the oldest political technologies we already trust ordinary citizens with: the jury.

Now massively parallelise it.

To what 4% of the population comes to as a number, is the amount of juries (at the least) likely being created throughout the year, in seasonal sessions.

Twelve randomly selected citizens.

Remotely working together.

At a pace they prefer.

One issue.

One ruling.

Then that jury is finished.

Not twelve people elected for four years who slowly accumulate a political career, donors, staff, party obligations and institutional relationships.

Twelve temporary people who have one job and then disappear back into society.

Here’s where the idea departs pretty hard from conventional sortition.

These aren’t miniature parliaments.

They don’t sit around writing laws for everyone.

Their natural scope is closer to a court case.

Person/business/entity A has a dispute involving person/business/entity B.

The jury hears it.

The jury can decide what outcome it thinks is fair and reasonable.

Then society moves on.

No need to write a universal 300-clause law predicting every version of that dispute that might occur for the next twenty years.

Just solve the actual thing in front of you.

And then do it again.

And again.

And again.

State by state across the entire country.

That sounds chaotic at first.

I thought so too.

The interesting part is what happens after you have enough of them.

Suppose a company is treating workers in a way ordinary people consistently consider unfair.

One case reaches a jury.

Then another similar one does.

Then another.

The company doesn’t need parliament to eventually notice, draft legislation, negotiate amendments, survive lobbying, pass both chambers, have regulations written, wait for enforcement and then spend ten years litigating what those regulations technically mean.

Management starts noticing a pattern.

“If we keep doing X, juries keep producing Y.”

So they stop doing X.

Competitors notice too.

Insurers notice.

Investors notice.

Industry advisers notice.

Someone starts compiling jury outcomes and selling businesses a service explaining the emerging standard.

Eventually most disputes never reach a jury at all because everybody has a fairly good idea what an ordinary group of twelve people will tolerate.

You’ve produced something that resembles law without having somebody sit down and deliberately write all of it.

An adaptive convention.

A sort of crowd-produced common law, except the decision-maker has broader discretion over the parties in front of it.

And importantly, it can change.

If technology changes and the old convention becomes ridiculous, cases start producing different outcomes.

The standard moves.

No parliamentary software update required.

Now the obvious objection:

Wouldn’t millions of juries contradict one another?

Yes, sometimes.

Especially at the beginning.

I don’t think that’s a bug.

Markets contain contradictory decisions too. So does science. So does culture. The question is whether the contradictions converge.

Say one jury produces a bizarre ruling.

Another affected party challenges it through another jury.

That second jury can overturn or modify it.

Potentially another jury challenges that.

The system isn’t pretending humans suddenly become perfectly consistent.

It’s trying to make inconsistencies cheap to correct.

That distinction matters.

Also the jurors are paid for jury work, but only if their ruling survives ever being overturned, and the jury decides that their decision was bad enough for them to lose some or all of their payment.

Not because I think jurors need punishment.

Because the incentive should be:

“Make a decision another random group of twelve ordinary people could live with.”

Not:

“Win.”

Not:

“Please my political tribe.”

Not:

“Get reelected.”

The unanimity requirement matters here too.

Twelve out of twelve.

That will absolutely make some cases slower.

Good.

These juries aren’t supposed to be miniature activist governments firing decrees across society.

If you want to impose state-backed power on somebody, convincing eleven other random citizens seems like a useful amount of friction.

Then suddenly, a confident declaration arises from someone in the crowd:

“Congratulations, you just invented bribing a jury instead of a politician, here's a medal”.

The defence for this isn’t that random people are morally superior.

They aren’t.

The defence is scale plus reversibility.

Imagine a company bribes one jury and receives an obviously favourable outcome.

Great.

Until another jury looks at the benefit those twelve people received, or the decision that resulted from it, and makes a decision to take it away and overturn the ruling.

To permanently purchase an unfair privilege, you don’t really need to purchase a jury.

You need to purchase enough of the jury ecosystem that future ordinary juries stop undoing what you bought.

The juries themselves decide what case to take, are only paid what the other juries are paid for a similar workload, and are many.

This means jury access is proportionally distributed through the population rather than sold to whoever can afford more of it, so the cost of maintaining that corrupt exception will continue to rise until it reaches the level of corrupting the system itself.

That’s the theory, anyway.

It also creates some entertaining anti-corruption possibilities.

If somebody offers a juror a bribe, imagine the juror being legally able to take it, report it, refuse to perform the requested act, and potentially keep a bounty from the resulting penalty.

Now bribery has a rather unpleasant counterparty risk.

I’m not claiming corruption becomes metaphysically impossible.

Nothing designed for humans gets that luxury.

The design goal is simpler:

Make corruption economically stupid.

And there’s another weird effect that keeps these rulings remaining small in scope.

Imagine one person convinces a jury to issue some gigantic society-wide ruling affecting 100,000 people.

Those 100,000 people now contain a rather large number of potential counter-cases.

So the broader and more intrusive your ruling is, the more opposition you manufacture.

A micro decision produces a micro response.

A macro decision produces a macro response.

Even if they push back over and over on that ruling, other rulings elsewhere in their life will occur to the point that they beg “I give up, just leave me alone”.

The jury complicit in the macro ruling and the other juries who kept reinstating it would lose their jury pay for those rulings.

This will only occur a few times and become a good lesson among many of what to avoid.

So I think the system naturally pushes juries toward relatively narrow rulings because trying to use one jury as a legislature gets you outflanked by other juries.

That’s an important part of this.

The system isn’t supposed to depend on everyone behaving nicely.

It’s supposed to make overreach generate its own opposition.

There’s also another part people tend to misunderstand when I explain this.

I’m not proposing the abolition of the elected government.

The government still exists.

Elections still exist.

The constitution still exists.

The government still handles the things that belong to the government itself: public assets, defence, foreign affairs, constitutional matters and the administration of what the state actually owns.

The jury layer operates alongside it.

Government becomes one part of the system rather than the only place democratic authority can meaningfully act.

The cleanest jurisdictional divide I’ve found are assets.

Who has a majority of asset value in a given place.

The majority of asset value in a geographic space/place/area/territory would be calculated by measuring the largest single asset in an area by space consumed, then the value of that asset and the value of all assets within that asset are then tallied.

The definition of a single asset would be based on past federal and state precedent for all current and future asset types.

Publicly owned stuff: elected government has direct authority.

Private sector: citizen juries have direct authority.

There will obviously be ugly boundary cases.

Good.

Those are exactly the kind of things I want, because if the boundary doesn’t survive contact with reality then the system doesn’t survive either.

But the basic distinction matters because otherwise we’ve just reinvented government with millions of tiny departments.

That isn’t what I’m proposing.

There is no Department of Jury Decisions employing 80,000 people to turn every ruling into regulations.

The ruling is the administrative act.

A jury agrees on an outcome.

It is published and digitally authenticated.

The parties deal with it.

If someone thinks it’s unreasonable, another jury can become involved.

Similar decisions accumulate into conventions.

Businesses mostly respond to those conventions rather than reading every individual ruling, just as they don’t personally read every court judgment produced today.

In fact I’d expect an entire information industry to appear almost immediately around this.

“Here’s what juries are currently doing with refunds.”

“Here’s the emerging standard on employee surveillance.”

“Here’s how similar disputes over AI-generated work have been decided during the last six months.”

Businesses could actually plan around that.

The question changes from:

“What can our lawyers technically argue is permitted?”

to something closer to:

“What would twelve ordinary citizens consider reasonable if somebody challenged this?”

I think those produce very different corporate cultures.

This is also where the idea starts having consequences I didn’t originally design into it.

Take insurance.

Today an insurance contract can contain enormous amounts of carefully engineered language determining exactly when the company owes you money.

Under this system the contract still matters.

But if the outcome created by some technical exclusion strikes repeated juries as obviously unreasonable, the technical brilliance of the exclusion stops being much of a defence.

Companies start anticipating that.

Product descriptions become more honest for the same reason.

Returns get easier.

Employment conditions change.

Whistleblowing becomes valuable.

Safety standards evolve.

Not because Parliament has passed the Omnibus Be Nicer Act.

Because repeated case-level decisions create economic consequences and businesses adapt before they become the next case.

The same mechanism would extend into social spending.

Governments would only be able to tax, as a percentage of the economy, a level that funds essential government operations and not much else beyond that, due to the parallel paced influence of the juries over public sector supply chains that go out into the private sector.

That doesn’t destroy healthcare, disability support, education, infrastructure and other social services, society will always want these, so will the juries.

My expectation is that jury rulings would gradually place obligations on businesses, and businesses would respond by developing standardised organisations or funds that collect and distribute those obligations fairly and efficiently.

So imagine somebody has a child requiring disability support that the existing system does not cover.

They challenge the refusal.

A jury decides the support is reasonable.

Other comparable cases appear.

A rough boundary starts emerging around what society is willing to fund.

Businesses don’t want to individually reinvent disability administration every Thursday, so specialist organisations emerge to manage contributions and payments.

Eventually most of it becomes boring infrastructure.

Until the standard becomes unfair or outdated.

Then somebody challenges it again.

The important distinction is that a jury isn’t sitting down one afternoon and announcing:

“Congratulations Australia, we just redesigned education.”

That’s exactly the type of macro ruling the rest of the system pushes against.

The change happens from specific cases outward.

Small decisions create patterns.

Patterns create expectations.

Expectations create institutions.

Institutions remain challengeable.

I also know what some of you political nerds are thinking because you have said it before:

“This is just Sortition.”

Sortition is definitely in its ancestry.

I’ve been interested in sortition for years.

But most sortition proposals I’ve seen still use randomly selected people as a replacement or supplement for the same basic centralised political structure.

A citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected chamber.

A deliberative body recommending legislation.

This asks a different question.

What happens if you take the distribution part of sortition seriously enough that there is barely a centre at all?

Not 500 randomly selected legislators.

An enormous rotating population of temporary jurors resolving individual problems simultaneously.

The point isn’t primarily that random citizens are wiser than politicians.

The point is bandwidth.

A legislature has to generalise.

Millions of juries do not.

And this is probably the largest philosophical disagreement underneath the entire thing.

Most political systems are designed around finding the right rules.

The right tax rate.

The right labour law.

The right healthcare structure.

The right welfare settings.

The right regulations.

Then everybody fights like hell because whichever side gets control can impose its preferred answer across millions of people.

This system starts from the assumption that there isn’t one permanently correct answer.

There are just circumstances.

And circumstances keep moving.

So instead of trying to perfect the rulebook, increase the amount of feedback.

Instead of concentrating enough intelligence at the top to predict society, let society continuously correct itself.

Instead of asking five hundred people to understand twenty million situations, ask twelve people to understand one.

Then repeat.

A lot.

[This is]

Parallel Democracy

Below is a writeup of my sortition based political system theory that has continued to be refined over the past 6.5 years, and while long, eases you into understanding (hopefully, maybe) this new variation of sortition that can easily be misinterpreted as a crazy version of a more centralised model, but is actually a new way to distribute state authority. It gives what sortition promises in cleaning out influence and turning down the pressure on the decision makers, but in the process of solving the lack of mandate issue (that allows monied interests to influence the public to weaken it over time, the classic "I never got to vote on that or them" weaponised), I discovered a way to fix it that also revealed a new way to transform how all governments work, for the better:

I’ve been trying to work out why governments can get dramatically more sophisticated, employ more experts, collect more data, write more regulation, and still keep producing the same category of stupid problems.

Not necessarily the same problems. The same type of problem.

Something everyone agrees should be fixed somehow survives three governments.

A company technically complies with the rules while obviously violating their purpose.

The government fixes one loophole, creating two new ones.

An industry becomes important enough that the regulator starts depending on the same people it regulates.

A policy gets designed around an imaginary average citizen who, as far as I can tell, has never actually existed.

We usually explain this as corruption, incompetence, capitalism, socialism, bureaucracy, voter stupidity, political polarisation, whatever.

I think there’s something underneath all of those.

The government has a scaling problem.

And I don’t mean there aren’t enough politicians.

I mean we’re trying to run a massively parallel society through a comparatively tiny, linear, decision-making system.

That distinction leads somewhere quite strange.

Bear with me.

Think about how your body works.

Your brain does not have a committee meeting every morning and issue Regulation 2026/418 explaining how much insulin every cell is permitted to use today.

There isn’t a 900-page Heartbeat Act covering the approved response to every possible combination of temperature, fear, exercise, disease, dehydration, caffeine and the dog suddenly barking at 3am.

Your body is doing an insane number of things simultaneously.

Local signals. Feedback. Correction. Prediction. More feedback. Different systems pushing against one another and settling into something workable.

Society looks much more like that than it looks like an organisation chart.

Millions of people and businesses are making decisions simultaneously using information that often exists only locally.

Then sitting above this giant parallel thing is government, which mostly has one basic tool:

Come up with a general rule.

Apply it to everyone.

Come back later and change it when reality finds an exception.

That seems normal because we’ve been doing versions of it forever.

But imagine actually designing governance from scratch for a society of many millions of independently acting people.

Would you deliberately funnel most corrective power through several hundred elected people, a collection of departments and regulators, then ask them to anticipate enough circumstances to write rules for everybody?

I wouldn’t.

My journey led me to a result that someone might arrive at eventually when asking:

What would democracy look like if democratic decision-making could happen in parallel too?

Not referendums on everything. That would be horrific.

Not replacing elections with randomly selected politicians.

Not an enormous parliament.

Something else.

Take one of the oldest political technologies we already trust ordinary citizens with: the jury.

Now massively parallelise it.

To what 4% of the population comes to as a number, is the amount of juries (at the least) likely being created throughout the year, in seasonal sessions.

Twelve randomly selected citizens.

Remotely working together.

At a pace they prefer.

One issue.

One ruling.

Then that jury is finished.

Not twelve people elected for four years who slowly accumulate a political career, donors, staff, party obligations and institutional relationships.

Twelve temporary people who have one job and then disappear back into society.

Here’s where the idea departs pretty hard from conventional sortition.

These aren’t miniature parliaments.

They don’t sit around writing laws for everyone.

Their natural scope is closer to a court case.

Person/business/entity A has a dispute involving person/business/entity B.

The jury hears it.

The jury can decide what outcome it thinks is fair and reasonable.

Then society moves on.

No need to write a universal 300-clause law predicting every version of that dispute that might occur for the next twenty years.

Just solve the actual thing in front of you.

And then do it again.

And again.

And again.

State by state across the entire country.

That sounds chaotic at first.

I thought so too.

The interesting part is what happens after you have enough of them.

Suppose a company is treating workers in a way ordinary people consistently consider unfair.

One case reaches a jury.

Then another similar one does.

Then another.

The company doesn’t need parliament to eventually notice, draft legislation, negotiate amendments, survive lobbying, pass both chambers, have regulations written, wait for enforcement and then spend ten years litigating what those regulations technically mean.

Management starts noticing a pattern.

“If we keep doing X, juries keep producing Y.”

So they stop doing X.

Competitors notice too.

Insurers notice.

Investors notice.

Industry advisers notice.

Someone starts compiling jury outcomes and selling businesses a service explaining the emerging standard.

Eventually most disputes never reach a jury at all because everybody has a fairly good idea what an ordinary group of twelve people will tolerate.

You’ve produced something that resembles law without having somebody sit down and deliberately write all of it.

An adaptive convention.

A sort of crowd-produced common law, except the decision-maker has broader discretion over the parties in front of it.

And importantly, it can change.

If technology changes and the old convention becomes ridiculous, cases start producing different outcomes.

The standard moves.

No parliamentary software update required.

Now the obvious objection:

Wouldn’t millions of juries contradict one another?

Yes, sometimes.

Especially at the beginning.

I don’t think that’s a bug.

Markets contain contradictory decisions too. So does science. So does culture. The question is whether the contradictions converge.

Say one jury produces a bizarre ruling.

Another affected party challenges it through another jury.

That second jury can overturn or modify it.

Potentially another jury challenges that.

The system isn’t pretending humans suddenly become perfectly consistent.

It’s trying to make inconsistencies cheap to correct.

That distinction matters.

Also the jurors are paid for jury work, but only if their ruling survives ever being overturned, and the jury decides that their decision was bad enough for them to lose some or all of their payment.

Not because I think jurors need punishment.

Because the incentive should be:

“Make a decision another random group of twelve ordinary people could live with.”

Not:

“Win.”

Not:

“Please my political tribe.”

Not:

“Get reelected.”

The unanimity requirement matters here too.

Twelve out of twelve.

That will absolutely make some cases slower.

Good.

These juries aren’t supposed to be miniature activist governments firing decrees across society.

If you want to impose state-backed power on somebody, convincing eleven other random citizens seems like a useful amount of friction.

Then suddenly, a confident declaration arises from someone in the crowd:

“Congratulations, you just invented bribing a jury instead of a politician, here's a medal”.

The defence for this isn’t that random people are morally superior.

They aren’t.

The defence is scale plus reversibility.

Imagine a company bribes one jury and receives an obviously favourable outcome.

Great.

Until another jury looks at the benefit those twelve people received, or the decision that resulted from it, and makes a decision to take it away and overturn the ruling.

To permanently purchase an unfair privilege, you don’t really need to purchase a jury.

You need to purchase enough of the jury ecosystem that future ordinary juries stop undoing what you bought.

The juries themselves decide what case to take, are only paid what the other juries are paid for a similar workload, and are many.

This means jury access is proportionally distributed through the population rather than sold to whoever can afford more of it, so the cost of maintaining that corrupt exception will continue to rise until it reaches the level of corrupting the system itself.

That’s the theory, anyway.

It also creates some entertaining anti-corruption possibilities.

If somebody offers a juror a bribe, imagine the juror being legally able to take it, report it, refuse to perform the requested act, and potentially keep a bounty from the resulting penalty.

Now bribery has a rather unpleasant counterparty risk.

I’m not claiming corruption becomes metaphysically impossible.

Nothing designed for humans gets that luxury.

The design goal is simpler:

Make corruption economically stupid.

And there’s another weird effect that keeps these rulings remaining small in scope.

Imagine one person convinces a jury to issue some gigantic society-wide ruling affecting 100,000 people.

Those 100,000 people now contain a rather large number of potential counter-cases.

So the broader and more intrusive your ruling is, the more opposition you manufacture.

A micro decision produces a micro response.

A macro decision produces a macro response.

Even if they push back over and over on that ruling, other rulings elsewhere in their life will occur to the point that they beg “I give up, just leave me alone”.

The jury complicit in the macro ruling and the other juries who kept reinstating it would lose their jury pay for those rulings.

This will only occur a few times and become a good lesson among many of what to avoid.

So I think the system naturally pushes juries toward relatively narrow rulings because trying to use one jury as a legislature gets you outflanked by other juries.

That’s an important part of this.

The system isn’t supposed to depend on everyone behaving nicely.

It’s supposed to make overreach generate its own opposition.

There’s also another part people tend to misunderstand when I explain this.

I’m not proposing the abolition of the elected government.

The government still exists.

Elections still exist.

The constitution still exists.

The government still handles the things that belong to the government itself: public assets, defence, foreign affairs, constitutional matters and the administration of what the state actually owns.

The jury layer operates alongside it.

Government becomes one part of the system rather than the only place democratic authority can meaningfully act.

The cleanest jurisdictional divide I’ve found are assets.

Who has a majority of asset value in a given place.

The majority of asset value in a geographic space/place/area/territory would be calculated by measuring the largest single asset in an area by space consumed, then the value of that asset and the value of all assets within that asset are then tallied.

The definition of a single asset would be based on past federal and state precedent for all current and future asset types.

Publicly owned stuff: elected government has direct authority.

Private sector: citizen juries have direct authority.

There will obviously be ugly boundary cases.

Good.

Those are exactly the kind of things I want, because if the boundary doesn’t survive contact with reality then the system doesn’t survive either.

But the basic distinction matters because otherwise we’ve just reinvented government with millions of tiny departments.

That isn’t what I’m proposing.

There is no Department of Jury Decisions employing 80,000 people to turn every ruling into regulations.

The ruling is the administrative act.

A jury agrees on an outcome.

It is published and digitally authenticated.

The parties deal with it.

If someone thinks it’s unreasonable, another jury can become involved.

Similar decisions accumulate into conventions.

Businesses mostly respond to those conventions rather than reading every individual ruling, just as they don’t personally read every court judgment produced today.

In fact I’d expect an entire information industry to appear almost immediately around this.

“Here’s what juries are currently doing with refunds.”

“Here’s the emerging standard on employee surveillance.”

“Here’s how similar disputes over AI-generated work have been decided during the last six months.”

Businesses could actually plan around that.

The question changes from:

“What can our lawyers technically argue is permitted?”

to something closer to:

“What would twelve ordinary citizens consider reasonable if somebody challenged this?”

I think those produce very different corporate cultures.

This is also where the idea starts having consequences I didn’t originally design into it.

Take insurance.

Today an insurance contract can contain enormous amounts of carefully engineered language determining exactly when the company owes you money.

Under this system the contract still matters.

But if the outcome created by some technical exclusion strikes repeated juries as obviously unreasonable, the technical brilliance of the exclusion stops being much of a defence.

Companies start anticipating that.

Product descriptions become more honest for the same reason.

Returns get easier.

Employment conditions change.

Whistleblowing becomes valuable.

Safety standards evolve.

Not because Parliament has passed the Omnibus Be Nicer Act.

Because repeated case-level decisions create economic consequences and businesses adapt before they become the next case.

The same mechanism would extend into social spending.

Governments would only be able to tax, as a percentage of the economy, a level that funds essential government operations and not much else beyond that, due to the parallel paced influence of the juries over public sector supply chains that go out into the private sector.

That doesn’t destroy healthcare, disability support, education, infrastructure and other social services, society will always want these, so will the juries.

My expectation is that jury rulings would gradually place obligations on businesses, and businesses would respond by developing standardised organisations or funds that collect and distribute those obligations fairly and efficiently.

So imagine somebody has a child requiring disability support that the existing system does not cover.

They challenge the refusal.

A jury decides the support is reasonable.

Other comparable cases appear.

A rough boundary starts emerging around what society is willing to fund.

Businesses don’t want to individually reinvent disability administration every Thursday, so specialist organisations emerge to manage contributions and payments.

Eventually most of it becomes boring infrastructure.

Until the standard becomes unfair or outdated.

Then somebody challenges it again.

The important distinction is that a jury isn’t sitting down one afternoon and announcing:

“Congratulations Australia, we just redesigned education.”

That’s exactly the type of macro ruling the rest of the system pushes against.

The change happens from specific cases outward.

Small decisions create patterns.

Patterns create expectations.

Expectations create institutions.

Institutions remain challengeable.

I also know what some of you political nerds are thinking because you have said it before:

“This is just Sortition.”

Sortition is definitely in its ancestry.

I’ve been interested in sortition for years.

But most sortition proposals I’ve seen still use randomly selected people as a replacement or supplement for the same basic centralised political structure.

A citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected chamber.

A deliberative body recommending legislation.

This asks a different question.

What happens if you take the distribution part of sortition seriously enough that there is barely a centre at all?

Not 500 randomly selected legislators.

An enormous rotating population of temporary jurors resolving individual problems simultaneously.

The point isn’t primarily that random citizens are wiser than politicians.

The point is bandwidth.

A legislature has to generalise.

Millions of juries do not.

And this is probably the largest philosophical disagreement underneath the entire thing.

Most political systems are designed around finding the right rules.

The right tax rate.

The right labour law.

The right healthcare structure.

The right welfare settings.

The right regulations.

Then everybody fights like hell because whichever side gets control can impose its preferred answer across millions of people.

This system starts from the assumption that there isn’t one permanently correct answer.

There are just circumstances.

And circumstances keep moving.

So instead of trying to perfect the rulebook, increase the amount of feedback.

Instead of concentrating enough intelligence at the top to predict society, let society continuously correct itself.

Instead of asking five hundred people to understand twenty million situations, ask twelve people to understand one.

Then repeat.

A lot.

[This is]

Parallel Democracy

I’m interested in whether one of the problems of modern governance can be understood as a problem of institutional architecture.

The basic hypothesis is this:

Society is a highly distributed, parallel system, while much of government operates through comparatively centralised and sequential decision-making. Could political institutions be designed to process information and exercise democratic authority in a more distributed way?

I’m using “parallel” here in the systems sense rather than as a metaphor for any particular political ideology.

Complex adaptive systems often coordinate through large numbers of local interactions, feedback mechanisms, and continually changing responses rather than by having one centre specify an answer to every possible situation in advance.

The human body is an intuitive example. Its stability does not result from the brain issuing exhaustive instructions covering every future contingency. Organs, nerves, hormones, immune responses and cells continuously interact with one another, while the brain both influences and receives information from those systems.

Societies have some similar informational characteristics. Millions of individuals, firms, communities and institutions possess different pieces of local knowledge and continually respond to changing circumstances.

Government, however, frequently has to compress this complexity into legislation, regulation and administrative rules written by comparatively small numbers of people. Rules necessarily generalise across circumstances that legislators cannot individually observe.

That suggests an institutional-design question rather than simply a criticism of government:

Can democratic decision-making itself be decentralised so that political adaptation occurs through many simultaneous decisions rather than primarily through periodic elections followed by centralized rule-making?

A possible institutional model: large-scale sortition

One way of experimenting with this idea would be to dramatically expand the political role of sortition.

Imagine a permanent system containing a very large number of randomly selected citizen juries. Each jury might contain twelve citizens and would have authority to issue something resembling an individual judicial or administrative ruling concerning a particular dispute, obligation or institutional problem.

Rather than creating one citizens’ assembly tasked with recommending national policy, millions or potentially more juries could operate simultaneously.

Several design principles would distinguish this from ordinary representative government.

Jurors would be randomly selected rather than elected. Participation could rotate continually through the population. Jurors could choose which available matters they were willing to consider, spend time casually examining them across several months, deliberate remotely, and receive compensation for their work.

Their rulings would also not necessarily become permanent legislation.

Instead, other juries could subsequently challenge, modify or reverse them.

The intended result would be an evolving body of conventions resembling a decentralized form of common law: repeated decisions made by different samples of citizens would gradually reveal which outcomes continued to receive support across independently constituted juries.

The important distinction is therefore between:

legislation: one institution establishes a general rule applying broadly until formally changed;

and

distributed precedent: many institutions repeatedly decide particular cases, producing conventions that survive only insofar as subsequent decision-makers continue to reproduce or tolerate them.

Why random selection?

Political scientists have already studied sortition as an alternative or complement to elections, particularly because random selection produces a different principal-agent relationship from electoral representation.

The specific proposal here pushes that principle much further.

An elected official has incentives associated with campaigning, party organisations, donors, organised constituencies and reelection.

A randomly selected citizen serving temporarily on one jury has a very different incentive structure.

More importantly, influence would be fragmented across a huge number of independently created decision-making bodies.

Under this model, capturing one jury would accomplish relatively little because another jury could reverse its decision.

Systematic capture would consequently require influencing not merely several prominent legislators or agencies but enough independently selected citizens to alter the overall pattern of rulings.

That does not make corruption impossible. The narrower claim is that the cost structure of political capture changes when political authority is dispersed across millions of temporary randomly constituted bodies.

Wouldn't the juries produce contradictory decisions?

Almost certainly, especially initially.

But contradiction is not necessarily a defect of the proposed mechanism; it is part of the feedback process.

Suppose Jury A establishes an outcome that substantially benefits one group. Jury B subsequently encounters an analogous dispute and decides differently. Jury C partially restores A's approach, while Jury D modifies it.

Over repeated cases, relatively stable expectations could emerge.

The claim is therefore not that twelve randomly chosen people always reach the correct decision. It is that repeated sampling and the ability to challenge previous rulings could generate an adaptive equilibrium without requiring one institution to discover the correct universal rule beforehand.

Existing jury systems provide at least the institutional intuition behind this: independently selected groups confronted with similar evidence are not perfectly consistent, but neither are their decisions completely random.

The proposal essentially asks what happens if this mechanism becomes a major component of governance rather than a narrow component of the judicial system.

Couldn't wealthy interests simply bribe the juries?

Individual juries could obviously be targets for corruption.

The proposed defence is redundancy.

If millions of independently selected juries can review or counteract decisions, purchasing one favourable outcome does not purchase the institution.

A wealthy actor would have to repeatedly influence enough independent juries to maintain the desired outcome against subsequent challenges.

The system’s operation could eventually lead to incentives against bribery by allowing whistleblowers to receive portions of penalties imposed for exposing misconduct, including attempted jury manipulation.

Again, this does not demonstrate that corruption disappears.

The institutional hypothesis is more modest:

distributed authority may make durable capture more expensive than concentrated authority because influence has to be continually reproduced across independently selected decision-makers.

What keeps the juries themselves accountable?

The proposal uses reversal as an accountability mechanism.

Jurors would be compensated for successful service, but compensation associated with a ruling could be lost if another jury later overturns it.

This would create an incentive to avoid decisions that jurors expect other randomly selected citizens to regard as indefensible.

The intended feedback loop is:

decision → consequences → challenge → independent review → reinforcement, modification or reversal.

Rather than locating accountability exclusively in elections several years later, accountability occurs through continuing competition between independently selected citizen bodies.

Wouldn't this simply create mob rule?

There is an important difference between majority plebiscites and randomised small-group deliberation.

A national referendum asks millions of people simultaneously to impose one binary decision on everyone else.

This system instead fragments political power.

No individual jury possesses legislative sovereignty over the entire population. A decision affecting very large numbers of people would expose itself to responses from many other juries representing citizens affected by it.

That creates a proposed countervailing mechanism: the larger the external effects of a ruling, the larger the number of people with incentives to challenge it through other juries.

A jury attempting to use a narrow case as de facto national legislation could therefore generate substantially more opposing proceedings than the original group could initiate.

Not just opposing the decision itself, but also likely initiating scrutiny on the lives of those in the original group, likely leading to a cessation of action by the original group.

The conclusion of this process could lead to some or all juries in the original group not receiving compensation for that jury participation, this is for the opposing juries to decide on.

Will this be enough to prevent these cases? Potentially, but not with absolute certainty.

What happens to elected government?

This model does not require abolishing representative government.

Instead, it proposes a jurisdictional separation between conventional governments and the distributed jury system.

Federal, and state or equivalent, governments would continue to exist, retain electoral legitimacy and operate public institutions.

This imagines that their direct jurisdiction will become increasingly associated with publicly owned assets, while juries would have authority over relationships occurring within the privately owned portion of society.

Governments could continue buying, selling and operating assets and could acquire property through existing public mechanisms such as eminent domain where constitutionally permitted.

This produces something like two overlapping forms of political coordination:

representative government, operating through elections, public ownership and conventional institutions;

and

sortition-based distributed governance, operating through repeated citizen rulings concerning the rest of society.

The boundary between those jurisdictions would obviously be one of the more complex constitutional aspects of the proposal.

What happens during emergencies?

A completely decentralised political system may respond poorly to situations requiring rapid, coordinated action.

The proposal therefore retains a form of legislative “kill switch.”

Because the jury institutions would initially derive their authority from legislation or constitutional authorisation, representative government could temporarily suspend some or all of their authority during an existential emergency.

That creates a deliberate asymmetry.

Ordinarily, authority would be highly distributed. During circumstances in which coordination becomes more important than decentralisation, elected institutions could temporarily re-centralise authority.

The safeguard against routinely doing this is partly political and partly economic: if social and economic institutions had adapted around the jury system, prolonged suspension would itself impose significant costs.

This obviously raises a classic constitutional problem: who decides that an emergency exists and how temporary powers remain temporary, but it means the proposed system does not depend upon assuming that decentralisation is optimal under every possible condition.

What about taxation and public goods?

The proposal also changes public finance.

Conventional governments would retain the ability to collect a reduced baseline level of revenue, rather than losing taxation.

Much additional social expenditure could instead emerge from jury rulings imposing obligations on firms or other institutions.

Repeated decisions would gradually establish expectations about what kinds of costs different actors should bear.

Businesses facing unusually large obligations would have incentives to challenge competitors carrying fewer equivalent obligations, potentially producing another feedback mechanism through which relatively uniform standards emerge.

The resulting system would therefore resemble neither laissez-faire government nor conventional centralised redistribution.

It would attempt to create decentralised redistribution through case-by-case obligations that gradually harden into conventions.

Whether such a mechanism could finance public goods efficiently would be an important empirical objection to investigate.

Why do I think this could outperform legislation?

The strongest argument is informational rather than ideological.

Legislatures face a familiar knowledge problem.

A relatively small institution has to construct rules covering enormous numbers of situations, many involving information available primarily to individuals directly involved.

Distributed decision-making permits local information to remain local while still affecting the larger institutional environment.

Markets use prices to accomplish something analogous economically: participants do not need complete knowledge of the economy for their decisions to communicate information throughout it.

This proposal asks whether democratic governance could develop its own distributed feedback mechanism.

The analogy should not be pushed too far, political decisions concern rights, coercion and distribution in ways market exchanges often do not, but it suggests a useful research path.

What I think is politically interesting about the proposal

I don't think the important claim is that this exact institutional design would automatically create an ideal society.

The interesting claim is that sortition could potentially be treated as an information-processing architecture rather than merely as an alternative method of selecting representatives.

Representative democracy essentially aggregates political authority upward:

citizens → elections → representatives → government departments → rules.

A massively distributed sortition system would create another direction of institutional movement:

individual disputes → randomly selected citizens → repeated rulings → emerging conventions → system-wide norms.

Political authority would therefore continually move both upward and downward instead of residing predominantly at the top of a hierarchy.

That puts the proposal at the intersection of several familiar political-science questions:

• centralised versus polycentric governance;
• representative democracy versus sortition;
• principal-agent problems;
• elite and interest-group capture;
• institutional redundancy;
• common-law versus statutory rule formation;
• local knowledge and information aggregation;
• constitutional checks and balances;
• democratic legitimacy;
• and the trade-off between coordination and decentralisation.

The empirical questions would be substantial.

Would repeated random juries actually converge on stable norms?

Would wealthy actors discover cunning methods to influence them?

Would citizens participate enough for random selection to remain representative?

Would precedent become coherent or simply chaotic?

Could minority rights survive continual popular adjudication?

Could distributed obligations reliably finance public goods?

Would reversing decisions provide accountability, or merely create instability?

And how much centralised constitutional structure would still be necessary to make the decentralised system function?

My own proposal contains possible mechanisms for several of these problems: redundancy against capture, reciprocal challenges against excessively broad rulings, reversal-based accountability, emergent precedent and emergency powers retained by elected government, but whether those mechanisms would be enough is ultimately a question for organised analysis rather than something that can be established from analogy and knowledge alone.

Every complex system faces the same fundamental challenge: how to coordinate countless independent parts without requiring every decision to be made from the top. The human body solves this problem remarkably well.

Our bodies function as parallel systems. Millions of processes occur simultaneously rather than in sequence. Cells, organs, hormones, nerves, and immune responses continuously adapt to both the external environment and the body's internal state.

This coordination is not achieved by a central authority issuing detailed instructions for every possible situation. Instead, countless local interactions are guided by continual feedback, learned patterns, and the brain's ongoing integration of experience and sensory information.

The brain itself is not a simple command centre. It is another parallel system, constantly influencing the body while simultaneously being influenced by it.

This allows the body to remain stable while adapting to change. No single component needs to understand everything. Each part only needs to respond appropriately to the information available to it.

Human society shares many of these characteristics. Millions of people, businesses, communities, and institutions make decisions every day. They respond to local conditions, pursue different objectives, and continuously adapt to new circumstances. Like the body, society is fundamentally a parallel system.

Yet the way we govern it is largely linear and sequential.

Governments primarily coordinate society through legislation, regulation, and bureaucracy. Decisions are concentrated into relatively small groups that must produce rules broad enough to apply across millions of unique situations. These rules inevitably generalise. They cannot fully anticipate changing circumstances, local knowledge, or the countless exceptions that emerge over time.

This is not necessarily because governments are incompetent. It is because sequential decision-making struggles to manage systems that operate in parallel.

Imagine if your brain could no longer regulate your heart through continuous feedback. Instead, it had to write legislation describing exactly how the heart should respond to every situation it might ever encounter.

The rules could be extremely detailed and thousands of experts could spend years refining them, and yet eventually, reality would produce circumstances the rules failed to anticipate.

The body succeeds precisely because it does not attempt to solve adaptation through legislation. It solves it through continuous distributed feedback.

Modern economies already demonstrate the power of this principle. Markets coordinate billions of individual decisions every day without requiring a central planner to allocate every resource. Prices communicate information. Competition rewards adaptation. Local knowledge remains local while still influencing the wider system.

Politics has never developed an equivalent mechanism.

Democracy today gives citizens considerable influence over who governs, but comparatively little direct influence over how society continuously adapts between elections. Most public decision-making remains concentrated within legislatures, departments, regulators, and public organisations.

If society itself is a parallel system, then maybe governance should become more parallel as well.

[ What this would look like ]

In a simplified sense, it would involve creating the brain equivalent of government by handing over control of the private sector to the people through a great number of randomly selected administrative juries of twelve that can each make a single court case like ruling. As many as needed season by season of those willing, unless opted out by another citizen who gives up their own access for that season. This allows the population to directly block any problem jurors themselves through equal sacrifice.

They are made of twelve and decide by that twelve, each juror is paid fairly for their work if the ruling of their jury survives being overturned by another, they also have complete discretion on which case they take on and how. Jurors would have months to make a decision and will often work at a very casual pace, using remote work tools and social media to communicate with fellow jurors.

Being randomly created from similar people means similar rulings on similar cases, as it is with all 12 member juries historically, and the sheer number of juries will prevent those with money from buying access because another jury will confiscate any unfairly gained extras they don't also get, and so on. So to pay any jury will require you to pay enough of them to remove the whole system, over time this will clean up government failure and waste and clean out electoral influence by special interests, from federal to local and everything in between.

[ Governments are still around ]

Under this system, federal and state governments, or equivalent, would still exist, but would now only control what they own, they can sell property and buy more private property for fair price by using eminent domain like powers that they already have today.

A government could own a business and the premises it operates from, but at some point, will not own a part of the supply chain that connects to that business. This still allows juries to obtain individual outcomes from public assets but just not directly, creating a clear separation of jurisdiction between public and private. The rest of the nation (outside of public property) is managed by businesses instead of the government and are continuously held accountable to the people through the juries.

[ Setting up the jury system ]

The juries are initially created through federal legislation if workarounds to (if any) constitutional limits are figured out, if this fails then constitutional change will be required, that change must only remove the limits while keeping legislative control.

The amount of juries would be allocated proportionally in each state, or equivalent, and these state juries can decide federal matters in their state and internationally, and while they won't have jurisdiction over state or local matters, through a little creativity, they are likely to work around that limit to effect change at all levels. States will eventually succumb to jury pressure electorally and enact their own legislation to give permission for these same juries to also make state and local decisions.

Because the juries are an act of legislation, the federal government will effectively have a “kill switch” to stop juries making rulings for a certain amount of time, but the entire economy will have adjusted to this system, so it would be economically painful to do it for too long. This control will be essential in existential situations that require the governments to play catch up, to acquire certain property to prevent nation state failure in emergencies.

[ How it operates together ]

Governments will be entitled to collect no more than a quarter of what that government had typically collected under the previous system, while also carefully managing what they have and acquiring new profitable property, with the hopeful and eventual goal of becoming self-funded.

They can use the public force at their disposal (military and police), combined with their electoral legitimacy, to obtain those funds if the juries haven't paid it to them in a reasonable timeframe, but if they push too far it will trigger a nationalistic like response from the juries so they will need to find the right balance in how they do it, this is also helped by those elected politicians no longer being the special-interest filtered lot we have today, they would be more respected by the people.

The rest of government spending would now be funded and allocated by the jury system through the private sector, by juries directly or indirectly placing social expenses and obligations onto businesses, which then leads them to demand other businesses who have less of these themselves to increase theirs and eventually (as will happen in all other areas) it will become an adaptive standard of sorts.

[ Why it could work ]

Because the jury system is proportional access and is not able to be bribed, this is possible because jurors are not going to sit by while another jury gets something they didn't get and will take it from them as their ruling, but if another jury thinks that was not fair then they will restore it or adjust part thereof, so a standard, precedent, convention of what they get to have will establish itself and persist over time.

It's also people checking people at the speed of people, any attempt to alter this dynamic will result in the jury system breaking, the only way to limit them outside of that, and nations who don't limit juries will outperform those who do, is by reducing the number of juries, how often they are formed, filtering who is able to be in, or by turning it off completely, and no special interest is ever big enough to cover the cost of doing that. This all means that special interests cannot get specific exceptions or carve outs, this is how a parallel democratic system works at a fundamental level, so this can never be watered down by anyone.

Bounties will be a big part of this society, where someone can whistleblow or bring justice and know that they will get a piece of the fine or charge laid on the perpetrator, if their conduct was fair and reasonable, this will also cover jury manipulation where they can take the bribe but not perform the action and get to keep a portion of it, and any other crimes.

[ What changing will change ]

This change brings about a pure democracy, one of fairness and prosperity for everyone, fixing almost every problem caused by government action or inaction, and solving the social issues that rarely get any better each generation.

Power will trickle up from the people and no longer just trickle down from above, and free of any mob rule mentality against those above. Light will shine through every hidden place in society, karma and merit will come to all those who deserve it.

Money will be better spent society wide, businesses will innovate other businesses for a cut in profits gained and some will be started for just this purpose, so innovation is everywhere all the time, only limited by the direct and indirect effect of juries and the laws of physical reality, economic growth will climb to new heights.

[ This be ] Parallel Democracy.

Every complex system faces the same fundamental challenge: how to coordinate countless independent parts without requiring every decision to be made from the top.

The human body solves this problem remarkably well.

Our bodies function as parallel systems. Millions of processes occur simultaneously rather than in sequence. Cells, organs, hormones, nerves, and immune responses continuously adapt to both the external environment and the body's internal state. 

This coordination is not achieved by a central authority issuing detailed instructions for every possible situation. Instead, countless local interactions are guided by continual feedback, learned patterns, and the brain's ongoing integration of experience and sensory information.

The brain itself is not a simple command centre. It is another parallel system, constantly influencing the body while simultaneously being influenced by it.

This allows the body to remain stable while adapting to change. No single component needs to understand everything. Each part only needs to respond appropriately to the information available to it.

Human society shares many of these characteristics.

Millions of people, businesses, communities, and institutions make decisions every day. They respond to local conditions, pursue different objectives, and continuously adapt to new circumstances. Like the body, society is fundamentally a parallel system.

Yet the way we govern it is largely sequential.

Governments primarily coordinate society through legislation, regulation, and bureaucracy. Decisions are concentrated into relatively small groups that must produce rules broad enough to apply across millions of unique situations. These rules inevitably generalise. They cannot fully anticipate changing circumstances, local knowledge, or the countless exceptions that emerge over time.

This is not necessarily because governments are incompetent. It is because sequential decision-making struggles to manage systems that operate in parallel.

Imagine if your brain could no longer regulate your heart through continuous feedback. Instead, it had to write legislation describing exactly how the heart should respond to every situation it might ever encounter.

The rules could be extremely detailed.

Thousands of experts could spend years refining them.

Yet eventually reality would produce circumstances the rules failed to anticipate.

The body succeeds precisely because it does not attempt to solve adaptation through legislation. It solves it through continuous distributed feedback.

Modern economies already demonstrate the power of this principle. Markets coordinate billions of individual decisions every day without requiring a central planner to allocate every resource. Prices communicate information. Competition rewards adaptation. Local knowledge remains local while still influencing the wider system.

Politics has never developed an equivalent mechanism.

Democracy today gives citizens considerable influence over who governs, but comparatively little direct influence over how society continuously adapts between elections. Most public decision-making remains concentrated within legislatures, departments, regulators, and public organisations.

If society itself is a parallel system, perhaps governance should become more parallel as well.

My proposal for achieving this outcome: Parallel Democracy.

Rather than attempting to replace representative state and federal government, it introduces a second democratic layer operating continuously alongside them.

Instead of relying on legislation to direct the private sector part of our society, this layer would consist of large numbers of independent citizen juries, each containing twelve jurors. Each jury would examine one private sector issue at a time, make one unanimous ruling, dissolve, then get paid and keep it if their decision survives another jury. Millions of these juries could operate simultaneously, each responding to specific circumstances rather than attempting to govern everything through universal rules.

Like cells within the body, no juror would need to understand the entire system. They would only need to decide the case before them.

Over time, consistent decisions would naturally establish expectations and conventions without requiring every circumstance to be predicted in advance. Poor decisions could themselves become the subject of future juries. Adaptation would become continuous rather than episodic.

The objective is not to remove state and federal governments.

Governments would continue to legislate over public sector assets, administer those assets, acquire new assets from the private sector for a fair price, conduct foreign affairs, provide defence, and maintain the constitutional framework.

The jury system would instead provide a distributed mechanism through which citizens could continuously hold private power accountable, resolve emerging problems, and influence society directly without requiring every issue to become a political campaign or legislative battle.

This system is about diluting political power to the largest number of people without it breaking, this drastic increase in scale creates a new democracy, the best of capitalism & socialism combined.

Taking Fair Very Far

It is near impossible for the few people elected to government to be able to communicate to us and provide for us effectively, the bottleneck between us and them then becomes manipulated by vested interests.

The laws being passed have to account for every possibility, a one size fits all, that will often be undermined by a generally self-interested society.

We can solve this by handing over government decision making of the private sector to the people through a great number of randomly selected administrative juries of twelve that can each make a single court case like ruling.

As many as is needed season by season of those willing, unless opted out by another Citizen who gives up their own access for that season.

This allows the population to directly block any problem jurors themselves through equal sacrifice.

Made of twelve and decide by twelve, each juror paid fairly for their work if the ruling of their jury survives being overturned by another, they also have complete discretion on which case they take on and how.

Jurors would have months to make a decision and will often work at a very casual pace, using remote work tools and social media to communicate with fellow jurors.

The output of these juries is synonymous with the pub test, which is an Australian concept that typically means when more than twice as many people in the nation agree on something than they don't, but asking the nation in a survey or by vote on every little decision is impractical.

Being randomly created from similar people means similar rulings on similar cases, as it is with all 12 member juries historically, and the sheer number of juries will prevent those with money from buying access because the other juries will confiscate any unfair extras they don't also get, so to pay any jury will require you to pay them all.

Over time this cleans up government failure and waste and cleans out electoral influence by special interests, from federal to local and everything in between.

Under this system, federal and state governments would only control what they own, and they can obtain any private property for fair price through eminent domain.

A government could own a business and the premises it operates from, but at some point, will not own a part of the supply chain that connects to that business.

This still allows juries to obtain individual outcomes from public assets but just not directly, creating a clear separation of jurisdiction between public and private.

The rest of the nation (outside of public property) is managed by businesses instead of the government who are continuously held accountable to the people through the juries.

The juries are initially created through federal legislation if workarounds to (if any) constitutional limits are figured out, if this fails then constitutional change will be required, that change must only remove the limits while keeping legislative control.

They would be allocated proportionally in each state, and in all territories combined, starting with a state, then rolling out state by state with the last state and all territories going together.

State juries can decide federal matters in their state, in any territory, and internationally. Territory juries can only rule in any territory or internationally.

While they won't have jurisdiction over state or local matters, they will be able to creatively work around that limit to effect change at all levels.

States will likely eventually succumb to jury pressure electorally and enact their own legislation to give permission for these same juries to also make state and local decisions.

These governments will begin to operate more like a business, one that is elected by the people as they are today, to keep the nation, states, and the juries working.

Governments will be entitled to collect no more than a quarter of what that government had typically collected under the previous (current) system, while also carefully managing what they have and acquiring new profitable property, with the eventual goal of becoming self-funded.

They can use the public force at their disposal (military and police), combined with their electoral legitimacy, to obtain those funds if the juries haven't paid it to them in a reasonable timeframe, but if they push too far it will trigger a nationalistic like response from the juries so they will need to find the right balance in how they do it.

This is also helped by those elected politicians being no longer the special interest filtered lot we have today, they would be more respected by the people in jury.

The rest of government spending would now be funded and allocated by the jury system through the private sector, by juries directly or indirectly placing social expenses and obligations onto businesses, which then leads them to demand other businesses who have less of these themselves to increase theirs and eventually (as will happen in all other areas) it will become an adaptive standard of sorts.

Because the juries are an act of legislation, the federal government will effectively have a “kill switch” to stop juries making rulings for a certain amount of time, but the entire economy will have adjusted to this system, so it would be economically painful to do it for too long.

This will be essential in existential situations that require the governments to play catch up, to acquire certain property to prevent nation state failure.

The jury system only works because the juries check each other and the consensus of the whole of them creates a balance, its people checking people at the speed of people, to try and limit or alter this will result in the jury system breaking.

The only possible way to restrict them without turning them off is by reducing the number of juries, how often they are formed, or by filtering who is able to be in one, the nations who don't limit juries will outperform those who do and win.

The features of this system as mentioned below are emergent effects of direct and indirect jury pressure and oversight and not rules or laws directing such, it is a best guess based on what would be fair and pass the pub test in each area of society, so use this as a guide on guessing what would happen in other areas not mentioned:

Juries will provide an effective automatic unionisation of all workers. Customers would also now be effectively unionised, they will get more honest product labels and descriptions (now with only white lies added) and easy to access returns for products that are not as advertised, submitting an easy to generate proof and that company having to collect it themselves or make it an easy pickup service if they want it back.

Insurance can no longer use technicalities to deny coverage and if something is missing or wrong in your declarations then only to the extent that this affects the outcome payment, would it be reduced.

Businesses will innovate other businesses for a cut in profits gained and some will be started for just this purpose. All aspects of every business would be continually surveilled and be accessible to others who don’t abuse that access, and as with everything else from the direct and indirect effect of jury, secrets and intellectual property cannot be used without fair compensation, also businesses could connect their products and services to other businesses through that same jury effect.

Productivity growth would only be limited by the laws of physical reality and the methods of achieving it being considered fair and reasonable by the juries.

Fair, safe, and adaptable regulations on everything and consequences directly or indirectly by jury on anyone involved in trade work, or any other type of work, who are not adhering to them. This would be in the form of taking profits, laying fines, and garnishing future earnings, from those directly involved and anyone indirectly, to a lesser extent, like a business or contractor who looked the other way on clear issues.

Welfare is replaced with a guaranteed job if that person has a fair go at it, that also aligns with their skills, interests, and abilities/disabilities when possible and if nothing local is available then remote options will be a part of this. This will transform gradually in the decades before life expectancy age from full-time work, into an asset tested, indexed, pension payment no worse than today. Other expenses like medical and home care are also covered as they would be if the need exists in other similar areas such as medical, disability, parental payments, and others.

If a major industry closed or shut down in a location, the likely full-time job (remote work) for each adult affected will bring money to that region and allow those workers and the economy around them to slowly transition to new or existing industries.

Tertiary education would have a multi-step testing process or a cheaper single exam option to pass coursework units. Up to them how they learn, how quick, and cost (if any) above what is covered by the usual direct and indirect effect of juries.

Early, primary, and secondary education would be like tertiary education, in that it is results driven through similar multi step testing that is akin to logbook testing for driving, this allows private education of all kinds to be used to get to that outcome and funding for this education would be fairly provided like all other essentials are.

Medical would become a system with the flexibility of a private system combined with the accessibility and cost of a government run system that pulls back as the wealth level of the individual accessing it goes higher.

No inflated prices, health care follows a person for their whole life, so no one health related business has to worry about carrying an unfair burden compared to others or could get away with short term focused treatments because it might not be their problem later in that person's life.

Emergency services remain a simple point of access but with different businesses providing the services, so police on the uniform but with a brand name under it.

When an emergency related business is called out, they will have the obligation to manage that crime or accident scene, call additional help if required and the rest, and like with all other essentials, is financed through business balance sheets as usual.

Bounties will be a big part of these nations, where someone can whistle blow or bring justice and know that they will get a piece of the fine or charge laid on the perpetrator if their conduct was fair and reasonable, this will also cover jury manipulation (where they can take the bribe but not perform the action and still get to keep a good portion of it), and any other crimes.

Prisons over time would keep only those who are actually a threat to the public in prison, everyone else would be released while still being thoroughly monitored, and controlled, through hidden methods, such as: a normal looking bracelet, ring, accessory on them under their clothes, and their earnings garnished for their victims.

All drug supply is legalised and controlled through biometric, remotely monitored, drug dispensers that destroy the drug if tampered with, so the black market is priced out and gone, supply safely managed.

The intent of jury rulings cannot be avoided or worked around, unlike with law.

So as the brain and body conceptually connect together so can the government and people connect together to bring us all to a peaceful balance.

A parallel brain over a parallel body that we are vs a linear government over a parallel society that we currently live in.

This change will bring about a pure democracy, one of fairness and prosperity for everyone, fixing every problem caused by government action or inaction, and solving the social issues that never get much better each generation.

Money will be better spent society wide, economic growth will climb to new heights, these nations will outpace any others who don't take a similar path.

Power will trickle up from the people and no longer just trickle down from above, and free of any mob rule mentality against those above.

Light will shine through every hidden place in society, karma and merit will come to all those who deserve it.

This is Parallel Democracy

An Australian made idea that aims to improve the world and leave a legacy well-earned for the prosperity it brings.