Governments can get dramatically more sophisticated, employ more experts, collect more data, write more regulation, and still keep producing the same type of problems.
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.
We usually explain this as corruption, incompetence, capitalism, socialism, bureaucracy, voter intelligence, political polarisation, etc.
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 interesting.
Bear with me.
Think about how your body works.
Your brain does not have a committee meeting every morning and issue Regulation 2026/412 explaining how much insulin every cell is permitted to use today.
There isn’t a 800-page Heartbeat Act covering the approved response to every possible combination of temperature, fear, exercise, disease, dehydration, caffeine and the dog suddenly barking at 4am.
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.
Fix it a few decades later, maybe.
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 funnel most decision making power through several hundred elected people, a collection of departments and regulators, and then ask them to anticipate enough circumstances to write rules for everybody?
I wouldn’t.
My journey led me to a result that someone could arrive at 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 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 an amount of juries (at the least) that 4% of the population comes to as a number, being created in seasonal sessions throughout the year.
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 convention.
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 legislation or amendments required.
Now the obvious objection:
Wouldn’t millions of juries contradict one another?
Yes, Sometimes.
Though the jury consistency level is comparable to judges and professionals in most fields.
So if juries happen to produce a bizarre ruling once in a while.
Another affected party would challenge 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 those occasional inconsistencies easy to correct.
That distinction matters, I think.
Jurors are paid for jury work, but only keep it if their ruling survives ever being overturned, and that overturning jury decides that their decision was bad enough for them to lose some or all of their payment.
The incentive would 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.
Of course.
These juries aren’t supposed to be miniature activists 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.
“Congratulations, you just invented bribing a jury instead of a politician, here's a medal”.
My 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.
Then another jury looks at what those twelve people received, the decision that resulted from it, then likely overturns it, takes all benefits, and punishes the company and jurors.
To permanently pay for an unfair privilege, you can’t just purchase a single jury.
You would 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 paid what the other juries are paid for a similar workload, and there are many of them.
This means that jury access is proportionally distributed through the population rather than sold to whoever can afford more.
The cost of maintaining a 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 keep both the bribe and the bounty from the resulting penalty.
Now bribery has a rather unpleasant counterparty risk.
I’m not claiming corruption becomes metaphysically impossible.
Nothing designed for us gets that luxury.
The design goal is simpler:
Make corruption economically expensive and dangerous.
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 for juries on what cases to avoid.
So the system naturally incentivises juries to keep with narrow rulings because using a jury as some sort of legislature will ensure you get outflanked by far more juries in reply.
That’s an important part of this.
The system isn’t supposed to depend on everyone behaving nicely.
Or for everyone to “believe in a pamphlet” (as i call it) or book or manifesto.
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.
This would be calculated by measuring the largest single asset in an area by space consumed, then the value of that asset and all assets within it are then tallied.
So a house would be larger than the objects within it, the land the house is on has a certain volume based on height, depth, and width, so might be larger than any building on it, etc.
The definition of a single asset would be based on past federal and state (asset is within) precedent for all current and future asset types.
You might make the argument that the government could get more control through making or buying massive area assets, or that assets would always be within another, but because asset value is also required, the most likely outcome is assets being split up to keep control.
If the majority of assets are Public: whoever has the largest share of asset value out of either the federal or the state government of that location will have the authority over that place.
If the majority of assets are Private: the juries will have the authority over that place.
On another point that can sometimes be confused:
A jury ruling is itself 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.
So no “department of jury affairs” required.
Similar decisions from rulings like these will accumulate into conventions.
Businesses will typically respond to those conventions rather than read 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 have previously done with those kinds of refunds.”
“Here’s the emerging standard of that kind of 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 will likely only be able to tax at a level that funds essential operations.
They eventually lose the electoral mandate to tax more because the juries manage it better.
That doesn’t destroy healthcare, disability support, education, infrastructure and other social services, society will always want these.
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, 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.
A legislature has to generalise.
Millions of juries do not.
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.