"The Circle" Prompt #4: You've Got Moxie, Kid

Like many of the concepts presented throughout the novel, demoxie is heralded as one of the next great inventions from the brilliant minds of the Circle. Like most of the company's technological breakthroughs. it immediately becomes ingrained into the daily lives of its users in a shockingly fast way, all while ignoring the potentially dire ramifications of the existence and acceptance of such technology. Stop me if you've heard that one before.

By looking at demoxie with our own political system in mind, we can easily see how its existence would invite the possibility of monumental abuses of power by the American people, the very same people who demoxie's twisted version of "democracy" is intended to protect.

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Demoxie starts perhaps innocuously enough with the idea to make everyone with a TruYou account a registered voter. Eamonn Bailey sees this as the most perfect form of electoral democracy, finally "closing the circle" between electors and the electorate. Just like every other sounds-good-on-paper-but-is-actually-terrible-idea to come from those crackpot Circlers, demoxie is met with raucous applause. To make matters worse, Mae has the idea to take the whole thing a step further by forcing everyone to vote. How democratic. 

Naturally, the Circle is so excited by this idea of 100% participation that a trial version is up and running in a week, with its first question asking about veggie options at lunch. Now, voting on the lunch menu may seem harmless enough, but imagine what could happen if such a direct democracy was left in the hands of ordinary people. We all know someone that makes us think, "Thank God they're not running the country." But by putting a vote in everyone's hands, demoxie opens up the possibility for disaster. Instead of qualified and experienced leaders, ordinary and uninformed citizens could end up making decisions that impact the entire country. Do I want the robot or the orange man as president? Should we nuke North Korea for insulting us so many times? How large should the military be? Should free speech be legal at all? You can see where I'm going with this; there's a reason why we elect people to run this country instead of doing it ourselves, and demoxie completely ignores it for the sake of transparency and a hollow definition of what "democracy" really means. 

The message behind demoxie is how it points out the necessity of our representative democracy. We have a process and a system for doing things, even though it's slow, confusing, and often frustrating for those who expect the instantaneous results produced by the Circle. Just as we citizens are checks on the power of our elected officials, our representatives keep us in line too. If we decided matters as easily as we did the vegetable menu, we'd run ourselves into the ground, which is exactly what Mae and Bailey are helping to do. They don't realize it; hell, they even think they're doing the right thing by "closing the circle". But time and time again, they sacrifice the value of human contact and experience for the sake of results and the illusion of connectivity. You can't "close" the distance between politicians and people by simply eliminating it; the distance needs to be there to protect the interests of everyone. 

That's the essence of democracy, not forcing people to vote because you think it's the right thing to do. It's more democratic to choose not to vote, because at least you still have a choice to do what you think is best, too. Eliminating that choice helps no one, no matter how glamorous Mae tries to make it out to be.