My country at least is a democracy exclusively for people who are willing to fight for attention, and who support views that are already popular enough that they are probably being implemented by our leaders anyway.

But of course the popular views are more often implemented while the unpopular aren't. How could it be otherwise? Your country is democracy for all, but it doesn't mean that every person can extort visible influence. Among 30 million others it would be impossible.

So I would like to know why we have representatives at all, would an aristocracy be much worse? Decisions are being made by an elite group who's only direct incentive to keep everyone happy is avoiding rebellion and their own ethics anyway.

Not only they want to prevent rebellion, they want to get reelected too. And you have a chance to become a member of that elite, which would be much smaller in an aristocratic system.

As for the proposed alternatives: Direct democracy to some degree is possible. In Swiss regional politics, a fairly large portion of decisions is made by referenda, which have a long tradition, and it works as well as the representative system.

My impression is that most proponents of direct democracy operate from the assumption that the main problem with the present state of affairs is representatives ignoring the public. In fact, the main problem is the public itself. Voters rarely rationally analyse the options, and most voters care about politics only as far as their biases go, except in rare situations where their own interests are clearly at stake. A typical socialist is going to vote for the socialist party, a conservative for the conservative party, and so on, not because they analyse the parties' programmes, but because they trust their party more than the enemy faction. It somehow works, because the factions tend to be in approximative equilibrium, and nobody is going to attain excessive power.

A perfect direct democracy will deprive the voters of their favourite parties. I would expect two effects. First, wider disinterest in politics. After all, would you every day check politics.gov.ca to vote on dozens of proposals, such as 1997 grain trade limitation act, second amendment or wheelchair construction safety standards? I wouldn't. It is extremely difficult to get attention to more technical issues and most of the laws would be unpassable (if 50% of all voters was needed) or be decided by a small minority of interested partisans (if 50% of voters participating in the poll was the threshold). Which may be good or bad.

The second effect I would expect is emergence of some substitutes of the older party system. Now, the factions would not compete for the seats in a parliament, but rather organise massive campaigns in the media to persuade the citizens to click on their proposals. If nothing goes wrong, the resulting state will not be much different from the present.

And of course, there is the issue of compatibility of laws. It is far more probable that an incompatibility is spotted and fixed during the standard legislative procedure in the parliament than during a public internet poll.

So, limited applications of direct democracy are fine, but abolishing the representative system altogether will be probably detrimental.

Randomised democracy: Although people seldom tell good things about politicians, the politicians are still at least rudimentarily qualified for their jobs. I don't want to see a bunch of random men and women sitting in the government.

If political activity is worthwhile for producing change, it's as a low probability, high payoff action. We live in large societies, with a single government acting over millions of people. That means that if you're able to make a beneficial change, it can have a huge benefit (multiplied over the millions of people who are influenced). But it also means that your chances of having an effect are tiny, since political power is divided among millions of people.

This is most obviously true of voting, but it also holds for other forms of political activity. A legislature that gets millions of letters and emails each year from constituents is unlikely to devote much attention or consideration to any one of them (apparently the US Congress gets 200 million; not sure about Canadian Parliament). And this would also be true with other political systems, including direct democracy and randomized democracy, unless you happen to be one of the few unusually influential people (like one of the people who's randomly selected in a randomized democracy).

Randomly grouping voters into districts might be worth considering. With geographic districts, incompetent and corrupt incumbents get reelected by bringing their district more than its share of national resources or by playing to regional prejudices (religion, etc.). If those options were off the table, character and competence might win more often.

The devil is in the details with both of these proposals.

The debate mappiing systems used in direct democracy proposal would determine any "attacks" on the same. How sensibly does a proposal have to be written, who determines that? How convincing does a rebuttal have to be ? Who decides that it was convincing? How many people minimum to support a proposal/to reject one? Does every proposal have to explain where the money is going to come from? If the government runs out of money, who decides the priority of ongoing programs? It's a lot of detail.

In the randomized democracy proposal, I would guess you would end up handing over a lot of power to the relatively stationary military and civil services. I can also foresee powerful dark arts practitioners being employed by the lobbyists who can completely profile a person within a week or so, and present proposals that will satisfy the ego of the newly selected person very quickly. But it would still be a little better than our system today.

The point is, it is difficult to modify mature political systems. You can support sea-steading or charter cities which will theoritically acccelerate the experimentation process. A sideways approach could be to support SENS and hope that long lives will give better future orientation to any politicians who are elected.