Democracy via Focus Groups“In the bad old days of liberal democracy, where people vote for what option to pick, you usually see the following: 40% vote for option A, 40% vote for option B, and 20% are centrist voters who decide what option actually gets picked.
That’s incredibly inefficient! Why not just skip the election, and survey the 20% directly?
Eventually, we refined the process further, cutting down the red tape and speeding up decision-making. In Alpha Complex, we now have a superior form of democracy - an electronic democracy, where The Computer selects an Electorate (consisting of 5 people to represent the total population). We then let this Electorate make decisions for us! All the benefits of democracy, without those inefficient elections!â€
I took the the ‘spork’ focus group mission in “Spin Control†and ran it on its own, treating the focus group system as the Electronic Democracy that I detailed above (with the focus group described as “the Electorateâ€). The decision the Electorate had to make was: “What service firm should be in charge of spork production in the complex?â€
The mission ended with the entire focus group murdered and then retroactively accused of treason since they were all carrying contraband. Before a new focus group was selected (players hoped they might randomly get selected to sit on it), a spork firm’s CEO was accussed of treason and promptly terminated in a confusing firefight that also destroyed the focus group center in the process. The CEO’s assets were then delivered to the sole remaining spork firm, so no decision needed to be made.
During debriefing, a Troubelshooter suggest that next time, members of the Electorate should be drawn from Troubleshooters or ex-Troubleshooters, to prevent a scenario like this from happening again (where every representative was found to be a traitor). “Service equal citizenship!â€
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