&gt; &quot;You still get single points of failure. You still get corruption. You have just jettisoned your ability to deal with any of them effectively.&quot;<p>Right, let&#x27;s look at this.<p>Corruption exists because people are driven by their own self interest, and that self interest can be guided by those who can shift the personal priorities of the individual. If a person is &#x27;bought off&#x27;, their actions may change to be in line with those that bought them off.<p>How many people need to be bought off in order to corrupt the decision making process? Enough to have a majority of the decision makers under control. Compared to a representative democracy, is the number of decision makers smaller or larger under direct democracy? It&#x27;s larger. That would suggest corruption is harder to maintain.<p>There&#x27;s a little bit more to it though. Corruption can take different forms. Corruption based on material wealth may be effective with representative democracies, but even if it doesn&#x27;t scale, the more insidious form of corruption is corruption of the mind. To guard against this, you need &#x27;inclusive, informative&#x27; news media, as it&#x27;s vital to be able to expose lies and misinformation.<p>Direct democracy with an effective news media is more resistant to corruption than the representative democracy with corporate media that we have now. If you disagree with that statement, let me know.<p>&gt; &quot;You&#x27;re replacing an explicit set of power structures with equally explicit rules with a set of implicit structures with no explicit rules.&quot;<p>&gt; &quot;Consider how Digg succumbed to organized influencers. Ask yourself how your system is immune to such things. Hint: it&#x27;s not.&quot;<p>So your argument is that implicit power structures are just as problematic as explicit power structures as you can still have a small number of actors who seek to game the system to their own advantage?<p>&gt; &quot;Excuse me. An identical balance for all individuals. What is good for one person is incredibly bad for another. You&#x27;re imposing uniformity where uniformity is unsuited.&quot;<p>You&#x27;ve just repeated what I said with different words.<p>&gt; &quot;Apologize to the dead created by people like you first.&quot;<p>I find that insulting, quite frankly. As I&#x27;ve said before, none of those societies you&#x27;re referring to were communist societies, nor did they start out as communist societies and devolve into something else. They were never communist to begin with, and did not make efforts to become more communist as time went on.<p>Here&#x27;s an analogy that should help explain why that statement is misguided. Imagine I&#x27;m a Muslim, and this is just after the Paris shootings. I can state that Islam is a religion of peace, and so state that the people who carried out the attacks were not true Muslims, regardless of what they claim to be. Would your response still be &#x27;Apologize to the dead created by people like you first.&#x27;?