When Governments Rule One Way and the People Live Another: The Global Schism Between Indirect Democracy and Practised Populocracy
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
The defining political condition of the 21st century is not revolution in the classical sense, nor reform within inherited constitutional limits. It is divergence. Across the world, a widening structural gap has emerged between how governments rule and how people live, organise, communicate, and decide. This divergence is not accidental, temporary, or ideological—it is technological, structural, and irreversible.
While State governments continue to operate through indirect-democratic rule, republican statehood, bureaucratic administration, and capitalist regulation, the governed populations of the world have already transitioned—organically and collectively—into populocratic behaviour, ethnopublic formations, commicratic organisation, and interdependent digital economies. The arena of this transformation is the web-internetisation platform. Its engine is AI-accelerated information exchange. Its outcome is unavoidable.
The world now lives under a dual reality: Governments practise one system; the people practise another.
1. Indirect Democracy Above, Populocracy Below
Across contemporary States, governance remains anchored in indirect democracy—a system in which political elites make decisions on behalf of populations who are structurally excluded from day-to-day governance. Representation, party politics, and bureaucratic discretion dominate this model. Consent is periodic; authority is continuous; accountability is diluted. Yet simultaneously, the governed people are practising populocracy in real time.
On digital platforms, individuals deliberate publicly, challenge authority, mobilise opinion, coordinate collective action, verify claims, expose corruption, and influence outcomes without mediation. Information no longer flows downward from State-approved narrators; it circulates horizontally among the governed themselves. Truth is contested, tested, revised, and socially validated in public view.
This is not symbolic participation—it is functional governance of meaning, norms, and social direction. The people are no longer passive recipients of policy narratives; they are active producers of social consensus. Indirect democracy, by contrast, increasingly appears as a formal shell—ritualised elections governing institutions whose legitimacy erodes daily.
2. Republican Statehood Above, Ethnopublic Formation Below
Where governments continue to practise republican nationalism, populations increasingly organise through ethnopublic logic. Republicanism assumes a centralised State identity enforced through uniform legal abstraction. Ethnopublic formation, by contrast, reflects cohort-based belonging, value-driven association, and collective-individual identity.
Online, people form communities around shared ethics, lived experience, labour interests, creative pursuits, cultural memory, and social causes—often transcending national borders. These groups function as proto-ethnopublics: self-organised, internally regulated, purpose-driven, and mutually reinforcing.
Unlike republican nationalism, which requires coercive unity from above, ethnopublic organisation emerges voluntarily from below. It is not imposed—it is lived. The State speaks of “national cohesion,” while the people practise relational cohesion grounded in interdependence and shared reality.
3. Bureaucracy Above, Commicracy Below
Governments remain bound to bureaucratic organisation—hierarchical, slow, procedurally rigid, and authority-centric. Decision-making power is concentrated, diffused through departments, and insulated by administrative distance. Meanwhile, the people have embraced commicracy.
On the internet, organisation is horizontal, task-specific, transparent, and outcome-driven. Leadership is situational. Authority is functional. Contribution determines influence. Collective intelligence outperforms central planning. Communities self-moderate, self-correct, and self-coordinate at speeds no bureaucracy can match.
This is why bureaucratic States struggle to respond to crises that online communities address instantly. The problem is not incompetence—it is architectural mismatch. Bureaucracy was designed for an industrial age of paper, delay, and scarcity. Commicracy is designed for a digital age of immediacy, abundance, and adaptive intelligence.
4. Capitalist Regulation Above, Digital Corporatism Below
Governments continue to regulate economies through capitalist frameworks—employment contracts, wage labour, taxation, corporate hierarchies, and monetary control. Yet the governed people increasingly earn, trade, and survive outside these structures.
Freelancing, influencing, content creation, decentralised services, platform-based collaboration, remote work, digital goods, and algorithmic monetisation have created a global corporatist economy without State mediation. Income is earned through networks, not institutions. Value is generated through visibility, skill, relevance, and participation—not credentialed gatekeeping.
This economic shift reflects interdependence rather than extraction. People rely on shared platforms, audience trust, reputation economies, and cooperative ecosystems. Capitalism’s vertical employer-employee logic is dissolving from below, even as States continue to regulate as though nothing has changed.
5. Two Worlds, One Trajectory
What emerges is unmistakable:
- Governments practise non-interdependent systems—indirect democracy, bureaucracy, republican nationalism, and capitalist regulation.
- The people practise interdependent systems—populocracy, commicracy, ethnopublic association, and digital corporatism.
These systems are not compatible. One is hierarchical and static; the other is relational and adaptive. One depends on control; the other on participation. One resists transparency; the other is structured by it.
This is why legitimacy crises are global. Governments feel increasingly detached because they are. The governed feel increasingly autonomous because they are. The independence between ruler and ruled has already materialised—not through rebellion, but through practice.
6. The AI Threshold and the End of Delay
Artificial Intelligence has accelerated this divergence beyond repair. AI collapses decision time, information asymmetry, and coordination cost—the very conditions upon which indirect governance depended. What once required representation now requires interfaces. What once required elites now requires verification. What once required bureaucracy now requires algorithms.
This is why alignment is no longer optional. It is not a question of whether States will adopt populocracy form of governance—it is a question of when. Delay only increases dysfunction. Resistance only deepens illegitimacy.
Conclusion: The Inevitable Alignment
Populocracy is no longer a theoretical alternative. It is already the lived governance of the governed. Govox-populi is already operational in digital life. Commicracy already organises labour and meaning. Ethnopublic formation already structures belonging. This Manifesto does not invent this reality—it formalises it for State governance.
The task ahead is simple but uncompromising: Governments must align their rule with the systems the people already practise. The age of indirect authority is ending. The age of interdependent governance has arrived. Populocracy is not coming. It is already here. The only question left is whether States will recognise it—or be rendered obsolete by it.
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