“Government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
-Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address (1863)
My mother was an underpaid cook and housekeeper who fought every day to raise me right while battling a lifetime of abuse, illness, and generational trauma. I was five when my parents divorced, and twenty-three when she took her own life at age forty-nine, after years of struggling to survive.
Looking back now, I see not only the slow collapse of her life but also the broader unraveling of our country, and how people like her—hardworking and hurting—slipped through the cracks of a political system that claimed to protect them.
Meanwhile, well-paid pundits and podcasters tell us we live in “the most modern, functional, representative, capitalist utopia in world history.” But the reality is a system that returns less and less to the people who pay into it—while pouring billions into tax breaks for billionaires, foreign wars, and the growing militarization of ICE and local police forces to keep those struggling people under control.
After witnessing decades of “trickle-down” promises that never reached those most in need, I’ve spent my life asking a simple question that cuts through the noise: How can we actually make things better?
As a kid raised on TV, that lead me to another important question “How would the people of Star Trek—and the people of our own future— stay connected to their neighbors, help each other live better lives, and elect representatives that actually represented their needs?”
Politicians today casually ignore the needs of the people, handing out tax breaks to billionaires and pouring public money into football stadiums for those same elites, while the residents living in their shadows beg for clean water, a living wage, and affordable health care. This isn’t governance—it’s moral bankruptcy disguised as policy. The brutal absurdity of austerity politics in our modern oligarchy makes the old cry of “taxation without representation” almost sound quaint. What we face now is far worse: a government openly serving corporate power, where each new generation of politicians arrives already owned, and accountability to the public has all but vanished.
This led me to the real question at hand: Do we need to tear down the entire system, or does democracy just need a better user interface?
This project began during the covid pandemic as a work of political science fiction. I’m a filmmaker by trade and much like Gene Roddenberry imagining a better future where the people of Earth had evolved past their differences and resource wars, I looked back at a lifetime of political disappointment and decided to build a video demo of the modern digital democracy that America needs but doesn’t yet have.
The result was the video MyVote: The Billionaire-Proof Digital Democracy. It may have taken Alexander Hamilton 6 hours to explain his new form of government, but I’m proud to say I summed up Electronic Governance in under 5 minutes! This book is a deeper look at the roadmap presented in that video. My hope in the face of a corrupt and unresponsive political system is that if I can demonstrate a better way to connect with our government, then surely more people with more money, power, and connections than me will be inspired to actually build it.
Maybe it won’t save the world, but I know the comprehensive e-governance platform described in these pages can start making things better by putting every American in the same virtual town square. Things can only get worse if we just keep shouting into the digital void while getting drowned out, distracted, and divided by billionaire-bots and troll-farms.
This isn’t a white paper from a well-funded corporate think tank that will get promoted by the profit-driven distraction algorithms and picked up by the local news or celebrated by the national corporate media. I’m just a regular dad trying to survive the class war by using the tools at my disposal to make the world a little better than I found it. So if you watched the video and thought it was full of “cheap, stolen, and AI graphics”… you’re right! So far, this has been a one-man project with the video and this book presented as an invitation to build a better future together instead of just giving up and letting the billionaires kill us for profit.
With that in mind, I want to give a nod to the power of fact-based LLMs for deep research, text analysis, and academic citations. This project wouldn’t have been possible without the time, money, and manpower multiplier of machine learning, and I firmly believe that the ability to analyze and digest massive amounts of data to produce factual, well-sourced information is the most important feature of the “AI” future.
I have major problems with “AI” stealing art and jobs while creating bland derivative nonsense that distracts us from real life (along with polluting our air and wasting energy), but I also believe we need to use every tool available to fight the overwhelming forces against us, and LLMs might be the best weapon we have to fact-check the onslaught of corporate propaganda and disinformation we are presented with on a daily basis.
I’m less worried about an all-powerful AI of the future enslaving humanity because the billionaires of today have already enslaved us under manufactured scarcity and a high cost of living while stealing trillions of dollars from us in wage theft and corporate tax breaks. Used for the collective good, a super-intelligent research assistant in our pockets could, in fact, democratize information and help destroy the petrochemical-patriarchy by proving beyond any doubt that 10 billionaires controlling the world while a billion poor people starve is NOT as unavoidable and impossible to solve as those billionaires claim it is.
As a Californian and long-time Apple user, I reference both throughout this project as an example of what collaboration between business and government could look like when it actually serves the public good. Many see Apple as just another predatory tech giant, but I argue that it remains more committed to individual privacy, creative empowerment, and user choice than its competitors who profit from distraction, manipulation, and surveillance. Even if Apple only cares about selling iPhones, it is better positioned to benefit from the informed, engaged, and independent citizens of a thriving middle class than authoritarian control of the American people. My hope is that Apple’s employees will remember their roots in technology and liberal arts and choose to help build the “Star Trek” future of shared progress rather than the Orwellian nightmare that unchecked power makes inevitable.
To quote Public Enemy and The Isley Brothers: We gotta fight the powers that be!
Zed Starkovich
MyVoteGov.org
myvotegov.substack.com
@MyVoteGov.bsky.social
