Most of us live in a representative democracy. We elect people to represent us, and they fight for our interests in parliament (or whatever the equivalent is). At least, that's what they're supposed to do. Instead, our representatives are co-opted by corporations and special interest groups through campaign financing. They fund our representatives' campaigns and in return, our representatives push their agenda when they're elected. This means they're representing the corporation and special interest groups, rather than us, everyday people.

Of course, often what they want is something along the same lines as what we want, but that isn't always the case. When it isn't the case, what they want beats what we want - think corporate welfare, net laws, interventionism. Popular opinion says we oppose these things, and yet, because our politicians have vested interests in continuing them, change is impossible.

In 2010, Justice Kennedy of the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations being able to finance our representatives was not only legal, but a feature of representative democracy. Free speech, he argued, is not restricted to individual people - it extends to corporations and groups of people as well. Donating money to campaigns is a form of political free speech, he argued also. Money = free speech.

It begs an obvious question - doesn't this mean that some people have more free speech than others? If freedom of speech is partly dependent on your capability to fund political campaigns, then doesn't that mean that corporations who have tonnes of money to donate to campaigns have more free speech than you do? Their voices are much more louder than yours and they have much more influence in decision-making, all because they have much more money than you.

Many of the companies that donate to campaigns aren't even from the same country as you. Transnational companies, through campaing financing, are lobbying their foreign interests into our political system. The main point I'm trying to make is that you are not being represented and our governments, rather than seeing this as a problem, recognise this situation as being a feature of our constitutions and part and parcel of representative democracy.

We aren't being represented and the people in power don't care. More and more of us are becoming aware of this and I believe if things continue the way they are, we'll see a populist revolution. It could work out and we could achieve change, or the govts. could clamp down and destroy it. It's a hard problem to solve because it's an institutional one that, perhaps, is, after all, a feature of representative democracy.

Maybe we switch to a different model of democracy then, instead? Direct democracy puts the power into the hands of the people, as opposed to representatives of the people. How could this work? One way, it's been suggested, is to employ the internet. You'd vote for a bill the same way you fund a Kickstarter campaign. Once the bill gets however many votes it becomes law. You crowdsource initiatives, reforms and policy and then vote on it. This type of direct democracy is called electronic direct democracy.

The question I want debated is, given that we aren't being represented in our representative democracies, how do we go about changing that?