Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: J.

---

The first thing you notice, sliding into Judicial Earth, is how engaged everyone seems.

This is genuinely impressive. On our Earth, civic engagement is something people claim to value the way they claim to value flossing — in principle, consistently, and with mounting evidence to the contrary. Here, people are participating. Constantly. Visibly. With the satisfied expression of someone who has found their purpose and would like you to know about it. They are looking at their wrists, where a small subdermal implant connects them, at all times, to the civic platform that runs the world. They are voting on things. Important things. The speed limit on the interstate. Whether that restaurant on Fifth Street should be allowed to stay open after the health inspection story broke this morning. The sentence for the man whose trial concluded eleven minutes ago.

Democracy has never looked so busy.

You will spend your time on Judicial Earth trying to identify the precise moment when “everyone has a voice” became a threat to anyone whose voice was outnumbered. This will take you approximately forty-five minutes, after which you will have a lot of follow-up questions and no good place to ask them, because the position of “person who asks uncomfortable questions about the system” is not, on Judicial Earth, a professionally stable one.

The Referendum That Started Everything (2017)

There was no single inventor. No lone researcher working late, no accidental discovery, no one person to hagiographize or quietly blame. What happened on Judicial Earth was more democratic than that, which is either fitting or deeply on-the-nose depending on your tolerance for irony.

What happened was a referendum in Switzerland in 2017 — not wildly different from the referendums Switzerland regularly holds, except for one feature that its architects considered a minor technical innovation and that turned out to be, in the fullest possible sense of the phrase, a whole entire thing. The referendum included, for the first time, a real-time public response mechanism. Citizens could not only vote yes or no on the measure itself but also register continuous sentiment as the debate unfolded — a live pulse of public opinion, updated by the minute, visible to legislators as they deliberated.

The architects called it the Participatory Feedback Layer. They thought of it as a dashboard. A way for elected officials to stay connected to the will of their constituents in real time rather than waiting for the next election to find out they’d misjudged the room.

The legislators, watching the live pulse of public opinion update every sixty seconds while they tried to debate the long-term infrastructure implications of a hydroelectric policy, experienced it somewhat differently. Specifically, they experienced it as standing at the front of a classroom while the class graded them in real time, with the grades posted publicly, with the results affecting their careers, and with the class containing a substantial contingent of people who had tuned in to the live stream primarily because they were already angry about something else.

The referendum passed. The feedback layer data was published. Three legislators who had voted against the majority preference were out of office within eighteen months.

The lesson that other governments took from this was not “be careful.” The lesson was: this works.

CivicVoice (2019–2023)

The product was called CivicVoice, and it arrived with the full force of a Silicon Valley company that had identified a massive underserved market and was prepared to move fast.

The pitch was elegant in the way that pitches are when they are designed to appeal to what you already believe: representative government, CivicVoice argued, was a 230-year-old workaround for the logistical problem of not being able to ask everyone their opinion simultaneously. That problem was now solved. The workaround was no longer necessary. Why should your congressperson vote on your behalf when you could vote for yourself, right now, in real time, on everything?

The CivicVoice implant was subdermal, wrist-mounted, about the size of a grain of rice. The app was intuitive. The onboarding took eleven minutes. For a monthly subscription fee that the company correctly identified as low enough to seem cheap and high enough to generate extraordinary revenue at scale, you could participate directly in the governance of your community, your state, and eventually — as CivicVoice expanded its government partnerships — your country.

The marketing was very good. The central image — a close-up of a wrist, the small chip glowing faintly, the tagline Your Voice. Every Vote. Every Day. — won three advertising awards and was credited by multiple political scientists as having done more for the concept of direct democracy than any philosophical text since Rousseau. This is not entirely a compliment to the political scientists.

By 2021, CivicVoice had 400 million subscribers. By 2022, twelve countries had granted CivicVoice votes advisory status in their legislatures. By 2023, four countries had granted them binding status, and the word “advisory” had quietly stopped appearing in CivicVoice’s marketing materials.

What Direct Democracy Actually Means (A Partial List)

A clarification, because language matters here: Judicial Earth is not a lawless world. It has extensive laws. Impressively extensive laws, in the sense that it has more laws per capita than any society in recorded history, which is what you get when legislation is a continuous real-time process rather than an intermittent one.

The issue is not quantity. The issue is consistency, which the laws of Judicial Earth do not have, and stability, which they also do not have, and the minor related matter of whether a law that can be voted into existence in forty minutes by people who watched an upsetting news segment constitutes, in any meaningful philosophical sense, justice.

On Judicial Earth, laws change fast. Not in any particular direction — ideology implies a consistent underlying belief system, and consistent underlying belief systems require people to hold roughly the same opinions on Tuesday that they held on Monday, which is a lot to ask of a population that is receiving continuous media input and has the ability to immediately externalize its reactions as binding legislation. After a high-profile violent crime, sentencing guidelines spike upward within hours. After a sympathetic human-interest story about someone currently serving under those sentencing guidelines, they can drop again by Thursday. Speed limits in major metro areas have fluctuated so frequently that two competing GPS companies have simply stopped attempting to provide accurate data and now display a calming green line with the disclaimer: Estimated. Please use judgment.

The legal scholars of Judicial Earth publish their analyses with expiration dates. This is not a metaphor. It is a formatting convention that their professional association formally adopted in 2024, following a peer review process in which three papers were invalidated between submission and publication.

The Harmon Case (2023)

His name was Marcus Harmon, and he taught high school history in Columbus, Ohio, and in the fall of 2023 he made the pedagogically reasonable decision to include, in his unit on democratic systems, a section on the historical limitations of direct democracy. He taught the Athenian assembly. He taught Revolutionary France. He taught the specific anxiety that the American founders had about majoritarian tyranny and the structural safeguards they built in response, which they discussed explicitly in The Federalist Papers, which are available in any library, which is a thing Marcus Harmon apparently did not realize was going to be a problem.

A parent recorded the class and posted it to the CivicVoice community forum with the title: Columbus Teacher Using Classroom to Push Anti-Democracy Agenda. Should He Still Have a Job?

The post received 2.3 million views in six hours.

The vote took four hours. It was not close.

Marcus Harmon was notified of his termination via the CivicVoice app, which sent him a push notification — the same push notification format used to inform users of weather events, traffic delays, and special promotional offers on their monthly subscription renewal — informing him that the Columbus Municipal Education Board, acting in accordance with a binding CivicVoice community vote, had accepted his resignation effective immediately.

He had not resigned. This was flagged as an error in the notification system and later corrected.

He appealed. The appeal was placed before the community. He lost 71% to 29%. His students have since said, in interviews they were careful to give outside the CivicVoice ecosystem, that the unit on democratic limitations was the best thing they learned in high school. Several of them are now studying constitutional law, which remains, for the moment, a legal field, though the question of how much authority courts should have relative to CivicVoice supermajority votes is itself the subject of several active CivicVoice votes, the current results of which you can check at any time on your wrist.

Marcus Harmon did not respond to interview requests. He is reportedly doing fine. He is, presumably, keeping his opinions about this to himself, which is a survival strategy that Judicial Earth has collectively rediscovered and which the Founding Fathers — had anyone been permitted to teach about them — would have recognized immediately.

The People Who Have Noticed

They exist. There is a loose coalition of legal scholars, former judges, political philosophers, and people who have personally been on the losing end of a CivicVoice vote who have been making, with increasing urgency and decreasing volume, the argument that the specific thing CivicVoice destroyed was not democracy but the structures designed to keep democracy from becoming its own worst enemy.

They call themselves Constitutionalists, or Deliberativists, or — in the more exhausted corners of their private forums — simply “still here.” They write papers. They hold conferences. They have, several times, filed legal challenges to the scope of CivicVoice’s binding authority.

Their most recent legal challenge was, in accordance with current procedure, placed before the public for a binding CivicVoice vote.

The Constitutionalists lost 74% to 26%.

The lead attorney issued a statement afterward. It was flagged by the CivicVoice platform’s community standards algorithm as potentially misleading, which meant it required a community vote to remain published. It lost by eleven points. The statement is no longer available.

She is, apparently, working on a new one. There is no particular deadline for when it needs to be ready. There is also no particular guarantee that it will be allowed to exist once it is. These are related problems that she is thinking about carefully, which is exactly the kind of careful thinking that Judicial Earth was specifically designed to eliminate from the governance process.

What the Sliders Know

You will leave Judicial Earth having seen a world that solved its engagement problem completely. No one here suffers from apathy. No one feels unheard. Participation is at an all-time high, and the people doing the participating will tell you so, enthusiastically, at any opportunity, which they are taking some care to do now, while the current vote on permissible speech is still running and the outcome is not yet final.

The thing that nobody at CivicVoice’s founding put in the marketing materials — the thing that is, in retrospect, the detail they really should have led with — is that “everyone has a voice” and “everyone is protected” are two different promises that turn out to require entirely different infrastructure. The voice part, they nailed. The infrastructure for the second part is what courts and constitutions and the whole slow grinding apparatus of deliberative law were for: the unglamorous, deeply unpopular, nobody-wants-to-crowdfund-it work of protecting the 29% from the 71%.

That infrastructure was voted out.

The vote was 68% in favor.

The measure was very popular.

Democracy had never looked so good. Marcus Harmon’s students could tell you what it felt like from the inside, if you could find them somewhere the platform couldn’t hear, and if they still thought that was a conversation worth having, and if they hadn’t looked at their wrists recently and decided that right now maybe wasn’t the best time.

---

Join me Monday for K — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.