Towards a Post-Politics Era?
Towards a Post-Politics Era?
(This opinion article was written by a lecturer at Yuppentek University of Indonesia and author of The Governance Game)
The political system reform discourse in early 2026, which plans to return regional elections (Pilkada) to the hands of regional legislative councils (DPRD), is a backward leap that insults common sense. This move is claimed to be a practical solution to the high cost of direct democracy, yet in reality it is merely an attempt to confine public participation back within the closed chambers of the legislature. If efficiency is the primary justification, why must we retreat to the old transactional methods? Why do we not leap further into the future by replacing the slow hammer of bureaucracy with the precision of computer code through algocracy?
We are trapped in a nauseating crisis of representation. At a time when the people’s right to vote is being curtailed, legislative positions have instead become the new “darlings” of celebrities and political dynasties who hunger more for the glamour of power than the substance of public service. If the human parliament is increasingly preoccupied with political theatre, is it perhaps time to replace the cacophony of political oratory with a Big Data-based decision-making system that has no ego?
The acute failure of our representative system is rooted in the deeply ingrained lust for rent-seeking embedded in the incentive design of our politics. Through the lens of James Buchanan’s Public Choice Theory, politicians are not “public angels” immune to temptation, but rather rational actors who frequently sacrifice long-term public welfare for short-term electoral capital accumulation. The current popularity of legislative positions should be viewed with suspicion — not as a passion for legislation, but because of the considerable authority to determine the distribution of state resources, which is vulnerable to manipulation.
On the other hand, decision-making algorithms fed with macro and micro data — from commodity price fluctuations to poverty indices — can operate without the emotional burden or obligation to repay campaign financiers. Following the logic of Yuval Noah Harari’s Dataism, politics is fundamentally just a data processing system. Until now, the human parliament has acted as an exceedingly slow processor, full of “noise” or interference in the form of personal interests, and laden with subjective bias. With increasingly massive digital infrastructure, citizens’ aspirations should be directly transformable into policy through automatic and transparent budgetary smart contracts, without needing to pass through the drama of behind-closed-doors negotiations that are susceptible to bribery.