In the light of recent problems with electronic voting machines, you’d think that promoting the idea of voting over the internet would be the last thing on anyone’s mind. However, there is a small minority of political futurists who think that is exactly the way the democratic world should be heading – as they say, the technology is already in place (with computers and set-top boxes in almost every home) and has been tested successfully in a number of real-world situations. There are understandable objections from the security experts, and it would be madness to roll out such a system before you made it bullet-proof and verifiable. But as our world becomes increasingly wired, a digital implementation of the democratic process seems an eventual inevitability – reality TV is laying the foundations right now.