The argument driving the book is relatively straightforward: The dawn of the third millennium has brought with it an array of “uniquely menacing dilemmas” (p. 7)—civil war, poverty, environmental degradation, Third World debt, disaffected youth, etc.—with which representative democracy, dominated by “tiny cliques of economically powerful and well-organized interests who are, by and large, sexist, racist and Social Darwinists at heart” (p. 6), is ill equipped to deal. The solution to these “threats to human viability” is teledemocracy: a “purer, future democracy” (p. 7) that makes liberal use of direct democratic instruments and new information and communication technologies, preferably on the model developed by Becker and Slaton in the course of more than two decades of experimentation. In their view, this “New Democratic Paradigm” is imminent, especially in America, the progressive center of the “one continent on this globe generating a series of impulses that contain the best way for humankind to work together, live together, grow together and govern together” (p. 8). This “wave of the future” (p. 9) is the political analog of the quantum revolution in physics (highlighting randomness, uncertainty, and unpredictability), its progress hindered only by political, economic, and media elites whose interests are wedded to the current representative system and the outmoded “Newtonian paradigm” (emphasizing reason, causality and hierarchy) upon which it is based and legitimated. The realization of teledemocracy requires a leap to “quantum politics” (p. 36), to which Becker and Slaton see their work as making a contribution.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I traces the lineage of teledemocracy in the ideas of a selection of “democratic visionaries of the 20th century” (p. 11), including Buckminster Fuller, Erich Fromm, and Abbie Hoffman. It also presents the case linking the failure of contemporary representative institutions to the Newtonian thinking which informed their founding, and for how a “political-scientific quantum correction” (p. 28) will “reinform our political thinking and processes in order to ameliorate some of the most debilitating and most lethal crises all modern governments face” (p. 21). Part II recounts the history of Becker and Slaton's experiments in “quantum politics”: Deliberative polling and televoting; electronic town meetings (ETMs) mediated by television, telephone, and computer technology; and the integration of Internet utilities into these models. This part also includes an interesting discussion of the authors' experience developing “a commercial enterprise devoted to producing ETMs for a profit” (p. 119). Part III imagines the future of teledemocracy in the quantum age. Drawing on Benjamin Barber's idea of strong democracy and the futurism of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Becker and Slaton forecast the proliferation of a global direct democracy movement, expansive implementation of technologically mediated direct democracy initiatives, the establishment of mediation as the core of “non-hierarchical, quantum-style conflict resolution” (p. 191), and the transformation of political organizations and institutions by the Internet. In other words, the future of teledemocracy will bear a marked resemblance to precisely what Becker and Slaton have been doing over the past 20 years.

There are sections of this book that are informative. The authors' recollection of their journey of social experimentation aimed at transformation holds lessons for those embarking on a similar trajectory, and their expertise undoubtedly will help identify best practices in the execution of teledemocracy exercises. Additionally, the section on the global direct democracy movement (pp. 158–78) provides a useful, if selective and uncritical, catalog of electronically mediated democratic activism around the world. Becker and Slaton do well to point out that political and economic elites who continue to benefit from the current configuration of power and technology have little to gain from real democratization and will use their existing advantage to preserve the status quo. Unfortunately, they assert rather than argue this point, typically at a level of rhetorical excess that undermines its persuasiveness. To their credit, they also seem aware that the combination of direct democratic and technological instruments is open to manipulation by these same elites in ways that undermine efforts at fundamental democratization. However—with the exception of a brief critique of Ross Perot's presidential campaign, apparently inspired by the candidate's rejection of the authors' offer of expertise in designing ETMs (p. 103)—this possibility is not adequately explored.

Chief among the book's shortcomings as a piece of research writing is its parochial stance relative to the broader scholarly discourses in which it might otherwise have been profitably situated. While Becker and Slaton do refer to fellow travelers on the experimental road to teledemocracy, with the exception of brief references to Barber, Amitai Etzioni, and James Fishkin's work on deliberative polling, there is little engagement with the theoretical or social science literatures that examine a number of issues with which Becker and Slaton ought to be concerned. Thus, the book suffers from a lack of sustained conversation with prominent contemporary theories of democracy, participation, deliberation, representation, technology, or citizenship and from minimal reference to the extensive mainstream social science research on direct democracy, the political economy of media, or the emerging political dynamics of digital technology. The result is that complex critical concerns about the potential pathologies of direct democracy and the Internet are glossed over, possibly because these instruments are inextricable from the “quantum democracy” to which the authors declare themselves committed on a personal level. How else are we to explain, in the age of Microsoft and Time–Warner/AOL, the authors' claim that the “New Internet” is a system of mass telecommunications with “no owners,” “no gatekeepers,” and under which “all Web sites are equal” (pp. 136–7)? Becker and Slaton refer extensively to their own previous work, and to that of their close circle of colleagues. However, more systematic attention to issues raised by theorists and scholars outside the fraternity of “friends of the ETM process” (p. 106) may have made the authors' case in favor of electronically mediated direct democracy more persuasive, and less exhortative.

Becker and Slaton are correct in their conviction that American democracy bears a name it does not deserve, and there is no reason to doubt their commitment to radical democratization or to dismiss out of hand the contribution teledemocracy might make to its realization. It is entirely plausible that televotes, technologically mediated deliberative polling, and electronic town meetings will become a more prominent element of public life, and it is certain that activists will struggle creatively to ensure that these processes reflect the best, rather than the worst, face of democracy. The counsel of intellectuals such as Becker and Slaton will contribute mightily to this struggle. That being said, this book disappoints as a revolutionary manifesto, primarily because it is utopian in precisely the sense in which Marx and Engels understood that word. There is nothing wrong with imagining and working toward a better, more democratic future. However, to assume that its achievement awaits “a correction of the underlying theory of all our social, economic and political structures” (p. 3) rather than an upheaval in the material conditions which support prevailing configurations of power serves only to misdirect the energies of genuine change. To paraphrase Marx on wage labor, we cannot do away with domination and inequality simply by eliminating the thought of them. To suggest the persistence of “Newtonian thinking” is the chief obstacle to a substantial democratization of liberal capitalism, or that “a quantum correction to the Newtonian political thought” (p. 153) will achieve this, is ultimately disempowering. Equally utopian are the authors' concluding projections that teledemocracy will reverse “the forces of rampant, market-based globalization,” yield “a fairer allotment of wealth and social services … reverse the severe degradation to the planet's ecology in the 20th century … [and] work some positive healing of the human psyche and spirit …” (pp. 211–2). It remains to be seen what the broad impact of technologically mediated direct democracy will be. Becker and Slaton succeed neither in establishing that the most important variable determining this outcome will be the prevailing theory of the nature of the cosmos, nor in adequately investigating what some of the other, more significant variables might be.