Way back when I was doing my Business degree, I remember studying traditional channels of retail distribution and how power in the channel goes down the value chain with maturity. So typically, power is focused on the manufacturer as the product being produced is scarce.

With some maturity, lots of little retailers spring up, who need to be serviced and so the power devolves to the wholesaler, who can then choose which manufacturer to buy from and pretty much dictate terms to the retailers, as none of them is strong enough to go direct to the manufacturer.

The next stage is that one or two retailers do grow big and powerful enough to cut out the wholesaler altogether and pretty much dictate their terms now to the manufacturer, which is the case with say, Tesco in the UK or Walmart in the US.

In those days, that’s where the model stopped, pretty much. Although I do remember speculating about if the logical evolution of the model would be that the power, in turn, passes down the chain again - to the consumer. In those days of pre-Internet, there was no practical way of this happening and I was told not to be stupid, in so many words.

And it’s really only now that the Internet is enabling these kinds of patterns to emerge, as the natural evolution I wondered about all those years ago finally comes into being. You’d have to be pretty stupid these days to realise that the power is indeed inevitably going to end with the consumer, after all.

For the best book I’ve read on the powerful consumer paradigm, read Tomi and Alan’s Communities Dominate Brands. Order here.

I was reminded of this sort of approach when reading about a new political party in Australia. Senator Online is apolitical, but pledges that its politicians will vote the way its constituents tell it to on every Bill/Law put to parliament. Voting takes place online, but could just as easily be via mobile - indeed, as mobiles have unique numbers, there’s an argument that potential vote-rigging could be better managed via the mobile platform.

While it remains to be seen what effect this will have in Australia, I am absolutely convinced that this is going to be the next phase in the representation of the people in democratic societies.

I’m not suggesting that every single Bill should be voted on, or will be, as this change happens. But some laws are simple enough for the ordinary person to understand and have an opinion on and moreover people will be interested in them enough to be motivated to vote.

As with any revolution, change will be resisted most by the people who have the most to lose - in this case the incumbent politicians. They stand to lose everything that they hold dear; status, power and influence. Really, their role will be transformed on one level from doing what they think, to doing what the people tell them to and where’s the fun in that?

The more intelligent will see the opportunities rather than the threats, as some always do and leave their erstwhile colleagues in one of the mourning phases associated with great change. These laggards will deny it’s happening, they’ll get angry, they’ll try to start bargaining, followed by depression over the death of an era lasting arguably one thousand years. The final stage is acceptance.

The main opportunity that the naysayers will miss is that the people will still need the arguments laid out for them in a simple way that nakes sense and that’s how the power of the politician will be maintained. It won’t be the same, but it’s not as bad as it might first appear.

Human tendency is always to view the world as “the end of history”, as if evolution stopped a couple of years ago. It’s that tendency which made someone like the misunderstood, Charles Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, pronounce back in 1899 that “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Successive generations have scoffed at his arrogance and yet, there’s plenty of people who feel pretty much the same way, even if they don’t pronounce it quite so unequivocally.

But the fact is that evolution never stops and this applies to animals and humans, as much to business models and institutions and in this case, even politics, which will change in the next ten years more radically that the previous 500. While there will be many problems to be overcome and much resistance by the incumbents (much good it’ll do them), political destiny lies with a post-representational model and the smart politician will move in that direction or be crushed remorselessly as it happens anyway.