Cyborg Citizens Hit the Nineteenth Century

I wasn't planning to post for a while, but I'm having a surreally interesting experience this afternoon. I'm alternating between checking CNN's predictions of the US elections and reading Geoge Eliot's Felix Holt. Apart from the usual dire 'nothing really changes in politics - it is all too depressing' kinds of response, it has also set me thinking (as other people are) about the contradictions between democracy, citizenship, suffrage, and effects. Us non-US people can jump up and down all we like, obsessively check the results as they come in with the gut level impact of 'this means something to us' but ultimately for all the cyborg citizen rhetoric we are like Eliot's miners in the pub - materially, we don't count.

I apologise if this doesn't make much sense. A few days of bad sleep and eating patterns and political nausea does that.