In my younger days I thought direct democracy was unworkable, but now I realise that might have just been my brain conforming to the bourgeois representative government status quo.
Obviously we easily have the tech to do DD these days, everyone has a smart phone in their pocket, we could do it instantly and on the go. But how you could manage a planned economy that way I’m not sure.
This is less of a description of a system of government than a description of the principles behind it. So, who exactly votes on what and when remains to be seen, but it's based on a particular set of ideas.
Institutions have no power of their own in the sense that they're basically employed by the people. Like, if the CEO hires a manager to run a convenience store or something, the manager isn't really the ultimate authority over the store, despite the fact that they make many decisions over how it runs. They've just been chosen by the CEO because the CEO isn't personally interested in micromanaging every aspect of the store, and while they have some range of personal discretion, ultimately if they started acting out of line with the CEO's vision they'd be removed.
So, the manager lacks nominal power, but it's also important to recognize that they will have some power in practice and set up checks against them abusing that power.
On the reconciliations:
You're right, I shoudn't have said this right should "basically never" be surrendered. For example, children surrender it to their parents, and if they didn't it would be pretty disasterous. I should have said, this right can't be surrendered without a very compelling reason.
Some people just don't want to be hassled about certain things, and so long as the thing isn't huge and immensely consequential, they should be able to turn down the chance to exercise their democratic power. Also, knowing what to do in a lot of situations could require a lot of research, and if people are forced to weigh in you're either putting a large burden of research on them or forcing them to vote on something they have no idea the consequence of. This point is really just the reason to have any institutions at all.
Yeah, this one doesn't contradict dd. If any of the points contradicts direct democracy, it's the second one, but am I wrong to say that a system that works like I described could still be considered direct democracy? Every policy is still implemented on the authority of the general public.