You've eloquently buried in there a number of problems. But I would like to make one change to what you just mentioned: it's not that politicians only listen if you represent a group of people. Politicians listen to power and money, first and foremost (and not always in that order). Everything else is secondary.
That you're on a website that is designed against incentivizing collective action, and yet tries to pass itself off as a bastion of, well, let's call it practical and realistic rhetoric most of the time, is part of the problem. You're not going to find collective action anywhere because the moment you do, "they" are going to insert themselves into the collective to try to sabotage and break apart. "They" have decades worth of experience at it and don't mind killing people left and right, either.
The actionable advice, for this community, would be to put all that great intelligence together and try to come up with a way to subvert whatever opposition would stand in the way of a collective action. I don't know if there's money in it so sadly it probably couldn't be a YC backed start up. Quite the contrary - the money would most likely try to kill you, but nevermind that.
That you're on a website that is designed against incentivizing collective action, and yet tries to pass itself off as a bastion of, well, let's call it practical and realistic rhetoric most of the time, is part of the problem. You're not going to find collective action anywhere because the moment you do, "they" are going to insert themselves into the collective to try to sabotage and break apart. "They" have decades worth of experience at it and don't mind killing people left and right, either.
The actionable advice, for this community, would be to put all that great intelligence together and try to come up with a way to subvert whatever opposition would stand in the way of a collective action. I don't know if there's money in it so sadly it probably couldn't be a YC backed start up. Quite the contrary - the money would most likely try to kill you, but nevermind that.