What is needed is a strong government for the people, by the people. Without that, it really doesn't matter what tech you can cobble together.
The people who do show up are independently wealthy, retirees, and people being paid to represent an organization. Representitive government doesn’t, and cannot represent the people.
This also helps curtail corruption. It is ostensibly easier to coerce/bribe/etc a state than a nation, but you have to do this for every single state and then try to keep them all under your thumb. A federal government may ostensibly be harder to corrupt, but once corrupted they can affect your whims on a national level and be relatively easier to maintain control of.
This decentralization of power seems to be the easiest way to have a functioning political system. It's always the same decision. Centralization paired with selflessness, benevolence, and competence will trend towards utopia. Centralization paired with selfishness, greed, or incompetence will trend towards dystopia. Decentralization will always just trend towards mediocrity as a mish mash of the averages of society.
They also explicitly dismissed the idea of one person, one vote.
And this all ignores the fact that there wasn't a singular, cohesive founding vision. Alexander Hamilton, for example, argued for a strong federal government.
With all that said, we shouldn't be hamstrung by what a deeply flawed group of people decided in the late 1700s.
Bringing this back to the discussion at hand, your point seems completely off the mark and basically irrelevant. The current copyright regime is nothing like what was created by those men hundreds of years ago. In the late 18th century after the country was founded, copyright was limited to 14 years plus another 14 year extension if the author was still alive. Going back to that would be a great idea.
the corollary being the further away government is from the people, the less accountable it is
Exhibit A: Brasilia
We need to be careful with that - it's one thing to make tools that help circumvent harmful behaviors, such as censorship and privacy violations, but rendering authorities unable to enforce laws (or forcing them to partially enforce them, based on who has and who hasn't technology protecting them) is not a desirable outcome.
I hope you don't think "accountability" means some hill billies storming some offices and then going home having accomplished absolutely nothing, except in some cases going to jail.