You offered a bunch of interesting thoughts there. Let's see if I can address them.

First off, note that I was not critiquing the concept of democracy, but rather stating my belief that the United States isn't one. I have plenty of critiques of democracy that don't strike me as relevant to the discussion so far.

This point about choices aggregating to something might be the crucial point of the conversation. With most of our actions, I agree with the view you're putting forward. The world is subtly shaped in innumerable and unimaginable ways by our daily choices. I view voting as an exception to this normal. It's a highly garbled signal and the value of the inputs is what the output ends up being. In most cases, my feeling is that if you vote and it doesn't change the outcome of the election, then there is no complex web of subtle effects. It's more like a black hole. There are a bunch of caveats to offer and many cases where I think voting makes sense, but that's the basic framework for why I think the two cases are different. It's also why I think engaging in political discussions is worthwhile, while thinking voting is not.

Also, it's at the individual level where I think voting is pointless, but I don't think it's pointless for someone with a huge audience to encourage their followers to vote. No individual voter is responsible for the current Supreme Court, but Tucker Carlson certainly might be.

It's interesting to me that you bring up the idea of making minds reel, because that's exactly what happens when people hear that I don't vote. It precipitates way more unusual brain activity, precisely because it breaks from their expectations for a highly educated and informed person. Often it leads to conversations about the political system that partisan tribalism doesn't usually allow.

You talk about contagion from people like me not voting, but 1) I would welcome that and 2) everyone I know irl still votes, so I'm not inclined to put any more stock in that than you put in my concerns about voting crowding out genuine civic involvement.

I will offer up that there are times where I have voted and where I consider it to make sense. In primary elections, delegates might be decided by a single vote, and that can change the downstream political calculus in positive ways. There might be a variety of thresh holds facing third parties and if there are enough candidates facing enough of these, then your vote might have a significant chance of determining the outcome. Also, I was a big enough Ron Paul fan that I just wanted his vote tally to be as high as possible. I'm sure there are plenty of others that people could come up with.