At no point in this thread - or anywhere else for that matter - have I advocated anarchy, feudalism, feudal anarchism, or anything of the sort. Centralisation is inevitable to an extent. However to say that our options are binary - the status quo vs feudalism - is absurd. There exists a whole set of improvements and new solutions. Parliamentary democracy is intrinsically flawed for many reasons, and I have given some, but fundamentally it's a machine whose original raison d'etre was to be a solution to an information problem. The views, concerns, and opinions of the uneducated, illiterate population were to be distilled into a smaller, more manageable, representative subset who held the power to affect change as per popular will.

One thing we - especially us on HN - have excelled at these past decades is the manipulation of information. This system was designed when paper was a luxury and literacy a specialist skill; we solved democratic decision-making the day we cracked UIDs and radio buttons.

Governance is like software: it takes information (capital, data, views, problem definitions, etc) in, transforms it, and spits information out (capital allocations, laws, etc) out. Tasked with rewriting the current, proprietary, overly ceremonious, deeply coupled, trillion line leviathan that only runs on a single ancient hardware architecture and has a man page that is not only out of date but is purposely deceptive...would we declare it perfect and go home? Would we dare be so arrogant as to keep it closed source and prescribe our opinions on the world?

Or would we open source it, and see what amazing shit starts to happen?