Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.

Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.

It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.

https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources...

Well I do know he's politically active and worked with Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky. So it's more than a little cheeky.

A democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We've lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.

American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.

As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.

It's also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.

Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.

Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn't a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.

I won't comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn't enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.

For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.

This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.

Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.

A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.

Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.

The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.

So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.

I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.

Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.

This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.

This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.

This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.

I like this, but a more general point is that at all scales, we need to resolve the tension tension between the singular and the plural, the individual and the group, the `int` and `[int]`.

Results vary between Milton Friedman's famous pencil to the devastation of war.