You ever get that feeling that we are just living in the late stages of a very long experiment? Like, we have been doing this nation state thing for a few hundred years, and we have just kind of collectively decided that democracy, autocracy, and theocracy are the only items on the menu. It is like going to a restaurant that only serves three things, and even though you are kind of tired of them, you are afraid to look at the secret menu because you think the food might be poisoned. Or maybe you are just worried the chef has no idea how to cook anything else.
That is a very vivid, and slightly dark, analogy, Corn. But you are right. We often treat our current systems as the end of history, as if we reached the final level of the video game and there are no more patches or updates coming. Herman Poppleberry here, by the way, and I have been waiting for a prompt like this. Our housemate Daniel sent us a really fascinating audio clip today, basically challenging that very notion. He was looking at some research on alternative governance, and he is particularly interested in the stuff that sounds like it came straight out of a science fiction novel.
Yeah, Daniel was talking about things like lottocracy, liquid democracy, and his favorite, which he called an agent-ocracy. Basically, letting an artificial intelligence agent run the show. It is a wild list, but it raises a really good point. If we were starting from scratch today, in February of two thousand twenty six, would we really build a system where we draw lines on a map and then fight over who gets to represent everyone inside those lines every four years? It feels like we are using a rotary phone to try and manage a quantum computer.
Probably not. The Westphalian system, which we talked about way back in the early days of the show, was designed for a world where information traveled at the speed of a horse. It was about physical territory because that was the only thing you could actually control. Today, information is instantaneous, and our identities are often more tied to our digital communities than our physical neighbors, but our governance structures are still moving at that horse and buggy pace. Daniel is pointing us toward what people call experimental governance. And I think the best place to start is the one that sounds the most absurd but actually has the deepest historical roots. Lottocracy. Or, as the academics call it, sortition.
Right, sortition. This is the one where you basically treat the government like jury duty. Instead of holding an election and having people spend millions of dollars on campaign ads and thirty-second soundbites, you just pick names out of a hat. Or a digital hat, I guess. It sounds like a recipe for chaos, but you say it has history?
It is actually the original form of democracy. This is how ancient Athens worked. Most of their administrative positions, their council of five hundred, even their magistrates, were filled by lottery. The Greeks actually thought elections were aristocratic because they favored the wealthy, the well-spoken, and the famous. They believed that sortition was the only way to ensure that every citizen was truly equal. The idea was that every citizen was equally capable of serving, and more importantly, it prevented the rise of a professional political class. You cannot have a career politician if the career is only open to you if your number comes up in the lottery.
It is a fascinating concept because it completely eliminates the incentive for populism or pandering. If I am chosen by lot to serve in the legislature for a year, I do not have to worry about what my donors think, because I do not have any. I do not have to worry about being re-elected, because I cannot be. I can just focus on the actual problem in front of me. But Herman, the obvious pushback is expertise. Do you really want a random person off the street, who maybe has never even read a budget proposal or understands the complexities of the power grid, making decisions about nuclear energy policy or international trade? I mean, have you met the average person?
That is the big hurdle. But the proponents of lottocracy, like the philosopher Helene Landemore or David Van Reybrouck, who wrote that great book Against Elections, argue that we underestimate the collective intelligence of ordinary people when they are given the right environment. Usually, these modern proposals include a period of deliberation where the chosen citizens are briefed by experts from all sides of an issue. Think of it like a citizen assembly. Ireland actually used this to great effect when they were considering massive constitutional changes regarding marriage equality and abortion. They brought in ninety-nine citizens, gave them expert testimony, let them deliberate for months, and they came up with recommendations that were far more nuanced and courageous than what the professional politicians were willing to touch.
I remember that. It actually worked. And it wasn't just a one-off. I think East Belgium, that small German-speaking region, actually established a permanent Citizens Council chosen by lot to work alongside their parliament. It is like they have a house of representatives and a house of random neighbors.
Exactly. The Ostbelgien model is the gold standard right now. It creates a bridge between the people and the experts. It is like the wisdom of the crowd, but with a structured education phase. It feels more human than what we have now, where politics feels like a team sport where the fans are just screaming at each other from the bleachers. But let's move to something a bit more tech-forward. Daniel mentioned liquid democracy. This feels like the middle ground between the system we have and a total direct democracy.
Liquid democracy. I have heard this one tossed around in crypto circles and by the Pirate Parties in Europe. It sounds like a way to make voting more fluid, but how does it actually function without turning into a full-time job for every citizen?
Liquid democracy is brilliant because it addresses the issue of scale and the "rational ignorance" problem. In a direct democracy, everyone has to vote on everything. Who has time for that? I do not want to research the technical specifications of a new sewage treatment plant or the intricacies of a trade tariff on semi-conductors. But maybe I know a friend, or a local expert, or even an organization like the Sierra Club, who I really trust on environmental issues. In a liquid democracy, I can delegate my vote to them.
And the liquid part comes from the fact that you can take that vote back at any time, right? It is not like giving someone a four-year power of attorney.
Precisely. It is dynamic delegation. If my delegate starts making decisions I do not like, or if I suddenly decide I have become an expert on sewage plants myself, I just click a button and my vote returns to me. Or I can delegate it to someone else. It creates a meritocracy of influence. If you are consistently right and consistently transparent about your reasoning, more people will give you their votes. You become a sort of temporary, specialized representative. We saw some early versions of this with the LiquidFeedback software used by the Pirate Party in Germany, and more recently in some decentralized autonomous organizations, or D-A-Os, in the blockchain space.
I can see that working for technical issues, but doesn't it run the risk of creating super-influencers? Like, imagine if a popular celebrity or a charismatic YouTuber suddenly has the voting power of a million people because their fans just delegated everything to them. That feels like it could go south very quickly. You end up with a system run by the people who are best at getting followers, which is... well, that is kind of what we have now, just with more steps.
That is the massive risk. We have seen how social media algorithms can distort influence and reward the loudest voices rather than the wisest ones. If you combine that with actual legislative power, you could end up with a very volatile system. It is one of those ideas that looks perfect on paper but has to contend with the reality of human psychology and the attention economy. It requires a very high level of civic engagement to keep the "influencers" in check.
Which brings us to something that tries to solve the intensity problem. Quadratic voting. I know you have been geeking out on this one since you read that book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl.
Guilty as charged. Radical Markets is a great book, and the more recent work on Plurality by Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang is even better. Most people think one person, one vote is the ultimate expression of fairness. But it has a huge flaw. It cannot measure how much you actually care about something. If there is a vote on whether to build a highway through your backyard, your vote counts the same as someone who lives fifty miles away and just thinks highways are generally good. The system ignores the fact that you are going to be devastated while the other person is only mildly inconvenienced.
So quadratic voting lets you put more weight behind the things that matter to you? It sounds like buying votes, which usually has a pretty bad reputation in history books.
It is not buying votes with money, but with a fixed budget of "voice credits." Everyone starts with the same amount. You can spend those credits on different votes. If you want to put one vote on an issue, it costs you one credit. But if you want to put two votes on it, it costs you four credits. Three votes cost nine credits. The cost is the square of the number of votes you cast. That is the quadratic part.
Oh, I see. So it gets exponentially more expensive to exert more influence. That prevents someone from just dumping all their credits into one thing unless they really, really care about it. If I want to have ten times the influence of a normal person, it costs me a hundred times the credits.
Exactly. It forces you to prioritize. It protects the interests of minorities who are deeply affected by a specific policy, because they can outvote a lukewarm majority by spending their credits strategically. It is a way of mathematically modeling the intensity of preference. We actually saw some experiments with this in the Colorado House of Representatives a few years ago. They used it to let lawmakers decide which bills to prioritize out of hundreds of options. They found it moved the conversation away from partisan bickering and toward shared priorities that everyone could live with. It turns out that when you have to choose what you care about most, you tend to be more reasonable.
That feels like a very elegant solution for internal governance, but it is still operating within the framework of a state. Some of the other things Daniel mentioned, like panarchy and seasteading, are trying to break that framework entirely. Panarchy sounds like a fancy word for anarchy, but I know it is different. It is more about choice than just having no rules, right?
It is very different. Panarchy is the idea of non-territorial governance. Think of it like this. Right now, your government is determined by where you stand on the Earth. If you move across a border, your rules change. In a panarchy, governance is like a service provider. You could live in the same apartment building as me, but you might be a citizen of the Swedish Social Democratic Governance Group, while I am a member of the Singaporean Efficiency Collective. We are neighbors, but we subscribe to different social contracts.
So we are neighbors, but we are playing by different rules? How does that even work when it comes to things like crime or shared infrastructure? If your government says it is legal to play loud music at three in the morning and mine says it is a felony, who wins?
That is the million-dollar question. You would need robust inter-governmental agreements, almost like roaming charges for cell phones or international law. If I commit a crime against you, which set of laws applies? Usually, proponents suggest a common law framework for interactions between members of different groups. But the core idea is competition. If your government is doing a bad job, if they are corrupt or inefficient, you do not have to pack your bags and move to a different country. You just switch your subscription. It treats governance as a competitive market, which theoretically should drive up quality and drive down costs. It is the ultimate "exit" strategy.
It sounds like the ultimate libertarian dream, but also a potential logistical nightmare. And seasteading is basically the physical version of that, right? Building floating cities in international waters to escape the jurisdiction of existing states. I remember hearing about this years ago with Peter Thiel and the Seasteading Institute. Is that still a thing in two thousand twenty six?
It is still a thing, though it has evolved. The early dreams of giant floating cities have been tempered by the reality of the ocean. The ocean is a harsh environment, both physically and politically. Most seasteading projects, like the one in French Polynesia, ran into massive legal and local hurdles. But the spirit of it has shifted toward what Balaji Srinivasan calls the "Network State." The idea is to start as an online community, build up a shared identity and an economy, and then eventually acquire physical land or platforms where you can exercise sovereignty. We are seeing "startup cities" popping up in places like Honduras with the Próspera project, though that has been caught in a massive legal battle with the Honduran government over sovereignty. It is a high-stakes game of chicken between new tech-wealth and old-world geography.
Okay, let's get to the one Daniel was really excited about. The AI-ocracy. Or the agent-ocracy. This is where we stop trying to fix human systems and just hand the keys to an algorithm. Daniel’s idea was an AI-run kibbutz or commune. What does that actually look like in practice? Are we talking about a digital dictator?
Well, we are already living in a soft version of this, which people call algocracy. Algorithms already decide who gets a loan, who gets bail, what information you see in your feed, and even how police patrols are distributed. An AI-ocracy would just take that to its logical conclusion. Instead of a city council debating a budget for six months, you have an A-I agent that has been fed all the data on the city's needs, its resources, and the stated preferences of its citizens. The A-I then calculates the optimal allocation of funds to maximize a specific metric.
But who picks the metric? That is the part that scares me. If you tell an A-I to maximize happiness, it might just put everyone on a permanent drip of dopamine. If you tell it to maximize efficiency, it might decide that elderly people who are no longer working are a net drain on resources and... well, you see where that goes. It is the classic "Monkey's Paw" problem.
That is the alignment problem, and it is the central challenge of A-I-ocracy. You have to be incredibly precise about what you are asking the system to do. But Daniel’s idea of an agent-ocracy is slightly more nuanced and, frankly, more interesting. Imagine every citizen has their own personal A-I agent. This agent knows you better than you know yourself. It knows your values, your history, your preferences, and your needs because it has seen every email you have sent and every purchase you have made. Instead of you voting, your agent goes into a massive digital simulation with everyone else’s agents. They deliberate, they negotiate, they look for win-win scenarios, and they come back with a consensus that represents the best possible outcome for the most people.
So it is like a representative democracy, but your representative is a digital version of yourself that can process a million times more information than you can. It is like having a personal senator who actually knows what you want. That is actually... kind of compelling. It solves the problem of people being too busy or too uninformed to participate. Your agent is always informed. It is always looking out for your interests. It doesn't get distracted by a scandal or a catchy slogan.
And it doesn't get tired, it doesn't get bribed, and it doesn't have an ego. It can run a billion simulations of a policy before it ever gets implemented. But then you have the transparency problem. If the agents come back and say, "We have decided that everyone needs to pay a five percent tax to build a new carbon capture plant," and you ask why, the answer might be a series of complex calculations and multi-dimensional trade-offs that no human brain can actually follow. Do you trust the black box? If the A-I says "Trust me, this is the best way to prevent a famine in ten years," do we just go along with it?
I think that is where it breaks down for most people. Governance isn't just about the output. It is about the process. It is about the feeling that you have a say, that you are being heard, and that the people in charge are accountable to you. If an A-I makes a mistake, who do you fire? You can't vote out an algorithm. You can't protest in front of a server farm and expect it to feel shame or change its mind. There is no "neck to wring" if things go wrong.
Exactly. There is a deeply human element to justice and fairness that is very hard to quantify. We often accept a less efficient outcome if we feel the process was fair. An A-I might find the perfectly efficient solution, but if it feels arbitrary or cold, people will rebel against it. This is why some researchers are looking at "Human-in-the-loop" A-I governance. The A-I does the heavy lifting of data analysis and scenario modeling, but the final decision-making and the ethical weighting are still done by humans—perhaps humans chosen by lot!
It is funny, we started this talking about how we are stuck with three options, but as we go through these, I am realizing why we are stuck. Every one of these alternatives solves one problem but creates three new ones. Sortition solves corruption but loses expertise. Liquid democracy solves scale but creates influencers. Quadratic voting solves intensity but is complex to explain. AI-ocracy solves efficiency but loses accountability. It is like we are trying to solve a Rubik's cube where every time you turn one side, the colors on the other sides change.
That is the nature of what they call wicked problems. Governance is the ultimate wicked problem. There is no perfect solution, only trade-offs. But I think the value in these weird and absurd experiments, as Daniel called them, isn't necessarily that we should adopt them wholesale tomorrow. It is that they expand our imagination. They remind us that the way we do things now isn't the only way. We are currently living in a system that was an "absurd experiment" to someone living in the year seventeen hundred.
So, what are the practical takeaways here? If someone is listening to this and feeling like our current system is failing, but they are not quite ready to move to a floating platform in the Pacific or hand their life over to an A-I agent, what can we actually use from these ideas? Is there a "Governance Lite" version we can start using?
I think the most practical thing we can do is start implementing these ideas at a smaller scale. We don't need to change the federal government overnight. We can use quadratic voting for local school board priorities or for deciding which features a software company should build next. We can use citizen assemblies for city planning or deciding how to spend a local municipal budget. We can even use liquid democracy within small organizations, non-profits, or co-ops.
I like that. It is like beta testing governance. We do it with software, we do it with medicine, so why not with society? If a city tries sortition for a year for its parks department and it works, then maybe you try it for the planning commission. You build trust through small, successful experiments. You prove the concept before you scale the system.
Exactly. And I think we should be looking at how to integrate A-I as a tool for deliberation rather than a replacement for it. Imagine a city council meeting where an A-I is running in the background, fact-checking claims in real-time, identifying common ground between opposing speakers, and suggesting compromises that satisfy both parties' core values. It is not making the decision, but it is making the human deliberation much more effective. It is like a super-powered mediator.
That feels much more balanced. It is about augmenting human governance, not replacing it. I also think the idea of the network state is going to become more relevant, even if it doesn't look like seasteading. We are already seeing people form communities around shared values online that are more meaningful to them than their physical neighbors. How do those communities start to take on some of the functions of governance? Insurance, dispute resolution, professional standards. We might see a slow hollow-out of the traditional state as these digital communities provide better services.
That is already happening in some ways. Think about how much of our lives is governed by the terms of service of the platforms we use. If you get banned from a major social media platform or a payment processor, that is a form of private governance that is often more impactful than local laws. The challenge for the next decade is making that private governance democratic and accountable. We need to bring the "weird" ideas into the digital spaces where we actually live.
Right, because right now, a handful of C-E-Os have more power over the digital public square than any elected official. That is not an A-I-ocracy, that is just a digital autocracy. We need to find ways to bring those democratic principles—whether it is sortition for content moderation or quadratic voting for platform rules—into the digital world.
And that brings us back to Daniel's prompt. Are democracy, theocracy, and autocracy our only options? I think the answer is a resounding no. But the fourth option isn't a single thing. It is a plurality. It is a world where we have many different systems co-existing and competing. Maybe you live in a traditional democracy for your physical safety, but you participate in a liquid democracy for your professional guild and a quadratic voting system for your local community garden.
It is a more modular view of governance. Instead of one big system that tries to do everything, you have a stack of different systems for different needs. That feels very twenty-first century. It matches how we interact with everything else in our lives, from our entertainment to our careers.
It does. And it is exciting, but also a bit terrifying. The stability of the nation state has given us a lot of peace and prosperity over the last eighty years, despite its obvious flaws. Moving to a more fragmented, experimental world is a high-stakes gamble. But as the old saying goes, the only thing more dangerous than change is staying the same when the world around you has already moved on. The horse and buggy can't navigate the highway.
Well, on that note, I think we have given Daniel plenty to chew on. It is a lot to think about, especially the idea of an agent-ocracy. I am still not sure I want a digital version of me making my laws, but I would definitely let it handle my emails and maybe my taxes.
One step at a time, Corn. One step at a time. If you are listening to this and you have thoughts on which of these systems you would actually want to live under, or if you have a totally different idea for how we should govern ourselves—maybe something involving dolphins or random number generators—we want to hear it. This show thrives on these kinds of deep dives into the "what if."
Definitely. And if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app or a rating on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find us and join the conversation. We have been doing this for over five hundred episodes now, and it is the feedback from you all that keeps us going. It is our own little form of community governance.
It really does. You can find all our past episodes and a way to get in touch with us at our website, myweirdprompts.com. We are also on Spotify, obviously. We will put some links in the show notes to the books we mentioned—Radical Markets, Against Elections, and The Network State—if you want to do your own deep dive.
Thanks to Daniel for the prompt today. It definitely pushed us into some interesting, and slightly brain-melting, territory. This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. We will talk to you in the next one.
Goodbye, everyone.
See ya.
