> It does not scale. It scales pretty well; but we have let our guard down and naïvely thought the problems would sort themselves out by virtue of voting. We "live in a society", that means casting a vote on a paper ballot won't make the farmer understand the downstream effects of fertilizer runoff, nor the impact to communities of a CEO outsourcing away jobs. We can't go about living our lives without trying to meet each other halfway. And we won't survive without finding a way to make being nice to each other mandatory.
> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]
On the contrary, I'm trying to prevent it from getting smaller. And, even better, to improve on it (we're a community of hackers and tinkerers after all, right?)!
We are all much more vulnerable to autocratic regimes nowadays due to the erosion of privacy rights and deregulation (again, the threat of instrumental convergence — the paperclip problem — threatens the fabric of society: censorship in the name of advertising-friendly content, spying in the name of targeted advertisement, and the weaponization of targeted ads and "the algorithm" propping up foreign-state-funded populists/autocrats).