On democracy vs. panarchy

There is a tendency to use metaphors from the past and/or present to describe the future, and the since the main consensus medium has been representative democracy, with ideology, government and a monopoly on violence acting as a consensus mechanism, it is common to see posts such as Tim Hollo on an ecological democracy where “everything is connected” and embedded in nature, and similar.

I think the use of the word democracy misses that a lot of the potential in recent peer-to-peer technology, such as blockchain technology, relies on math, specifically cryptography, five to six decades of work in cryptography actually, as well as reward incentives, to form a consensus, the use of technology implying that it is inherently post-democracy, not limited to dunbars’ number.

Democracy is a form of organization that runs on human brains, which has been great, but, what if a technology came into existence that is built on entirely different principles? The blockchain is exactly that, and one possible scenario is that it is the shape of the future. What it produced is a “consensus medium” within which any interaction or code will be viewed as being part of the shared state, similar in many ways to how nation-states have worked. Just based on the precedents so far, with religion, and nation-states, it seems like global consensus is a medium that is selected for.