Eric Schmidt and Andrew Sorota have diagnosed a genuine crisis. Democratic institutions are hemorrhaging legitimacy precisely when artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to automate consequential decisions. Their concern is well-founded: populations losing faith in human-led governance will embrace algorithmic alternatives, replacing democratic deliberation with what they call "algocracy"—automated systems that optimize for efficiency while eliminating accountability.
Their prescription focuses on using AI to augment rather than replace democratic processes. Taiwan's vTaiwan platform demonstrates that technology can surface consensus from polarized debates. Identity verification and information authenticity create prerequisites for legitimate digital participation. These contributions are valuable and necessary.
But they address symptoms rather than causes. The legitimacy crisis facing democratic institutions stems not from inadequate deliberation tools but from structural monopoly. Democratic governments operate as territorial monopolies with minimal accountability between elections. Citizens can vote every few years but have no meaningful recourse when institutions fail to deliver competent governance in the interim. This monopolistic structure, not the absence of better AI tools, explains why institutions decay, why bureaucratic dysfunction compounds, and why public trust continues its steady decline.
The solution requires not just better deliberation mechanisms but structural changes that introduce competitive accountability into democratic governance itself. This is not about replacing democracy with markets or eliminating human judgment through algorithms. It is about recognizing that institutions without competitive pressure invariably decay, regardless of how well-intentioned their leaders or how sophisticated their deliberation tools.
The Decay Function of Monopolistic Institutions
Every monopoly follows a predictable decay trajectory. Without competitive pressure to improve service quality, monopolistic institutions optimize for internal convenience rather than external value delivery. Bureaucracies multiply because no competitive force constrains their growth. Regulatory capture by incumbents accelerates because the institution faces no threat from alternatives. Innovation stagnates because there is no penalty for maintaining outdated processes.
Democratic institutions exhibit all these pathologies. When loan approvals take sixty days instead of minutes, when airport systems fail because they run on floppy disks, when the Pentagon cannot account for eight hundred million dollars in annual spending, the problem is not that citizens failed to vote correctly or deliberate adequately. The problem is that these institutions face no competitive pressure forcing them to improve. Citizens cannot easily exit poorly-governed jurisdictions. The switching costs of physical relocation—abandoning property, relationships, and economic opportunities—give governments enormous room for dysfunction.
As Balaji Srinivasan observes, Western politics has become negative-sum. Each election cycle weaponizes institutions against opposing parties, leaving both sides worse off. This destructive dynamic stems from relative economic decline. The G7's share of global GDP has collapsed from over forty percent in 1992 to roughly twenty-seven percent today, with BRICS nations capturing that lost ground. When the economic pie stops growing and switching costs remain high, zero-sum competition over fixed resources intensifies into negative-sum competitive dynamics. Institutional decay accelerates rather than self-corrects.
This creates the conditions Schmidt and Sorota warn against. When democratic institutions prove incapable of basic competence, populations rationally turn to any alternative that promises effectiveness—whether authoritarian strongmen, technocratic experts, or now algorithmic systems. The appeal is not ideological but operational. People want governments that work. If democracy cannot deliver working governments, democracy will lose legitimacy regardless of how effectively AI helps aggregate public input.
Competition as Accountability Mechanism
The missing element in democratic theory is continuous accountability through competition. Traditional democratic accountability operates through voice and vote: citizens express preferences through elections and deliberation, hoping institutions respond appropriately. When institutions fail, citizens have minimal recourse beyond waiting for the next election cycle. This episodic accountability creates long periods where institutions can decay without consequence.
Competitive accountability operates continuously. When citizens and economic activity can migrate between jurisdictions based on service quality, governments face immediate pressure to improve performance. Bad governance faces consequences through population and capital flight. Good governance receives rewards through attraction of talent and resources. The feedback loop compresses from years to days.
This is not theoretical abstraction. China's Special Economic Zone competition demonstrates the principle at national scale. Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen competed to demonstrate which policies generated economic growth. Successful zones attracted investment and talent. Failing zones reformed or stagnated. The competition generated thirty years of unprecedented development precisely because zones could experiment rapidly and successful models could propagate throughout the network.
The United States exhibits similar dynamics through state competition. Delaware attracts corporate incorporations through efficient courts and clear corporate law. Nevada offers different advantages through favorable tax treatment and privacy protections. Wyoming pioneered DAO-enabling legislation to attract digital organizations. This competition generates governance innovation impossible in monopolistic systems where no alternative exists.
But traditional jurisdictional competition operates too slowly to discipline modern governance effectively. Relocating a business across state lines takes months. Moving personal residence disrupts lives and severs relationships. The time lag between deteriorating governance and economic consequences provides ample space for political dysfunction to compound. What Schmidt and Sorota identify as democratic crisis is actually monopoly crisis operating on accelerated timescales as technology outpaces institutional adaptation.
Network Topology and Governance Design Space
The structure of networks determines what organizational forms become possible. Centralized hub-and-spoke topologies create single points of failure and bottlenecks that constrain throughput. Distributed mesh networks enable parallel experimentation and rapid propagation of successful patterns. The topology itself shapes the possibility space for what can be built.
Current democratic infrastructure operates primarily as hub-and-spoke hierarchy. National governments sit at the center, with citizens as peripheral nodes. Information flows upward through representatives, decisions flow downward through bureaucracies. This topology worked adequately when communication was slow and coordination across distance was expensive. It breaks catastrophically when technology enables direct coordination at scale.
Consider the topology shift from telegraph networks to the internet. Telegraph systems operated as centralized networks where messages passed through operator-controlled exchanges. The internet operates as distributed mesh where any node can communicate with any other node through multiple paths. This topological change did not merely make existing communication faster. It enabled entirely new forms of coordination impossible in hub-and-spoke architecture: peer-to-peer file sharing, distributed computation, decentralized social networks, global collaboration on open-source software.
Governance infrastructure faces an analogous transition opportunity. Rather than all decision-making flowing through central authorities, distributed governance networks could enable parallel experimentation across multiple nodes with rapid propagation of successful models. Rather than citizens being peripheral nodes dependent on representatives, citizens could participate directly in multiple governance networks based on their actual needs and preferences.
Taiwan's vTaiwan represents movement in this direction but remains constrained by underlying centralized topology. The platform aggregates public input more efficiently, but that input still flows upward to central authorities who deliberate and decide. The network structure itself has not changed—only the efficiency of information flow within existing structure. This helps but does not address the fundamental bottleneck of centralized decision-making unable to process complexity at the pace technology generates it.
Exit Rights and Continuous Accountability
Democratic theory traditionally emphasizes voice and vote as accountability mechanisms. Citizens express preferences through elections and deliberation. Institutions aggregate those preferences and implement corresponding policies. When institutions fail to do so, citizens use voice more loudly or vote out incumbents.
But this model assumes citizens are captive to geography. Exit requires physical relocation with prohibitive switching costs. This captivity creates principal-agent problems where representatives pursue interests misaligned with constituents because constituents cannot easily leave. The threat of being voted out in the next election provides some constraint, but years of damage accumulate between elections with no recourse for citizens.
Exit rights provide accountability operating continuously rather than episodically. When citizens can leave failing systems costlessly, institutions must deliver value or face collapse. This is not about eliminating voice or vote but complementing them with accountability mechanisms that function between election cycles. The combination of voice, vote, and exit creates stronger discipline than any single mechanism alone.
The principle extends beyond individual mobility to organizational and economic activity. When businesses can relocate easily, when capital can migrate rapidly, when talent can flow freely between jurisdictions, the competitive pressure on governance quality intensifies. Jurisdictions cannot rely on captive populations or switching costs to retain economic activity. They must earn the right to harbor citizens and businesses by providing superior services: efficient dispute resolution, predictable regulation, quality infrastructure and responsive governance.
Digital infrastructure enables exit rights operating at speeds impossible in physical space. You cannot relocate your physical residence daily based on governance quality fluctuations. But you can participate in multiple digital governance networks simultaneously, allocating your attention, resources, and compliance with different systems based on how effectively each serves your needs. This creates accountability pressures operating continuously as citizens vote with their participation rather than waiting for periodic elections.
Infrastructure Determining Possibility Space
The infrastructure available determines what governance models become technically feasible. Representative democracy emerged because direct participation was logistically impossible at scale. You cannot fit millions of people in a room for deliberation. You cannot process that many perspectives through manual voting mechanisms. So we elect representatives and trust them to faithfully reflect constituent preferences despite principal-agent problems this indirection creates.
Digital infrastructure dissolves these logistical constraints. You can gather millions of perspectives asynchronously through online platforms. You can process complex preferences through cryptographic voting mechanisms that preserve privacy while ensuring integrity. You can verify that decisions reflect actual consensus through transparent tallying that anyone can audit. The infrastructure exists to enable forms of direct participation impossible with paper ballots and physical assemblies.
But most democratic institutions continue operating with processes designed for pre-digital constraints. Voting happens on single days at physical locations. Deliberation occurs in chambers with limited seating. Representatives serve as information aggregators because direct information flow from millions of constituents was logistically impossible. These processes made sense given historical infrastructure constraints. They make no sense given current infrastructure capabilities.
The question is not whether AI will improve these outdated processes—it will—but whether the processes themselves should be rethought given different infrastructure possibilities. Schmidt and Sorota propose using AI to make representative democracy work better. The deeper question is whether representative democracy remains the optimal model when the logistical constraints that necessitated representation no longer bind.
Consider liquid democracy as example of what becomes possible with different infrastructure. Rather than electing representatives for fixed terms to vote on all issues, citizens could delegate their voting power issue-by-issue to trusted experts while retaining the ability to override those delegations at any time. On healthcare policy you might delegate to someone with medical expertise. On climate policy you might delegate to someone with environmental science background. On foreign policy you might vote directly. The flexibility emerges from infrastructure enabling dynamic delegation impossible with paper ballots.
Or consider quadratic voting mechanisms that enable citizens to express preference intensity rather than just binary yes-no votes. You receive voting credits and can allocate them across multiple issues, with the cost of additional votes on any single issue increasing quadratically. This prevents narrow interest groups from dominating outcomes by caring intensely about single issues while most citizens remain apathetic. The mechanism requires computational infrastructure to calculate costs and aggregate results but creates more accurate preference revelation than binary voting.
These are not speculative proposals but governance mechanisms deployed in production environments. Colorado used quadratic voting for participatory budgeting. Taiwan uses it for platform governance. The mechanism works. The constraint is not technical capability but institutional inertia of democratic systems designed for different infrastructure realities.
Parallel Experimentation and Rapid Propagation
Monopolistic institutions cannot experiment effectively because failure means systemic collapse. If the national government implements a policy that fails, the entire population suffers. This creates strong incentives toward conservative incrementalism even when radical reform might be necessary. Democratic paralysis stems not from inadequate deliberation but from concentration of risk that makes bold experimentation too costly.
Network structures enable parallel experimentation where failures remain localized while successes propagate rapidly. When multiple jurisdictions try different approaches to the same problem, successful models become visible quickly through comparative performance. Other jurisdictions can adopt successful approaches while avoiding failed experiments. The network learns collectively through distributed trial and error impossible in centralized systems.
China's economic reform demonstrates this pattern. Rather than implementing national policies uniformly, China designated special economic zones to experiment with market mechanisms while the rest of the country maintained socialist planning. Successful zones attracted investment and generated growth. Unsuccessful zones reformed or stagnated. Over decades, successful models propagated throughout the network while failed experiments remained contained. This parallel experimentation generated faster learning and better outcomes than would have emerged from centralized planning or uniform national policy.
The United States exhibits similar dynamics through federalism enabling state-level experimentation. States serve as laboratories of democracy testing different approaches to healthcare, education, drug policy, and countless other domains. Successful state policies inform federal legislation. Failed state experiments inform other states about what to avoid. The system learns through diversity rather than imposing uniform solutions.
But this distributed learning operates too slowly in current institutional infrastructure. Policy diffusion between states takes years as legislators observe outcomes, draft bills, navigate committee processes, and build political coalitions for adoption. By the time successful policies propagate broadly, circumstances have often changed requiring different approaches. The learning cycle cannot keep pace with technological and social change.
Digital infrastructure enables distributed learning operating at software speed. When governance protocols are specified explicitly rather than encoded in ambiguous legal text, successful mechanisms can propagate instantly. When outcomes are measured transparently through verifiable data rather than opaque institutional reporting, comparative performance becomes clear immediately. When jurisdictions can adopt successful models by deploying software rather than passing legislation, the feedback loop from experimentation to propagation compresses from years to days.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations as Governance Substrate
Schmidt and Sorota worry that algorithmic governance might replace democratic deliberation with systems where there is no one to hold accountable. This concern reflects appropriate skepticism about opaque algorithmic decision-making. But it assumes that automated governance necessarily means obscure black-box systems making inscrutable choices.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations demonstrate an alternative model where automation creates transparency rather than obscurity. DAOs operate through rules encoded in smart contracts visible to all participants. Every decision, every transaction, every allocation of resources happens on blockchain infrastructure where it can be verified, audited, and questioned in real time. The rules are explicit and public rather than hidden in bureaucratic discretion. The enforcement is automatic and verifiable rather than dependent on fallible human intermediaries.
This is not replacing human judgment with algorithmic determinism. It is eliminating the friction that prevents human judgment from being implemented faithfully. When a community reaches consensus through deliberation, that consensus should translate to implementation immediately rather than getting lost in bureaucratic delays, regulatory capture, or political gridlock. Programmable governance infrastructure makes this possible by encoding agreed-upon rules directly into enforceable systems.
Traditional democratic institutions rely on humans to interpret vague legal text, exercise discretion in enforcement, and aggregate information through informal processes. This creates opportunities for corruption, capture, and incompetence. Officials can claim policies mean whatever serves their interests. Enforcement can be selective and arbitrary. Information can be manipulated or suppressed. The opacity is not accidental but structural—the infrastructure cannot support transparent, verifiable operations.
DAOs invert this relationship. The rules are mathematically precise rather than linguistically ambiguous. The enforcement is deterministic rather than discretionary. The information is cryptographically verified rather than dependent on trusted intermediaries. When someone proposes spending treasury funds, the vote is transparent, the outcome is binding, and the execution is automatic. You cannot hide in ambiguity or selective enforcement.
The governance implications extend beyond small organizations experimenting with novel coordination mechanisms. Countries like Wyoming and Marshall Islands have created legal frameworks recognizing DAOs as legitimate organizational forms. Estonia's e-residency program enables digital participation in governance regardless of physical location. These are not fringe experiments but serious attempts by sovereign jurisdictions to explore what governance structures become possible with different infrastructure.
Policy Markets and Skin-in-Game Truth Seeking
Democratic deliberation assumes that truth emerges from reasoned debate among informed citizens. But this model breaks when participants face no consequences for being wrong. Politicians can promise outcomes with no penalty when those outcomes fail to materialize. Activists can advocate policies with no accountability when those policies produce harmful results. The system rewards persuasion over accuracy because the persuasive suffer no cost from being incorrect.
Policy markets and prediction markets create accountability through economic consequences. Rather than declaring what will happen, participants wager resources on outcomes. Those who consistently predict accurately gain influence and capital. Those who consistently fail lose both. The mechanism surfaces truth through revealed preferences rather than costless declarations.
Polymarket demonstrates this principle at scale. The platform enables betting on political outcomes, economic indicators, and current events. The market consistently outperforms polls and expert predictions because participants have skin in the game. They face real losses from incorrect predictions and real gains from accurate forecasts. This creates stronger incentives for accuracy than traditional punditry where experts face no penalty for being spectacularly wrong.
The principle extends to policy evaluation. Rather than politicians claiming their policies will generate growth or reduce poverty, governance systems could create markets where participants bet on policy outcomes. If a proposed regulation will reduce housing costs by twenty percent as advocates claim, participants confident in that prediction can profit by betting accordingly. If the regulation will actually increase costs as critics claim, they can profit by betting against it. The market aggregates distributed information and expresses collective predictions about likely outcomes.
This is not replacing democratic deliberation but complementing it with mechanisms that separate signal from noise. Citizens still vote on values and priorities—what outcomes we want to achieve. But prediction about what policies will actually achieve those outcomes shifts from political rhetoric to economic forecasting where accuracy generates profit and inaccuracy generates loss. The result is more honest discourse about policy tradeoffs because participants cannot profit from empty promises.
Zero-Knowledge Democracy and Privacy-Preserving Participation
Schmidt and Sorota identify a genuine tension between verification requirements and privacy expectations in democratic participation. Identity verification prevents bots from overwhelming civic processes. But verification systems create surveillance infrastructure that authoritarian successors could use for political persecution. Citizens cannot engage in controversial political activity without fear that their participation will be recorded and used against them.
Zero-knowledge cryptography resolves this tension by enabling mathematical proofs that verify properties without revealing underlying data. You can prove you are eligible to vote without revealing your identity. You can prove you are a citizen without exposing your address. You can prove you possess credentials without disclosing which credentials specifically. The verification happens cryptographically without the verifier learning anything beyond the specific property being proven.
This is not theoretical capability but production-ready technology already deployed in financial systems processing billions in transactions. The mathematics are well-understood and implementations are battle-tested. The constraint is not technical but institutional—democratic systems continue operating with identity infrastructure designed for pre-digital realities where verification required identifying.
The implications extend beyond voting to all forms of civic participation. Citizens could sign petitions without exposing themselves to retaliation. Whistleblowers could submit evidence without revealing their identity until appropriate protections are in place. Government officials could be held accountable for decisions without exposing them to harassment. The verification and accountability mechanisms operate while preserving privacy protections essential for legitimate democratic discourse.
Consider the structure of supply chain verification as analogy. Currently, verifying that a product was ethically sourced requires trusting documentation at every step from raw materials through manufacturing to retail. Zero-knowledge proofs enable verification without exposure. A manufacturer can prove their product meets ethical standards without revealing supplier identities or proprietary processes. The customer gains confidence in ethical sourcing without the manufacturer sacrificing competitive advantages that transparency would compromise.
The same principle applies to governance. Citizens can verify that their vote was counted correctly without revealing how they voted. Officials can demonstrate policy compliance without exposing sensitive operational details. Institutions can prove they are following appropriate procedures without creating surveillance records that could enable abuse. The verification creates accountability while preserving privacy protections that freedom requires.
Higher-Dimensional Governance and Voluntary Association
Traditional political theory assumes governance must be geographically contiguous and jurisdictionally comprehensive. A government controls defined territory and regulates all activities within that territory. Citizens are bound to governments by birth or residency rather than choice. This model made sense when communication was slow, movement was costly, and economic activity was localized.
Digital infrastructure dissolves these constraints. Economic activity operates globally. Communities form across continents. Identity persists independent of location. Yet governance remains territorially bound, creating misalignment between how humans actually organize and how political systems recognize those organizations.
This enables what one observer describes as governing in higher dimensions—the ability to connect with people over more complex topological structures than simple geographic proximity. Traditional nation-states organize along single-dimensional territorial lines. You live within borders, therefore you accept that jurisdiction's governance. Higher-dimensional governance enables individuals to participate simultaneously in multiple governance networks based on their actual needs and values rather than geographic happenstance.
Consider education as concrete example. Traditional nation-states implement comprehensive curricula for all residents within their territory. Parents who disagree with curriculum decisions can vote, petition, or relocate—each option carries high costs and low probability of success. The result is perpetual conflict as different factions attempt to control the singular system that everyone must accept.
With voluntary association enabled by digital infrastructure, educational communities could form around shared pedagogical philosophies and operate across geographic boundaries. Parents who value classical education could coordinate globally with others who share that priority. Parents who prioritize STEM education could form different networks. Parents who emphasize arts education could organize separately. Each community governs itself through transparent mechanisms, pools resources efficiently, and credentials teachers through verifiable standards. Parents dissatisfied with one network can exit to alternatives without geographic relocation.
This is not replacing territorial governments but complementing them with voluntary associations that better match how humans actually organize when freed from geographic constraints. Territorial governments continue providing comprehensive services for residents within their borders. But citizens gain the ability to participate in specialized governance networks for specific domains where voluntary association serves their needs better than territorially-imposed uniformity.
The model extends beyond education to countless domains where diverse preferences exist but territorial monopoly forces uniform solutions. Healthcare, retirement systems, dispute resolution, professional licensing, research funding—all are areas where parallel governance networks could serve diverse needs better than one-size-fits-all territorial mandates.
The Absurdity of Bundled Binary Choices
Current democratic systems force citizens to choose between two parties who then decide everything for four years. This bundling creates absurd outcomes where citizens must accept positions they oppose in order to support positions they favor. You cannot vote for progressive social policy and conservative fiscal policy. You cannot support aggressive climate action and deregulation simultaneously. The binary choice forces compromises that satisfy almost no one fully while preventing expression of actual preference profiles across multiple dimensions.
This bundling is not essential to democracy but an artifact of infrastructure constraints. When voting requires physical presence at polling places on single days using paper ballots, you cannot easily enable complex preference expression across multiple issues. The logistical costs of gathering and aggregating that information outweigh the benefits. So we bundle everything into binary party choices and hope that subsequent representation through elected officials captures preference diversity that the voting system cannot.
Digital infrastructure removes these constraints. Citizens could express nuanced preferences across multiple dimensions. Rather than voting for parties who decide everything, citizens could vote directly on specific issues they care about while delegating other decisions to trusted representatives. Rather than accepting bundled platforms, citizens could construct customized governance portfolios matching their actual preference profiles.
This unbundling could dramatically reduce political polarization. Much of the intensity in contemporary politics stems from forcing diverse issues into binary party alignments. When everything bundles together, every issue becomes existential because losing means accepting an entire platform you oppose rather than just specific policies. When citizens can express preferences issue-by-issue, the stakes of any single decision decrease because you are not accepting or rejecting an entire worldview.
The technology enabling this unbundling exists. The constraint is not capability but institutional design locked into patterns optimized for historical infrastructure realities. We continue forcing binary party choices not because this serves citizens well but because the institutional infrastructure cannot easily adapt to enable more nuanced preference expression.
Dynamic Rather Than Static Governance
Traditional democratic institutions operate as static systems with infrequent updates. Laws pass through lengthy legislative processes then remain in effect until subsequent legislation modifies them. Regulatory frameworks persist for decades with minimal adaptation to changing circumstances. Constitutions require supermajority support and lengthy ratification for amendment. This stability provides predictability and protects against hasty decisions, but it creates dangerous rigidity when circumstances change faster than institutions can adapt.
Technology and social conditions now change at unprecedented pace. A regulatory framework appropriate for industrial manufacturing becomes obsolete when production shifts to distributed digital services. Immigration policies designed for agricultural labor needs make no sense in knowledge economies. Tax structures optimized for stable employment patterns break when gig work and remote employment become dominant. The gap between institutional design and contemporary realities widens continuously because institutional update cycles operate on decade timescales while technological change operates on year or month timescales.
This creates the crisis Schmidt and Sorota identify. When institutions prove incapable of adapting to changing circumstances, populations lose confidence in their capacity to govern effectively. The appeal of algorithmic alternatives stems not from ideology but from operational necessity—current institutions simply cannot process complexity at the pace reality generates it.
The solution requires governance systems that are dynamic rather than static, continuously adapting rather than episodically updating. This does not mean constant chaos or instability. It means infrastructure that enables more frequent, more localized, more experimental updates that can be rapidly adopted when successful and quickly abandoned when failed.
Consider how software development operates through continuous integration and deployment. Rather than releasing massive updates every few years, software teams release small incremental improvements continuously. Each update is tested in isolation. Successful updates merge into production immediately. Failed updates roll back before causing systemic damage. The result is software that adapts continuously to changing requirements and discovered bugs rather than accumulating technical debt until it becomes unmaintainable.
Governance systems could operate similarly. Rather than passing comprehensive legislation that tries to anticipate all contingencies, governance frameworks could enable incremental adjustments based on observed outcomes. Rather than requiring supermajorities for any change, different types of changes could have different approval requirements scaled to their impact. Routine operational updates could happen frequently with minimal friction. Fundamental structural changes could require broader consensus and longer deliberation. The system adapts continuously at appropriate speeds for different types of changes.
This requires infrastructure enabling rapid experimentation, transparent measurement of outcomes, and efficient propagation of successful models. Current institutional infrastructure supports none of these capabilities well. Experimentation is costly because failure affects entire populations. Outcome measurement is opaque because institutions control their own reporting. Model propagation is slow because policy diffusion happens through legislative processes rather than software deployment.
The Path Forward
Schmidt and Sorota correctly identify that democracies need reliable identity verification and authentic information before they can safely incorporate AI into governance. These are necessary prerequisites. But they are not sufficient solutions. Identity verification and content authenticity enable democracies to function in digital environments. They do not address why democracies are failing to deliver competent governance in the first place.
The complete solution requires structural changes that introduce competitive accountability into democratic governance itself. This means enabling exit rights that operate continuously rather than relying solely on episodic voice and vote. This means distributing governance across networks that enable parallel experimentation and rapid propagation of successful models rather than concentrating decision-making in centralized monopolies. This means leveraging digital infrastructure to enable forms of direct participation, nuanced preference expression, and transparent verification impossible with legacy systems.
These changes do not replace democracy with markets or eliminate human judgment through algorithms. They recognize that institutions without competitive pressure invariably decay, that centralized systems cannot process complexity at the pace technology generates it, and that infrastructure designed for pre-digital constraints leaves enormous governance improvements unrealized.
Taiwan's vTaiwan demonstrates that technology can help existing institutions function better. But incremental improvements to monopolistic structures will not address the legitimacy crisis that Schmidt and Sorota rightly worry about. Democracy needs not just better deliberation tools but fundamental rethinking of institutional architecture for the realities of digital coordination, global mobility, and continuous technological change.
The question is not whether these transformations will occur—technology makes them inevitable as citizens discover what becomes possible with different infrastructure. The question is whether existing democratic institutions will embrace these changes and maintain relevance, or whether they will resist until alternatives emerge that better serve citizens' needs for effective, accountable, adaptive governance.
The infrastructure exists. The mechanisms have been proven in various domains. The demand is evident in declining institutional trust and rising frustration with democratic performance. What remains is the political will to acknowledge that the crisis facing democracy is not about better AI tools but about monopolistic structures that no amount of technological augmentation can redeem without a restructuring of the format of governance itself.