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by gsf_emergency_6 214 days ago
Nice turn!

>makes decisions on its own

Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"?

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-...

  A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget.
(Contexts: upcoming Donald-Zohran meeting, Venezuela. Etc):

Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?)

-Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive)

-NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself )

Literary case study: The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist)

Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism