Personally, I believe we need more democracy, not less. In the future evolution of our social and political systems we should seek to replicate the leaderless, decentralized, continuous, multi-channel free-flow demonstrated by mycelial networks. But to have more democracy we must also evolve different mechanisms for education and participation. It seems obvious that the Internet and blockchain provide the right medium for this to unfold. But these potentially emancipatory tools were hijacked and misused to serve the profit-making drive of late-stage Capitalism.

I find it helpful to recall that the distributed architecture of the Internet was a form of bio-mimicry, imitating the decentralized, holographic structures found in mycelial and neural networks, which hold memory and information, and respond immediately to threats. The Internet was built this way due to the threat of nuclear war. This is also interesting: Existential threats often seem to lead to evolutionary leaps in social organization and complexity.

Over a long span, biological evolution reveals an inveterate tendency to progress from competition, aggression, and domination to cooperation and symbiosis. Trees, for example, are millions of years older than we are. A tree is a symbiotic organism that provides shelter, food, etcetera, to many other species, from mycelium and lichen to birds, insects, and monkeys. Our own bodies are made of communities of micro-organisms⁴ that once fought each other for food in a difficult environment. Eventually they learned to build cooperative structures. These are now our organs, zipped up inside of these skin suits.

As a very young species, we are still in our competition/aggression/domination stage. But we are realizing this is not something we can continue and survive, particularly as exponential technologies become more destructive and powerful. We therefore need to evolve toward cooperation/symbiosis, as quickly as we can. 

(I realize this looks impossible from where we are now, but impossible things sometimes happen). 

Another analogy from the organic world is a snake shedding its skin. The new skin needs to form underneath the old fraying skin so it is ready when the old layer disintegrates. Our current civilizational model resembles an old snake skin. We must discard and shed it to allow for new healthy growth.