Gosh, look what @cstross posted exactly ten years ago: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html

[Since the preview isn't showing up, I’ll just say that my Twitter reaction at the time was “does democracy have any future?”]

@timbray @cstross
"Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy."

Peter Thiel came to the same conclusion.

@andeux @timbray Yes, but he drew the exact OPPOSITE moral from the conclusion.

@cstross @andeux @timbray Which side are you on, boys ?

@cstross @andeux @timbray Everytime somebody explains an existing danger, someone in the crowd sees it as a masterplan. It's basically a dark version of the problem/opportunity thing.

@xanathar @andeux @timbray Yeah. Right now it looks like half the Project 2025 crowd mistook "The Handmaid's Tale" for a road map, and the other half read "Accelerando" and thought the cautionary tale was a utopia.

@alanpaxton @andeux @timbray I'm on the side of the humanitarians. Thiel thinks he is, but he didn't check the dictionary and he thinks a humanitarian is like a vegetarian only for humans.

@cstross @xanathar @andeux @timbray the few that mix and match are probably worse imagine what a theocratic dystopia could do with conceptual filtering it probably wouldn't last long given the context it would likely exist in but it would be horrific while it lasted

@cstross @alanpaxton @andeux @timbray TV will ruin your vocabulary
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImAHumanitarian

@addressforbots @xanathar @andeux @timbray I can imagine horrors easily: just mix and match stuff that already happened (hint, that's what Atwood did in that book). Example: take Romania's Decree 770 regime and add smartphones and cheap immunoassay kits. (Please don't tell Vance.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

@cstross @xanathar @andeux @timbray smart toilet dystopia

@cstross @andeux @timbray

Billionaires should be treated as a danger to the effective working of democracy in the same way that monopolies are treated as a danger to the effective working of capitalism. And their existence and operation should be regulated and restricted by government.

One way to do this would be to use progressive taxation to ensure that individuals do not accumulate more than a certain proportion of the GDP (or some other relevant figure). This would give a system which is capitalist in the small but communist in the large.

A stable democracy would then be a voting system with an army (to prevent take-over from outside) and progressive taxation (to prevent take-over from within). There are probably a few other things that will need to be added to ensure stability against other threats.

@tristrambrelstaff @andeux @timbray That's far too logical to work with real human beings™.

@cstross @andeux @timbray
See also billionaires in ‘Communist’ China.

@cstross @andeux @timbray But we need ideas to fight back against the idiocy. (They don't necessarily need to work so long as they push things in the right direction)