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Comment by lovich

1 day ago

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hierarchy.

Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of or is this the kind of guy whose so far anarchist he thinks that republics and dictatorships are equivalent if not equal?

I tried to steel man this and looked up historical records on any democracy voting in a new, non democratic system and the closest I get is(not intending to Godwin’s law this) examples like the Nazi party being voted in and then taking authoritarian control.

You could make that argument if you squint your eyes a little or hold a high bar to the electorate, but I feel like I’m missing a reference with the way he said it.

> Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of [..]

Historically: Weimar Republic, Czechoslovakia in 1948, Italy starting 1922, Austria starting 1933.

More recently: Venezuela starting 1999

Halfway there: Turkey starting 2017, Hungary starting 2010

If you broaden past just nations to include various organizations that used to be democractically organized at one point, you could make a much longer list...

Sociocracy is a theory of governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy

  • I’m mildly familiar with the idea, but I was referencing this subset of the quoted sentence

    > … and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy …

    The ellipses are intentional, if the fragments of the sentence before or after change how to interpret this, please let me know

    • The US example that I would give would be the Articles of Confederation being turned over and replaced with our Constitution.

      In the article I read this to mean: they designed a power structure thinking it should be fully open and flat, like a company where everyone can do everything on GitHub. But once they had run the project for some time, they acknowledged that the decisions were flowing through the three people.

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