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Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
Organizing and generating variety in politics
I don’t want to press too hard on the resemblance between Eno’s analogies and my own ideas, but I think it’s fair to say that game theoretic accounts of democracy as a self-enforcing equilibrium are more like a rigid structure moving through an environment that it ignores except in crisis, than an adaptive organism with responsive subsystems. Even game theoretic models that play with the math to provide a somewhat more complex account of the relationship between the environment and the democratic equilibrium tend to assume that expectations rapidly converge on stable outcomes. You want, on her account, loosely connected federal politics: sufficient for basic rights to be protected, and for safeguards to work, but not so strong as to impose a single vision on constituent parts that may experiment in diverse directions.
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