Some people are still under the impression that they live in a democratic republic under a constitutional doctrine of permissive freedom and the rule of law.
Governments are universally based in having a relative monopoly of coercive force. It would be fascinating to explore alternatives, where the coercion was based in algorithms, AI, or other systems relatively free from perverse incentives. Perhaps an effective system of government without coercive force might even be explored, if someone could figure out a strong enough incentive alignment to make that work(doubt).
The principal obstacle to fair, enduring, and prosperous governance is that the built in perverse incentives are much, much stronger than the aligned incentives, and only are held in check by the ratio of coercive power of the perverse vs aligned incentive holders.
When a population becomes to compliant, obedient, or distracted in the presence of a strongly misaligned state, disaster always follows.
Fascinatingly, we can presently watch this unfold in real time on a global scale.
A nuisance app that generated zero revenue for these app stores was used in a murder. It’s a PR no-brainer to simply remove it just as they constantly remove other apps for all sorts of reasons.
