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For most of history, a few things needed a central authority: keeping records, holding money, doing the work, connecting people, making things, producing energy. One by one they are becoming possible at the scale of a town — or of a group scattered across the world. When those functions no longer need a centre, neither does governance.
Cryptographic signatures and public ledgers let anyone check a record without trusting whoever keeps it.
A vote, a membership roll or a set of accounts can be verified by every member — not only by a clerk.
A signature proves who decided. It cannot prove the decision was wise.
Bitcoin and the Lightning network let a group hold and move money without asking a bank.
A community can keep its treasury in the open and pay directly — through OrangeCat — only as its members decided.
Taxes and the laws of the place you live still apply. Open money is not a way around them.
AI agents can draft, translate, summarize and check — the clerk's work that used to need an office.
A small group can run its governance properly without paid staff; Loki's agents and people carry decisions out.
Agents propose; people decide. Some decisions — who belongs, and the rules themselves — are reserved to people.
Phones and satellite internet reach almost everywhere — a mountain village, a ship, another continent.
An assembly no longer needs everyone in one room. Members can take part from wherever they are.
Being able to vote is not the same as taking part. Good design still has to make participation easy.
3D printing and small-scale manufacturing move some production closer to where people live.
Communities can make more of what they need locally — and decide together what to make.
Most things are still made in large factories, and will be for a long time.
Local solar and batteries are already common. Small modular reactors promise compact nuclear power: two are generating commercial electricity today (in Russia and China); the first Western units are under construction.
Communities can hold more of their own energy — and will need to govern it together.
Small reactors are not yet proven at scale or cheap. This is a direction, not an arrival.
If the functions no longer need a centre, the rules can be chosen by the people who live under them — as easily as joining a club, and as openly as a Landsgemeinde. Consensus or majority, assembly or board, a village or a network spread across continents: Solon provides the infrastructure, not the ideology.