Democracy is not made of elections.

Okay, I'll start saying elections for whatever remains of this conversation. I'm not convinced ordinary people actually taking interest in groundwater allowances far away could ever happen, which is what it sounds like you're talking about.

If you want more than holes; read the damn book I recommended. It goes over this at book length.

I'll put it on the reading list. My expectations are low though, TBH.

I didn't understand what you meant by casual (we're paraphrasing, I see)

If you get arrested, you can't just slip the cop a hundred and leave. In many countries, that's almost always an option, to the point they'll just straight up tell you they want a "brown envelope" or whatever the local euphemism is. This was the case in all civilisations historically.

Food not Bombs

I'm familiar. My impression is that it's a brand for throwing potlucks.

They tend to be pretty secretive, because when they’re not the cops murder them or arrest them for terrorism.

Usually they splinter within like a year and then hate each other forever, if that's the sort of group you're talking about. If they don't, it's because they grow a governance system, and just push out dissenters periodically.

If you haven’t studied human coordination, even casually, why spout off about your opinions?

I have. Anthropology is great, sociology and political science are neat too. You may have noticed my interest in history. Just not "management philosophies", except enough to realise they're largely snake oil for people faking competence.

You're an idiot.

We all are.

Bandwidth

This is actually neat to hear, so it gets it's own section. That's exactly how I think of it. The difference is that as far as I can tell it's a bottleneck between every single human, including us right now. Nobody understands things handled more than a couple of degrees of separation away, which is insufficient to directly run a complex industrial economy.

When organisations work it's because they're self-correcting regardless of some opacity. Yes, that always involves guns, even if it's at the very abstract level; pacifism gets you killed.