Working notes by Petar Juršić on how power and public systems work, and what AI changes about them. These are unfinished: each note lists what still needs checking before it is posted.
Also here: Reading Map and Electoral Calendar.
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- Bogotá’s 420 mimes
- Entrenched power can lose
- Everything is easy except your city
- Facebook and the angry reaction
- Government can’t go bankrupt, so what then?
- Jailed politicians speaking through AI
- Milei: inflation and poverty
- Novi Sad: from canopy to ballot
- Systems fail when true information stops
- Technocracy for the people
1 Democracy still runs at horse-carriage speed
- Argentina before Milei
- Blocked by process, not money
- Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy
- Civic habits and Italian regions
- Croatia: 62% at home, 21% for Europe
- Cybersyn: Chile’s live economy
- DOGE: 2 trillion promised
- Did bad information end the USSR?
- Everything is easy except your city
- Fewer, older local candidates
- Follow one question through the paper trail
- Hear the quiet middle instead of the loud forty
- Mamdani’s video campaign
- Mamdani: promises so far
- Milei: inflation and poverty
- Published is not the same as available
- Reading messy documents just became cheap
- Small-town mayors have huge leverage
- States flatten society to see it
- Strong state, strong society
- Systems fail when true information stops
- Tallinn’s free public transport
- The nation state wins wars and loses potholes
- What even is democracy?
- Why people stop taking part
- Why voting runs on old calendars
2 The system rewards the wrong people
- AI speeds up the race to the bottom
- Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy
- Entrenched power can lose
- Facebook and the angry reaction
- Government can’t go bankrupt, so what then?
- Nobody is in charge and everybody is trapped
- Rulers answer to whoever keeps them there
- Same game, different name
- Soviet targets by weight
- The 1928 banana massacre
- Treat people as schemers, get schemers
- United Fruit and captured states
- Who profits from the Ukraine war
3 Some places actually work
- Bogotá’s 420 mimes
- Croatia’s budget: readable, not open to input
- Estonia’s shared data layer
- Ližnjan’s plain-language budget
- Ljubljana’s waste turnaround
- Medellín: safer, still unequal
- Pontevedra without cars
- Prozorro: volunteers and 35,000 dollars
- Pula’s neighbourhood budgets
- Same game, different name
- Singapore: competence by design
- Small-town mayors have huge leverage
- Somaliland: elections without recognition
- Tallinn’s free public transport
- Vienna’s city-owned flats
4 Technocracy for the people
- Albania’s AI minister
- Blocked by process, not money
- Context building and AI
- DOGE: 2 trillion promised
- Estonia’s shared data layer
- Jailed politicians speaking through AI
- Protesters can win, but can they govern?
- Prozorro: volunteers and 35,000 dollars
- Published is not the same as available
- Reading messy documents just became cheap
- Run by lawyers, run by engineers
- States flatten society to see it
- Technocracy for the people
- Technocracy’s 1930s craze
- The new flattening hides in whoever writes the prompts
- Who gets technology’s gains
- Why smart cities stall