I highly recommend anyone interested in these processes read “The Democratic Coup”.
It tries to explain the circumstances where a coup such as this can lead to democracy.
Key interesting example include Portugal in 1974 ... and the American Revolution against the British.
It’s happened before and it could well happen again here. My heart goes out to the protestors. May they fill the power vacuum with strong leaders who can make their country better for future generations.
I thought it was super ironic that after the government of Nepal banned almost all social media platforms last week, this week the Gen Z protesters who overthrew the government used one of those platforms, discord, to choose a new prime minister.
The person they picked is 73 year old Sushila Karki, who used to be a Cheif justice of the Supreme Court until she retired at age 65, and is the only woman to have ever held that position. She is also now the first and only female to run the country. The protests that overthrew the Nepali government this past week were started to protest corruption in government, and Karki is known for being fiercely against corruption as a judge. She was sworn in on Friday. Good luck to her. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c179qne0zw0o
It's unclear if interim leaders should exist at all
Wouldn't it be best for the country to be leaderless, with no laws being made and all existing government departments continuing their work under the same set of budgets and instructions as before until a new leader is selected by the election department?
Ie. The goal of lawmakers should always be to, at any given point, have a set of laws such that the country will continue for as long as possible with no further laws.
Ie. Perhaps do budgets by percentage of GDP rather than fixed amounts.
I'm hereby announcing my candidacy for world leader. I'll be running on a populist platform of self-enrichment. My first executive order will be to give myself access to unlimited money. Then I will use the money to acquire and/or launch tech companies and use price-gouging and predatory lending techniques to run all major corporations out of business. Then I will proclaim myself "The most cunning entrepreneur in the world" and I will write a book and give inspirational talks about how I did it all by myself without any special advantage. Then I will offer compulsory business advice to all the CEOs of the corporations (which I would have bankrupted) to explain to them that it's their fault they went bankrupt and should have worked harder.
A discord server with 150k people whose identity or nation of origin are not verified, where only 8000 people voted. This is as illegitimate an election as they come. Come literally just have been elected by Russian (or any other) bots.
You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".
Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.
It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.
i ve been waiting for democracies to go digital for ages. We should be electing mayors like that too. there s no reason for all this gatekeeping and secrecy in politics other than to enable corruption
It's kind of ironic that a nominally communistic government doesn't believe that the people have agency to act on their own, guess it reflects their own fears. I hope Xi lies sleepless at night worrying about the Chinese people getting rid of him.
Discord servers and its most active users were paid NGO workers of Samata Foundation and Hami Nepal, which are very well funded NGOs by The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is in turn funded by the US Congress and run by the CIA
The average Chinese who’s seen China progress by leaps and bounds continuously over the past 40 years probably wants this to keep up. So why change something that’s working?
It only sucks for the people who oppose the ruling party, the dissidents, which is true under any authoritarian government. But most people just go along, this is why such governments can exist. If you grew up barely able to afford a bike and now can afford to drive modern EVs through your modern city, it’s hard to argue the appeal of having it even better.
that is true. the chinese also value community and harmony over individuality. it is part of their culture to go along with the mainstream. it's one reason why china is able to progress so fast. because people are generally united in the countries goals. there is no opposition just for the sake of opposition. opposition would have to have a very good reason, and even then the preference is to not rattle things up. even at the family level. i have experienced that myself.
but i also believe that a revolt is china's greatest fear. not for the sake of the leadership, but for the sake of the country as a whole. because a serious revolt in china would be massive and have many casualties.
this is why china blocks outside information. the less educated older generations lack the knowledge needed to separate misinformation and fake news from the truth. which incidentally i believe is also in part the motivation for the ban in nepal.
the difference is that china was able to block access to the outside before it got hold in the population. it also was able to build alternatives, and china is large enough for the outside not to matter.
china is exploring opening up. there was talk if reducing blocks in the shanghai area. and i believe it will happen as the education of people rises and outside influences become less of a threat.
Historically, China backed the monarchy (the royal family excluding Gyanendra never really forgave Nehru and Indira Gandhi for abolishing and then nationalizing royal property, as the Shah family continues to only marry Hindu royalty within their caste along with their historic antipathy to a monarchist Hindu Rashtra leading to the INC backing the Nepali Congress and Vanarasi-raised and ideologically Gandhian Koirala brothers) and KP Sharma Oli's Marxist communist faction, while India backed the Prachanda Path communists and the Nepali Congress (NC).
After the move to democratization, India continued to back NC and Prachanda (eg. He and his wife are/were devoted followers of BJP-aligned Baba Ramdev [0][1][2]), but KP Sharma Oli's faction continued to lean pro-China, as he and his peers started their revolutionary path during the Naxalbari uprising [3]. The monarchists (RPP) on the other hand switched to being more India leaning after Yogi Adityanath - the religious leader of the Gorakhnath Math which is heavily patronized by the royal family and Pahari Hindus from Kathmandu to Kashmir - became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Last year, the NC surprised everyone by collapsing Prachanda's government and making an alliance with KP Sharma Oli.
Based on how prominent Maoist Center (Prachanda), RSP, and RPP party workers have been during the protests and even within the discord, I am starting to suspect this was a repeat of the Rajapaksa-Siresena episode in Sri Lanka in the sense that a significant faction was used to undermine the China leaning Oli government.
Sushila Karki is viewed as fairy pro-India - the town she's from is for all intents and purposes Bihar, and she studied at the PoliSci department at Banaras Hindu University during the JP Andolan and when several future Indian political leaders were studying at BHU as well. China also hasn't congratulated her yet but the Indian government did almost immediately after the announcement. Of course, we will only find out once Karki's cabinet is announced.
This also makes me wonder what could be done to make discord (or something similar) a better venue for direct democracy. I know the circumstances in Nepal were exceptional, but I wonder if we will see other countries experiment with Discord for similar purposes. It seems like in Nepal they have essentially used it as a caucus, and I wonder if this could be shaped into a better way to elect leaders (or even legislate directly) than what most of the world is doing.
My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader who will oversee elections. They've gone for a 73-year-old former chief justice who is famous for being steadfastly anti-corruption.
It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join. So not representative of everyone, but obviously more democratic than if the military had just appointed someone by themselves
> "This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader"
They are imposing on a country who didn't vote for it a leader who will rule them.
> "It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join."
Only one political viewpoint was represented on that server—the viewpoint of people who agreed with the overthrowing-the-government politics they were organizing on it.
"Motivated" is the wrong question: people with different or opposed viewpoints, would refuse to participate in that teenager internet poll, because they would not identify it as a legitimate election. (And they'd be 100% right).
No one was made leader by the discord server. They made a suggestion, but it's only because that suggestion was accepted by the military leadership, who were de facto in control of the country, that she's been made prime minister.
Obviously, she will lose legitimacy as an interim leader if she doesn't swiftly organise free and fair elections for a legitimate prime minister. The fact that she's acceptable both to the young protestors and to the military leadership suggests she's a safe pair of hands for this role.
What outcome would you have preferred to see, given the circumstances?
In one sense representative democracy is mob rule scaled up, but yeah this is mob rule scaled way down then applied to everyone else without representation.
(“democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." etc)
Discord is a place you get randomly banned forever and that cannot be reliably linked to your real identity. It's really not a place anyone should rely on for any real world actions. (And I'm even skipping basics like transparency and future audits)
Absolutely. Discord is a scourge, a completely closed proprietary platform that is impossible to access via any standard compliant mechanism. Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
> Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
Does it currently? I have a couple Discord accounts that never got tied to a phone number and can still use them.
Telegram on the other hand does that, I've never managed to get my own account for it without a phone number... and all the anonymous (pay for temp number) end up giving you a shared "account" that anyone can take from you if they get attribued the same number (and they will).
Do you want people to participate, or do you want to have the moral high-ground for using X, Y, Z? Nobody outside our fringe circles use IRC server/mailing lists. Younger people are all on Discord.
I have no skin in this game, but I get the general line of thought.
Taiwan has been trying to develop web platforms explicitly for facilitating democratic decision-making. Might be something to look into.
Discord is a spectacularly bad fit for that, it was probably only used because the timetable was short and "it was there" and "everyone already had it".
Liquid democracy is a total viable platform. But Discord is better in so far as it can be used for all kinds of things and conversations, not just for voting or debates.
> My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
I don't see that argument at all. What was so democratic about it? Violent overthrowal of the government may sometimes be justified, but it is not an act of democracy.
Seems a bit vulnerable to subversion of the host (and/or its government) once they decide to pay attention (or even through negligence; imagine a minister being banned because of some ML false-positive).
If the format is to be sustainable, they will need to find or found a different platform.
I daydream about a open source peer reviewed system, that can process votes, control, manage government at every level through general public and open voting system. Distributing control ultimately.
IMO, the superflat architecture is the opposite of maximum inclusion. The luckiest kid always wins the debate. Ensuring hierarchical mobility by allowing weaker players bunch of small wins is key.
https://archive.ph/G3XjL
I highly recommend anyone interested in these processes read “The Democratic Coup”.
It tries to explain the circumstances where a coup such as this can lead to democracy.
Key interesting example include Portugal in 1974 ... and the American Revolution against the British.
It’s happened before and it could well happen again here. My heart goes out to the protestors. May they fill the power vacuum with strong leaders who can make their country better for future generations.
I thought it was super ironic that after the government of Nepal banned almost all social media platforms last week, this week the Gen Z protesters who overthrew the government used one of those platforms, discord, to choose a new prime minister.
The person they picked is 73 year old Sushila Karki, who used to be a Cheif justice of the Supreme Court until she retired at age 65, and is the only woman to have ever held that position. She is also now the first and only female to run the country. The protests that overthrew the Nepali government this past week were started to protest corruption in government, and Karki is known for being fiercely against corruption as a judge. She was sworn in on Friday. Good luck to her. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c179qne0zw0o
It's unclear if interim leaders should exist at all
Wouldn't it be best for the country to be leaderless, with no laws being made and all existing government departments continuing their work under the same set of budgets and instructions as before until a new leader is selected by the election department?
Even with no new laws, most countries still have non-automatic decisions to be made just as part of the structure.
But I guess they shouldn't...
Ie. The goal of lawmakers should always be to, at any given point, have a set of laws such that the country will continue for as long as possible with no further laws.
Ie. Perhaps do budgets by percentage of GDP rather than fixed amounts.
I'm hereby announcing my candidacy for world leader. I'll be running on a populist platform of self-enrichment. My first executive order will be to give myself access to unlimited money. Then I will use the money to acquire and/or launch tech companies and use price-gouging and predatory lending techniques to run all major corporations out of business. Then I will proclaim myself "The most cunning entrepreneur in the world" and I will write a book and give inspirational talks about how I did it all by myself without any special advantage. Then I will offer compulsory business advice to all the CEOs of the corporations (which I would have bankrupted) to explain to them that it's their fault they went bankrupt and should have worked harder.
Just wait until you hear America picked a president because of a TV show...
As did Ukraine!
A little education would go a long way here
Let's be honest: he had no other credentials when he decided to run.
That has nothing to do with the original statement
A discord server with 150k people whose identity or nation of origin are not verified, where only 8000 people voted. This is as illegitimate an election as they come. Come literally just have been elected by Russian (or any other) bots.
You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".
Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.
It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.
Military of Nepal want to make an agreement with the activists, rather than the Nepali.
Therefore activists need suggesting a representative of the groups. IMHO a private voting is fine in this case.
Presumably if people aren't happy about it they'll just continue to revolt.
Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/world/asia/nepal-protest-...
i ve been waiting for democracies to go digital for ages. We should be electing mayors like that too. there s no reason for all this gatekeeping and secrecy in politics other than to enable corruption
because there is no safe way to vote digitally
Funny, don't you bank digitally?
Another color revolution by the CIA, to keep Nepal bound to the Western eco system and hostile to China.
It was Discord that changed the government, it was the looting and burning down of government building by well funded and organized mobs.
resulted in about 7000 prisoners escaping jail. A lot of them surrendered and were captured but It is unsafe out here in a long long time.
It's kind of ironic that a nominally communistic government doesn't believe that the people have agency to act on their own, guess it reflects their own fears. I hope Xi lies sleepless at night worrying about the Chinese people getting rid of him.
Discord servers and its most active users were paid NGO workers of Samata Foundation and Hami Nepal, which are very well funded NGOs by The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is in turn funded by the US Congress and run by the CIA
Ni hao from every Confucius Institute establishment ever. Expect such behavior from everyone everywhere, it’s basic game theory.
The average Chinese who’s seen China progress by leaps and bounds continuously over the past 40 years probably wants this to keep up. So why change something that’s working?
It only sucks for the people who oppose the ruling party, the dissidents, which is true under any authoritarian government. But most people just go along, this is why such governments can exist. If you grew up barely able to afford a bike and now can afford to drive modern EVs through your modern city, it’s hard to argue the appeal of having it even better.
that is true. the chinese also value community and harmony over individuality. it is part of their culture to go along with the mainstream. it's one reason why china is able to progress so fast. because people are generally united in the countries goals. there is no opposition just for the sake of opposition. opposition would have to have a very good reason, and even then the preference is to not rattle things up. even at the family level. i have experienced that myself.
but i also believe that a revolt is china's greatest fear. not for the sake of the leadership, but for the sake of the country as a whole. because a serious revolt in china would be massive and have many casualties.
this is why china blocks outside information. the less educated older generations lack the knowledge needed to separate misinformation and fake news from the truth. which incidentally i believe is also in part the motivation for the ban in nepal.
the difference is that china was able to block access to the outside before it got hold in the population. it also was able to build alternatives, and china is large enough for the outside not to matter.
china is exploring opening up. there was talk if reducing blocks in the shanghai area. and i believe it will happen as the education of people rises and outside influences become less of a threat.
Historically, China backed the monarchy (the royal family excluding Gyanendra never really forgave Nehru and Indira Gandhi for abolishing and then nationalizing royal property, as the Shah family continues to only marry Hindu royalty within their caste along with their historic antipathy to a monarchist Hindu Rashtra leading to the INC backing the Nepali Congress and Vanarasi-raised and ideologically Gandhian Koirala brothers) and KP Sharma Oli's Marxist communist faction, while India backed the Prachanda Path communists and the Nepali Congress (NC).
After the move to democratization, India continued to back NC and Prachanda (eg. He and his wife are/were devoted followers of BJP-aligned Baba Ramdev [0][1][2]), but KP Sharma Oli's faction continued to lean pro-China, as he and his peers started their revolutionary path during the Naxalbari uprising [3]. The monarchists (RPP) on the other hand switched to being more India leaning after Yogi Adityanath - the religious leader of the Gorakhnath Math which is heavily patronized by the royal family and Pahari Hindus from Kathmandu to Kashmir - became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Last year, the NC surprised everyone by collapsing Prachanda's government and making an alliance with KP Sharma Oli.
Based on how prominent Maoist Center (Prachanda), RSP, and RPP party workers have been during the protests and even within the discord, I am starting to suspect this was a repeat of the Rajapaksa-Siresena episode in Sri Lanka in the sense that a significant faction was used to undermine the China leaning Oli government.
Sushila Karki is viewed as fairy pro-India - the town she's from is for all intents and purposes Bihar, and she studied at the PoliSci department at Banaras Hindu University during the JP Andolan and when several future Indian political leaders were studying at BHU as well. China also hasn't congratulated her yet but the Indian government did almost immediately after the announcement. Of course, we will only find out once Karki's cabinet is announced.
[0] - https://english.khabarhub.com/2019/20/63249/
[1] - https://english.makalukhabar.com/ramdev-arrives-at-prachanda...
[2] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world/prachanda-fellow-maoist...
[3] - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b959a806-fd27-4c20-bfb3-a2...
It is. Communists are just imperialists in a red coat of paint.
They do not believe that people can act on their own, everything is a conspiracy to them. Because why you would rebel against their utopia?
Not worth arguing with them. Cast them to the dustbin of history where they belong.
This also makes me wonder what could be done to make discord (or something similar) a better venue for direct democracy. I know the circumstances in Nepal were exceptional, but I wonder if we will see other countries experiment with Discord for similar purposes. It seems like in Nepal they have essentially used it as a caucus, and I wonder if this could be shaped into a better way to elect leaders (or even legislate directly) than what most of the world is doing.
My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
> "in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done"
How is one faction holding an internal vote to impose rule on the rest of the people, who have no representation, anything at all like a democracy?
This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader who will oversee elections. They've gone for a 73-year-old former chief justice who is famous for being steadfastly anti-corruption.
It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join. So not representative of everyone, but obviously more democratic than if the military had just appointed someone by themselves
> "This wasn't to "impose rule". It was only to select an interim leader"
They are imposing on a country who didn't vote for it a leader who will rule them.
> "It was an open discord server that anyone sufficiently motivated with an internet connection could join."
Only one political viewpoint was represented on that server—the viewpoint of people who agreed with the overthrowing-the-government politics they were organizing on it.
"Motivated" is the wrong question: people with different or opposed viewpoints, would refuse to participate in that teenager internet poll, because they would not identify it as a legitimate election. (And they'd be 100% right).
No one was made leader by the discord server. They made a suggestion, but it's only because that suggestion was accepted by the military leadership, who were de facto in control of the country, that she's been made prime minister.
Obviously, she will lose legitimacy as an interim leader if she doesn't swiftly organise free and fair elections for a legitimate prime minister. The fact that she's acceptable both to the young protestors and to the military leadership suggests she's a safe pair of hands for this role.
What outcome would you have preferred to see, given the circumstances?
In one sense representative democracy is mob rule scaled up, but yeah this is mob rule scaled way down then applied to everyone else without representation.
(“democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." etc)
[flagged]
Discord is a place you get randomly banned forever and that cannot be reliably linked to your real identity. It's really not a place anyone should rely on for any real world actions. (And I'm even skipping basics like transparency and future audits)
An IRC server or even a mailing list seems far better suited to the purpose than a notoriously closed and proprietary platform.
Absolutely. Discord is a scourge, a completely closed proprietary platform that is impossible to access via any standard compliant mechanism. Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
> Even for their website they demand a phone number just to read anything.
Does it currently? I have a couple Discord accounts that never got tied to a phone number and can still use them.
Telegram on the other hand does that, I've never managed to get my own account for it without a phone number... and all the anonymous (pay for temp number) end up giving you a shared "account" that anyone can take from you if they get attribued the same number (and they will).
Do you want people to participate, or do you want to have the moral high-ground for using X, Y, Z? Nobody outside our fringe circles use IRC server/mailing lists. Younger people are all on Discord.
I have no skin in this game, but I get the general line of thought.
You guys are using IRC??
I have, admittedly, used it once last year to get in touch with some people.
[dead]
Taiwan has been trying to develop web platforms explicitly for facilitating democratic decision-making. Might be something to look into.
Discord is a spectacularly bad fit for that, it was probably only used because the timetable was short and "it was there" and "everyone already had it".
I bet China is excited about that
Liquid democracy is a total viable platform. But Discord is better in so far as it can be used for all kinds of things and conversations, not just for voting or debates.
> My wife and I were talking about this today and we thought it's possible that what has just happened in Nepal is at least in some sense the most democratic thing any country has ever done.
I don't see that argument at all. What was so democratic about it? Violent overthrowal of the government may sometimes be justified, but it is not an act of democracy.
I agree, but I don't know if a closed platform could ever be suitable for this.
Seems a bit vulnerable to subversion of the host (and/or its government) once they decide to pay attention (or even through negligence; imagine a minister being banned because of some ML false-positive).
If the format is to be sustainable, they will need to find or found a different platform.
I daydream about a open source peer reviewed system, that can process votes, control, manage government at every level through general public and open voting system. Distributing control ultimately.
IMO, the superflat architecture is the opposite of maximum inclusion. The luckiest kid always wins the debate. Ensuring hierarchical mobility by allowing weaker players bunch of small wins is key.
Blockchain is well suited for this. Polymarket really proved that blockchain can be useful beyond crypto, especially when trust is at stake.
Yeah my thoughts went to DAOs! I'm so excited for a future where we can use DAOs to harness the power of the people :)
I really hope not in their current form, given how inevitable anything based on smart contracts is to be exploited.
Well I discussed it with my wife and extended family. We all agreed it was a terrible idea.
Yeah, a mob is a mob. Us human beings are despicable to each other tbh.