I have been watching people argue about which party will save the country for as long as I have been alive and every election cycle the same people show up and tell me that this time it is different and this time the right people will get in and this time things will finally change and every time things stay the same or get worse and the people who promised change become the very thing they fought against and then a new set of people show up and promise to change that and the whole thing repeats like a machine designed to output nothing but disappointment. It the problem of the state itself rather than the problem of the wrong people in the state and that distinction changed how I think about everything because it means the issue is not that the BJP is in power or that the Congress was in power before them or that the AAP will be in power after them and the issue is that the state is a machine that concentrates power and any machine that concentrates power will eventually be captured by people who want power and the name on the party flag does not matter because the machine eats whoever feeds it.

The trick of democracy is that it gets you to participate by fear because you worry that if you do not vote the other side will take away your rights and force you to do things you do not want to do and jail you for saying the wrong thing and take your house and that fear is real enough that you show up every time and vote for the slightly less terrifying option and you call it civic duty and call the other side evil and the whole time the machine grows stronger because both sides feed it. The alternative is exit instead of voice which means instead of trying to win the game you build something that makes the game irrelevant by replacing the functions of the state with locally controlled and owned machines that provide electricity and water and food and money and transportation and healthcare and protection without requiring anyone to have power over anyone else. If your stuff is cheaper and better than what the state offers people just stop using the state and the state withers without needing to be defeated in an election or overthrown in a revolution because it becomes irrelevant the way a landline becomes irrelevant when everyone has a mobile phone.

I think about this every time I see someone posting about which party to vote for and I wonder how many of us are trapped in the game because we are afraid of what happens if we stop playing and how many of us would build something new if we were not so busy defending against the worst outcome. The greatest battle in the next twenty years is between the forces that centralize power and the forces that decentralize it and most people are fighting on the wrong side without knowing it because they think they are defending freedom when they are really just feeding the machine that will eventually eat them too.

Tell me the last time you voted for someone and felt like it mattered. I am @troysk704.