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 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
Historically, China backed the monarchy 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, but KP Sharma Oli's faction continued to lean pro-China, as he and his peers started their revolutionary path during the Naxalbari uprising [0]
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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).
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/G3XjL
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
Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/world/asia/nepal-protest-...
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
Historically, China backed the monarchy 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, but KP Sharma Oli's faction continued to lean pro-China, as he and his peers started their revolutionary path during the Naxalbari uprising [0]
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.
[0] - 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.
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
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
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)
So, they modeled it after the US Supreme Court?
Unless you think Donald is the admin of the Discord server with dirt on half of the voters and the other half are part of his personal cult, no.
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.
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.
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).
[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".
> 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.
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.
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.
I agree, but I don't know if a closed platform could ever be suitable for this.
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.
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.
Well I discussed it with my wife and extended family. We all agreed it was a terrible idea.