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"If something did go terribly wrong in human history — and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did — then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."

"Those ideas about liberty had a profound impact on the world. In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today."

This was published 20 years ago! It is scary how much sense the "vectoralists" term makes when one considers the status quo of big-tech and the data-rush to train vector-based statistical models that some call AI.

"Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory — just within a much smaller territory than a nation state."

Escutei o livro em duas pegadas, enquanto dirigia por dois dias. Estória interessante e diferente, mas acho que não se decidiu entre ciência ficção e fantasia. Os diálogos da protagonista são as vezes irritantes e repetitivos, a estória chega num final meio rápido demais, mas eu fiquei bem vidrado na estória.

"Governable spaces arise when social and technical infrastructures enable participants to deliberate, make decisions, and enact those decisions through accessible, transparent, and just ­processes."

No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration -- or indeed, any form of ruling class. (...) We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as ‘simple’, but in fact these citizens of Omelas were ‘not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.’ The trouble is just that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’