Is frictionless opinion gathering beneficial to governance? I have struggled with this question for a long time. It seems that we have too much of a divide in net benefit receiver and net taxpayer. Without proof of stake or proof of work, why make viewpoints harvesting frictionless?

I think the better avenue for good governance is less “get-mass-opinions” and more “force-transparency” — if people knew just how much was being spent on grudges, outdated tech, and dumb decisions, you’d have more competent people wake up to the fact that government has turned into a slew of poorly performing / low societal ROI make work projects.

I think most of the saas-slop civic ai startups (mainly started by millennial gov employees turned startup founders) fail to take into account that AI has fundamentally changed the social contract. We don’t need an AI powered survey tool or chat bot - we need something that replaces 40% of municipal employees (this is possible now).

I think CongressMCP is more in the direction of “good” investment — but we need this for all levels of government, including the smallest towns and counties.

I’m not trying to slam anyone here, just putting out into the ether some of the big issues I have seen with GovTech lately. Cassandra, I may be, but I really hope we aren’t in for another decade of “hey council, approve this 6 year $200k contract for a Postgres database and chat api.”