Excellent piece. The reason why the EU and soon all other governments do the opposite is that they are rent seekers too. Collapsing income numbers is also collapsing tax revenue.
I like the idea of liquid democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy where you can shift your voting power for every vote and also can split it by topic. The nice part is the the representatives get punished immediately if they act against their promises or their supporters wishes. Voting power becomes very decentralized and dynamic.
I would call this state competition (where none of them are obliged to follow rules as always). At least the competition works and consumers can profit for now.
"So when someone tells me with confidence that non-biological neural networks can’t be conscious because “it’s just pattern matching,” I want to ask: what do you think you’re doing?" is exactly what I was thinking as well. Even before LLMs became a thing.