It's funny, I talk about checks and balances a lot when I'm talking with the designers of modern decentralized networks, because often the idea is to encode som

It's funny, I talk about checks and balances a lot when I'm talking with the designers of modern decentralized networks, because often the idea is to encode some limiting factor on the ability of one element of the node, to prevent it disproportionately capturing the value or goal of the whole network. And "incentivizing people to plant trees" is basically the challenge of producing public goods, which at the very least how a lot of folks view the ongoing work of these networks. (See https://fundingthecommons.io/ https://fundingthecommons.io/ ) There's no golden road to public goods without norms, laws, and technology to support it; and there's no sacred system that doesn't have a road to power concentration within it. The incredibly oligarchical Roman Republic and Empire (from I think your quote comes from), had a system of public goods provision that depended on those oligarchs, who personally bankrolled them, but which lasted a very long time. The United States is the system that most deliberately implemented Montesquieu's checks and balances theory, and depending on how you look at it, is either the most successful capitalist/liberty-driven society ever, or a terrible inditement of how oligarchy can prosper within a constitutional framework built on that system. The hacker culture of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on access to computers, but for a sizeable subsection was a ticket out of (a somewhat relative) poverty and social exclusion for many of them. There were a lot of rich kids too, but I don't think many of the excitement about the global power-distributing abilities of access to knowledge, and access to personal computing power was, or is insincere. One of the directions you can take that goal is as you dsay: to create a governed, constitutional, environment of laws online. But the challenge here is: how would you do that? In a global space, it either requires the rigid and drastic national division of the existing world network, or the development of a world governance system with global reach and enforcement. There are some routes to get there, and people I know are working on it, but I don't think it's a path that's particularly guaranteed to lead to a democratic system free of oligarchs. It's a tough problem, and I wish I had your confidence about what the right ways to solve it online are.