Trying to provide some context without explicit spoilers: > The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly Demarchist society at/aroun

Trying to provide some context without explicit spoilers: > The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system. > they definitely ran into some problems Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes. It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?