I've reached pretty much the same conclusions, but you do make novel points that I think make tremendous sense.
> We need to realize that "voting" and "money" and "shares" or "securities" etc. are all the same thing
This blew my mind said like that. I can now see how this is all but 'materialistic vectors' in a 'phase space' taking us from now to "change" (however small/big). Conceptually you may reduce it to a particular instanciation of information theory, sort of a "memetic" signal (a "meme" is a "cultural gene" in anthropology, unrelated to the internet-thingy) that spreads onto and influences civilization(s), big groups of individual vectors. It's an interesting model, "tensors" of civilization so to speak, which we are increasingly able to estimate with actual data — whether numbers for votes and money, shares; whether principles or sentiment reduced to political/investment choices; I mean there's a way to model that thing, framed like that.
Great food for thought, thank you so much.
About a "social network that is local first": I think eventually we need to get together with like-minded people (from all fields) and design something, a spec. Solutions are aplently, what lacks is imho some common standards to iterate deeper, more focus.
About a "democratic" form of governance: that's next step, I see the network as a pre-requisite of sorts (not necessarily in theory, but in practice very much so, to "warm up minds" to the paradigm shift in coherent ways, to "teach" by example). However I'd caution against forcing a type of "regime" so to speak in the protocol, the spec itself: let some be dictatorial or in anarchy if they so wish, let all forms of governance emerge from first-principle-inspired bricks. (I guess this would speak to the "expressivity" of the spec, the topologies allowed/defined by it).
Fascinating topics which have occupied my mind for decades now (only 37 though...), that I think will define civilization throughout this century and beyond. It's our time to innovate politically in ways that go back 250 years, and in a deeper slower move some 2500 years. Grand cycles, eh!