Vitalik: Democratic mechanisms need to shift from "building a perfect order" to "tools for consensus discovery" to adapt to chaotic times

Crypto World News reports that Vitalik Buterin posted that over the past decade, external enthusiasm for DAOs and their internal voting mechanisms, quadratic funding and other financing tools, ZKpassport voting scenarios, social media internal voting systems, and political reform has declined. The reason is that we have moved from a “stable era” to a “chaotic era.” The stable era can be imagined as a more perfect order, while the chaotic era is characterized by interventions driven mostly by selfish power struggles. Democratic mechanisms tend to adopt a conservative stance for defense, making long-term victory difficult. He believes that in a chaotic era, democratic tools should focus on “consensus discovery” rather than rigid decision-making. For example, Pol.is-style anonymous voting—where votes or statements initially remain anonymous and automatically become public once a certain support threshold is reached—helps highly dispersed groups voice their opinions and demonstrates the potential for broad support to influential actors. Taking Iran as an example: tools are needed to give the collective voice of the Iranian people immediate influence, rather than relying solely on future order.