Most people in notional democracies have far less agency than they did sixty years ago; the allowable range of political discourse is much less, the scope of proposed policy has collapsed into a single beige dictatorship of preserving incumbency (effectively, established wealth) at all costs, and while the VLSI revolution was very distracting it was no kind of revolution in practice.Effective responses, by definition, have to stick the root cause; get rid of incumbency.