The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
Gaaze: Supplement — Biopolitics, "Dumb Power", the Death of Humanism and the Stop-Loss¶
Chapter: 06 — Structural Hypocrisy and the Elites' Arsenal
File: 06_038b · v1 · 16 September 2026 (Gemini dialogue, session 15-09-26)
Source: reconstruction through K. Gaaze's optics (sociology of power, Foucault/Agamben, Kordonsky's "administrative market", "Where Do Dictatorships Drift?", 2026 interview on the crisis of humanism) and from the transcript of his interview (transcript_gaaze.md). Not quotations. Supplements 038 (Gaaze: sociology of the operator) and 056c; only what is absent there.
1. Legalising biopolitics¶
The modern state (especially the post-Soviet one) is engaged not in politics but in managing "bare life" — feeding, security, medicine — in exchange for obedience. Reconstruction: "AB-EXIT is a moment of ultimate honesty. You take the liberal fiction 'every citizen is a political subject' and throw it out; you officially admit that the majority are objects of biopolitical care; and you propose replacing the lying, thieving guardian (the apparatus) with a mathematical algorithm. You legalise depoliticisation, making it a voluntary deal rather than the result of repression."
The main enemy is not the populist at the rostrum but the apparatus. An official has power because he distributes resources under artificial scarcity and opaque rules. Automatic dividend distribution and direct decisions by the core of pragmatists make the army of distributors unnecessary; the estate bureaucracy will sabotage the protocol before politicians open their mouths — it strips them of status and rent.
The question of the Leviathan. The sovereign is he who declares the state of exception. The protocol moves sovereignty from the abstract "people" that autocrats juggle to a concrete class of builders. The hard question: "How will the new collective sovereign manage the machine of violence? The Leviathan does not understand dividend mathematics — it understands the baton and the order. If the builders are not ready to take on the sin of direct violence to defend the protocol, the Leviathan will devour them and return the old masters." The protocol's answer — 048d (the army as a cross-section of society, the shareholders' police, contractual violence) and 040f.2.
Escapism as a resource. The main survival strategy of the smart today is internal emigration, private life, crypto. The protocol reverses the sign: the mass's escapism becomes a resource for crystallising an elite — the crowd legally leaves with a cheque, freeing space for those who build institutions.
2. Ten theses from the interview and what the protocol does with them¶
| # | Gaaze's thesis | The protocol's hack |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The ruler is "a small man in a huge spacesuit": a chip inside an exoskeleton of apparatuses, elites, enforcers | The protocol does not fight the man inside — it de-energises the exoskeleton by buying out the votes of state employees and the inert mass |
| 2 | The basic drive is fear of losing illegitimately held power; the system generates unpredictability so it cannot be "read" | The smart contract is absolutely predictable; the monopoly on uncertainty vanishes, fear stops being an instrument |
| 3 | The main threat to the system is the dictator himself: he squanders the capital built over decades by effective managers and owners | Direct confirmation of the builders theory: x2/x3 is the instrument to legally seize governance and save the assets |
| 4 | The covid lesson: there are so many poor that for 300 thousand they risk their lives — which later allowed buying lives for war | The dividend removes the biological lever: the basic need is met without blood (056e) |
| 5 | The contract "do your job and love the leader": the state pays for a profession plus loyalty | The contract becomes honest: "stop pretending you love the authorities — take the dividend and mind your business" |
| 6 | There is no civil society — no link between citizens without the state, no presupposition of equality | Since classical society is dead, the protocol assembles a new one from the 15–25 % who refused |
| 7 | The marker of the regime's end is a cash gap: unpaid wages, a black market | A lifebuoy before collapse: the pragmatists stop populist spending, preserving the ability to pay at least the base dividend |
| 8 | The reserve plan: outsource violence to the enforcers (Iran, Guatemala) | The only protection is the builders seizing governance before the terminal stage of poverty (048d) |
| 9 | The only form of resistance is to go underground, minimise relations with the state | The dissident's bitter lot becomes a state service: escapism as a good with severance pay |
| 10 | Evil is dumb and persistent, self-strangling by nature, banging its head against the wall | The protocol lets evil strangle itself comfortably: the nomenklatura loses its feeding base and dies of exhaustion |
The answer to "how to accelerate the bankruptcy of the old system without waiting for natural collapse": the protocol does not wait for the regime to run out of money for loyalty — it makes loyalty chargeable from day one (040i.1, Linz).
3. "Dumb power" and the return of demand for intellect¶
The architect's refinement of Gaaze's diagnosis: "power does not need knowledge to govern passive, uneducated voters; voters used to be smarter and something had to be known about them, but now there are so many dumb ones that dumb methods suffice for dumb authorities". Sociologists are shy of putting it so bluntly, but that is exactly the point. In the mid-twentieth century the state had to build rockets and factories — power was forced to be smart or hire the smart. Social networks and primitive political PR revealed a terrible thing: why solve problems when you can hack the crowd's attention? Why economics — migrants are to blame; why plan twenty years — a Twitter show for a month; why science — a troll factory paints the rating. "The sovereign says: I am my own academy of sciences." The elite degraded because manipulation became so cheap that competence ceased to be a condition of survival in power.
The protocol is a trap for dumb power: the audience for dumb methods took the dividend and went to watch a series; the object of manipulation physically left the building. The politician turns to the hall — there are those who read balance sheets; he opens his mouth to say "we'll restore greatness" — the hall answers "show the plan to cut inflation over two quarters, or we fire you". Gaaze recorded the death of the state's demand for knowledge; the protocol artificially and harshly restores that demand: to survive, power will have to report to the smart.
"Where Do Dictatorships Drift?" The book's methodological breakthrough is the rejection of the "Russian rut" and the "evil genius": a dictatorship slides into war and chaos through institutional logic. Drift is not a plan but a funnel: opposition and feedback destroyed, errors accumulate, fears grow, stakes rise until the system hits the wall. A dictatorship has no brakes. The thermostat is the only built-in feedback that cannot be destroyed without destroying the payment (§13.9, §42).
4. The death of humanism¶
In the 2026 interview Gaaze speaks of the crisis of humanism: we can no longer operate with "man is brother to man" and are losing our grasp of what personality, subject, rights mean in the Enlightenment sense. Reconstruction of his view of the protocol: "a brilliant and terrifying monument to the post-humanist transition: you proceed from the premise that the Enlightenment Citizen who makes a responsible conscious choice no longer exists, or is in a minority that does not shape the weather; you admit that for the majority rights are not an existential value but an asset; you digitised the death of humanism and turned it into a working financial institution".
Sewing power and knowledge back together. The paradox of modern autocracies (and Trump): power no longer wants to hear experts — "I am the sovereign, I need no knowledge". The protocol is "a desperate mathematical attempt to forcibly sew power and knowledge back together: by removing the crowd that elects clowns, you hope the technocratic elite will be forced to rely again on science, statistics and calculation, because without the crowd governing by emotion and chaos becomes impossible".
Automation against chaos. Autocracies use chaos as a weapon; we are in a "pool of possibilities" where old institutions collapse. The thermostat is "an attempt to remove the human factor from the breaking of institutions: the sovereign has gone mad and breaks the rules, so the rules are sewn into a smart contract; punishment for bad policy is administered not by the opposition or the intelligentsia but by the blind algorithm of a falling dividend".
Fear of mutation. "What if the remaining elite, having received a legal monopoly without the need to answer to the masses, mutates into something even more monstrous? What if it decides that the masses, having sold their vote, are no longer needed even as dividend recipients? Any technocracy deprived of friction against an imperfect society risks becoming a digital concentration camp." Verdict: "a brilliant, cold, dystopian architecture; it may work, but it finally closes the door on the Age of Enlightenment".
5. The answer: "this has already happened without AB-EXIT"¶
"Mutates into something even more monstrous — that has already happened: Putin reached total war in 26 years, the US reached Trump. And could there be something even more monstrous?" Professors at conferences ponder "what if algorithmic technocracy turns out cold", while outside the window the classical system has already produced wars, dictatorship and chaos. We are already in the worst scenario, and the current system has no brakes. Comparing the monsters:
- The monster of the current system — infinite fall. Power can decouple its survival from the economy: an autocrat does not need a rich country — resources and television suffice; the economy falls — an enemy is invented and a war begun; the crowd rallies from fear. The bottom is infinite: camps, nuclear threat, millions killed — economic failure is compensated by terror and propaganda.
- The monster of the protocol's worst case — limited loss. Suppose Gaaze's fears come true: the remaining elite are cynical greedy sociopaths. Will they start a war? No — it crashes capitalisation, cuts them off from markets, zeroes the budget. Build a Gulag? No — slave labour is inefficient. How will they keep power? They have no television to zombify people — the mass looks at its bank balance. The only way is to keep paying the dividend. In the most nightmarish scenario the protocol mutates into a greedy soulless corporate oligarchy: they saw super-profits, fly jets, look down on the masses — but to saw they must sustain growth and pay severance; overplay and empty the till — the thermostat fires.
This is a built-in stop-loss for the country: not a guarantee of paradise but a limit on the depth of the fall. Cf. 040b.6 (nirvana fallacy) and 040f.6 (why would the winners steal).
6. Weak point of the answer¶
The stop-loss works if the elite's only resource is the economy from which the dividend is paid. For a resource autocracy (oil without the population's labour) the link "saw super-profits → must sustain growth" is weakened: rent does not require growth. The protocol's answer is tying D to median earnings, not rent (§1), but in resource economies that tie is weakest (057d). Gaaze's fear of a "digital camp" is not removed — reduced to a "Singaporean elitocracy" as the worst plausible outcome. 🟡
Related: 038 (Gaaze: sociology of the operator) · 056c · 048d (the forces) · 040i (Linz and Shulman) · 040f (Acemoglu) · 040b.6 (nirvana fallacy) · §13.9 (thermostat) · 006 §15.25 (Shulman) · 040g (Russian thought)