Study history to understand the future:
The kleroterion.
The kleroterion was the first governance algorithm — but analog.
A marble machine from 2,500 years ago in Athens that decided who ruled by chance.
The hardware was stone, and open source. Don't trust, verify. The code was law.
The Greeks didn’t trust power. So instead of elections that could be manipulated, they built a system where luck — not influence — decided who would serve the people.
Randomness as an antidote to control.
The kleroterion was a slab with slots. Citizens inserted their ID tokens (pinakia). Then, black and white balls were drawn to determine the chosen ones. A kind of marble blockchain — no mining, no fees.
The real innovation wasn’t the mechanism, but the logic: decentralize authority. Athenian democracy used randomness to prevent corruption.
Today, we use algorithms to “optimize” power. The difference is who programs the outcome. If the kleroterion was the first algorithm, it was also the last one that needed no programmers. Its “source code” was public, visible, and verifiable, it was open source. No hidden line of code behind private interests. Compare that with modern governance: randomness has been replaced by prediction.
Today’s algorithms don’t draw lots — they select. And they do so based on data, bias, and economic incentives.
Athens used stone to protect justice. We will use silicon to reshape it.
The shift from chance to calculation changed democracy itself: from citizen lottery to algorithmic scoring.
Maybe the kleroterion wasn’t a relic, but a warning. A reminder that without transparency, every algorithm — analog or digital — stops being democratic.
And chance, ironically, was once the fairest system we had.
