What happens when the people who build software start asking what should happen if democracy worked the same way? At the Next Democracy Summit in San Francisco, Ruzgar Imski and Kate Lee explore a provocative idea: if code can be forked, why not laws, institutions, and even identity itself? In a world where AI remembers more about us than we do, the question is no longer who writes the rules—but who gets to change them.

There's a moment. A specific moment when someone decides to stop waiting for permission. Maybe it's quiet. Maybe nobody's watching. But something shifts — and the path they were supposed to take starts to look a lot less interesting than the one they're about to make up entirely. Today, we're talking to two people who made that choice — in completely different directions, for completely different reasons, with the same kind of unshakeable commitment.

Here's the thing about the Amazon basin. There's a number scientists use when they talk about it — the number of species living there that we haven't discovered yet. And here's what's strange about that number: we don't know what it is. We can't know what it is. We only know it's enormous. That somewhere in that forest right now, creatures are going about their lives, doing whatever it is they do — and not a single human being on earth knows their name.