US Capitol attack
A crowd of roughly 2,000 stormed the US Capitol during certification of the 2020 presidential election. Organized partly through social media and niche message boards. Certification was paused for six hours. Five people died. The first violent disruption of a US presidential transition in modern history.
The attack was organized in public on platforms run by private companies, using rhetoric from the sitting president. The legitimacy crisis it exposed was not about who won. It was about whether the loser's supporters would accept the result. The answer, for the first time in modern US history, was conditional.
06 · Code & Crowd
Legitimacy is now contested on two fronts at once. Above: populist movements and algorithmic media reshape what 'the people' means. Below: decentralized organizations run on code, voting on-chain, executing automatically, with no sovereign above them. The 20th-century assumption that states are the highest political unit is quietly breaking.
Read the full era →