To the extentthat people accommodate themselves to the faceless inflexibility ofplatforms, they will become less and less capable of seeing thevirtues of institutions, on any scale. One consequence of thataccommodation will be an increasing impatience withrepresentative democracy, and an accompanying desire to replacepolitical institutions with platform-based decision making:referendums and plebiscites, conducted at as high a level as possible(national, or in the case of the European Union, transnational).Among other things, these trends will bring, in turn, theexploitation of communities and natural resources by people whowill never see or know anything about what they are exploiting. !escope of local action will therefore be diminished, and will comeunder increasing threat of what we might call, borrowing a phrasefrom Einstein, spooky action at a distance.