As a consequence of your ancestors and mine having spent their lives living in small groups the Social Media world has great interest in Dunbar's Number.

Its been a concern long before the Internet however.

Authoritarianism's rise, which developed along with the move to organized agriculture from a hunter/gatherer existence thousands of years ago and persists in many places today, was due to:

• The loss of congruity between the social network (a hypothetical natural human community size related to Dunbar's Number) and the social organism* necessitating multiple social networks within a single social organism. (see Social Networks & The Social Organism - Healing the Breach)
• A hierarchical stratification of those networks roughly mirroring a hunter/gatherer pecking order...
• Accentuated by an inherent social inertia arising with the loss of this congruity and a break in the immediate influence feedback loops such congruity provided and...
• More importantly an additional problem relating to scalability of biological altruism and loss of related forms of proximity. (see Self-Interest vs Altruism - Problems in Scaling the Decision Process)

Representative government in it's various forms has been designed to overcome these problems through a variety of mechanisms designed to introduce counter-balancing distributed networks, compartmentalization, network shuffling and clear delineations of fundamental rights and responsibilities.  But complex/chaotic systems (and a civilization is certainly that) are always changing!  

Technology has cut both ways in the ongoing balancing act seeking to resolve the tension between the social organism and the individual's natural social network size.

A successful civilization must guarantee the individual's rights, opinions and opportunities regardless of that individual's social position.  

* A self-recognized and internally governed economic/political grouping organized for basic survival.

 (This post is part of a series briefly laying out some broader ideas, problems and opportunities underlying development of Chagora and perhaps having some general relationship to the evolution of a global civilization.)