Election revisions were rationalised as protection of democracy. Supreme-court revisions were rationalised as rebalancing. A distant incident in Ukraine — a nuclear near-miss, according to the chronicle — was rationalised away entirely, its details filed under a classification category that the modern network could no longer even address.
Each new crisis gave the regulator a pretext. Each pretext inched the old decentralised ecosystem one step closer to extinction. The masses, by then already exhausted, traded principle for comfort without noticing the transaction.