Virtualia: vol. 3, n. 2 (2026).

Editorial: Governance as a Problem of Collective DecisionBy Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Cid, The PhilosopherGovernance, in its essence, is the art of answering an unavoidable question: how do we decide together? From tribal councils to modern corporations, from cooperatives to DAOs and artistic communities, the challenge repeats itself. And at the heart of this question lies a mechanism that is deceptively simple yet philosophically treacherous: the vote. Which voting system is the fairest? Arrow’s impossibility theorem taught us that there is no universal answer. Every context — its size, its urgency, its level of trust among participants — demands a specific institutional design. This dossier does not offer ready‑made formulas. Instead, it maps how different agents and sectors are confronting this problem. VAN Ameneyro, in their conversation with One Love DAO, shows us how governance becomes a “necessary evil” in the world of digital art. The promise of horizontality runs up against concrete questions: who gets a seat at the table? Who is still left out? The answer, for VAN, lies in transparency, real participation, and the construction of institutional memory — something fragile in the volatile environment of Web3 platforms. Fer Caggiano delivers an incisive diagnosis: power has not disappeared with decentralisation. It has merely moved — from institutions and curators to wallets and tokens. Community curation, in practice, often reproduces plutocracy. Their article forces us to ask: before voting, who defines what can be voted on? Governance begins with visibility. Steve Coulter (aka 45renegade) offers an unexpected interpretative key: punk as an operating system. Before lean startup, before bootstrapping, before the creator economy, punk already practised independent production, direct distribution, and community building as survival strategies. His text reminds us that governance is not only about formal rules and votes. It is also about ethics, refusal, and the courage to build without asking for permission. Vessy Mink appears twice in this issue, each time with a different governance experiment. In Governing the Sound, she presents Optimus Goddess, a licensing model where the artist retains full publishing rights and curation is replaced by equitable partnerships — an attempt to rewrite the rules of a historically extractive industry. In Music Train S9 E1‑6, co‑created with BK Han, she documents a live, collaborative song‑minting project. The audience does not merely listen; it participates in real‑time creation, turning musical production into a participatory governance performance. Here, the very act of making music becomes a collective decision process. Vitor Emanuel Gripp, writing from inside Token Nation, shows how a technology event can become a living laboratory for governance. By bringing together academics such as Maria Goreti (Fiocruz), Carlos Frederico (UFOP/KryptoLab) and Rodrigo Cid (UFOP/GIFLABS), Token Nation does not merely discuss decentralisation — it practises it, in the curation of its stages, the selection of its projects, and the constant negotiation between efficiency and participation. His account, grounded in his own journey from exhibiting artist to community manager, reminds us that governance is not an abstract protocol but a daily, messy, collective achievement. Rodrigo Cid, in Voting or Governing, returns to the philosophical bedrock of the problem. He reminds us that Arrow’s theorem is not a mathematical curiosity but a structural warning: no voting system is neutral. By applying this lesson to blockchain, his article demonstrates that digital governance does not escape the aporias of collective choice — it merely translates them into code. He also develops the problem of many hands and the fragility of institutional memory in decentralised systems, connecting directly with the questions raised by VAN Ameneyro and Fer Caggiano. Felipe Farinha, from the University of Saint Joseph in Macau, brings a comparative perspective. In Direct Democracy in the Age of the Extended Mind, he examines how different jurisdictions and cultural contexts shape the possibility of legitimate digital governance. His reflection on personal exocortices — AI assistants that extend a citizen’s cognitive capacity — asks whether direct democracy might finally become feasible at scale, provided we solve the problems of authenticity, manipulation, privacy, and civic deskilling. The exocortex, for Farinha, is not a substitute for democratic agency but a prosthesis for it. Daniel Gomides, from the Federal University of Ouro Preto, revisits Rousseau’s First Discourse in Scientific Progress and Moral Progress. He argues that technical sophistication does not guarantee ethical advancement. His analysis of AI, hunger, and climate agreements shows that the gap between what we can do and what we should do remains as wide as ever — a sobering reminder that governance cannot be reduced to algorithmic efficiency. Rousseau’s warning, written in 1750, still echoes today: science may teach us how to build better tools, but it does not teach us how to be better humans. Rafaela Ferrari Kley, from Degenerados Club, takes a complementary path in The Logic of Irrationality. Diagnosing a civilisation that has never been so technologically advanced yet remains emotionally manipulable, she recalls that Aristotle’s logic was a civilising attempt to contain collective hysteria. Today’s algorithms, however, are optimised for engagement, not truth. Her reflection forces us to ask whether governance can ever be purely rational, or whether it must always wrestle with the irrational architectures of attention, fear, and belonging. The question she leaves us with is disarmingly simple and profoundly uncomfortable: are we seeking to understand reality, or merely constructing emotionally bearable versions of it? Finally, this issue closes with a special launch. Rodrigo Cid’s The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (co‑authored with Pedro Luiz Caetano Filho) is not merely reviewed here; it is treated as a governance artifact. Its systematic collaboration with AI systems, its transparent use of the CRediT‑IA framework, and its rigorous discussion of Arrow’s theorem, opacity, bias, and responsibility provide a conceptual toolkit for exactly the questions this magazine raises. The book is available for free download (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20143966), and we invite our readers to read it alongside the articles in this issue. At the end of this volume, we hope that the reader will not find definitive answers. Instead, find a richer repertoire of questions. About who votes, about who decides what is put to a vote, about how we move from paper to action. About whether code can ever fully replace trust, and whether we would want it to. About what the classroom, the punk venue, the music studio, the DAO, the tokenised event, and the blockchain have in common: all are arenas where the same question echoes, again and again — how shall we decide together? Enjoy the reading. Prof. Dr. Rodrigo CidThe Philosopher(GIFLABS / Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto)