The prediction has some supporting signals but is too broad and causally vague to call clearly right or wrong.

1. Public dissatisfaction with current systems has clearly risen.

Surveys since 2021 show widespread discontent with how democracies are working. An Ipsos poll in 2025 across nine Western countries found that in eight of them, fewer than half of respondents were satisfied with democracy, with strong majorities saying democracy is at risk and demanding radical reform.(theguardian.com) The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2024 Democracy Index reports global democracy at its lowest level on record, with over a third of the world’s population living under authoritarian regimes.(axios.com) Other global surveys (e.g., Edelman) show deep distrust of government and elites and growing readiness—especially among younger people—to support disruptive tactics for change.(reuters.com) These trends are consistent with a broad dissatisfaction that could motivate people to seek alternatives.

2. There has been notable growth in alternative / decentralized governance experiments.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which encode governance rules in smart contracts and allow token‑based collective decision‑making, have expanded rapidly. Academic and market analyses estimate that by 2024–2025 there are on the order of 13,000 DAOs managing roughly $23–24.5 billion in treasuries, with about 11 million governance‑token holders involved in on‑chain decision processes—dramatic growth from only a few thousand DAOs just a few years earlier.(arxiv.org) Research explicitly frames DAOs as new governance models and studies them as laboratories for alternative organizational structures.(arxiv.org)

Related ideas like Balaji Srinivasan’s “network state” (cloud‑first, community‑governed quasi‑states) moved from blog posts in 2021 to a 2022 book and recurring “Network State” conferences, drawing thousands of attendees and even government delegations by 2024–2025—evidence of at least niche interest in alternative governance concepts.(balajis.com) Meanwhile, decentralized social platforms such as Mastodon saw significant user spikes after concerns about centralized control and moderation on Twitter/X, and are explicitly positioned as community‑governed alternatives to corporate platforms.(en.wikipedia.org) These developments suggest that some portion of the public is experimenting with different ways to organize and govern digital communities.

3. But scale, causality, and direction of broader trends are unclear.

Even after their growth, DAOs, network‑state projects, and decentralized platforms still involve only a tiny fraction of the global population; they are far from a mainstream shift in how “people in general” govern themselves. The evidence that rising authoritarianism specifically is the primary driver of this experimentation is also mixed: motivations range from crypto‑economic speculation to privacy, censorship concerns, corporate power, and general institutional distrust, and are not cleanly attributable to anti‑authoritarian sentiment.

At the same time, macro‑level political trends do not show a clear mass migration toward alternative governance models. Global democracy measures indicate continued democratic backsliding and expansion of authoritarian rule, not a broad popular exit toward decentralized self‑governance.(axios.com) In many countries, public anger at perceived authoritarian or corrupt elites has been channeled into street protests and support for populist or strongman leaders within existing state structures, as seen in recent protest waves in parts of Europe and elsewhere, rather than into DAOs or network‑state‑like experiments.(en.wikipedia.org)

4. Overall assessment.

The direction of the prediction—rising dissatisfaction with authority coinciding with growth in decentralized and non‑traditional governance experiments—has some qualitative support, especially in digital and crypto‑adjacent domains. However, the claim is broad ("people in general" and a general acceleration of sociopolitical trends) and implies a scale and causal clarity that we cannot demonstrate from available data. Because we see:

• clear dissatisfaction and democratic backsliding,
• some real but still niche growth of alternative governance models, and
• no strong evidence that such models have become a major, dominant outlet for that dissatisfaction,

the prediction’s truth value cannot be determined with confidence. Hence the best judgment is ambiguous rather than clearly right, wrong, or merely too early.