Around 60 Nepali student groups abroad have urged the government to uphold Nepalis’ fundamental right to vote by enabling secure digital i-voting for citizens overseas. Without such a system, migrant workers and students remain locked out of the democratic process, their political rights stalled by an analog state that no longer matches the realities of a digitally mobile population. The contradiction is stark. Remittances now make up roughly one third of Nepal’s GDP, yet the very citizens who sustain the nation’s economy are denied a say in its political future. This tension reveals something deeper. As society moves toward a world where cyborg intelligence grows faster, broader and inherently collective, Nepal stands at the early edge of that transformation. Protecting basic rights will now require political systems that understand and adapt to the new tempo of human life shaped by emerging machine augmented consciousness.
On September 8, 2025, the country grieved, but grief could not contain what emerged in its wake. The Gen Z uprising did not merely expose the brutality as result of centralized system of the analog state. It revealed the arrival of a new political subject. Nepal’s institutions, still operating as if they are built from paper, ink, and queues, suddenly confronted a generation whose identity and agency take shape inside digital networks. What surfaced the following day was something larger than a protest. The analog state collided with a cyborg generation. More importantly, the whole world was compelled to grasp the distributed intelligence of the cyborg generation and the scale of the analog system’s crash against it.
Cyborgs1.0
The word cyborg often evokes images of metal limbs, implanted chips, or humans fitted with one of the neural interfaces pioneered by companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink.But Nepal’s Gen Z represents a different kind of transformation, one that is social, cognitive, and unmistakably human. Their perception stretches into the digital because that is where so much of their lives now unfold. Their memories gather in shared threads that function as communal archives. Their political awareness sharpens through continuous streams of information moving across channels the state cannot slow or contain. They move through physical streets and digital corridors with equal ease, as if both were native terrain. Out of this doubled life grows a new kind of citizen, one whose intelligence is not contained within one body but dispersed across friends, networks, devices, memories, and the algorithms that accompany them everywhere.
After the tragic incident of September 8, the state expected grief to burn itself out. Instead, thousands returned to the streets with a coordination that felt almost organic. No one commanded and no one obeyed. The movement learned, adjusted, and multiplied as if it possessed a nervous system of its own. Authorities dismissed this as the work of foreign actors or vandals, but what they confronted was something far more elemental: the behavior of a linked organism responding to injury. These young people did not act like a protest. They defended like a single living system.
The hours that followed terrified the establishment because the protest seemed to operate without leaders. Routes changed as if responding to invisible signals. Information circulated in real time. Attempts to silence the protesters only generated new nodes of resistance. It was a moment that revealed the widening gulf between the governing that was too primitive and the governed that was too high-tech. Nepal’s state is built on the logic of paper files, offices, rude government officials, and delays. The generation it confronts is built on the logic of networks, updates, and constant feedback that is adept at using synthetic intelligence. The uprising did not erupt despite technology. It erupted because technology has shaped an entirely new political consciousness.Its most unsettling aspect is the source of its power: once awakened, this hive of defenders with collective mind moves with the coordinated fury of hornets whose nest has finally been struck.
Democracy as Living Network
The Technological Singularity is Near
The young people who rose up are not seeking cosmetic reforms. They are asking for a form of democracy that reflects the world they already live in. They want a political architecture consistent with their sense of speed and transparency. They want a process that listens continuously. They want a system that evolves. In short, they want democracy for the cyborg era that has alraeady started.
To them, democracy is no longer an occasional ritual. It should be a living, public, measurable process. They imagine platforms where proposals rise and fall in full view, where every citizen can participate when they choose, and where authority is always accountable. They question why one elected figure should speak on all issues for more than a decade even when they are out of touch with reality. They believe representation should be fluid and revocable, a relationship shaped by trust that can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice. They want civic forums that feel less like parliamentary chambers and more like open-source software projects.
They also know that artificial intelligence will shape civic life whether invited or not. They do not fear AI. They know how to harness it. They imagine systems where AI helps model the consequences of policy before those consequences devastate real people. They imagine audit engines that protect public money. They imagine tools that distribute power rather than concentrate it. They want democracy that behaves more like a living network than a bureaucratic machine.
Cyborgs 2.0
Today’s cyborgs are social and cognitive. Tomorrow’s will be biological, equipped with neural interfaces, augmented limbs, embedded sensors, artificial memory and 1000 X intelligence than normal humans. Citizens will be able to think and act through forms of augmentation that blur the line between person and system. Nepal’s Gen Z is already demanding a world built to support that reality because the govenrmentis trying to operate within a political architecture designed for the 18th Century which is like the civic equivalent of installing ChatGPT on an outdated operating system of Iphone 8.
When people try to update new apps on a outdated OS of our smartphones, the messages flash instantly.On Android: “This app is not compatible with your version of Android. Please update to the latest version”On IOS: “This app requires IOS 15.0 or later. Update required to continue.”Nepal’s ziegiest is sending the same warnings as the country is not able to run the democracyfit for the cyborg generation.
A the same time, democracy in which some citizens are enhanced and others are not will require new ethical foundations. A polity containing people who can process information faster than any legislative chamber can deliberate will require new structures of fairness. The very idea of representation may collapse when millions of augmented minds can participate at once. Authority will need to be redistributed across networks rather than vested in individuals. Truth will need to be verified through collective, transparent processes rather than official declarations. In the era of real cyborgs, democracy will not survive unless it becomes profoundly distributed.
Nepal is often described as a country where global trends arrive late. Yet September 9 revealed something different. It showed that Nepal may be one of the first places to confront the tension between an analog state and a cyborg generation. The uprising was not an anomaly. It was a preview. It demonstrated what happens when institutions cling to the slow logic of the past while the people they govern live with the reflexes of cyborgs.
The choice before Nepal is now unavoidable. It can continue forcing its grand children to shrink themselves to fit an outdated political operating system. Or it can upgrade the architecture itself to match the citizens it already has and the citizens it will soon have. One path leads to constant crashes, failed installs, and civic error messages. The other allows Nepal to become a prototype for what democracy must evolve into when the boundaries between human, machine, and collective intelligence continue to dissolve.
Beginning of a New Politity
Nepal has to immediately begin the long transition from human democracy to cyborg democracy. The bulldozing of the state on September 9 revealed the first generation of distributed citizens, a cohort whose political instincts come from connection, shared memory, and real-time coordination. The next generation, armed with biological augmentation and machine intelligence, will only accelerate this shift. Nepal’s institutions can ignore this reality for a little while, but they cannot outthink a generation that already inhabits the political future. The children of September 8 did not die for better government services or an election. They died because the world to which they belonged was denied by the world that claimed the right to rule them.
For the cyborg generation, democracy is not the act of choosing a directly elected president or prime minister every five years. That model belongs to the grandparents’ era, a time when information moved slowly and authority was shaped by scarcity. The new generation lives in a world where decision making is constant, distributed, and transparent. They want a democracy that behaves like the networks through which they live, a system that updates, responds, and includes. Their vision is not of a stronger ruler but of a weaker center. It is a political architecture where authority flows through many nodes, where citizens participate directly, and where legitimacy emerges from collective intelligence rather than concentrated power.
Democracy for a New Generation
For Gen Z, the future is already being written in the code that shapes daily life. The old ritual of voting every few years for a distant leader that they will never meet feels almost absurd to a generation raised inside systems that refresh by the second. They want a democracy that behaves like the apps: live, transparent, and always on. AI will filter proposals, blockchain will secure the record, and decisions will unfold with the speed and clarity of a group chat. Representation becomes unnecessary when citizens can participate directly. The feed becomes the forum, and people become the architects of a political system that mirrors the networks through which they think, move, and act.
For Gen Alpha, the very concept of state will transform. It will not be a distant institution they interact with, but an embedded layer of their daily existence, woven into the flow of how they think, learn, and connect. Democracy will no longer be understood as a ritual such as voting for free speech. It will be the operating system they are born into.
For them, the model of a single remote leader representing millions will feel as archaic as a rotary dial tone. Instead, consensus will form dynamically in shared digital spaces, with governance becoming a continuous and participatory process. They will inherit a democracy that is always on, iterative, and responsive, a system that moves with them rather than above them.
Furthermore, the idea of a government that closes at 5 pm in the evening or on weekends will be incomprehensible. They don’t want government to run two shifts. They will expect an ambient and intelligent interface, a form of governance that operates with the immediacy, context awareness, and omnipresence of a supercharged AI assistant.In short, they want DemocracyGPT.
Just as baby-boomer Nepali Congress and Communist political activists were once jailed by the Panchayat and even the Rana regime for demanding a political system fit for their time, today’s elders confront a similar disorientation. For many Baby Boomers and even Gen X, the world emerging before us still feels like science fiction — a future arriving faster than their political imagination can update.
For Generations Z and Alpha, it will feel as ordinary as speaking to ChatGPT as effortless as moving through environments saturated with sensors, ambient intelligence, and real-time data currents. Governance will not appear as an institution situated outside their lives. It will function as an ever-present layer within their digital ecosystem, a quiet cognitive service that adapts to them the way today’s devices already anticipate searches and intentions. The question will no longer be whether the government is open. It will be how completely it dissolves into the continuous stream of daily experience, becoming another intelligent presence in a world where everything listens, learns, evolves, and responds.
Shah is author of the book “Algorithmocracy”
