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Challenges Facing the Present and Future of Democracy (Friday, May 19 2017)

Historical Post: https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/events/239625786/

Audio Summary:

https://soundcloud.com/nick-merange/summary-challenges-facing-the-present-and-future-of-democracy

The summary and analysis below were drafted by Claude Code from the episode's automated transcript, to bring this older post up to the standard of the newer ones. The original meeting notes are preserved in the collapsible section at the foot of the post. Quotes are reconstructed from an auto-generated transcript — verify against the recording before citing.

Around the table: a 15-minute retrospective on Meetup No. 5

The audio linked above isn't a recording of the meetup itself, but a short retrospective summary recorded afterwards: Nick Merange goes around the table and asks each participant — in turn — what they see as the biggest present and future challenges facing democracy. The result is a kind of snapshot of where seven people, with quite different backgrounds, landed independently on the same question in May 2017.

Corporate power and populism (Tom and Francisco)

Asked first, Tom points straight at corporate influence over politics:

"The power that corporations have in politics is obviously one of the biggest issues facing democracy today... I can't really see corporations losing power anytime in the near future without some sort of drastic change in politics." — Tom Sesselman

Francisco narrows it to three problems — disengagement, misleading information, and populism — and illustrates the populism point with the two figures dominating the news that month:

"Both of them, they have to deal with each other. And those guys, they are not democratic persons. They are not leaders in the liberal progressive way. They are populists. One is a dictator, and the other one is a populist. And that's the result that we are going to keep having if more countries keep having populist leaders in their system." — Francisco

His pessimism about the trajectory comes with a deliberate counterweight, though — an appeal to the idea that ordinary people, not leaders, are where the fix has to come from:

"I have faith in humanity, and I think that we can be smarter enough to start creating a social change now... that's what John Lennon was saying — power to the people. So we can have a true democracy." — Francisco

David: economic "slavery", referendums, and disconnection from process

David — described in the attendee list as a former police officer who now guides people through constitutional law — frames the challenge in terms of rights and process. His starting point is removing what he calls "economic" or "financial slavery", and entrenching human rights and natural-law rights comprehensively across constitutions.

He then turns to referendums as a case study in how democratic mechanisms fail to live up to their own billing — not the mechanism itself, but the "massive amount of belief systems" around how a referendum should be run, interpreted, and acted on, and how leaders who are meant to act as a "guide" for others routinely fall short of that responsibility.

His second point is broader: the sheer degree of disconnection people have from understanding "the purpose, the roles, the responsibilities, the direction" of the systems that govern them — a theme that echoes through several of the other contributions.

Brian: information overload, and filtering democracy through argument-mapping

Brian identifies information overload as the defining challenge — "we are just inundated with so much information... that we can't possibly make the right decision." His proposed direction isn't to reduce the information, but to build better filters:

"Social media websites like Reddit, or experimental argument-mapping websites... if it's combined with other kinds of technologies which allow us to vote, [that] might allow us to actually have better control over the kind of people we filter into positions of power, or the decision-making that filters into law." — Brian

It's a 2017-vintage version of an argument that recurs throughout DOD's later episodes in different forms: that the tools for collective sense-making — not just collective voting — are themselves a democratic design problem.

Andrew Downing: trust, public forums, and blockchain as "distributed trust"

Andrew Downing — at the time a councillor with the Pirate Party — names trust as the big one, and argues that much of the rest follows from it:

"Trust is a big one. Discourse between opposing sides, public forums, that sort of thing. A lot of the rest can sort itself out if you just deal with that — either people cooperate based on trust, or they don't. So that's fundamental." — Andrew Downing

This leads into a side discussion with Nick about blockchain. A colleague (Nicola, not present) had apparently been describing blockchain as a "trustless" system as part of a PhD on the future of trust. Andrew pushes back on the framing:

"I don't like describing it as trustless — trust is still involved, it's just a distributed trust mechanism rather than a centralised one. In a centralised institution, it can become corrupt, and then you can't trust it any more. A distributed trust system means either everybody collectively has a common interest you can trust in, or — well, you're in it anyway." — Andrew Downing

Nick Merange: cognitive bias, the tragedy of the commons, and why nation-states exist

Nick frames the underlying problem as one of rationality rather than information or institutions: confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, combined with individual incentives, systematically pull people away from cooperation. It only takes one participant in a prisoner's-dilemma-style situation to defect for cooperation to collapse — the classic tragedy of the commons — and because resources are finite, competition for them can't simply be designed away.

His point isn't pure pessimism, though: nation-states themselves are, in his framing, "a big, important invention" precisely because they get large groups of people who otherwise wouldn't cooperate to do so anyway — leveraging humans' evolved capacity for group-level cooperation beyond the small groups we evolved in. The implication for DOD's broader project: new democratic mechanisms are, in effect, attempts at the same trick — finding the next "hack" that lets cooperation scale past where raw self-interest would otherwise break it down.

Closing: "bring purpose back" — towards fully self-governing communities

The recording closes with a participant (most likely Kevin Woods, returning to the "desired future" question he'd raised earlier and which Nick had deferred for time) tying the threads together: despite the different framings, everyone at the table is ultimately describing the same goal — equality, fairness, and, in their words, "just... being human."

Their proposed direction is to bring purpose back — to people's understanding of their role in their community, and to people's role in government — and to push the locus of governance itself back down into communities:

"Bring the governance, the whole governance of the whole system, back into the communities — to have, for the first time, full self-governing communities."

It's a fitting note for DOD's fifth meetup to end on: a 2017 articulation of the kind of structural, bottom-up reframing that the group's later episodes — on cooperatives, citizens' juries, participatory budgeting, and liquid/issue-based democracy — would go on to explore in much more concrete detail.

Original meeting notes (Designing Open Democracy Meetup No. 5) # Designing Open Democracy Meetup No. 5 - What are the Present and Future Challenges for Democracy? Link to previous meeting's discussion document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q2yaCWEoXkFNT2qvpBhLv0oLp--FelZXRcAvSf8wbf4/edit?usp=sharing Attending: * Nick Merange * Tom Sesselman - Software engineer * Francisco - psychology * David - Former police officer, guide people into constitutional law * Kevin Woods - Working with small projects, balancing intentions, service models * Brian - How technology works influences * Andrew Downing - Councillor in the pirate party, ## What is democracy? * The ability to change groups * To achieve good outcomes, to get good input, and to have transparency of process (Think "Digital Democracy" for introducing these topics) *Francisco's understanding:* * A system of Government * *DE-mos* - of the people Kratos - rule * *Politics* - Affairs of the city (e.g. Finding solutions for the affairs) * Creating better things * Democracy is best system we have at the moment ## Part of a wider social change, * 17th Century * "Juridical persons", biological persons", "informational persons" * The power of capitalism subsumes democracy *Francisco:* * Biggest issue is lack of engagement in politics * Journalism is an important part of this engagement. * Political exposed person - leads to people manipulating information ## "Democracy in crisis" * Democracy vs. Populism * Populism - Single leader who can solve all problems ## The common/social contract * *Brian* - Informed discussion vs. less ### Problem with low level of Trust * Which information do you trust? - Journalism as a safeguard for democracy has collapsed - Media monoculture - Online Advertising has destroyed the normal regular business models for running newspapers * Comments by Andrew: - Information: Problem of scale - too much information for anyone - We have to provide balance between "labour" and "capital" - Big economic change in developed countries ## Need for Discourse within different mindsets * Peterson - Progressives open, lacking in conscientiousness, conservatives the reverse. * Tom (Flux Party) - Discussion is not our responsibility as there are already experts in their field (Importance of seperation of concerns). - Governments should aim to increase prosperity ## Issues are: * Corruption : Corporations have a lot of power/influence in government. * Conflict of interest via money donated to political parties *Francisco:* * Crisis from the political parties * Disappearance of ideologies (more like parties, imo) * Disengagement from the political system - Why? Because of Corruption and influence ## How do you get people who are both disengaged and more awake then ever? We have all the ingredients to answer this question and address this positively. * Engage youth * Marketing, crowdfunding Read Michel Foucault how social change occurs. People creating their own truth (youth choosing not to vote) * Legal System is critical in this Key issue - Accountability very important - Government - Economics Corporations should represent everyone, not just themselves ## Summary of Challenges to Democracy * Tom: Power of corporations too high in politics relative to Government, increasing chances for Corruption to enter. * Francisco: - Political Disengagement in the public sphere. - Misleading information - Rise in Populism - Misalignment between goverment decision and the interest of the public - Must deal with the impacts of populist leaders' decisions - More populism, more poor decisions * David: - Remove human slavery - Government doing things that are illegal/unconstitutional * Kevin: - Biggest challenge - lack of adhering to something' - Degree of disconnection people have with everything - Problem of limited accountability of corporations; they aren't accountable to everyone. * Brian: - Issue of information overload - Need for better represention of population informed decision. * Andrew: - Trust (lack thereof) - Discourse between opposing sides - Too much information; scaliblity issues * Nick: - Cognitive biases and coordination - Is Blockchain a "trustless" or "distributed trust" system? ## Further Readings http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/betweenthelines/populist/7989176

See also