Recreating Democracy
Last week, I hosted a two-day workshop on recreating democracy.
The idea was to bring together people from a variety of disciplines who are all thinking about different aspects of democracy, less from a “what we need to do today” perspective and more from a blue-sky future perspective. My remit to the participants was this:
The idea is to start from scratch, to pretend we’re forming a new country and don’t have any precedent to deal with. And that we don’t have any unique interests to perturb our thinking. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government mid-eighteenth century politicians technology could invent. The twenty-first century is a very different place technically, scientifically, and philosophically. What could democracy look like if it were reinvented today? Would it even be democracy—what comes after democracy?
Some questions to think about:
- Representative democracies were built under the assumption that travel and communications were difficult. Does it still make sense to organize our representative units by geography? Or to send representatives far away to create laws in our name? Is there a better way for people to choose collective representatives?
- Indeed, the very idea of representative government is due to technological limitations. If an AI system could find the optimal solution for balancing every voter’s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives—or should we vote for ideas and goals instead?
- With today’s technology, we can vote anywhere and any time. How should we organize the temporal pattern of voting—and of other forms of participation?
- Starting from scratch, what is today’s ideal government structure? Does it make sense to have a singular leader “in charge” of everything? How should we constrain power—is there something better than the legislative/judicial/executive set of checks and balances?
- The size of contemporary political units ranges from a few people in a room to vast nation-states and alliances. Within one country, what might the smaller units be—and how do they relate to one another?
- Who has a voice in the government? What does “citizen” mean? What about children? Animals? Future people (and animals)? Corporations? The land?
- And much more: What about the justice system? Is the twelfth-century jury form still relevant? How do we define fairness? Limit financial and military power? Keep our system robust to psychological manipulation?
My perspective, of course, is security. I want to create a system that is resilient against hacking: one that can evolve as both technologies and threats evolve.
The format was one that I have used before. Forty-eight people meet over two days. There are four ninety-minute panels per day, with six people on each. Everyone speaks for ten minutes, and the rest of the time is devoted to questions and comments. Ten minutes means that no one gets bogged down in jargon or details. Long breaks between sessions and evening dinners allow people to talk more informally. The result is a very dense, idea-rich environment that I find extremely valuable. (See the first ten comments below for details of the conversations.)
It was amazing event. Everyone participated. Everyone was interesting. (Details of the event—emerging themes, notes from the speakers—are in the comments.) It’s a week later and I am still buzzing with ideas. I hope this is only the first of an ongoing series of similar workshops.
Subscribe to comments on this entry
Bruce Schneier • December 14, 2022 9:39 PM
(International Workshop on Reinventing Democracy) IWORD 2022 Notes
Convened by Bruce Schneier at HKS, Dec 7–8, 2022
Themes
Americans to make decisions
(incorrect information) and disinformation (a strategy to combine
information and misinformation toward engaging people in a project
with a desired outcome).
institutional failure; it’s harder to sow division among
people who are safe, secure, and prosperous than in people
clinging to the rung above homelessness.
about these platforms. We’ve had massive institutional
failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on
the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe
anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on
opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was
conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I
have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare
decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like
this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
our social goals.
building with the technologies that we have? What is the role of
truth and lies in how we form groups? Not much human communication
is in the form of costly signals, but we spend a lot of effort
establishing trust through individual and tribal/group
connections. Every word you say comes framed in the context of
your tribe.
use to talk about the world we want to live in together….
Language evolves between us when we are speaking to another human
as a function of context. we’re not developing language in
the way we have been
ways to include their voice—we need experts who are
equipped, like the Lorax, to speak for the trees. Not necessarily
scientific experts, could be indigenous—pluralize idea of
expertise.
boundaries including Nature/Culture, Human/Nonhuman, Man/Machine
been modern”?
Things, reflecting the embeddedness of humans in everything else—I
am constituted by everything else around me. Once you have
breakdown of dualism, acceptance of hybridity, this absolutely
connects to the indigenous conversation and climate.
Rearticulation of indigenous principles.
both anticipatory and retrospective/historical thinking to designing
robust and resilient governance systems?
permits that’s unintended by the designers. Subversions of
rules that change the system. What happens when AI starts doing
that kind of thing? Idea that AIs can become a creative force to
find loopholes and exploit them.
what will happen when this system inevitably becomes encrusted with
corruption, polarization, demagoguery, and threats from the
outside?)
several democratic imaginaries from science fiction of the past
seventy-five years).
people. What kind of a society do we want to have? What is our
relationship with truth and honesty?
made worse by it) but actually the default state of humanity. How
do we build systems with the knowledge that the production of facts
is fragile and rare?
optimizing for economics
from a rational pursuit of relevant facts. Money and power pervade
everything. Many “governing”/state systems are actually
about protecting property.
possible. Students have trouble imagining beyond the perverse
incentives of capitalism.
years old. We’re pretty new in the surveillance
hypercapitalism sphere. Governance feels locked in stone because
these platforms are huge. We are thirty years into Thatcher and
Reaganism. If we could get back to public investment, we could see
change very quickly.
result of state funding—yes, this is one justification for
why they ought to be subject to regulation. I believe if you create
something that has dire consequences for democracy, you should be
subject to regulation regardless of who funded it. I try to resist
the economic mindset—it doesn’t matter who bought it,
it matters what the consequences are for society.”
formation, with the appearance of a Newtonian absolute, where the
project is maintaining a form of growth that has no end in sight.
Time is fixed—what you make in an hour can change but not the
hour; Increased productivity only redetermines what is contained in
a unit of time.
technologies, and one wholly unsuited to supporting democratic
practice
optimizing for outcomes, but rather for refereeing background
disagreement.
AI is fundamentally governed by something we call “the
market”—the master AI. These are fundamentally
optimization systems. What our market system does is optimize for
corporate profit.
“technology” is deeply totalizing and emerges from a
narrow capitalist profit seeking—and Turing computation—two
reductive models of the world, conceptions of what technology is.
When I hear something like the phrase “data is the new
oil”—if that’s true, it’s very clear that
the thing to do is leave it in the ground. So many of the rules
that we are trying to tweak were put in place to maintain systems
of colonialism and imperialism. If we don’t acknowledge that,
we are doomed to create those systems over and over again.
Fundamental misunderstanding—we can’t change the
training set of the system, but the culture in which the system
arises. What processes actually do this?
democracy = governance optimizing for edge recursion as the
means for collective intelligence.
always underspecified. We are good at filling in contextual
gaps with each other, but technology is not.
here
a different picture of democracy in the places they are being used.
residents working together to solve problems. Beyond deliberation
to action and implementation.
2050 good scenario is that younger people onboard to governance in
digital spaces and then transfer that back to the governance of
physical spaces
which many worlds can thrive.
with a sense of agency, empowerment, and possibility.
describing
the world to
define it. We risk remaking systems in the image
of a toy model of reality.
necessarily robust predictors or prescribers.
model for a blueprint; when you look at the sensors needed to be
part of the built infrastructure to enable self-driving cars and
other aspects of smart city technology to function, it turns the
sidewalk into “basically cages.”)
what is progress, if it doesn’t make life better for people
who work?”
experience (and maintenance) of governance systems matter.
experiences of informal democratic practice as from formal
mechanisms of democracy”
things used to be worse. Despair is how we lose.
come back to, from Sorcha and Gojko, the mundane experience…
Alexis, emphasis on relation as the unit of analysis. We focus on
getting in a room and coming up with the rules. We don’t pay
enough attention to asking what’s the relational experience,
the information I’m getting about the world that we live in?
Getting away from a high-level focus on what the constitution
should say, and think more about the person getting dropped off
without someone to open the door—neglect of the care we can
experience.
next election, but we need people who will invest in the
infrastructure for different systems of decision-making.)