Democratic futures; how Meta misunderstands 2020 as history
Last week, I joined a workshop at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation on reimagining (or reinventing, or recreating—the workshop materials sometimes vary the call to action) democracy. Each of 48 participants spoke for up to 10 minutes on loosely-grouped panels of six, with questions and answers and robust hallway debate. I returned home Wednesday night exhausted beneath the adrenaline buzz of new ideas and post-conversational high.
Now that I’ve had a few days to stew in all that material, I want to capture a few of the highlights that will stick with me and shape my own projects going forward. This is far from a complete event summary—I expect the hosts will publish more complete notes in the near future.
I’m personally bullish on the potential for smaller and more local politics to thrive, and I was excited to hear how many other participants are also thinking small. Nathan Schneider compared his attempts at building democratic governance for online communities to his mother’s garden club and its rich bylaws and relationships, and “the garden club” became a touchstone many others brought up over the two days. Hahrie Han described small groups in the megachurch she studied and talked about the “smallest replicable unit” of an organization and its culture. Jon Evans, in exploring where we might be able to experiment with other forms of democracy, looked to Burning Man and fan clubs as potential test beds. A model of people’s assemblies that Democracy Next and MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication are testing begins with listening sessions among “circles of trust” to identify themes for larger-scale discussion. In an end-of-day conversation with Eli Pariser, I asked if a more localized type of news building on some of the lessons of Upworthy was possible, and unsurprisingly it’s something he’s also been thinking about.
Alongside that interest in small groups as a place where democracy may yet be thriving, several presenters noted the shortcomings of designing first for individuals as our unit of study/consideration. For Woodrow Hartzog, a 1:1 approach to govern technology platforms through their contracts with individual users and the notion of consent is broken and needs to be defined based on social values if we want to restore trust in technology. Hahrie Han noted how much leadership and structure matter in how we practice democracy, proposing that “our goal is to create spaces for leadership to emerge.” Glen Weyl talked about experiments in digital democracy in Taiwan and its strengths in building for diverse, intersecting groups.
I hadn’t been thinking in these terms, but several speakers touched on the need for more imagination and bigger future visions. Suzette Brooks Masters called for looking past incremental fixes and asking people to design from a viewpoint of “governing as good ancestors.” Sorcha Brophy described teaching a course on health policy in which the students, given a blank slate to reimagine a healthcare system, resolutely insisted on reinventing private insurance until they saw case studies of other models and the challenges of getting past “imaginative limits.” Aditi Juneja is connecting futurists and organizers to design democracies capable of withstanding a variety of scenarios, while Rob Ricigliano led a different imaginative planning exercise for the Omidyar Group. Eugene Fischer, one of several science fiction or fantasy authors participating, read a new short story imagining Ionia, where governance by weekly direct democracy elections was made possible by the challenges of building a community in a nuclear fallout zone. I’d been thinking about the importance of joy in movement-building work, but the power of big visions to counter fatalism and inaction is something I’ll be thinking more about in the days and weeks ahead.
Several speakers underlined how important it is to be clear about what problems we’re working to solve. In a comment, Hahrie Han noted the tradeoffs between designing for consensus versus representation versus addressing uncertainty, while Nick Chedli Carter’s presentation contrasted the workshop’s calls for human centered, multiracial, small-scale democracy with politics as he’s experienced it via campaigning—top-down, consolidated, dehumanizing, ad-focused, and centered on a presidential cycle. After my own call to organize more people’s assemblies outside of government, Aditi Juneja rightly pointed out how much political and organizing energy goes to seemingly intractable issues and how inefficacy—having all that time and effort not lead to change—can poison movements. It’s a challenge I’m still grappling with.
Outside those four big thematic ideas I’m taking inspiration in, the biggest divisions in the room came up around AI (shocking, I know), with a presentation from Joshua Fairfield suggesting that using AI in identifying legal precedents would be catastrophically destructive, adjacent to a presentation from Teddy Collins wondering whether letting an AI model serve as a legal code, or even a constitution, might allow us to capture meaning and nuance we as humans haven’t yet been able to articulate into code. There was more consensus and energy around questions of where and how to deploy AI as a supportive tool for deliberation and governance (Claudia Chwalisz, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication team, Bruce Schneier, Helene Landemore, Paul Gölz, Marci Harris) and proactively ensuring democratic oversight (Archon Fung, Aviv Ovadya, Iason Gabriel).
And after Francesca Tripodi’s presentation on search manipulation, several hallway conversations sprung up around what the “deep story” is for the political left. Arlie Hochschild, who proposed a deep story for the right in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, also drafted one, though conversation about what the most deeply felt narrative might be was not a question we solved in the room. I found yet another proposal from another Ash affiliate afterward.
And I certainly haven’t had time to get my hands on any of these yet, let alone crack into them, but based on recommendations in the room, my reading list post-gathering now includes:
Demopolis - Josiah Ober
Empowering Affected Interests - Archon Fung, due out next year
Cancel culture: Heterodox self-censorship or the curious case of the dog-which-didn’t-bark - Pippa Norris
Governable Spaces - Nathan Schneider, due out next year
Imagined Futures - Jens Beckert
The Revolution that Wasn’t - Jen Schradie
Infomocracy - Malka Older
Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer
The Actual Star - Monica Byrne
One presentation touched on democratic history as well—while our simplified school civics stories tend to jump from the Greeks to the Declaration of Independence, David Perry described the… involved process of nominations and random selection used to select the Doge of Venice, and I enjoyed the reminder of how much we as humans love a good bylaw and possibly always have.
What Meta doesn’t understand about 2020
Outside of the workshop, I also got to take a look at (much more recent) history for Tech Policy Press last week. About a month ago, the Wall Street Journal highlighted a change in Meta’s election ad policy—while advertisers are still prohibited from questioning the legitimacy of an “upcoming or ongoing” election, past elections are now fair game. Meta is right in that history is never totally settled and dispute about what happened and why is just about as human as our love of bylaws. But as I watch the 2024 election unfold, what I’m seeing is that next year is a continuation of 2020: from the top of the ballot to the never-ending threats to election officials to ongoing challenges to election law and practice, 2020 simply never ended for many. And giving those deniers new avenues to broadcast their lies about the election absolutely has an ongoing, and upcoming, effect.
It’s baking season
One of the excellent things about the between-formal-roles muddle is the flexibility to arrange my own days. Much of this post was written between batches of seasonal treats—to send to far-flung family, share with the daycare teachers whose work makes mine possible, and to enjoy right here at home. In case you also cope with shorter, colder days by turning on the oven, a handful of recommendations:
Ali Slagle’s big cluster chocolatey granola
The King Arthur spiced hot cocoa cookies
Melissa Clark’s sticky cranberry gingerbread
I’ll be doing another batch later this week, so if you have favorites of your own to share, please do!