🏛️Polis in the Year of Democracy
A woman holding a sign “We Demand Democracy”, by Fred Moon.
Setting the Scene
We're sat in our big election year. Nearly half the world's population spanning across a range of democracies will be asked to go to the voting ballot.
Yet, the early signals don't suggest it will necessarily be a win for democracy.
The EU elections have delivered a resounding victory for populism. Kenya has just faced massive public protest leading to the death of 20. Even the last 24 hours have seen an attempted military coup in Bolivia and a US presidential election debate that resembled a series of diatribes as opposed to a dialogue.
The world is in shouting mode. So much so, no one can hear. So we shout more.
How could we return to listening? How could we encourage dialogue?
“To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need.”
Barry Lopez
The Acropolis, Athens, by Pat Whelen.
The Scape
Democracy depends upon the ear.
Since the polis in Athens, democracy has had many-faced enemies. Division. Diversity. The majority.
The tensions between consensus, diversity and bandwidth have been viewed as insurmountable. As diversity increases, trenches grow between communities and voices wearing out our collective attention. These trenches are driven by society’s mounting problems. And so, democracy turns cancerous as islands of opinion fracture and splinter.
This has long been warned as the danger of democracy: it is unable to resolve divergence of opinion in times of crisis.
In a digitised world, the problem has only grown. The emotion of in-person humanity has been removed and so the islands become even more isolated. It has become easier than ever to (mis)characterise people and false polarisation – the idea that someone's beliefs are diametrically opposed to yours – is driven by social media algorithms. Unfortunately, false polarisation feeds real polarisation. Diversity can be degenerative on social fabric.
Fortunately, innovators have started to invest in 'Collective Response Systems' built to foster deliberation, reach consensus and regenerate diversity. Blending in-person and online political debate, the health of democracy is restored by building bridges across islands of thought.
Across democracies, one of the key civic forums is the Polis.
A place of deliberation and dialogue.
AI-assisted, it works to enable the islands of thought to be mapped and articulated before representatives are chosen to come together and find common ground.
In practice, the Polis enables in-person conversation and dialogue across diverse opinions to be recorded. These conversations are painstakingly slow. People are remunerated for adopting the principles of deep listening and a spirit of inquiry in the hope that threads of consensus can be identified. This makes space for reasoning, feeling and emotion. Alongside this, the Polis uses AI models to identify the islands of coherence across the viewpoints being submitted to its online platform.
Everyone is invited to contribute to any issue of public importance, and many do. Key representatives from these 'online' islands are identified and asked to come to in-person discussions.
For instance, your post on social media about a carbon tax on private vehicles, though it didn't receive great attention, has been identified as representative of a wider proportion of society. You are asked to attend the Polis in person. It's similar to Jury service, except that you are paid for adhering to the principles of deep listening and displaying a spirit of inquiry. Though the debate is long, and there is clear emotion on show, you leave it with more empathy and understanding of those you thought as wholly oppositional. As do they. And the threads of consensus are communicated.
The Polis has radically transformed democracy:
Identity politics is no longer. Due to the versatility of the system, people are given their voice across every issue. Binary spectrums of the right or left wing have long since vanished. The complexity of social life is mirrored in the differing and diverse viewpoints held across issues. The array of unexpected agreements highlights the unrepresentative nature of binary identity politics.
The loss of binary voting blocks has led to a wide array of societies. Each represents a unique pathway toward protopia. A state of gradual betterment of society.
Slowly, the non-human has entered the space. Using the scientific metrics of ecosystem health, the non-human entities have been able to communicate their own troubles through the AI Polis system. It has encouraged the increasingly common practice of today's 'Council of all Beings' sessions in which people speak from the vantage points of others – including non-human others.
Instead of deepening division, democracy now witnesses a reciprocal exchange of ideas across the diverse viewpoints in society.
As was designed, the Polis has restored healthy dialogue, regenerated diversity and provided pathways to consensus.
Show Notes
vTaiwan: Decentralised open consultation process combining online and offline interactions for Taiwanese citizens to discuss national issues.
Polis: Developed in Seattle, Polis is a has been used by Taiwan to help mapping difference in opinion across the electorate.
Talk of the City: Open-source LLM interface for improving collective deliberation and decision-making.
False Polarisation: A paper examining the potential for the overestimation of polarisation in the US.
Antidebate: A concept and process developed by Perspectiva that looks to improve collective sense-making and decision-making in the public sphere by going beyond traditional concepts of ‘debate’.
Council of All Beings: A practice that encourages participants to embody the non-human ‘other’.
