Paper by Pancho Lewis, Jacob Ainscough, Rachel Coxcoon & Rebecca Willis: “In recent years, many local authorities in the UK have run local climate assemblies (LCAs) such as citizens’ assemblies or juries, with the goal of developing citizen-led solutions to the climate crisis. In this essay, we argue that a ‘convenient fiction’ often underpins the way local authority actors explain the rationale for running LCAs. This convenient fiction runs as follows: LCAs are commissioned as a response to the climate threat, and local decision-makers work through LCA recommendations to implement appropriate policies in their locality. We suggest that this narrative smooths over and presents as linear a process that is in fact messy and political. LCAs emerge as a result of political pressure and bargaining. Once LCAs have run their course, the extent to which their recommendations are implemented is dependent on power dynamics and institutional capacities. We argue that it is important to surface the messiness and political tensions that underpin the origins and aftermath of local climate assemblies. This achieves three things. First, it helps manage expectations about the impact LCAs are likely to have on the policy process. Second, it broadens understandings of how LCAs can contribute to change. Third, it provides a complex model that actors can use to understand how they can help deliver climate action through politics. We conclude that LCAs are important — if as yet unproven — new interventions in local climate politics, when assessed against this more complex picture…(More)”
Digital Freedoms in French-Speaking African Countries
Report by AFD: “As digital penetration increases in countries across the African continent, its citizens face growing risks and challenges. Indeed, beyond facilitated access to knowledge such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to leisure-related tools such as Youtube, and to sociability such as social networks, digital technology offers an unprecedented space for democratic expression.
However, these online civic spaces are under threat. Several governments have enacted vaguely-defined laws, allowing for random arrests.
Several countries have implemented repressive practices restricting freedom of expression and access to information. This is what is known as “digital authoritarianism”, which is on the rise in many countries.
This report takes stock of digital freedoms in 26 French-speaking African countries, and proposes concrete actions to improve citizen participation and democracy…(More)”
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
Book by Jennifer Pahlka: “Just when we most need our government to work—to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats—it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.
But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government…(More)”.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
Book by Jeff Jarvis: “The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.
To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.
What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power…(More)”
Shallowfakes
Essay by James R. Ostrowski: “…This dystopian fantasy, we are told, is what the average social media feed looks like today: a war zone of high-tech disinformation operations, vying for your attention, your support, your compliance. Journalist Joseph Bernstein, in his 2021 Harper’s piece “Bad News,” attributes this perception of social media to “Big Disinfo” — a cartel of think tanks, academic institutions, and prestige media outlets that spend their days spilling barrels of ink into op-eds about foreign powers’ newest disinformation tactics. The technology’s specific impact is always vague, yet somehow devastating. Democracy is dying, shot in the chest by artificial intelligence.
The problem with Big Disinfo isn’t that disinformation campaigns aren’t happening but that claims of mind-warping, AI-enabled propaganda go largely unscrutinized and often amount to mere speculation. There is little systematic public information about the scale at which foreign governments use deepfakes, bot armies, or generative text in influence ops. What little we know is gleaned through irregular investigations or leaked documents. In lieu of data, Big Disinfo squints into the fog, crying “Bigfoot!” at every oak tree.
Any machine learning researcher will admit that there is a critical disconnect between what’s possible in the lab and what’s happening in the field. Take deepfakes. When the technology was first developed, public discourse was saturated with proclamations that it would slacken society’s grip on reality. A 2019 New York Times op-ed, indicative of the general sentiment of this time, was titled “Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe What We See.” That same week, Politico sounded the alarm in its article “‘Nightmarish’: Lawmakers brace for swarm of 2020 deepfakes.” A Forbes article asked us to imagine a deepfake video of President Trump announcing a nuclear weapons launch against North Korea. These stories, like others in the genre, gloss over questions of practicality…(More)”.
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance
Open Access Book edited by Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin, and Lex Paulson: “…explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field.
Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy…(More)”.
Governing the Unknown
Article by Kaushik Basu: “Technology is changing the world faster than policymakers can devise new ways to cope with it. As a result, societies are becoming polarized, inequality is rising, and authoritarian regimes and corporations are doctoring reality and undermining democracy.
For ordinary people, there is ample reason to be “a little bit scared,” as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently put it. Major advances in artificial intelligence raise concerns about education, work, warfare, and other risks that could destabilize civilization long before climate change does. To his credit, Altman is urging lawmakers to regulate his industry.
In confronting this challenge, we must keep two concerns in mind. The first is the need for speed. If we take too long, we may find ourselves closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. That is what happened with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: It came 23 years too late. If we had managed to establish some minimal rules after World War II, the NPT’s ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament might have been achievable.
The other concern involves deep uncertainty. This is such a new world that even those working on AI do not know where their inventions will ultimately take us. A law enacted with the best intentions can still backfire. When America’s founders drafted the Second Amendment conferring the “right to keep and bear arms,” they could not have known how firearms technology would change in the future, thereby changing the very meaning of the word “arms.” Nor did they foresee how their descendants would fail to realize this even after seeing the change.
But uncertainty does not justify fatalism. Policymakers can still effectively govern the unknown as long as they keep certain broad considerations in mind. For example, one idea that came up during a recent Senate hearing was to create a licensing system whereby only select corporations would be permitted to work on AI.
This approach comes with some obvious risks of its own. Licensing can often be a step toward cronyism, so we would also need new laws to deter politicians from abusing the system. Moreover, slowing your country’s AI development with additional checks does not mean that others will adopt similar measures. In the worst case, you may find yourself facing adversaries wielding precisely the kind of malevolent tools that you eschewed. That is why AI is best regulated multilaterally, even if that is a tall order in today’s world…(More)”.
Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy
Article by Martin Wolf: “…our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned against the spirit of faction. He argued that the “alternate domination of one faction over another . . . is itself a frightful despotism. But . . . The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual”. If one looks at the US today, that peril is evident. In current electoral politics, manipulation of the emotions of a rationally ill-informed electorate is the path to power. The outcome is likely to be rule by those with the greatest talent for demagogy.
Elections are necessary. But unbridled majoritarianism is a disaster. A successful liberal democracy requires constraining institutions: independent oversight over elections, an independent judiciary and an independent bureaucracy. But are they enough? No. In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media…(More)”.
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Paper by Braley, A., Lenz, G.S., Adjodah, D. et al.: “Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behaviour is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy…(More)”
Actualizing Digital Self Determination: From Theory to Practice
Blog by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “The world is undergoing a rapid process of datafication, providing immense potential for addressing various challenges in society and the environment through responsible data reuse. However, datafication also results in imbalances, asymmetries, and silos that hinder the full realization of this potential and pose significant public policy challenges. In a recent paper, I suggest a key way to address these asymmetries–through a process of operationalizing digital self-determination. The paper, published open access in the journal Data and Policy (Cambridge University Press), is built around four key themes:…
Operationalizing DSD requires translating theoretical concepts into practical implementation. The paper proposes a four-pronged framework that covers processes, people and organizations, policies, products and technologies:
- Processes include citizen engagement programs, public deliberations, and participatory impact assessments, can inform responsible data use.
- People and organizations, including data stewards and intermediaries, play a vital role in fostering a culture of data agency and responsible data reuse.
- Effective governance and policies, such as charters, social licenses, and codes of conduct, are key for implementing DSD.
- Finally, technological tools and products need to focus on trusted data spaces, data portability, privacy-enhancing technologies, transparency, consent management, algorithmic accountability, and ethical AI….(More)” See also: International Network on Digital Self Determination.
