Despite Its Problems, Network Technology Can Help Renew Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Daniel Araya: “The impact of digital technologies on contemporary economic and social development has been nothing short of revolutionary. The rise of the internet has transformed the way we share content, buy and sell goods, and manage our institutions. But while the hope of the internet has been its capacity to expand human connection and bring people together, the reality has often been something else entirely.

When social media networks first emerged about a decade ago, they were hailed as “technologies of liberation” with the capacity to spread democracy. While these social networks have undeniably democratized access to information, they have also helped to stimulate social and political fragmentation, eroding the discursive fibres that hold democracies together.

Prior to the internet, news and media were the domain of professional journalists, overseen by powerful experts, and shaped by gatekeepers. However, in the age of the internet, platforms circumvent the need for gatekeepers altogether. Bypassing the centralized distribution channels that have served as a foundation to mass industrial societies, social networks have begun reshaping the way democratic societies build consensus. Given the importance of discourse to democratic self-government, concern is growing that democracy is failing…(More)”.

Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sophia Psarra, Uta Staiger, and Claudia Sternberg: “As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.

Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?

This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history…(More)”

Cities are ramping up to make the most of generative AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Citylab: “Generative artificial intelligence promises to transform the way we work, and city leaders are taking note. According to a recent survey by Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the Centre for Public Impact, the vast majority of mayors (96 percent) are interested in how they can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT—which rely on machine learning to identify patterns in data and create, or generate, new content after being fed prompts—to improve local government. Of those cities surveyed, 69 percent report that they are already exploring or testing the technology. Specifically, they’re interested in how it can help them more quickly and successfully address emerging challenges with traffic and transportation, infrastructure, public safety, climate, education, and more.  

Yet even as a majority of city leaders surveyed are exploring generative AI’s potential, only a small fraction of them (2 percent) are actively deploying the technology. They indicated there are a number of issues getting in the way of broader implementation, including a lack of technical expertise, budgetary constraints, and ethical considerations like security, privacy, and transparency…(More)”.

City Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ramon Gras, and Jeremy Burke: “The Aretian team, a spin off company from the Harvard Innovation Lab, has developed a city science methodology to evaluate the relationship between city form and urban performance. This book illuminates the relationship between a city’s spatial design and quality of life it affords for the general population. By measuring innovation economies to design Innovation Districts, social networks and patterns to help form organization patterns, and city topology, morphology, entropy and scale to create 15 Minute Cities are some of the frameworks presented in this volume.
Therefore, urban designers, architects and engineers will be able to successfully tackle complex urban design challenges by using the authors’ frameworks and findings in their own work. Case studies help to present key insights from advanced, data-driven geospatial analyses of cities around the world in an illustrative manner. This inaugural book by Aretian Urban Analytics and Design will give readers a new set of tools to learn from, expand, and develop for the healthy growth of cities and regions around the world…(More)”.

Networked Press Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mike Ananny: “…offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public’s freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny’s notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear.

Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today’s press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” Ananny urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike…(More)”.

Markets and the Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue by Jay Tolson: “How, then, do we think beyond what has come to be the tyranny of economics—or perhaps more accurately, how do we put economics in its proper place? Coming at these questions from different angles and different first principles, our authors variously dissect formative economic doctrines (see Kyle Edward Williams, “The Myth of the Friedman Doctrine”) and propose restoring the genius of the American system of capitalism (Jacob Soll, “Hamilton’s System”) or revising the purpose and priorities of the corporation (Michael Lind, “Profit, Power, and Purpose”). Others, in turn, prescribe restraints for the excesses of liberalism (Deirdre Nansen McCloskey “An Economic Theology of Liberalism”) or even an alternative to it, in the restoration of “common good” thinking associated with subsidiarity (Andrew Willard Jones, “Friendship and the Common Good”). Yet others examine how “burnout” and “emotional labor” became status markers and signs of virtue that weaken solidarity among workers of all kinds (Jonathan Malesic, “How We Obscure the Common Plight of Workers”) or the subtle ways in which we have reduced ourselves to cogs in our economic system (Sarah M. Brownsberger, “Name Your Industry—Or Else!”). Collectively, our authors suggest, the reluctance to question and rethink our fundamental economic assumptions and institutions—and their relation to other goods—may pose the greatest threat to real prosperity and human flourishing…(More)”.

The Open Sky

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lars Erik Schönander: “Any time you walk outside, satellites may be watching you from space. There are currently more than 8,000 active satellites in orbit, including over a thousand designed to observe the Earth.

Satellite technology has come a long way since its secretive inception during the Cold War, when a country’s ability to successfully operate satellites meant not only that it was capable of launching rockets into Earth orbit but that it had eyes in the sky. Today not only governments across the world but private enterprises too launch satellites, collect and analyze satellite imagery, and sell it to a range of customers, from government agencies to the person on the street. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites bring the Internet to places where conventional coverage is spotty or compromised. Satellite data allows the United States to track rogue ships and North Korean missile launches, while scientists track wildfires, floods, and changes in forest cover.

The industry’s biggest technical challenge, aside from acquiring the satellite imagery itself, has always been to analyze and interpret it. This is why new AI tools are set to drastically change how satellite imagery is used — and who uses it. For instance, Meta’s Segment Anything Model, a machine-learning tool designed to “cut out” discrete objects from images, is proving highly effective at identifying objects in satellite images.

But the biggest breakthrough will likely come from large language models — tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — that may soon allow ordinary people to query the Earth’s surface the way data scientists query databases. Achieving this goal is the ambition of companies like Planet Labs, which has launched hundreds of satellites into space and is working with Microsoft to build what it calls a “queryable Earth.” At this point, it is still easy to dismiss their early attempt as a mere toy. But as the computer scientist Paul Graham once noted, if people like a new invention that others dismiss as a toy, this is probably a good sign of its future success.

This means that satellite intelligence capabilities that were once restricted to classified government agencies, and even now belong only to those with bountiful money or expertise, are about to be open to anyone with an Internet connection…(More)”.

Enhancing the European Administrative Space (ComPAct)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “Efficient national public administrations are critical to transform EU and national policies into reality, to implement reforms to the benefit of people and business alike, and to channel investments towards the achievement of the green and digital transition, and greater competitiveness. At the same time, national public administrations are also under an increasing pressure to deal with polycrisis and with many competing priorities. 

For the first time, with the ComPAct, the Commission is proposing a strategic set of actions not only to support the public administrations in the Member States to become more resilient, innovative and skilled, but also to strengthen the administrative cooperation between them, thereby allowing to close existing gaps in policies and services at European level.

With the ComPAct, the Commission aims to enhance the European Administrative Space by promoting a common set of overarching principles underpinning the quality of public administration and reinforcing its support for the administrative modernisation of the Member States. The ComPAct will help Member States address the EU Skills Agenda and the actions under the European Year of Skills, deliver on the targets of the Digital Decade to have 100% of key public services accessible online by 2030, and shape the conditions for the economies and societies to deliver on the ambitious 2030 climate and energy targets. The ComPAct will also help EU enlargement countries on their path to building better public administrations…(More)”.

Learning Like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marion Fourcade and Jeff Gordon: “What does it mean to sense, see, and act like a state in the digital age? We examine the changing phenomenology, governance, and capacity of the state in the era of big data and machine learning. Our argument is threefold. First, what we call the dataist state may be less accountable than its predecessor, despite its promise of enhanced transparency and accessibility. Second, a rapid expansion of the data collection mandate is fueling a transformation in political rationality, in which data affordances increasingly drive policy strategies. Third, the turn to dataist statecraft facilitates a corporate reconstruction of the state. On the one hand, digital firms attempt to access and capitalize on data “minted” by the state. On the other hand, firms compete with the state in an effort to reinvent traditional public functions. Finally, we explore what it would mean for this dataist state to “see like a citizen” instead…(More)”.

Shifting policy systems – a framework for what to do and how to do it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by UK Policy Lab: “Systems change is hard work, and it takes time. The reality is that no single system map or tool is enough to get you from point A to point B, from system now to system next. Over the last year, we have explored the latest in systems change theory and applied it to policymaking. In this four part blog series, we share our reflections on the wealth of knowledge we’ve gained working on intractable issues surrounding how support is delivered for people experiencing multiple disadvantage. Along the way, we realised that we need to make new tools to support policy teams to do this deep work in the future, and to see afresh the limitations of existing mental models for change and transformation.

Policy Lab has previously written about systems mapping as a useful process for understanding the interconnected nature of factors and actors that make up policy ecosystems. Here, we share our latest experimentation on how we can generate practical ideas for long-lasting and systemic change.

This blog includes:

  • An overview of what we did on our latest project – including the policy context, systems change frameworks we experimented with, and the bespoke project framework we created;
  • Our reflections on how we carried out the project;
  • A matrix which provides a practical guide for you to use this approach in your own work…(More)”.