A foresight exercise about the future of citizen participation renewing the democracy
While doing the introductory course on futures thinking from the Institute For The Future (https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-to-futures-thinking/), I was asked to decide over 2 "futures" to use as topics for the course, and one was "politics", that I definitely love. As I have a small exercise there I wondered "why not share it on Medium?", so here it is.
Peer-graded Assignment: Collect and analyze a signal!
1. What future topic are you investigating?
The future topic being investigate is Politics, mainly about how people can be directly connected to the policy making, instead of having “full time politicians” as intermediaries.
2. Add a link to a SIGNAL of this future.
https://medium.com/@samkeate/direct-democracy-the-future-of-democracy-b95cf043ef4a
3. Describe the signal in your own words.
Talking about politics, a topic that is getting more and more traction all over the world is “how can so many people feel like they have been cheated by the same political system (representative democracy)”? The system is either broken or rigged from the start. In any case, it seems that politics is not keeping up with the complex demands of evolving societies.
As an alternative to the lack of representativity, many movements all around the world have been creating direct participation systems that works as experiments of a direct democracy, that can be one path to go.
4. What kind of change does this signal represent? From WHAT to WHAT?
It represents a change from a world where people have intermediaries to decide laws and public policies, a system that creates distance, reduce empathy and promote larger scale corruption, to a world where each people will be able to directly participate on the building of decisions or give and take their “vote” anytime they want, instead of having to wait for the usual 4 years of a politician mandate.
5. What’s driving this change? What’s one “future force” behind it?
Since the Occupy Wall Street movement we have seen the rise of descentralized decision tools (Appgree, Democracy OS, Loomio, to cite a few), used by political movements all over the world. The future force behind is both the technology, internet itself and the lowering costs of creating apps that can handle millions of users, and the social aspect that the “social technology” called representative democracy is no longer keeping up with the complexity of our world.
6. What might the world be like in 10 years if this signal gets bigger? If it’s common and widespread?
A world where direct democracy is largely available can be one more empathetic, connected as a bigger network, but focused on multiple local governments, where people are directly involved and feel the pros and cons of each decision made.
On the trail of such addoption, more studies around new governance models like Deep Democracy and Quadratic Voting arise and consolidate to help bring balance to the debates and voting, like avoiding people to decide over matters that doesn’t affect them directly or being neglecting about topics they don’t understand.
The “dictatorship of the majority” will have an end and minorities will get more and better represented.
7. Is this a future you want to help make? Or a future you want to prevent? Why?
Definitely a desirable future that I wanna help make it happen, as it’s clear that our planet and many living beings haven’t been able to have a say on the current political system.
Nice that you read it till the end! hehe
Thanks and let me know if you have any inputs (even in portuguese — I only wrote it in english cause everything on the course is in EN)
