Democracy and its possibilities in the age of technology.
Volunteer Rie Takeuchi interviews Citizen OS CEO Margo Loor on democracy, its evolution in the context of technology, and how can we embrace the possibilities to shift societies towards eDemocracy and participatory democracy.
Let’s start from the beginning. What is democracy?
It’s a sociopolitical system of government, where the ultimate power rests with the citizens. Democracy can be practiced on many levels — a village can have democratic decision-making and so can a company, but we often think of democracy first on the national level. In which case, it means that the people of a country get to decide about the laws of their country. Occasionally, this can be practiced directly, as is the case with referenda.
Switzerland is the most famous example, where people get to directly vote on how their country is run about 10 times per year.
More often, though, people practice their power via elected representatives. Once every 4 years, for example, people elect members of a parliament, who then make legislative decisions in the name of the people. The exact system varies from country to country, but representative democracy is today the most widely practiced form. Also, when we say democracy, we often mean western democracy, although many other forms are used around the world. Western democracy, in addition to electing representatives, is also characterised by a separation of powers, the rule of law, an open society, a market economy and the equal protection of human rights and civil rights for all people. So on the face of it, democracy appears simple, but it quickly gets more complex once you look into it.
What is the best practice of realising democracy in the current society?
(He laughs). Haha, there is no magic one-size-fits-all answer, unfortunately! From Switzerland to Japan to the UK to the US to India democracy looks different, because there are numerous cultural and historic variables that must be taken into account. Democracy has evolved and is evolving in different directions, influenced by these variables.
However, in many parts of the world, we see an increased interest and willingness by people to be more involved in democracy. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that many people are far more educated today than they were a century or two ago. Information, also, is much more widely and freely available. Another factor is time; people have more free time today than ever before. So one of the best practices today is giving people more chance to be involved in democratic decision-making.
Technology is also having a substantial impact.
Younger people will no longer go to a physical ballot box, do not read newspapers and do not belong to NGOs. But they are happy to start and sign online petitions, make micro-donations and discuss issues on social media.
Democracy has to accommodate this, which is what we’re working on at Citizen OS — to create solutions for democracy in the digital society.
How many countries currently succeed in achieving democracy? What is the role of democracy in future societies?
Democracy, as we understand it, only works when combined with an open society — in which citizens are guaranteed their human and civil rights, including freedom of speech.
I think about 1/5 of the world’s countries are currently fully democratic, and a further fifth have a somewhat limited democracy. In that sense, democracy is not some future utopia that we strive towards; in many societies it is a daily reality. However, even in those truly democratic countries, we are currently observing several crises of democracy — input, output and throughput legitimacy crises, etc.
Therefore, some more interesting questions exist around what kind of democracy is suitable for increasingly technological societies, how to solve the existing crises, and how to help citizens achieve democracy in countries, where they so wish.
Currently, parliamentary democracy — a form of representative democracy — is the most commonly practiced form. I think the ongoing crises indicate that this is not consistent with emerging technological and educational realities. For the future, we must therefore find new, more inclusive, more deliberative forms of democracy, which combine representative elements with more directly participative ones.
It seems that society has been transformed dramatically along with the development of technology.
One thing we should realise is that the development and implementation of technologies in society doesn’t directly bring the natural emergence of new forms of democracy.
The biggest example is the Internet. It seems to allow people to have more voice and greater direct participation. However, it turns out to not always be the case, because of issues related to security, equity and policy.
Also, technological development almost always outpaces social developments. Younger generations have grown up with IT, and it forms a natural part of their thinking and behaviour. Older generations, even though they might be reading news online or using e-banking, are very much living pre-IT lives. Many of them prefer face-to-face meetings, paper notebooks and using cash. And our democratic practices stem from many centuries ago, so it takes time for people to change, and even more time for societies to change. Yes, technology has had an impact, but I would say more dramatic technology-induced social transformations still lie in wait.
This, by the way, is also part of the reason why making a very forceful change into a digital, online democracy is not doable in most countries today. It would traumatise many people — excluding and leaving them behind. The switch to e-democracy needs to be a gradual process, starting with petitions and 1% participatory budgets. It’s too early to start dissolving any parliaments yet.
Do you think technologies can contribute to creating a new form of democracy?
Yes.
Two millennia ago, at the fountain of democracy in Ancient Greek city states, it was possible for all male free citizens to gather on the agora to jointly make decisions. With larger, more populous states, which had more people obtaining civil liberties, but also toiling on fields or in factories, and later in offices, physically meeting to discuss matters of the nation was no longer possible. Thus, representatives had to be elected; it was the only way for most people to politically express their will.
With the advent of information technology, it is once again possible for everyone to connect with everyone else.
Decisions can jointly be discussed and made online, without the need to gather physically. This is the new quality of connectedness that technology has created, and which can help realise a more inclusive, more deliberative democracy.
You established Citizen OS four years ago. How do you view the steps you have taken during these four years?
I should say there are no fixed models or clear paths to the new form of inclusive democracy in a highly techno-developed society. What we are doing at the Citizen OS Foundation, together with our partners and volunteers, is mapping the steps, testing and inventing the way forward.
When we first developed our platform, and started to work to build the e-petition platform for Estonian Parliament in collaboration with Eesti Koostöö Kogu, we did not know where the path would lead us next. The vision is also being created step by step. We’ve been very fortunate to have partners — political and civic movements, researchers and academics — who use Citizen OS, request features, critique it and ultimately, take us toward to a better model.
Recently, we had a local petition from the city of Narva in Estonia posted on Citizen OS. They had a good discussion and gathered signatures through our platform. It’s an example of a grassroots, co-creating decision-making process among inhabitants of a city and an example of one form of participatory democracy. If someone had told me four years ago that this will happen, I’m not sure I would have believed it.
It’s a constant learning journey and I’m very grateful to all those who journey alongside us.
What do you think about the future of democracy?
On a personal level, I hope my kids will one day enjoy the same level of human and civil rights and open society that I have been fortunate to be a part of, but that they will have far more opportunities to partake in the decisions on how their country, their town and their community is run.
On a national or global level, we don’t have many fixed ideas about it. We’ll take a few steps at a time, test them out with our partners, and see what works. Still, the trends are visible — more expectation of involvement by better educated people with more time on their hands, making more use of technology (including machine learning), and with more information (but sadly also misinformation) available.
An important, but unknown factor right now is the fate of globalisation. The problem with global institutions like the UN, the World Bank, the WTO and many others, is that these institutions significantly impact peoples’ lives, but democratic control over them is weak or very indirect. In Estonia, the parliament directly elected by the people has little say in legislation that comes from the EU, where policy is made by many unelected officials. Maybe globalisation as we understand it today will be scaled back and this will not be as much of a problem.
Personally, I think globalisation will continue to increase, and then we need a way to make these global structures more democratic. But how that is going to happen is anybody’s guess right now.
Going further into the future, there’s a few exciting ideas that I would invite everyone to think about. One is the combination of human and machine intelligence to make the best possible decisions. A century ago, we mostly did not have data to make informed political choices about energy production, tax levels, public health, etc. In the age of big data, the information is there. It is now up to our decision-making systems to make the best use of that data. An increasing body of evidence shows that the human brain alone is not well equipped to handle complexity and big data. How we are going to combine biological and artificial intelligence to achieve the best decisions is a very big, but also a very interesting, challenge.
Another idea to play with is vote liquidity. What if your vote was as liquid as your money? Right now, you give your vote once every 4 years to a political party or a representative.
Perhaps in the future, you will be able to delegate your vote to one representative in energy issues, to another in health issues, while using it yourself in education issues.
Sometimes you could decide to delegate your vote for an extended period of time, while you are on vacation, but on an issue of special interest to you, you could override your representative and use your vote yourself. In other words, there would be no permanent or semi-permanent representatives. Votes would constantly flow from one person to another based on issues, discussions and the best arguments. The implications of this on government structures, accountability issues, even political philosophy are profound.
However, if all this leads to higher quality decisions and an improved quality of life for us and the rest of the planet, then it’s a journey well worth taking. Join us!
The interviewer, Rie Takeuchi, volunteered with Citizen OS Foundation for three months, from December 2018 to February 2019.
Citizen OS Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing free open source civic tech and building a worldwide civic hacktivist network. The Citizen OS platform enables participative discussion and delegative voting. Ideal for e-democracy initiatives, online meetings, e-voting and petitions.
Find out more at: www.citizenos.com or follow the Citizen OS Facebook Page. For more details on the design work featured above, visit the DUX website.
