Is Virtual Reality the Future of Democracy?
How design, linguistics, and mushrooms can show the way forward.
Have you been convinced? Is democracy a technical affair best left to those with the precise skills to legislate?
Or could it be like nature — an act of creation.
In the coming years, emerging technologies and global challenges will require us to answer one species-defining question after another, maybe even all at once.
From climate change creating hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, to bio-hacking and gene-editing, to artificial intelligence, we will soon be called upon to find a way to govern ourselves collectively; on a global scale, and at a speed that can only be engendered by an effort to achieve true democracy, and Universal Sovereignty.
Just one problem: we don’t yet know how to make complex decisions together even when in assembly, let alone on a global scale. How can we ever hope of making obsolete, the outdated decision-making apparatus that excludes most of humanity?
According to Rousseau, the key is decision-making that best expedites affairs:
“…when the functions of government are shared by several tribunals, the less numerous sooner or later acquire the greatest authority, if only because they are in a position to expedite affairs, and power thus naturally comes into their hands.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Could this explain the juxtaposition between our collective frustration at a lack of political power, and the willingness of many to give it away to technocratic billionaires and autocratic strongmen?
Does power naturally move towards the autocratic, or does it simply favour those who can most easily actuate it?
It is for this reason we must create a more efficient form of collective legislation; whereby the People can make complex decisions together and learn to govern more effectively than any one leader.
But what are its features?
The Design
Could true democracy be an art?
In the Social Contract, Rousseau explains that the People being sovereign, create laws by asserting the “General Will” — their collective interests as citizens, synthesized in assembly.
They execute on those laws by way of the government body — an agent of the “public force” — which makes them binding to all individuals as subjects; making the People both sovereign and subject to the laws they created.
So, wait, law-making is just saying what you want in a group?
In assembly, yes. Legislation is a “declaration of the General Will”; a collective act whereby citizens in official assembly communicate their particular wills and amalgamate them into a general will, which is then declared as law.
The startling insight of this explanation is that decision-making is not entirely synonymous with legislation but rather a product of it. Decisions happen as a result of acting on our vision, as art does through a craft.
Rather than make individual decisions sequentially through traditional forms of bureaucracy, could we instead engage ourselves in envisioning and actualizing our intended society as a creative act? Would this not be impractical?
As Rousseau points out, the ancient Athenians — whose vigilance in preserving democracy was so stark that they even opposed elections for fear that it could leave them vulnerable to manipulation by the rich, and instead preferred sortition(election by lottery) — were constantly assembled in their town square, shaping the society on an active basis.
Today, virtual reality can create spaces in which people can interact with one another physically, across the world; augmented reality even can allow participants to re-imagine the real world through the virtual.
Douglas Rushkoff describes the “cyberpunk” possibilities of VR:
It would be a technology for enacting what science fiction author William Gibson called “the consensual hallucination” — a shared space conjured up by the thoughts of everyone within it. We called it “virtual reality” because we truly saw it as a test run for virtual reality.
We cyberpunks actually believed — and maybe we all still should — that this ability to collectively dream things into existence could be learned and practiced in real life.
What if declaring the general will of society was as simple as creatively reshaping a virtual version of the world based on our interests as citizens?What if you could see the effect of a law and how it would shape your community?
What if the whole of society was actively engaged in its improvement?
The Language
In linguistics, a core effort is to identify universal grammar; those characteristics universal among humans out of which emerges the capacity for language. And since these universal characteristics are some of the few in reach of empirical investigation, they are also — as some theorists have posited — the key to understanding and identifying the basis of human nature itself.
As famed linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky puts it:
Language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use, provides the basic criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the human capacity for free thought and self-expression, and with the essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of repressive authority.
Furthermore, we might try to proceed from the detailed investigation of language and its use to a deeper and more specific understanding of the human mind. Proceeding on this model, we might further attempt to study other aspects of that human nature which, as Rousseau rightly observes, must be correctly conceived if we are to be able to develop, in theory, the foundations for a rational social order.
— Noam Chomsky, Language and Freedom
The implications are fascinating. Creativity distinguishes Humanity’s distinct intelligence in the natural world as it is the Creative faculty that allows for language, and language itself indicates creativity.
Creativity holds innately the essential need for freedom, both to exercise creativity, and thus for “freedom from repressive constraints”; language also allows for the creative use of it, and freedom itself.
As such, it goes to say that the greatest political freedom is that of having creative access to the social order (society). The creative faculty of society/community is Legislative power = sovereignty, which is acted upon through the declaration of the General Will (the common interests of the collective), and carried out through executive acts (governmental functions).
If the basis for human nature itself is of creativity, then is not democracy in its truest form a collective act of artistic expression?
In a world where bringing together the entirety of humanity in assembly is a feasible — though highly aspirational — task of engineering, it is time to reclaim our inalienable right of sovereignty to decide for ourselves the direction of our communities.
The Speculation
In the same way trees utilize the Mycelial network (the network of fungi in soil and organic matter integral to the function of most ecosystems) to communicate and share resources based on the needs of the forest, we might one day employ the virtual world to network among ourselves.
As Artificial Intelligence undertakes the burden of intellectual work, and precipitates the emergence of brain-computer-interfaces that afford individuals the ability to interface with computers, and eventually, A.I. itself, its first requirement will call on us to learn how.
Given that the human capacity for language emerges out of an innate creative faculty, and learning language is a creative act, perhaps any such intuitive capacity would be creative in nature.
What if acting together in democracy through learning how to interact with Virtual Reality provides the creative basis for learning how to synergize with A.I.? Could our social development finally catch up to our technological progress?
Could Virtual Reality become the mycelium of our social order, mimicking the intuitive decision-making process that occurs organically under our feet, all the time?
Why it Matters
Lucid dreamers — depending on how practiced they are — can use the awareness of their dream-state to create whole scenarios, abilities, and even worlds with just their intent; the experience becomes exhilarating because it is one of discovery rather than imagination.
They experience zero creative latency; the ability to let ideas conceived come into being simultaneously; inspiration and discovery all at once.
As we face exponential change and global challenges, it is imperative we learn to govern ourselves together with the creative capacity to respond just as intuitively.
It is in this way that we can prepare for a world that no longer prioritizes technical expertise as the highest form of contributing to society; by realizing our universal nature as creative beings acting together to improve the world and ourselves.
