The Move Podcast S1E1: Welcome to The Move Podcast!

Welcome to The Move Podcast Season 1!

This episode kicks off Season 1 by introducing the theme of the season — How do we build a new civic infrastructure that allows for a more complex public to do the work it needs to do for a fair and just society to be created? With co-hosts Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy, The Move Season 1 tackles eight different types of conversations that need to be had to better engage with our increasingly diverse communities and cities.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ceasar: How do we build a new civic infrastructure that allows this complex public to actually do the work it needs to do for a fair and just society to be created.

Ayushi: How do you design for collaboration? For equity? For the people that aren’t heard for people to be able to feel healed in that hearing process?

Ceasar: We actually know how to do those things.

Ayushi: I’m Ayushi Roy.

And I’m Ceasar McDowell. And welcome to The Move.

Ayushi: Coming out of MIT.

Ceasar: You’ve lived in different cities. I’ve lived in different cities. I can tell you, in every one of those cities I’ve been to, there’s been some announcement about some plan for the future -

Ayushi: Right.

Ceasar: — that they rolled out for the public to come to.

Ayushi: Yeah.

Ceasar: The time you show up at the meeting people have already decided what the options are. And your only -

Ayushi: They decided before you got there.

Ceasar: Yeah! And your only participation is to kind of choose among options that people who have a vested interest decdide is what you should choose across.

Ayushi: Like, the voting booth is dead.

Ceasar: Yeah.

Ayushi: And it’s one of the only ways that government can ever get a pulse of their people. Google is [00:01:00] getting our pulse every single second of the day. Every click of the day.

Ceasar: Every click of the day.

Ayushi: And government has no way of measuring even by proxy how we’re feeling.

Ceasar: Yeah, and I think that’s a piece I really want to problematize in this, too the need for Big Democracy as a counterbalance the Big Data.

Ayushi: Yeah.

Ceasar: Because the public has been so complex and cities now, instead of dealing with that complexity with the human part of that complexity, what they’re doing is dealing with the data that they’re complexity throws off. And they’re trying to make decisions about people based on the places they visit, the clicks they make, the other kinds of data information they have. But that’s not all who people are.

And in order for people to build a more equitable and just society to live in, then they have to be really in that, totally. Right? But their voices, their experience — their lived experiences, their imperfections and everything. And negotiating that with each other. They can’t have [00:02:00] someone else negotiate for them. The public needs to negotiate that with itself. And unfortunately, we don’t have a system in our society that allows that to happen, right?

So right here, on The Move, we’re going to move the conversation on democracy to the real issue, which is: how do we build a new civic infrastructure that allows this complex public to actually do the work it needs to do for a fair and just society to be created.

Sound Tech: Okay. (laughter)

Originally published at https://themove.mit.edu on July 13, 2018.