People sometimes forget that democracy is by construction always imperfect, it is a forever unfinished system. There are numerous examples of current democratic systems being weakened by various kinds of technological, cultural or societal evolution. There are also new international challenges like the effects of globalization or the climate crisis, which are currently handled by cross-national entities made of government delegates with moderate success and often questionable democratic mandate. At many levels, there are doubts whether the traditional tools for governing are really suited for decisions which could profoundly impact people. A few attempts have been experimented, like participatory democracy, citizen assemblies or petitioning a government, but the inertia is understandably very strong.
The potential of modern technology to contribute to democratic processes is almost untapped, although the means of communication as well as the volume have skyrocketed. The poor commercial value but also the inertia of societies (especially of political systems) probably contribute to this dearth of innovation. Nevertheless traditional political systems may face serious challenges in the future, some might even collapse. There are also multiple other applications of collegial decision-making where existing tools are very basic and limited. This is why it would be wise to design and develop these future tools of democracy in the near future, rather than waiting to see if and when they happen to be direly needed.
To clarify, simple vote counting is not enough, of course; democratic decision-making processes are actually fairly complex: they require rules to organize the development of vague ideas into objectively defined “laws”, including organizing debates where different opinions can be expressed within a regulated framework, so that the optimal outcome is reached. Technology allows exploring alternatives to existing political systems, it can simplify many steps in the process, increase transparency and encourage participation for citizens by making it more accessible. Of course this would bring important issues too. Moreover, the real value of any democratic system lies in its acceptation by society as a reasonably good representation of its ideas, as a trustable institution. It can take a long time and multiple cycles of “experimental politics” for a democratic system to be adopted, for a society to develop a feeling of ownership with their “institutions”. This is why it makes sense to start building and experimenting with new technology-based tools for democratic processes as soon as possible.
Online collaborative projects
The Internet hosts various collaborative projects. The most famous example is certainly Wikipedia; the StackExchange question-answering sites (including StackOverflow) and a few others are also well known, but there is a multitude of little-known projects as well. Open-source software is a major area where people contribute on their free time to projects, sometimes of very high quality. In fact, even social media platforms are partially collaborative in nature, in the sense that the content is produced by non-professional users who contribute mostly as a hobby.
New technologies allow people to communicate, create and share for no or very little cost, something which was previously impossible. Nowadays a lot of this happens on social media platforms, where the added value of the content is often questionable (there is no question about the added value for the social media companies and advertisers, of course). But in other virtual spaces, a lot of people are also happy to contribute to various projects as a hobby, enjoying the teamwork and the feeling of participating to something for the common good. This is the tech equivalent of a community gathering to build or maintain communal goods for the benefit of everyone.
When contrasting “common good” or “shared passion” projects against the main commercial social media platforms, multiple differences are striking. First the two kinds of activity are fundamentally opposed in their objectives: a business philosophy targeted at mass-market on one side, against a kind of grassroots philosophy where a self-empowered group of people sharing a common passion join forces. Collaborative projects rely mostly on humans to curate and moderate the content, resulting in slow pace and low volume but usually high quality content which keeps most of its value across time. By contrast, social media users produce a huge volume of often poor quality data, most of which is meant for immediate consumption and loses value quickly. Contributors and users also tend to have radically different feelings: social media platforms tend to generate a lot of of negative emotion and even societal turmoil (cyber-bullying, disinformation, social media addiction, etc.), whereas both contributors and users of collaborative content are often enthusiastic about their project, they feel proud and empowered.
Decision making in medium to large size communities
The fertile ground of online community projects offers an ideal field of application for building and experimenting virtual tools for democratic decision-making; these projects very often need such tools for their own decision-making. It is fairly common that some participants become disgruntled at a decision perceived as made in an authoritian way, and leave the project. Occasionally projects can fall apart by lack of a well accepted decision-making process, especially in the early stage of a project. In other words, for these projects to keep their contributors and flourish, it is crucial that participants keep a feeling of ownership about the project.
Naturally, these communities are well equipped to test, improve, tune their own version of a system. In fact, it is likely that some of the software-oriented communities would be interested in participating to the implementation of these tools.
The Fediverse is a set of interconnected servers used as a non-commercial social media infrastructure. Mastodon, which is probably the most popular application relying on the Fediverse, is a free and open-source software mostly used for microblogging. In 2022, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter caused a significant exodus to Mastodon (incidentally illustrating the issue of relying on commercial platforms for free speech: if it can be bought, then it probably is not a reliable support for democratic values). The decentralized nature of the network guarantees some level of democratic flexibility. This rich ecosystem can be a great terrain for experimenting new democratic tools for discussion, moderation, policing, or disinformation. Local “real-life” communities could also benefit from such tools, facilitating constructive discussion and decision-making in a more flexible way.
Technology and society
In the past two decades, technology has been driven by big-tech companies which have the resources needed to innovate\footnote{It is worth noting that technological breakthoughs in AI have been mostly due to these companies.} and to deploy products on a global scale. Commercial companies have an obvious interest in rationalizing costs, centralized control, homogeneous processes across their network. As a consequence, there was comparatively little effort made to develop technology which relies heavily on human resources and runs on decentralized architectures. In other words, the technology which fits cooperative and democratic usages is under-developed, simply by lack of commercial interest. I think that this is a gap that academic research can fill, and potentially bring improvement on a societal level.