Concrete Achievements

Category: Democracy

  • Don’t call me stupid!

    Geoff Mulgan proposes sensible solutions to the problem of organised disinformation in his recent blog post, but the “collective stupidity” framing is self-sabotaging.

    Someone else who doesn’t like being called stupid. (Kevin Kline and John Cleese in “A Fish Called Wanda”

    The article, “Collective Stupidity is a Security Threat” recommends taking greater action to build collective defences against “cognitive warfare” – a combination of epistemic risk and disinformation, both on technical and social fronts.

    As well as better regulation of AI and of social media information flows, he proposes a strategy of “cognitive rearmament” including by giving people the skills to recognise fake information and manipulation. Finally, he argues that we need new information and social institutions to support truth, and new laws to preserve it.

    I agree with pretty much every word of this, but I am less convinced, indeed a bit repelled, by the overall framing of “collective stupidity”, which appears also to be the framing of his forthcoming book.

    As a democrat, I don’t think that people are stupid, still less stupider than they were, they are just people, and you need to work with them as they are.

    Geoff proposes various reasons for thinking that people in democracies have become more stupid. I’m not convinced. Declining PISA scores are certainly a concern, though it’s not simple to link them to intelligence, and IQ scores are little better than phrenology as a metric of intelligence.

    Most of all, I know myself. I know how (outside my own specialisms in politics and democracy) I am no better informed than the person in the street.

    Perhaps – perhaps – I have a slightly better-attuned bullshit detector from having worked so long on policy – but then I find myself swallowing a plausible news story that’s debunked hours later. Everyone is susceptible to the temptation of a good story that aligns with our preferences.

    But even if people were more stupid than they used to be, on some measure we could devise, it’s poor strategy to make the argument in these terms.

    The piece argues, rightly, that huge resources are being put into cognitive warfare – making people believe untrue things and act on those beliefs. Those come from motivated actors, whether from political or commercial motives.

    Calling the targets of that activity “stupid” has a sour taste of victim-blaming. If we were in a shooting war, rather than a cognitive war, would anyone other than Donald Trump call the fallen soldiers “weak”?

    Perhaps this seems like a minor point, even hypersensitive, but there are practical consequenes.

    A “collective stupidity” approach reduces the range of possible solutions, by assuming that the people themselves have no stones to bring to the wall.

    The corollary of collective stupidity is technocracy and paternalism – both of which are wide open to corruption by big money and big information.

    Instead, we need to bring people together, to act collectively – not against disinformation in those terms, but in favour of truth, democracy and collective purpose.

    In doing that, government action is important, but it cannot work on its own. The trust of the 1990s has gone, and it’s not going to come back if institutions still work in a top-down Whitehall-knows-best way.

    Only organised people can stand up to organised money. The cognitive war is hard enough to win as it is – let’s not create frames that see the public as our enemies not our allies.

  • Reading: The Nerd Reich

    Finished Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, which is a history of the last twenty years or so in Silicon Valley, and how the PayPal Mafia and other technologists turned against governments and liberalism.

    I am perhaps closer to democratic decay conversations that the average reader, but there wasn’t much in here I didn’t know in one form or another, stitched together into a multi-year story of how Peter Thiel and the people around him reached the positions of wealth and power that they have today.

    The title will tell you this isn’t a fawning biography, Durán – a journalist and political adviser to a number of Democrats – is rightly angry and concerned about what is being done to American democracy.

    However, where the book didn’t land for me is the absence of the rest of the world. Not just in the usual American sense of no other country really being given any attention, but Durán’s hyperfocus on two dozen ultra-rich connected individuals who are driving this movement.

    For a political operative, in particular, it was odd to see nothing – even in the final chapter – that considered why or how these people had built what political following they had; where the fractures might be within the network or – more important – between these billionaires and the wider Trump/MAGA/Techbro movement.

    In particular, the last chapter, looking at the future, seemed to be very light on solutions other than “stop having billionaires”. Where were the mobilisation strategies? What are the political messages that need to be used? How can communities come together?

    A Great Villain theory of history is not so very different from a Great Man theory of history – both over-emphasise the individual, the personal relationships, and the historical destiny of the people involved. Both make contingency and chance seem like divine ordinance.

    If you believe that World Historical Figures exist, perhaps Thiel is one – one for the age of post-democratic technology. What comes across in the book, though, is how far he is from bringing a Fichtian synthesis to contending visions of the world. Rather, he is someone who is driven only by one dark, semi-apocalyptic vision, “made darker still by the lights of a perverted science”, as Churchill said.

    Thiel’s politics and the companies he invested in influence billions of people every day, but those billions of people – at least, those in democratic countries – can push back and cut them down to size. That they have not yet does not mean they cannot, or that they never will.

    Unfortunately the Nerd Reich doesn’t give us many clues on what we need to do to make that happen.

  • Synthetic publics can’t see the future

    Listening to a presentation on synthethic publics*, something we’re increasingly seeing discussed in the participation and democracy space.

    Reassuringly, the research suggests that while synthetic publics are good at matching public opinion survey results on existing situations, they are not good at addressing new situations.

    On one level, this is what you’d expect – the training data exists for the past, not the future. The AI is guessing what a group of people in the past might think, it’s difficult for it to take new situations into account.

    I say it’s reassuring, though, because for me democracy is about defining the future, not commentary on the past. I don’t think an aggregate of past public opinion could ever be a reliable source for synthetic democratic participation, because the nature of being citizen is having a vision of the future, and working out in society how to deliver it.

    That doesn’t mean we should ignore AI in our field, of course, there are plenty of organisations thinking hard about how to use it, and Democratic Society is one of them (I’m about to speak on a panel on this very topic). But this is further evidence that it should be used to enhance participation and deliberation, not to replace it.

    * (where existing public opinion research is aggregated and the data is queried using AI to get a synthetic public opinion on an issue, or AI personas are created who can be interacted with as if in an interview).

  • Where is the anti-Authoritarian Stack?

    This dynamic website shows the different connections in what Francesca Bria calls the “Authoritarian Stack” – the connected network of ultra-rich, corporations and politicians that is driving the international

    I am less concerned about the existence of this than I am about the absence of something on the anti-authoritarian/democratic side of the debate.

    There are a few funders and ultra-rich individuals who are funding organisations, there are organisations like Philea who are trying to connect up the different European foundations, and of course there are also European and national government funds for research.

    However, the picture on our side of the divide seems far more disconnected, far more hesitant, and reluctant to put private egos and interests aside to defend the very foundations of our democratic system.

    It looks, in fact, a lot like the division of mainstream parties trying to face up to the populist right.

    The lessons of success against the populists in politics are to keep the focus on living standards and not on culture wars; to reinforce norms around anti-racism and split the pro-business right from the far right; and to ensure that the foundations of the rule of law and fair elections are preserved.

    To this might be added the work on epistemic security that my own organisation is starting to do with the support of one of those pro-democracy funders, looking at policy and at hyperlocal levels.

    But much of this is done on tiny budgets, without the ability to invest in research, in network building, and in design. Unless we can start to build collective and collaborative work on anti-authoritarianism, and create the network of people at local level that can make the difference in one-to-one interactions.

    It’s unlikely that we can compete toe-to-toe with authoritarian billionaires. But we can recruit real people and work in real communities to stand up to their influence.

  • The Local Government Politics of Megalopolis

    The first thing to say about Megalopolis is that it is a mess of a film.

    It feels like it’s badly edited down from a seven hour original cut, and indeed it would work much better as a TV series where some of the world-building and plot lines could be built out rather than abandoned halfway through. But we’re not here for film criticism we’re here to talk about the local government policy.

    Megalopolis is roughly based on a hybrid of modern New York and ancient Rome, although the Catiline in this film is not the Catiline of Roman history, despite the extensive quoting of Cicero.

    Even so, it is much more modern than ancient, with a populist rabble-rouser, Clodio, who is very clearly meant to be Trump (and who ends up – spoilers – hanging upside down à la Mussolini).

    The striking thing about it from a city governance perspective is how unimaginative most of it is.

    In particular, the utopia that the Robert Moses-ish Cesar Catalina is trying to create looks like Midjourney has had a go on an Elon Musk tweet.

    In this bright new future, the transport mechanisms are either conveyor belts for individuals or things that look like bubble rolling along a road – magically flying off to different destinations.

    There is nothing appealing or collective about that cold and isolated vision of the world. It reminded me of Robert Moses’s view that public transport should be kept away from his state parks on Long Island in case it brought the wrong sort/colour of people.

    The film also takes a very mayoral and personalised view of leadership, more Roman Empire than Roman Republic.

    The mayor, as well as his rival, is seen only as a single monarchal leader. In reality, even imperial Rome in the early years had significant other power centres, and while Augustus may have been “first among equals” he was definitely – even if only for politeness’s sake – among equals.

    Also part of the Great Man theory of Megalopolis is Cesar Catalina, almost a John Galt figure in his icy certainty about his vision, and similarly treated by the film as unquestionably true.

    So don’t go to see Megalopolis for a vision of the future, either of Rome, Moses’ New York or the future of America. Although the present moment is one of infinitely arrogant rich men shouting about their unquestioned brilliance, that is driven by a grassroots, decentralised movement of individuals in a way that makes the faceless crowds of the film feel very old-fashioned.

    The film misses out on the most important parts of what future governance looks like – decentralisation, for good or ill. The TV-political binome in the film is gone. The single male leader is still with us, for now, but has to rely on more than traditional institutional structures. The idea that making the better argument on TV is now all there is to winning the votes.

    There are optimistic and pessimistic visions of the future, and we need to do our best to head down the positive path, but Megalopolis gives you a future that is very much of the past.

  • Sue Gray and Citizen Assemblies

    Before rejoicing that Labour is going all-in on citizen assemblies, it’s worth thinking about what was actually said in this morning’s Times (which I’ve now managed to read).

    First, the story itself (https://lnkd.in/esK-VCnf) is a write-up of comments made to Tom Baldwin, who is writing a book about Kier Starmer. This is at best a kite-flying exercise. Most of all, it’s an author wanting a juicy story to trail his book. I respect that need, but it’s not a policy commitment.

    Second, the content of what was said is underwhelming from a democratic innovation perspective. 

    To start with, it’s high level and focused on just one approach. Citizen assemblies are a tool not a solution – a hammer that works for knocking in a nail, but won’t help you mend your glasses. Democratic innovation will need lots of different tools that work together, at scale, over time, not single-run single-topic events. The work that we are doing at Democratic Society on climate change in cities is a good example of how complex and long-term decisions need to be taken. 

    What’s more, the citizen assembly hammer seems to be being waved to threaten civil servants and politicians – “Whitehall won’t like it”, which is the opposite of the point. If democratic reform is done well, for the right reasons, Whitehall should like it, because it will be a meaningful contribution to effective democratic governance. 

    If we instrumentalise tools like citizen assemblies either by presenting them as a universal solution to wicked obstructive politicians, or using them to break down institutional opposition, then the whole cause of democratic reform is set back. 

    And even then, a citizen assembly won’t reduce opposition to housebuilding if it is not part of a much wider and long-term democratic approach, in which councils have to be involved in shaping trade-offs and compromise. People opposed to a housing development are not going to be less opposed because a group they never met or voted for thought it was a good idea three years ago. 

    I don’t want to sound negative. Institutionalising more participation in government is essential if we are going to make up the gap that has been created by the falling-away of mass party membership and the rise of a more individualistic politics. I’m glad that the Labour Party are taking democratic innovation seriously, along with many other social democratic parties across Europe including my own. 

    But for those of us who care about democratic reform (and social democracy) our very commitment means that this is the time for scepticism. If reform is on the table, we have to make sure it’s done right, or we won’t get another chance.

    So, for this reason, let’s be cautious in the welcome. Let’s not mistake a tool for a solution. And let’s be wary of celebrating a semi-announcement that treats citizen assemblies as an institutional bludgeon not as part of structural democratic reform.

    (originally posted on LinkedIn)

  • Runciman on Europe as superstate

    David Runciman’s article on the political philosophy of the European Union is fantastic (though a little whiskery – 2001). Link: LRB – David Runciman: Invented Communities.

  • Long live the dictatorship of the commentariat!

    Thank GOD for the journalistic profession. I for one couldn’t have lived a moment longer without knowing that Tony Blair was once sent a reminder about an unpaid bill. And as for his purchase of a dishwasher – why in heaven’s name has it taken till now for us to know the brand? Now our war dead can rest in peace.

    Step aside, founding fathers! No greater contribution to democracy and the rule of law has ever been made.

  • Credulous Bayesians

    I posted this – a paper on extremism and online debate, among other things – over at the Demsoc blog.

  • Vote for genitals!

    The NHS is inviting people to vote on whether the interactive bodymaps on the NHS website should have accurately represented genitals or not. Admirably democratic of them, I think.