For almost 250 years, the United States has operated under a system of indirect democracy. Citizens elect a small group of representatives, who are then responsible for making nearly all of the decisions. But Hélène Landemore, a political science professor at Yale University, argues that model is now broken and outdated.
“I think currently, we still live in very closed democracies, if democracies at all, actually,” she said during a conversation at Unfinished Live. Landemore envisions a future in which nations randomly select groups of 500 people to govern for set periods of time. That might seem like a radical idea, but Landemore says a greater number of voices would be represented, allowing for more productive deliberation.
Around the world, thousands of organizations are trying to find ways for more people to participate directly in democracy, science, and other disciplines that are often reserved for experts or the elite. “People are coming from very, very different backgrounds, in any given program,” said Elizabeth Tuck, the executive director of Genspace NYC, a community biology lab. “Which is a pretty radical environment for making innovations in biotech.”
It’s not just about giving citizens more ways to get involved, but also ensuring they can hold those in power responsible for their actions. “There’s always this notion of like these people, these experts in power, they failed us,” said Xiaowei Wang, an artist, technologist, and the author of the recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm. “I think part of that is this ongoing buildup of harm, or like there’s no way to hold these companies accountable.”
Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.
Bryan Walsh
It can often feel as if the future is a destination, it’s a place we’re all going to as we pass through time, but it’s really not. It’s something that we can actually make, something we, as a citizenry can build with the decisions that we make every day together. So if we want a future that will be different and better in the present we’re living in, one with power on every level, where there’s technological, scientific, political, is no longer monopolized by just a few, then we’re going to have to build that for ourselves, is what we’re here to talk about, on this panel.
We have three great experts from three very different subject areas here to discuss their visions of what a decentralized future might look like and how we might get there. To my left, we have professor Hélène Landemore, who is the professor of political science at Yale University, as well as an advisor to multiple governments on citizen participation and democratic innovation.
To her left we have Xiaowei Wang who is an artist, writer, organizer and coder, and the author of a book that I think probably the best title of any book in 2020, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside. And to their left, we have Beth Tuck, who is the executive director of Genspace, the world’s first community biology lab located just across the East River in Brooklyn.
I want to start by asking each panelist to introduce themselves a little bit about their ideas. Hélène, do you want to start?
Hélène Landemore
Sure. Thank you for having me. I’m a professor of political theory at Yale University. I’m French also. I came to the U.S. in 2001, a week before the Twin Towers fell and I’ve been here since then. I research democracy theory and I recently published a book called Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century.
Xiaowei Wang
I’m Xiaowei Wang. I recently published a book called Blockchain Chicken Farm, which looks at rural tech in China. I also help steward a school called Logic School, which is a 12-week community-driven school for tech workers on social justice and activism, and I think a lot about the distribution of power.
Elizabeth Tuck
And I’m Beth Tuck. I’m the executive director at Genspace. I’m a scientist and educator and a passionate advocate for all people being able to science the way that they want to see science happen.
Bryan Walsh
Excellent. Alright. Hélène, you’ve studied and written about the concept of open democracy. Can you just talk about what that is and how that differs from the democratic government that we all know and sometimes love and sometimes don’t here in the U.S.?
Hélène Landemore
Right. We’re here to talk about decentralizing the future and decentralization can mean many things, but one thing it can mean is diffusing power from the center to the periphery, distributing power more equally. And if you do that more equally, I think what it means really is democratizing power, and it means also opening up power to … more diverse groups and individuals. I think currently, we still live in very closed democracies, if democracies at all, actually
Part of the reason why our governments are so closed off and so sometimes unresponsive to what people want is because we send to power people on the business of a mechanism that we’re all familiar with and that we associate with democracy in a mere periodic elections. But in fact, political theory will tell you that elections are an aristocratic, oligarchic mechanism of selection for rulers.
And so ancient Greeks didn’t have them, the classical Athens didn’t have elections for the distribution of political office. And I think it’s an insight we should return to. So in my vision of open democracy, anyone can access the center of power, legislative power by being randomly selected to enter a house of the people, imagine 500 randomly selected citizens in positions of power for about say three years.
And in charge of legislating for the rest of us with a connection to the larger public through regular referenda and the possibility for the public to put things on our agenda via citizens initiatives or recall, or other things, or other methods. Using technologies to make the deliberations inside that body visible, transparent, accessible, and to create a feedback loop and a form of deliberation between the mini public and the larger public via crowdsourcing platforms.
That’s like the vision for this open democracy I have, and of course, it’s very different from the current versions we’re familiar with.
Bryan Walsh
Awesome. Xiaowei, tell me about what you learned during the research for your book about looking at how technology is being used in China’s countryside? I think in the U.S., we think of China, we think of those large urban cities, but how is it actually being exercised there? Is it empowering? What does it look like actually?
Xiaowei Wang
I think the case of China is always interesting because it’s held up as a justification either for decentralization or for extreme regulation. And in the countryside of China, it’s fascinating because I realize that decentralization does not guarantee a distribution of power. Just because it’s a protocol that does it doesn’t mean everyone will have its fair share.
In the case of the Blockchain Chicken Farm, is very much a top down initiative of trying to use blockchain to improve food safety without considering that farmers have a very asymmetrical sense of agency in relation to large corporations that they’re selling to, and that doesn’t necessarily shift power just because they’re using blockchain. I think it brings up all these provocations around, well, what does that actually look like in terms of community organizing from the ground up then?
And so I did see some really fascinating examples of people trying to think about accountability rather than decentralization in China’s countryside.
Bryan Walsh
Okay. Beth, just tell us about Genspace and how it works. I think it’s a radically different vision for what most of us think is biological research. We think it’s big universities, we think it’s companies, but this is actually fairly ordinary people, students, young people actually getting to exercise some of this power.
Elizabeth Tuck
Yeah. Exactly like you said, when we typically think about where the locus of power and control in scientific research lives, it’s in academia, it’s in industry, it’s in these powerful players, and our vision for the future is to make sure that that technology is distributed equitably. We want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to learn and make this technology the way they want to see it develop.
Genspace is a community science lab. We’re about 1,500 square feet in south Brooklyn in Sunset Park. We are a little bit of a mixture between an art studio, a science lab, an education center, a library, and we serve as this place where people come together to meet each other and exchange ideas. People are coming from very, very different backgrounds, in any given program. We’ll have an architect, a computer engineer, a high school student and a stay-at-home mom, and all of these folks learning and creating together, which is a pretty radical environment for making innovations in biotech.
Bryan Walsh
Hélène, could you talk about… It’s a little hard, I think for us here in the U.S. to really imagine how the system could be different, but there are other countries where there… Your ideas and the ideas of other people who are in this movement have been putting into some practice, in Iceland, in France, where you’re from as well. Can you talk a little bit how that’s actually worked in practice and what’s actually come out of it?
Hélène Landemore
Indeed because what I just presented may seem a little far fetched and utopian, but in fact, it’s inspired by real life experiments that have been conducted in various countries. One was in Iceland in 2010, after the financial collapse, they decided to rewrite their constitution, the social contract. And they did so in very creative and innovative and inclusive ways by starting the process with a national forum of 950 randomly selected citizens who came together to say, “Okay, here are the values we want to see in our new social contract.”
Then they had a body of 25 citizens, nonprofessional politicians who wrote the draft, then crowdsourced it to the rest of the country 11 times. Got the feedback, integrated it. And then they put the final product through a referendum, two thirds of the voting population approved it. And then it went on to die in parliament, but it was a great idea. Later, Ireland was much more successful because they did a citizens assembly in 2013, I believe, ’12, ’13 on marriage equality where they hybridized a little bit the selection process.
They had 66 randomly selected citizens, 33 politicians. They came together, made a recommendation. The recommendation was put to referendum, 2015, marriage equality is passed in the constitution. They did it again in 2016, ’18 on the decriminalization of abortion. This time they went for a pure random sample of 99 citizens who said, “Okay, it’s very difficult subject in a Catholic country, but we have to decriminalize abortion.” Again, referendum and it passed in 2018.
France, a mixed story again. President Macron convened a citizens convention for climate. He convened 150 randomly selected citizens in 2019 to basically occupy the function of quasi legislators. He said, “Give me your best legislative proposals about how to curb greenhouse gas emissions by 40% of the 1990s levels by 2030 and I’ll put them directly without filter to direct regulation, a referendum or a parliamentary debate.”
For a year, those people met, talked with many experts, interacted with them, came up with 149 very bold proposals. None of them went to a referendum, unfortunately, and President Macron proceeded to ignore most of them. But still it’s really interesting that we came very close to putting ordinary citizens in the position of quasi legislators. And I could give you many other examples. UCD just published a report where they document over 200, in fact, at this point there are more than 400 cases of deliberate mini public service.
And so I think surprisingly, the U.S. has not been as innovative in a way at the federal level at least, and so I think this is something that could be done a lot more, looked into.
Bryan Walsh
I’m not sure that’s surprising just given our political system.
Hélène Landemore
I was being polite.
Bryan Walsh
Why is that, do you think? Is there something… Because you think of the U.S. as a very large non-homogenous country, but two very powerful parties that just split and share powers or something about the U.S. that makes that system harder for us to imagine possibly?
Hélène Landemore
I don’t really know why. I know that James Fishkin at Stanford, he has a Center for Deliberative Democracy, he’s done many so-called deliberative polls around the country, one in Texas that completely reversed the energy policy of Texas. They went full on towards green energies after the deliberative poll results, so it’s not like it’s not happening. But it’s true that, I know that Joe Biden’s going to have a democracy summit very soon. I don’t expect them to… I hope they will, but they talk about citizen assemblies, maybe they will.
It’s just not on the edge of that. Perhaps because the U.S. is not that democratic precisely. The power of like those powerful oligarchies of the parties that have control will not let things open up so much. They try to do it at the primary level, but in a way that builds on self selection and feels in my view, extremism. When you open up like that, you get the more motivated, the more angry people.
When you open up on the basis of random selection, you get a cross section of the country. It’s a lot more diverse and it’s conducive to much more reasons and productive deliberation.
Bryan Walsh
Xiaowei, you also do something called Logic School where I think you work with workers in tech to look at how they can become more active politically, really change the direction of the tech sector. That’s another way we can sort of exercise power. Can you talk a little bit about how that works, how you teach them and what you think they can really accomplish with it?
Xiaowei Wang
The first class of Logic School, we always come together and we say, “Well, we’re going to start building these community agreements.” I feel like when we talk a lot about like power and taking power and agency and access to power, there’s also this other side of that, which is accountability, like, “Well, if you have power, how are you held accountable? How do you take accountability?”
And I think the community agreements is this incredible exercise for this cohort of 20 folks to come together and say like, “Okay, we acknowledge that harm and conflict will happen in a community space. And so then where do we go from there?” And throughout the 12 weeks, it’s this constant exercise of having these ouch moments having, how can you say, “Ouch and then move on from there, have these discussions?”
And out of it have been an incredible set of projects, whether that’s people reforming what their company is doing, maybe contracts with ICE, things like that or platforms that are actually rethinking and trying to push up against gentrification that’s happening in Pittsburgh. A toolbox for gig workers to really leverage and go to these companies and say, “We have this data, you have to stop taking our tips.”
And so it’s just beautiful to have this foundation and this community and this solidarity so that people can move from that place.
Bryan Walsh
As a followup to that, do you think that the industry itself let up, bottom up by their workers can really affect major change? Does it have to work with governance, does it have to work in politics as well to think about the regulations, the rules for the road around some of these concerns?
Xiaowei Wang
I think we’re at a point where we need all different kinds of strategies, and so there’s definitely people in the cohort who feel like bottom up change is the way. Other people have actually quit their jobs being individual contributors, so engineers in tech and actually moved more towards policy. Other folks were working in policy and came to us and were like, “We actually are trying to rethink this whole regulation thing as a strategy.” So I think it’s this multitude of ways that we really need.
Bryan Walsh
Beth, at Genspace and at just the whole community biology level, we’re talking a little bit about how community can govern itself to a certain extent. How do you govern yourselves? And how do you both decide what should be done, what maybe shouldn’t be done, which is always an issue with biology, just how you set those rules of a road as a community?
Elizabeth Tuck
Actually a lot of what Xiaowei was saying in terms of community agreements is really critical for how we engage. Do-it-yourself biology or community biology movement set up many years ago, I think it was like 2012, I think was when they published their first code of ethics. This code of ethics is supposed to be some kind of guidelines for how we engage with community science. And then of course, within Genspace, we have our own set of guidance and our own set of norms and codes of conduct.
And so we do, again, like you said, to be very intentional about how we engage with each other and with science. With respect to the question about risks and safety questions, we do have a process in place for reviewing projects that people have proposed to come into the lab to make sure that they’re safe. We operate under current federal guidelines for what’s called Biosafety level 1, and so we prevent any projects that don’t fall under those guidelines, they don’t come into the lab. That’s one way that we’re able to make decisions about what can and can’t be done.
Bryan Walsh
We talked a little backstage about the parallel of computer programming. 40, 50 years ago, computers, they filled rooms, you had to be at MIT or somewhere with resources to actually do any kind of computer programming. Now, of course not the case, that’s led to a lot of great things, led to some negative things as well. Is biology going to go in that direction? And what would that world really look like if people can start almost biologically programming the way we can with computers now?
Elizabeth Tuck
I think this is what both thrills us and terrifies us as a community, this idea that we could follow in the footsteps of technology and make biology a more living technology, a more future-looking process. Definitely there are a lot of players in the game that are working to make the technology more accessible, so they’re trying to bring the cost of the technology down the same way that people did with early computers.
They’re trying to make things more systematized and programmable, so that it’s easier for people who don’t have as like deep expertise to learn how to do it. There are people who are working on teacher engagement and curriculum materials and kits that you can buy and do in your home. Again, I think it really speaks to ecosystems of approaches that will engage more learners in doing this.
But I think one of the things that speaks to me that feels a little bit different about biology as technology is maybe a sense of humility or multi-species ethics that we really have to take into consideration when we’re working with living things as our technology.
Bryan Walsh
Hélène, we’re talking about these complicated issues. Technology is complicated, science, questions around biology, how we respond to something like the pandemic is complicated. I would wonder, can just a randomly chosen selection of citizens actually make judgements on that? I would think, “Oh, we have experts for a reason.” But tell me how that would work actually when it comes to these more complicated issues.
Hélène Landemore
They’re complicated issues, but they’re also political issues. They’re not scientific questions only. In fact, the approach in the pandemic initially to leave everything to the experts is problematic. So I think that you may want to include the citizens on the questions of values at the very least, the questions of distribution of resources at the very least, justice implications of certain constraints on freedom and rights.
That to me speaks for a more democratic way of making decisions, unless we really give up on our idea that we are all equals when it comes to the public good and that we should just move to a regime of pure meritocracy like allegedly China has made the choice to go toward. So if we are in a democracy and we think that when it comes to issues of the public good, that includes questions of health and management of a pandemic, then we all should have a say.
And it’s true, not just at the level of the polity, but also at the level of organizations. And I think hospitals are a good place to start thinking about how to democratize the process. Because it’s one thing to say, nurses and primary caregivers are like heroes, but then to completely ignore the voices in the process and let the people at the top, the administrators, or maybe the doctors make all the decisions, when in fact it’s really nurses often that have the best knowledge of the best patient care.
When you say, “We have experts and they have more knowledge,” depends on what kind of knowledge we are talking about. Yes, we need epidemiologists and virologists, but we also need to understand the lead experience of people on the ground. Like how does that differentially affect them in their communities, in their lives? And that can only be done if you include people from the ground up in a way.
So I think there are a lot of questions around what is knowledge, what is political knowledge and who has it? And my view is that the political knowledge we’re talking about is actually widely distributed. And in order to tap it, to get this collective wisdom, you need to distribute power, because that’s the only way you actually will be able to aggregate that knowledge that you need. Otherwise, you get terrible blind spots.
Bryan Walsh
Xiaowei, how does this… Hearing what Hélène’s saying, how does that work in a place like China? On one hand, I think it is a very powerful centralized government, on the other hand, a very big country distributed in the same way. What does, I guess, decentralization mean for China itself when it comes to whether technology, or even whether it’s power to a certain extent?
Xiaowei Wang
I think the very… There’s a lot of folks who’ve referred to this kind of dynamic in China as like a decentralized authoritarianism in many ways. There are pockets of, especially the countryside where rural peasants have very direct power into their local environment, but then there are also many of these top-down initiatives. I think specifically with tech, things like blockchain or like centralized cryptocurrencies, it’s not surprising to me because those technologies, they’ve really functioned as a kind of like opaque box.
You can just get a private company that contracts with the government to start doing it. So I think that in China, you still see these pockets of like self-organization on the ground in the countryside, and that I think gives me a lot of hope.
Bryan Walsh
I am curious what you think of President Xi in recent weeks has really cracked down, frankly on the big tech companies in China. I think just overnight, there was, I believe report about sort of cracking down on crypto further as well. Just straight up, what do you think about that, I suppose? Is there some hope to that in terms of curbing the power of tech in China or on the reverse side, is this showing a more heavy-handed central government as well?
Xiaowei Wang
I think it points out this really… I think when we’re building tech, we don’t think of it as… We’re always like, “It’s going to change the world, it’s going to change culture,” but it’s also very honestly like an economic driver, and China’s government wants a lot of control over that. I think on the flip side of that, there were a lot of tech projects and tech companies running very fast in China and there wasn’t regulation to begin with. So a certain amount of it is also catching up.
Bryan Walsh
Beth, Hélène was talking about the pandemic and how that’s reflected in politics. I am very curious how have you weathered in Genspace, whether the pandemic changed your mission at all? It certainly brought home the importance of these skills in a way that perhaps it wasn’t the case for a lot of people before. But what direction you think this world might take?
Elizabeth Tuck
It was definitely a pretty profound moment for us, for a life sciences organization to suddenly have antigen and monoclonal antibodies in the news. That was wild for us as an experience and it never felt so potent, the need for literacy and community engagement around some of these issues. Because this language is so inaccessible, these ideas are so abstract. So we definitely felt a call to action to make sure that our community was informed, engaged, and supported as we are a science organization.
And then of course, two to think about the broader community, both in Brooklyn and the broader landscape of community science and DIYbio. There were some pretty interesting initiatives that got going among the distributed community bio network. There’s this organization called Just One Giant Lab and they were quite active in the early stages of the pandemic, giving out micro grants and things like that.
But again, fundamentally, what it came down to was like, how can we make space for people to have honest, open dialogue and conversation about what this technology means for us. And again, to acknowledge the very legitimate concerns and questions that people have about very fast moving life sciences tech.
Bryan Walsh
Sort of following up on that, big pharma companies have a lot of power. Obviously in this country, they have the power to set the price of drugs. I think of something like insulin, this is something that’s been around for over a century, these companies are pumping up the price of that. I think there are some in the community biology movement who are actually trying to synthesize that on their own, spread that out.
Is that an example of where… Again, these tools become usable by ordinary people. They can then change things and actually attack that power.
Elizabeth Tuck
Yeah, definitely. The project that you’re talking about is called Open Insulin and the idea is exactly that, how can we distribute the manufacturing and production of insulin so that we can make it locally and we can distribute it locally, and we can encourage those drug makers to bring down the prices? This is a pretty provocative and exciting kind of technology. It also comes with its share of risks, and so again, I think one of the critical roles that community labs like Genspace play is as a place for critical dialogue.
And not just saying, “Yes, we’re going to disrupt this field in this way,” but really having a space where people actually can contemplate what this might mean. And having rich conversations with anthropologists, and sociologists, and historians, and others who can call attention to some questions that maybe some of us who rushed to scientific solutions don’t always think about.
Bryan Walsh
Hélène, when it comes to open democracy, is it a reflection of the fact that the expert classes failed us in many ways, whether it’s expert… And this could be the question really for everyone because whether it’s expert class in politics, in technology, in science, the fact that we need to change the system this way. The people who have found themselves in power are not doing what we need them to do, I suppose.
Hélène Landemore
Yes, I suppose you could say that. And it’s not that an indictment of experts as persons, I think they have good intentions. And elected officials are a variety of experts I might say and I think on the whole they’re well intentioned, but it’s just that as a class, they have huge blind spots. And we’ve seen it in things from like the Iraq War, on a false assumption about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. We’ve seen it in the financial crisis where none of the experts could predict the economy collapse that was coming.
Now, we could say the pandemic was also a failure of experts somewhere in the system to handle this and prevent it from happening. So I think that there’s something that’s not growing well and that could be, I think not necessarily fixed, but improved by having more inclusive decision processes. I’ll give you an example from France where the experts keep telling us, climate change, climate change. Soon the solution is a carbon tax. So what does Macron does? He thinks, “Well, the experts are right, so let’s do a carbon tax.”
What is the result? Massive social rebellion, the yellow vest movement paralyzes the country for months. And the thing is 75 of the population was behind them for a while. That expert solution did not work. And when the French Citizens Convention for Climate was put in charge of addressing the question from a more democratic angle, because in fact, the reason why Macron convened it is because he couldn’t handle that topic from the top down like he intended to, so he delegated the deliberation to that group.
They chose not to go for a carbon tax. Among the 149 proposals they put out, there was no carbon tax. They have many innovative creative ideas about how to curb greenhouse gas emissions that didn’t involve a carbon tax. So I’m just saying the experts have certain views, and maybe they’re correct in some ideal world, but that’s not how the world works. You cannot force policies on people, it has to work for them.
And the thing that citizens bring to the table is also the question of social justice, like a carbon tax, it punished these people at the periphery who can’t afford to live in the center and bike to work, are not urban and wealth the way elected officials tend to be, so that way they reason that way. So they felt like the carbon tax was a punishment for the lifestyle. And so I think there are other ways where you can distribute the burden more equally, and that’s what the citizens tried to do. So this is just one example of where expect thinking failed.
Bryan Walsh
Xiaowei, similar question to you, I think in regards to the technology industry. These are incredibly powerful companies. It’s often hard for ordinary citizens to understand them. Again, if we need to change in this movement, are they failing us in some way, those who are actually in the position of power, who we turn to for that expertise?
Xiaowei Wang
I think that’s a really interesting question because it goes back to, I think of accountability. There’s always this notion of like these people, these experts in power, they failed us, therefore we should just not listen to these institutions at all. I think part of that is this ongoing buildup of harm or like there’s no way to hold these companies accountable. So just the example of food safety in China in 2008, there was this really terrible scandal where farmers wanted to increase their profits, so they added melamine into infant formula, which gave infants kidney disease and many of them died.
There was huge public outcry, but how do you mediate that kind of harm? What happens after that? And so the government is able to say like, “Well, we have vast sources of power and we’ll try the CEO and give them the death penalty.” Of course now, there’s no repair in that. It’s like, there’s a distrust of corporations, there’s a distrust of the government for faulty regulation. And so I think there is a difficult conversation in there to just be had in the first place.
Bryan Walsh
You talk about lack of trust. How does blockchain fit into this? On one hand the system seems built to address that kind of lack of trust, but will it actually, I suppose? Is that really going to work in this kind of environment? Can you almost take a shortcut via technology to just bypass that problem or does it have to be solved politically and socially?
Xiaowei Wang
I think sadly there’s not a shortcut. One blockchain engineer I talked to in China was very honest with me and he was just like, “Well, it’s like pick your poison. You could trust the government or you could trust this technology that you probably don’t really know how it works.” And sometimes it’s a proprietary blockchain and can’t really see into it as much. And so I think it’s just like the difficult work.
Bryan Walsh
Beth, for you, expertise to me is such a fraught question around science, because on one hand we do trust these people. We have to, especially when it comes to biology and especially when it comes to medicine. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean they’re always going to be right. And we’ve seen, I think with the pandemic both a sort of populist pushback against that, but also some real understanding that it’s not a monolith.
How could education play into this? Because that’s a big part of what you’re doing. It’s not just doing things, but you’re teaching people. If you give them those skills, you teach them up those skills, can that change that relationship, perhaps?
Elizabeth Tuck
Yeah, I think that’s exactly our hope, is that by putting technology in people’s hands, that you create space where they get to learn it, they get to understand it in a different level than they do if they’re just like reading about it or hearing about it from experts or mass media or otherwise. There’s a very different experience that you get when you get to make a CRISPR yeast, for example, than you do when you’re just reading about it on the internet.
And so I think the notion of expertise as a very transferable thing and a place… And again, for us, we think a lot about place and place for knowledge transfer and skill sharing, and knowledge sharing, and knowledge distribution as core to the process of what we do with education.
Bryan Walsh
And just as a follow up, you mentioned CRISPR and you can’t really have a panel about the future without mentioning CRISPR at some point. There are going to be enormous decisions that have to be made as a society, as a world in terms of how we’re going to use these technologies, how would they use them on ourselves? Will we choose to cure certain diseases? Will we even look to enhance people in some kind of ways?
I don’t even know how to begin to answer this question, but your thoughts on how do we come to sort of a public understanding agreement about this, as opposed to just people with money or power, just doing it, doing what they want to do?
Elizabeth Tuck
I’m actually really excited to hear more about our distributed democracy and a random sampling of people as a way of decision-making about something like this. Because I think this is a clear example of like the people who are in power, having control over how decisions get made. And I’ve sat in on National Academies panels about CRISPR gene editing, and what are we going to do with this technology? And a lot of those conversations tend to be fairly circular in nature. It’s people who are experts in the field talking to each other.
And for us, again, I think the core role that we play in this larger ecosystem is place for people to learn dialogue and talk among folks who have different types of expertise, lived knowledge, embodied knowledge, traditional knowledge and spaces for that, all of those different plural knowledges to come together for a conversation and consensus making.
Bryan Walsh
Hélène, maybe connected to that. When we’re talking about really big decisions, abortion could be one. Obviously, whether we’re going to gene-edit human beings to change in some ways, in other words, what we should allow around that. We really have to hope that these decisions are made and that people actually accept them. They believe that they are authentic, that they reflect their interests to a certain extent, even though we’re going to disagree on that.
So when it comes to open democracy, do you think that this kind of system can give more of that acceptance? That people will actually, if they see decisions made in this kind of way by not just professional politicians, but actually deliberate, like a sort of random body, they’ll actually except that to a degree they wouldn’t necessarily if it were something that was just brought down with them, imposed on them by other politicians or powerful scientists, I suppose?
Hélène Landemore
Well, that’s the hope and also something that we’re supposed to be committed to as democrats. We think that the legitimacy of laws come from the fact that they’ve been consented to by the people at the very least. And an additional source of legitimacy for people like me in deliberative democracy generally is that the laws and policies are not just the result of an aggregation process or negotiation or compromise process, but a true deliberation among all the parties affected and in which all individuals are equally represented.
Because ideally, we’d all be able to be in the same room and make the decisions. We can’t do that, so we have to choose representatives. But if you have to delegate that deliberation to a subgroup, what’s the best way to make representative in such a way that the end product will be endorsed by as many people as possible? I think random selection is again, very close to the best thing we can get, and I think that this new forms of democratic representations are not quite established yet.
It still looks fishy to people, a little dangerous potentially, but I think they are gaining in legitimacy. And as they are getting to be known and news and practice, you realize that actually it works quite well, that there are not extreme proposals coming out of those environments. And also, it’s not a strict dichotomy between ordinary citizens on the one hand and experts on the other. In the French Convention, for example, there were almost as many experts involved as citizens. But the key thing is that the experts were, as I say often, on top and not on top. Meaning the experts were available sources of information and critical knowledge, but they were not the decision makers.
And I think it’s a better model than the other way around where you have experts making all the decisions and consulting when it’s convenient to the people. Because the way they filter the information coming from the people is going to be massively biased. Whereas with the diversity of groups, I think the expert input gets aggregated better since it use better. So I think that’s how I see things.
Bryan Walsh
Xiaowei, again, we’re talking about the future here and I feel like in the United States, there’s a pessimism about the future often. It might be related to climate change, might be related to the way politics are going. The people you’d spoke to for your book and people in China, and I realize it’s a huge generalization, but what is the attitude towards the future? Is there more optimism there? What is the sort of feeling around that, I suppose?
Xiaowei Wang
I think it’s hard to say because it’s a big country.
Bryan Walsh
It’s a big country, yeah.
Xiaowei Wang
But I think that it’s also generational too. I would talk to other millennials and it was the same feeling as folks here where it’s like, “Wow, you can’t really buy a house, you can barely buy a car. What does the future look like?” And this feeling that this promised life was no longer available. Just as an example, birth rates in China are declining because a lot of people are like, “I can’t afford to have a kid. I can’t, I have to work, my partner has to work.”
There’s no longer nice free daycare, things like that. So I think it’s not just within the U.S. right, it’s really this kind of global condition that we’re feeling right now.
Bryan Walsh
I think we have about three minutes left, so I just want to put a question to everyone, which is, what would be the most fruitful long-term change that you could make happen tomorrow, if you could? If you could really accelerate change within your fields, what would you do, I suppose? And Beth, maybe we can start with you.
Elizabeth Tuck
Jeez.
Hélène Landemore
Jeez.
Elizabeth Tuck
I’m a firm believer that place matters, that places for people to convene, places for people to learn, for places to people to share and exchange knowledge, and resources, and tools, and thoughts matters. Whether that’s physical space or virtual space, I think that’s the thing to me that sticks out, is places for people to gather and for places for there to be level playing fields. Where there’s not this dominant hierarchy of power and structure. So I think that’s where I’m leaning, is more places.
Bryan Walsh
It sounds good. Hélène, same question for you. Most fruitful long-term change you can make if you had the power, it was given to you by a random body of citizens, I suppose. In this case, it was, you had the power to actually make that change.
Hélène Landemore
I think I would start with education because I think that in order to change the system, you have to be able to visualize a future and you need a lens for that. And that lens is going to shape by what you learn at school in particular. And I think our systems are still… We are still Plato nation. We still believe that the best and brightest should rule. And as long as we are taught that or that this academic system is built around these meritocratic ideas, I think there’s a sense in which we will never see the problems with our current system.
And so I think that I would change the way we teach children to make the education more collaborative, more respectful of differences. But not in this like political correct way, but really in a way that embraces cognitive diversity, the way that you need all kinds of people to make a world and a just world. I think that’s where I would start because not very hopeful that the generations that are current in power will do anything about it.
I think the future is in the hand of the youth, the millennials. They are the ones who are the most effected by the disaster state of the world, and so I think we need to empower them to change it.
Bryan Walsh
And Xiaowei, same question for you for the last word, I suppose.
Xiaowei Wang
Oh, boy. I guess, abolishing work and just having people being paid for doing things that they care about, whether it’s caring for their family or pursuing their passions, I don’t know.
Bryan Walsh
Great. Well, that’s a postcard from the future, I think one that I actually really want to live in, frankly. Thank you so much to our panelists and thank you to Unfinished, and thank you all for listening. I appreciate it.