A thank you, and the year to come

Where Futurepolis goes next.

I’ve been writing Futurepolis for less than three months, if you deduct the time off I took in November. I’m extremely grateful to all of you who’ve joined me for this journey, especially those who’ve thought it worth paying for.

I’m still experimenting with the format and voice. Of the pieces I’ve published, my favorites are the ones that tell specific stories of innovative things: the political newcomer who used AI to connect with voters in Japan, the cross-partisan conversation on gun safety in Tennessee, and the use of AI to cut through decades of bureaucracy in California.

But I’m under no illusions that what I’m doing right now is having much impact. The readership is much too small, the writing much too infrequent, the topics too scattered. I can’t begin to cover this space comprehensively on my own, and even if I could, it would be a long slog to reach all the people I’d like. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what to change. Those ideas are still very half-baked, but I plan to develop them in the new year. I’ll tell you about them as they take shape.

What strikes me the most as we end the year, though, is the effect the US election has had on many of the people I’ve been talking to in future-of-democracy land. Donald Trump’s stunning victory in both the White House and Congress has terrified them, but it’s also been kinda bracing. These are all people who have long believed the system is deeply flawed. Nothing proves that like the voters’ embrace of a nakedly authoritarian leader. If Kamala Harris had won, the pressure for reform would have been much weaker.

The trouble is that there are two different conceptions of what reform should look like. My sense is that most progressives—and the foundations that fund them—still believe it mainly involves shoring up existing institutions: making elections more secure and more representative, strengthening safeguards against corruption and conflicts of interest, fighting to keep federal agencies politically independent. These things are all necessary, but they are not sufficient, and in any case they are clearly going to go backwards under a Trump presidency. The only question is how much institutions and civil society can slow down that backsliding.

The stuff I’m interested in is, of course, the work that happens away from the swell and roar of national politics: the local community peacebuilding, the deliberative democracy experiments, the tinkering deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the improvement of governmental customer service, the reforms at local and state level. As one person put it to me, these things are not about improving how Americans vote every few years, but how they experience democracy and citizenship day-to-day. Work in these areas can and should progress even as Trump and his cronies do their best to dismantle the administrative state and its checks and balances. The question is whether funders will recognize the importance of that work and support it.

Anyway. It’s time for all of us to take a break. Futurepolis will be off next week and the week after. See you in January.

This week’s links

Governments getting creative. This OECD report on tech innovations by governments in 2024 is as stodgy as you’d expect, but it contains several interesting examples, like Korea using AI to identify and track down phone scammers; Serbian railway stations translating announcements into AI-generated sign language, to help deaf travelers; and a slightly creepy-sounding British system for monitoring city streets using IoT sensor data. (OECD)

An argument for liquid democracy. Direct democracy (referendums, ballot initiatives, etc) gives people a vote in everyday decisions in between elections, but is vulnerable to misinformation and the tyranny of the majority. In liquid democracy, voters can delegate their vote to people they trust. Is it any better? Yes, say the authors, but use with caution. (Nature)

Being divisive pays dividends. A study of how “builders” (politicians who try to foster bipartisanship) and “dividers” (the opposite) fared in the US election. Answer: the dividers who were up for re-election won 100% of their seats, the builders only 82%. (Starts With Us)

The healthcare opportunity for Democrats. The party should seize on the groundswell of glee at the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month, and make healthcare reform their signature issue, “attacking the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress, and insurance companies as all one entity.” (The Cross Section)