Hi, and welcome to the Designing Open Democracy podcast. What we will be showing you is a retrospective recording of an event that we held on Friday 19th of May 2017 at Ross House. The event topic was, What are the present and future challenges for democracy?

This will be a summary of the whole event, where we ask everybody at the end of the event to provide at least a short description about what they thought about the challenges of democracy and how they feel it could be addressed. These days, we have a newer microphone, which sounds better. But this recording, since it was a few years old, is not as good.

So just keep that in mind. But aside from that, I hope you enjoy the 15-minute summary. Is there any way that there's an opportunity here?

I would like to ask you, can you go around the table, or whoever is participating in tonight's session, and sort of list personally what we feel might be challenges to the present democracy, let alone future democracy, you can separate them. It doesn't matter about right and wrong, it's got nothing to do with that. It's more about how your feelings are into what you perceive.

I like that. Well, I think I already sort of mentioned it, is that I think that the power that corporations have in politics is obviously one of the biggest issues, I think, is facing democracy today, and... Do you think this is something that will, like, is something that will also be a future challenge for democracy, or will be the biggest future challenge for democracy, or do you think that might shift to something else?

Possibly. I mean, the problem is... Look, I haven't really been following politics so...

I haven't really started following politics about, you know, like, about a year ago. I mean, I don't even really know about the history of politics as much as I say you guys might know. So I don't know if corporations have even had a big role in politics in the past, you know, 50 or 60 years.

All I know is that at the moment, I think, there seems to be a lot of power going towards corporations. Yeah, in the future, yeah, I mean, I can't really see corporations losing power anytime in the new future without some sort of drastic change in politics. What about a desired future?

How about we work on a desired future of how you envision a democracy?

It doesn't matter what it might be, it's whether you see what you just said in a desired vision, an envision of what the future do you... Can we say that?

I love that question, but can we have that for another... We've got 10 minutes left for the discussion. We do not have time to tackle that question tonight, but we will definitely discuss that in future sessions, thank you for that question, Kevin.

So we'll move on to Francisco. Biggest challenge basically. Biggest challenge, this moment, this engagement, misleading of the information, and populism.

Those are the three main problems that I can see this time in democracy and in history. Now, the future, I would like to think optimistically about it, but if we keep going in the same route that we are going now, we are absolutely fucked. No, but once you think that the challenge is, in what way will we be fucked, if I may put it that way?

Like, what are the future challenges that we should be addressing to minimize the chance that we'll be fucked?

We will be fucked. Well, as you can see, in most of the world now, there are a lot of populist leaders leading the country. Basically, that means that they have highly conflict of interest and they have highly problems of credibility and basically transparency.

And because of that, the fact of point that is coming from there is that they do whatever they want to do, and those things that they do, they are not aligned at all with what most of the people want in this time. So when you have that kind of situation, sorry, the thing that is going to happen basically is that because they do whatever they want to do, they are not accountable to the people, they don't give a fuck, you know, and the result basically is going to be a disaster. Like you can see now between two main men in the world now, that is Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, and both of them, they have to deal with each other.

And those guys, they are not democratic persons. They are not leaders in the liberal progressive way. They are populists.

One is a dictator, and the other one is a populist. And that's the result that we are going to keep having if more countries keep having populist leaders in their system. In the optimistical way, I think that I have faith in humanity, and I think that we can be smarter enough to start creating a social change now that can allow us to create a certain truth that basically is what John Lennon was saying, power to the people.

So we can have a true democracy. That's what it means. Just quickly, to remove the economic slavery, the financial slavery that although it's been around for a long time, but can easily be removed in many, many countries, and probably all over the world.

Although the human rights lawyers want certain things, comprehensively, it should be in most, or should be in all constitutions of the countries, ingrained human rights and natural law rights, which encompass as many areas. I'll leave it there, because there's many topics. The biggest challenges that I'm going to tell you is that if we start with just simple principles, one of the principles in our democratic system, supposedly, was referendums.

And one of the key things just out of referendum is there's a massive amount of belief systems around not only a process of a referendum, let alone the result of a referendum, let alone how a referendum should be adhered to or whatever. Those processes and belief systems around a referendum have really played a major role with what I would call if government's meant to play an element of a leader and how we perceive a leader that will only be one human being or 20 human beings, to me, they are there as a guide to other people to look up to. And in that sense, a referendum, like all forms of their responsibilities, they have not adhered to their level of responsibilities that they claim they may have.

That is only one part of a major challenge because it's right behind the democratic process. Another one that I would say is, once again, the amount of disparateness there is, let alone the amount of disconnection and the degree of disconnection that many people have with understanding the purpose, the roles, the responsibilities, the direction, and the future where everything is going. I'll leave it at those two.

Cool. Thank you. And Brian.

Oh, hi. I think the biggest thing that is facing democracies in general, as I probably mentioned in the beginning, well, probably before the recording, is the issue of information overload. We are just self-led with so much information that we, like, that may be true or false, that we can't possibly make the right decision.

And so, part of the things that I've seen online, which I think is a very interesting way to approach information overload, is through social media websites like Reddit, or through experimental argument mapping websites like Argument. And all these different ways of representing information, or filtering information, may, if it encompasses with, or joined with other kind of technologies which allows us to vote, and also think they're correct way, might allow us to actually have a full, or at least better control over the kind of people we filter into our position of power, or the decision making that filters into law. So, that's the way I see it.

Cool. And, yeah, Andrew. Trust.

Trust is a big one. Discourse between opposing sides, public forums, that sort of thing. A lot of the rest of all can sort it itself out if you just deal with those ones.

The economic disparities, I think, ultimately fall, by the way, so either people cooperate, they cooperate based on trust. So that's just fundamental. What systems for that, please?

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Well, I guess slightly connected to that is the idea of like blockchain as a trustless system. So- It's a distributed trust system. Okay.

Well, yeah, it's interesting because Nicola definitely describes it as trustless. And she's writing, I wish she was here to talk about it because she's writing a PhD on the future of trust. So- Yeah, I don't like describing it as trustless.

Trust is still involved. It's just, it's a distributed trust mechanism rather than a centralized one. Okay.

I guess it's trustless in the sense that you don't need to worry about it because it gets to the person you send it to and you don't have to- An entity involved. Yeah?

In a centralized institution, it can become corrupt and then you can't trust it anymore. Instead, the distributed trust systems mean that, well, either everybody collectively has a common interest and you can trust in that, or if you can't trust in that, well, you're there anyway, so. Yeah, yeah, cool.

Yeah, I like that term. Yeah. No, that might be something I kind of discuss with her, or we could discuss it on the channel, because that's an interesting kind of discussion.

I don't know enough about it, but yeah, just wanted to bring up that perspective. And for me, I think the problem is in rationality, actually. Well, it's similar to coronation problems, but it's the idea of confirmation bias.

It's like these psychological cognitive biases that we all have, and that, in combination with incentives, that actually pull us away from cooperation systematically, means that it's basically just a tragedy of society, that it can never be a utopia, because... Tragedy of the commons. Yeah, tragedy of the commons is based off this idea, because individuals have different interests individually to the collective.

Like, if... And if one person defects, then, like, everything else kind of falls away. So it only needs one person to kind of defect from a prisoner's dilemma scenario, for it to be always, you know, better to defect.

So then you have no cooperation whatsoever. And that's not really anyone's fault. That's just people acting, like, in their own rational self-interest, but everyone would be worth soft if they could somehow, like, agree, but they won't agree because of these individual incentives that we all face.

So because there are limited amounts of resources, we have to allocate them, you know, there's trade-offs. And so we have to kind of, like, compete for those resources. So it's effectively competition is the problem, and we can't get away from competition because there's finite amounts of resources.

So I think, I just think those are the, I think they're hard, like, I think they're impossible problems to solve. But we should acknowledge them, and maybe there are hacks for, you know, using empathy or using some other kind of method to kind of connect with other people. These nation-states are a big, important invention, in my view, and in getting people to cooperate who otherwise wouldn't have.

So we're able to do that through our psychological makeup as group-like kind of beings who have evolved in groups. So that kind of allows us to get beyond that stuff. So, yeah, I guess it's both those things, and yeah.

Tough. I think it's interesting to see that we've all got different answers to this one question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah, sorry. Excellent.

In general, most of the topics we've discussed just before are actually all linked. Oh, yeah. To the same goal, technically, what we're all saying.

It's for equality, fairness, and it just comes down to being a human, you know. Bring purpose back for all people to understand their positioning and why they live in the community. Bring purpose back to community.

Bring purpose back for people's role in government. That is, bring the governance, and I'll give you one thing that we're working on. Bring the government, governance, the whole governance of the whole system back into the communities to have, for the first time, full self-governing communities.

That's all I will say. Okay, yeah, cool. That's one way to definitely increase, deal with a couple of these ideas of engagement.

It's people's responsiveness, people's participation, all the stories under the sun. Yeah, yeah, cool. Nice.

Thanks for sharing that with us. Thanks everyone for coming today. Thanks for everyone who's potentially listening to this podcast.

Thank you, Tom, Francisco, David, Kevin, Brian, Andrew. Yeah. Thanks to you, Nick.

Thank you very much. And yeah, we'll see you next time. Thanks, everyone.

So thank you for listening to the end of this retrospective podcast for Designing Open Democracy on the summary of challenges facing the present and future of democracy. If you have any feedback, we will be eager to hear what you say. So you could contact us at contact at designingopendemocracy.com or you could reach us at our reveal page.

So thanks for listening and have a nice day.