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A Committee of Five, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, worked together to write the U.S. Declaration of Independence. They are among the leaders known as Americas Founding Fathers.

The Declaration of Independence states a list of wrongs done against the people of the newly formed states by Britains king. They include the dismissal of Representative Houses repeatedly because they resisted the loss of the rights of the people.

The Declaration also notes that any form of government gets its powers from the consent of the governed.

Democracy was a dirty world

Some experts note, however, that the men who would go on to write and sign the U.S. Constitution were some of the richest people in America. They also say these same men were not fully open to democratic ideas.

Andrew Wehrman is an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. He says the leading Americans who wrote the Constitution did not think of the new country as a direct democracy.

It was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy, where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all issues, he said. Instead, Wehrman believes that they thought the vote was for the wealthy and educated.

Wehrman also says the founders expected common people, the poor and uneducated, to take part indirectly. This would be through their local government, at town halls and meetings, and through protest actions like boycotts. They were very concerned about rule by a mob.

Wehrman said some of the founders thought that democracy was a dirty word. Even John Adams, he notes, did not want poor people or women to vote.

Bruce Kuklick is a retired professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He says the framers of the Constitution had a very different idea of democracy than Americans do today.

The founders didn't want this sort of democracy at all. The Constitution is written so that citizenship rights are very, very limited, he said. Because once you let everybody participate You're likely to have people come to power who appeal to the frenzy of the masses.

Wehrman notes that the framers of the Constitution saw to it that only one part, or one branch, of the federal government, the House of Representatives, was elected by the people in a direct vote.

The Electoral College chooses the president. The presidents select the Supreme Court justices and, until the early 1900s, senators were selected by state legislatures. It was only after the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 that U.S. senators were afterwards elected by direct popular vote.

Wehrman says leaders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton believed that state legislatures had gone too far and that too many people were voting in elections.

For example, New Jersey gave the right to vote to people who lived in the state and met a property requirement. That included women and African Americans, who were able to vote from 1776 until 1807, when the state restricted voting rights to white men.

They (the founders) thought that there were too many voices in the state legislaturesthat they were beholden to the interests of the common man, Wehrman said.

What would the founders think about modern America?

So what would people like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the other framers of the Constitution think about America today?

I think they would all be sort of delighted that the general framework that they created is still in action, Wehrman said.

They might even be open to change. After all, they included a process for amending the Constitution. They made changes in the early days of the Republic with the ratification in 1804 of the 12th Amendment. It established separate Electoral College votes for president and vice president. That change kept political adversaries of opposing parties from serving in the same administration as president and vice president.

But even with these facts, Kuklick believes, the Founding Fathers would be considered reactionaries today.

[They] didn't want what came to be. He added that in the 1800s, America changed from having a limited group taking part in government to one that people now completely accept as being the democratic way.

Democracy in action today might not be exactly what the founders expected. However, some experts say that money and power continue to play an important part in U.S. politics.

Im Jill Robbins. And I'm Mario Ritter.

Dora Mekouar reported this story for VOANEWS. Mario Ritter Jr. adapted it for VOA Learning English with additions from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Hai Do was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

consent n. permission for something to happen or to be done

sort (of) n. a certain kind of something

framers n.(pl.) often used to describe the writers of U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; literally people who build the structure, frame, of a house

frenzy n. wild or uncontrolled activity

ratification n. the process of making a major legal document official by signing or voting on it so it becomes law

beholden adj. owing to a favor, gift or loyalty to someone or something

delighted adj. pleased, happy with something

adversaries n. (pl.) an enemy or opponent

reactionaries n. a person who strongly opposes new political or social ideas

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What Did Democracy Mean to the US Constitutions Writers? - VOA Learning English

That democratic protests can succeed in an illiberal democracy is a fond myth, a chimera, a mirage. In India, the legal powers vested in the state are so immense that any democratic protest can be made to fizzle out by a clever abuse of the laws.

The writing on the wall is clear.

Zack Beauchamp, global policy expert at Vox, has described the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn as a strongman who has proved that a ruthless party could indeed take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.

Roger Cohen, columnist for the New York Times, has pointed out that Orbn has established a template, Neutralise an independent judiciary. Subjugate much of the media. Demonise migrants. Create loyal new elites through crony capitalism. Energise a national narrative of victimhood and heroism through the manipulation of historical memory. Claim the peoples will overrides constitutional checks and balances.

I do not wish to draw any comparisons by taking names but look around you, reflect upon the situation and you can decide for yourself.

Jason Stanley, in his How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, gives the label fascism to ultra-nationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural, etc.), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf. Their other strategies include propaganda for perception management; divisive politics of us versus them; dehumanising of certain segments of the population; anti-intellectualism (that is, attacking every intellectual activity that challenges their ideas); and law and order, with them projected as lawless and us as lawful.

On an emotional plane, they promote appeal to the great mythic past; victimhood of the majority; sexual anxiety regarding protection of our women from them; and a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

Appears all too familiar, does it not? You do not really require genocide and ethnic cleansing for fascism to creep in and take hold.

View of the extensive barricade between famers and riot police at a protest against farm laws at the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border in Ghaziabad, India February 3, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

The roots of the state garnering excessive powers

During the Constituent Assembly debates, Somnath Lahiri, the only communist member in the Constituent Assembly had famously stated, There are certain rights, which we have been denied in the past by an alien and autocratic government. We want to incorporate every one of those rights which our people want to getI am constrained to say that these are fundamental rights from a police constables point of view and not from the point of view of a free and fighting nation. Here, whatever right is given is taken away by a proviso.

The right to democratic protest under Articles 19(1)(a) and (b) of the constitution has been enshrined in the eloquent words of several judicial pronouncements, starting from the case of Romesh Thappar vs The State of Madras (1950) until the recent Amit Sahni vs Commissioner of Police (2020), but its exercise is riddled with insurmountable difficulties.

The next Article 19(2) itself empowers the state to impose reasonable restrictions on the exercise of this right. A dispute about whether the restrictions imposed are reasonable or not can be settled only by the courts and that, by itself, makes it impracticable.

How illiberal democracy can crush peoples movements

India has a battery of laws for preventive detention. In this unique example of constitutional tyranny, one could be arrested on the mere apprehension that he could commit some act prejudicial to the state. The British, of course, relished it. They started with the Bengal State Prisoners Regulation, III of 1818 and sailed through the Defence of India Act 1915 and 1939.

Not to be left behind, independent India started with the Preventive Detention Act, 1950. Almost immediately thereafter, a political leader of the stature of A. K. Gopalan was arrested under this and quite amusingly, the Supreme Court upheld its constitutional validity in the case of A. K. Gopalan vs The State of Madras (1950)!

Emboldened by it, various governments went on to enact the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), 1971; Foreign Exchange Conservation and Prevention of Smuggling Activities (COFEPOSA), 1974; National Security Act (NSA), 1980; Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), 1985; and Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act (POTA), 2002 besides numerous states Goonda Acts, and so on.

These days when people lament that getting bail under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 is so very difficult, they forget that its most draconian section 43D(5), was introduced by an amendment in 2008 by the then UPA governmentalbeit in a knee-jerk reaction to the 26/11 attack in Mumbai. Thus, no one can claim to be holier than thou.

Then, it is the prerogative of the police under the Police Act, 1861 and various judgments of the Supreme Court to regulate a procession, decide the place of protest and the manner in which a dharna may be held. The police could very well ask the protest to be held at a place where its very purpose is defeated. Sometimes others would do for police what it could not do by itself, as it happened in the case of protests at Jantar Mantar.

File image of Bhim Army supporters holding a protest at Jantar Mantar. Photo: PTI

If the protests are held anyway (or disrupted using agents provocateur in some False Flag Operation), the protesters are likely to be prosecuted under a veritable battery of charges for rioting, disturbing communal harmony and damage to public property, etc. It could easily haunt them for years and spoil their careers and businesses a frightening prospect for anyone who has not given up all aspirations in life.

When nothing works, the state has legal powers to use lethal force on the people under Section 129 of the Criminal Procedure Code, killing as many people as it would deem necessary.

Even for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Hunter Committee, which had three eminent Indian members also in it, held Reginald Dyer guilty of grave error of judgment alone and he could not be prosecuted for a crime. All that he suffered was that he was made to resign!

Continuing the same obnoxious tradition, there is hardly any instance in independent India when a police officer was prosecuted for excessive or wrongful use of lethal force.

A policemans boot is seen on a mans face in Singhu on January 29. Photo: PTI

Spiralling

The German scholar Goethe had summed up the course of all institutions in one immortal line in his tragic play Faust, To nonsense reason turns, and benefit to worry. French diplomat and litterateur Chateaubriand expressed the same sentiments, Every institution goes through three stages: utility, privilege, and abuse.

This is exactly what happened to India. We gave ourselves a Constitution and institutions that, in theory, served the ends of utility by raising this nation to a high moral pedestal with its lofty ideals. However, the way we manipulated and practiced electoral democracy, granted immense powers to the state and thus to the ruling dispensations; and converted them to a privilege. With time, abuse of almost all institutions became the new normal.

There is no reason to believe that those who gave us one of the most elaborate and complicated constitutions in the world, could not have rewritten the colonial era criminal major Acts to make them more responsive to the aspirations of an independent nation. Since it was not done, it means that they actually wanted the unlimited powers of the state to continue.

The gradual death of democracy

Democracies do not die necessarily by guns of coups dtat or in bloody street riots; they die when the institutions of democracy are quietly subverted by elected leaders.

As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in their How Democracies Die, this may be less dramatic but equally destructive; it erodes democracies slowly, in barely visible steps so that generally, no alarms go off in the collective consciousness.

Democracies die when rivals are treated as enemies; when the media is intimidated or bought; when the state assumes greater and greater legal powers; and when the legal powers are abused with abandon.

Policemen stand guard in front of the historic Red Fort after clashes between police and farmers, in the old quarters of Delhi, India, January 27, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

As Levitsky et al say, the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive, Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Any failure of the regime can be wrapped in the flag and it becomes inviolable.

Also read: A Farmer Cant Be Draped in the Tricolour at His Funeral, But a Lynching Accused Can

Those who denounce government abuse or criticise its failures are dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. In India, the entire troll army of bhakts pounces upon the librandus (as they like to call the liberals) with rape and death threats.

Repression is the real Deep State of India

We are now in a situation where constitutional values are being violated in the name of upholding the law. By using law as a weapon, this nation is now shooting from the cloak of law to murder justice.

As Mohan Gopal notes, One of the oldest, most pernicious and widespread forms of abuse of state power in India involves the police and enforcement agencies selectively targeting political and ideological opponents of the ruling dispensation to interrogate, humiliate, harass, arrest, torture and imprison them.

The state has become like the Komodo dragon. It bites the prey and waits patiently for the wound to be poisoned. Then, it eats the prey. Anyone who annoys the state becomes a prey. Malicious prosecution is the bite of the dragon, and conviction is the preys death.

Since malicious prosecution is yet to be recognised as a substantive offence and the process of getting justice is so costly and cumbersome, justice is effectively placed beyond the reach of all but the rich. Gautam Bhatia has drawn our attention to the reality of the state of liberty for many in the country.

Journalists, students, academics and activists held under repressive laws. Illustration: The Wire

About the rampant abuse of laws about hurting of sentiments, Arghya Sengupta points out, These laws do not exist in a vacuum; they take their cue from the ConstitutionEven our founding fathers, having faced the full force of British repression, chose to create a state that privileged public order over fundamental freedoms. Contrary to what we would like to believe, repression is Indias deep state.

Noted journalist and civil rights warrior Arfa Khanum Sherwani had tweetedin anguish, They control the narrative. They have the machinery. They know how to crush peoples movements.

Yes, unfortunately, illiberal democracies happen to be the past masters of the art of crushing movements. Anybody, who ever dreamt that democratic protests have any future, is guilty of naivet. Disheartening though it may be, clever rulers will always win and the naive public will always lose.

Intolerance aside, dissent is treated with disdain

Besides being a democratic right, dissent signifies that one has not surrendered meekly to those who happen to be in position of power. In India, every protest is treated with utmost disdain, as if it were some odious disease. Protests are also hated because they question the authority, the supposedly infinite wisdom of some Supreme Leader, raised to the status of a demigod in the eyes of his Bhakts.

It is this inherent intolerance that makes them isolate and stigmatise all protests as anti-national, anti-people (by causing inconvenience to them), being instigated by a small section of privileged people with vested interests (such as rich farmers), or confined to a limited region or people.

Then they also fear a Domino Effect in relenting to any demand. If they are seen to yield on say, the matter of the farm laws, they know it well that the Citizenship Amendment Act would be the next.

Farmers take part in a three-hour chakka jam or road blockade, as part of protests against farm laws on a highway on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, February 6, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

Our future is frightening

The Hollywood film The Post (2017) is about the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers by The Washington Post. Their attorney says, If the government wins, The Washington Post will cease to exist. The editor Ben Bradlee replies, If we live in a world where the government can tell us what we can and cannot print, then The Washington Post has already ceased to existWhat will happen if we dont publish? We will lose! The country will lose!

We are staring into a similar abyss.

We do not have any totalitarian secret police like the KGB or the Stasi. We do not have any Gulag Archipelago either. Arguably, Indians are not unfree but, paradoxically, we are not free either.

In the game of dice in the Mahabharata, Yudhishthir could have never won against Shakuni in a game of his choice, as per the rules devised by him, and played with the charmed dices made by none other than him. So is the fate of democratic protests in an illiberal democracy.

Dr. N.C. Asthana, a retired IPS officer, has been DGP Kerala and a long-time ADG CRPF and BSF. Views are personal. He tweets @NcAsthana.

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The Future of Democratic Protests in an Illiberal Democracy - The Wire

Australian policymakers may have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic effectively so far, but can they heed the lessons of this crisis in order to be ready for those still to come? Joining Mark Kenny on this episode of Democracy Sausage to discuss public policy in the wake of the pandemic are Helen Sullivan and Warwick McKibbin.

Australia has managed the joint health and economic crises brought on by COVID-19 better than most countries. But with the pandemic far from over and the damages of climate change becoming increasingly obvious, can Australian policymakers translate this short-term success across to the long-term challenges they have thus far failed to address? What price are the Australian people paying for policy uncertainty, particularly in regards to climate and energy policy? And does the country need a new macroeconomic framework if it hopes to be properly prepared for a post-pandemic world? On this episode of Democracy Sausage, ANU Crawford School of Public Policys Professor Helen Sullivan and Professor Warwick McKibbin AO join Professor Mark Kenny to discuss public policy-making in the new normal. Listen here:https://bit.ly/3a1LW4v

Helen Sullivanis Director of Crawford School of Public Policy. She has published widely on public policy, public governance and public service reform, and in 2013 established the Melbourne School of Government.

Warwick McKibbin AOis the Director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis in the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Mark Kennyis a Professor in the ANU Australian Studies Institute. He came to the university after a high-profile journalistic career including six years as chief political correspondent and national affairs editor forThe Sydney Morning Herald,The Age, andThe Canberra Times.

Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny is available onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wed love to hear your feedback for this podcast series! Send in your questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes topodcast@policyforum.net. You can also Tweet us@APPSPolicyForumor join us on theFacebook group.

This podcast is produced in partnership withThe Australian National University.

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Democracy Sausage: Climate, the coronavirus, and the costs of uncertainty - Policy Forum

You probably hear countries like the United States or France referred to as democracies. At the same time, you probably also hear both of these countries called republics. Is that possible? Are democracies and republics the same thing or different?

We dont blame you for confusing these two terms. With a major and heated US election underway, its the perfect time for some Government 101. Lets brush up on these two words to see what they have in commonand what sets them apart.

A democracy is defined as government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. A nation with this form of government is also referred to as a democracy.

A democracy is achieved by conducting free elections in which eligible people 1) vote on issues directly, known as a direct democracy, or 2) elect representatives to handle the issues for them, called a representative democracy.

The word democracy dates back in English to around 15251535. It comes from the Greek dmokrata, meaning popular government. Ancient Greece was home to what most consider to be the oldest form of democracy, the city-state of Athens. In Athens, the people (Greek, dmos) held the power (Greek, krtos) and made the decisions for their societyforming a dmokrata.

But its essential to note the people who are able to vote in Athens only included certain non-enslaved Athenian men, making this direct democracy very different from the way we understand democracy today.

For example, if a town only had enough funding to repair either their sewer system or roads, it might ask the citizens to vote on which one should get the money. Its members would vote on their preference, and the towns government would follow the will of the people and go with their choice. This is a basic example of direct democracy.

Many referendums are voted on this way, such as the Scottish independence (from the United Kingdom) referendum in 2014 and the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum (popularly referred to as Brexit) in 2016.

In contrast to a direct democracy, the people in a representative democracy elect representatives who act then on behalf of them, known as their constituents. Many of the worlds parliaments and the USs Congress are an example of representative democracies.

Today, it is inefficient, if not impossible, to have every eligible citizen vote on every issueto vote on every piece of legislation that it takes to run a city, a state, a country. Instead, citizens vote for leaders to do the work of governing for them.

Lets revisit our municipal sewer/road matter. A representative democracy would not have each and every citizen of a town directly vote on whether to fund a sewer system or road repairs. Instead, the citizens would elect a mayor and city council to handle these issues in their place. The elected officials would then vote on where city funding should go, doing their best to reflect and respect the needs of the people who voted for them.

A republic is defined as a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them. Sound familiar? It should.

You see, many of todays democracies are also republics, and are even referred to as democratic republics. So, the US and France are considered both democracies and republicsboth terms point to the fact that the power of governance rests in the power, and the exercise of that power is done through some sort of electoral representation.

The key concept to the word republic is that the leader of this government (or state) is not a hereditary monarch but a president, whether they are elected or installed.

This core idea helps explain in part why autocratic governments like North Korea is officially called the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Its citizens vote (or vote) on a single candidate. A historical example of a republic is also instructive. The Republic of Venice, a mercantile city-state of the Middle Ages, was led by a doge who was elected by wealthy merchants and served until his death. Neither of these governments would be considered a democracy.

The word republic is first recorded in English 15951605. It comes from the Latin rs pblica, meaning public thing, characterizing that a state is ultimately run by its peopleas opposed to monarchy or tyranny. For nearly 500 years, ancient Rome was a republic before it became ruled by emperors.

For all practical purposes, its both. In everyday speech and writing, you can safely refer to the US as a democracy or a republic. If you want or need to be more precise in referring to the system of the US, you can accurately call it a representative democracy. And should you need to be exacting? The US can be called a federal presidential constitutional republic or a constitutional federal representative democracy.

What you should take away in the confusion (or debate) over democracy vs. republic is that, in both forms of government, power ultimately lies with the people who are able to vote. If you are eligible to votevote. Its what, well, makes true democracies and republics.

Exercise that right to vote, whether by mail or in person. Want more information on what mail-in voting means? Read our article on absentee vs. mail-in ballots!

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Democracy vs. Republic: Is There A Difference ...

Every citizen is aware that digital technologies have transformed our individual and collective lives. But democratic theorists have been slow to take stock of this transformationand to trace how democratic theory and institutions should respond. The new bookDigital Technology and Democratic Theory, edited by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Associate Director Rob Reich, Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab Director Lucy Bernholz, and Yale professor Hlne Landemore, brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars across political philosophy, social science, and engineering to weigh in on the implications of digital technologies for democratic societies as well as ways in which democracies might be enhanced by these advances.

Here, Reich, who is also a professor of political science at Stanford School of Humanities andSciences, director of the Center for Ethics in Society, and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, discusses the books purpose, reach, and takeaways.

What are the high-level takeaways from the book?

We had at least a decade of techno-utopianism in which digital technologies were thought to be inherently liberating, that they would spread democracy across the world, and that they would enrich individual lives in some unparalleled fashion. And then we switched to a decade of techno-dystopianism in which digital technologies hijacked our attention, violated our privacy, corroded our very souls, and undermined democratic societies.

This volume takes a mature approach to thinking about the intersection of digital technology and democratic theory, so that we can better understand how to harness digital technologys great benefits and mitigate or contain the potential risks.

We call upon readers, just as has historically happened with earlier eras of technological revolution, to avoid the polar extremes of thinking about the development and deployment of technology as uniformly good or bad. This is a book for people who want to take a longer view pondering the implications of technology for democratic institutions over the next 10 to 50 years rather than reacting to the newest unicorn or the scandal du jour. Its also a book for scholars across the world who can find in this volume a rich and fertile set of research agendas to pursue as well as an appreciation for the ways in which cross-disciplinary consensus can help guide where our attention should be paid.

You and your co-authors say that democratic theorists havent really figured out if social media companies are publishers, news organizations, or a new form of private government or even private superpower. Why is it so difficult to get a clear understanding of the power wielded by the tech industry?

Social media platforms are certainly powerful. In the book, we quote from a Stanford-affiliated scholar from Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash, who says, The policies of Facebook and Google are more consequential for permissible speech than is anything decided by Canada, France, or Germany. Indeed, he says, big tech firms are the new private superpowers.

These are the great public squares of our 21st-century digital age. And as a result, the private power of the CEOs of these companies to determine permissible or impermissible content or to design the algorithms that uprank and downrank content means they shape the information ecosystems of citizens across the world. Thats an extraordinary form of power that currently has almost no form of accountability attached to it.

The decision by all the major social media companies to ban Donald Trump from posting, and then deleting his account, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is just the latest proof of this extraordinary power in the hands of a few people at a few large companies.

We cant decide what to do about social media companies, or how to rein in their power, until we have a clear understanding about their actual function and purpose.

Some say that Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, or Twitter are like the telephone company a conduit that connects people and makes communication possible. When two people plot a crime on the phone, no one blames the phone company. Is that what a social media platform is?

Clearly not. The core function of these platforms curating and upranking and downranking information for us makes them different from the telephone company.

Some would say that the social media platforms are distributors of content that people consume. That they should abide by the kinds of professional norms or standards that newspapers, television shows, or radio programs rely on when they make judgments about what should be published. But unlike newspapers and other mass media, social media platforms dont create content users do.

So, we are left with the question, what are these platforms? The answer is that their core function is algorithmic sorting or curation. And this allows for great amplification of content and the possibility of privileging virality over veracity. And, of course, their function is also to sell advertising based upon a massive collection of data about our online behavior.

As a result of not having a clear-eyed view of what platforms are or how they wield the power they do, we dont yet have a clear understanding of how to govern them. And thats part of the great debate we see playing out today about such things as privacy policies, misinformation and disinformation, CDA 230 [section 230 of the Communications Decency Act], political advertising, and so on.

The books introduction describes one view of tech company leadership as a band of ahistorical, techno-libertarian merry pranksters and sociopaths. If these are the people with so much power, how can one avoid feeling dystopian, especially during a global pandemic?

That sentence was meant to capture the spirit of the techno-dystopian rhetoric that is so common today. My view is that we should stop focusing on the personalities of tech founders. And we should start focusing on the influence of concentrated tech power over the rest of our lives.

We have a big lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic and work-from-home conditions should remind us of how essential digital technologies are and how dependent upon them we have become. The work productivity thats been possible because of videoconferencing compared to what would have been possible 10 years ago is owed to digital technology. The same is true for connecting with family and friends across the country who we cant see. Not to mention all of the AI tools that have been essential for identifying therapies and vaccine candidates for the coronavirus.

So thats partly why I would like to say were coming out of a dystopian sensibility. Perhaps the coronavirus can remind us that rather than being uniformly bad, these technologies have become something like the essential infrastructure that has allowed certain elements of our lives to continue during the pandemic. And now is the time to have this mature and sober perspective and to get serious rather than to indulge in utopianism or dystopianism.

Are there ways in which digital technologies might be used to enhance democratic institutions?

Rather than addressing the need to have democratic societies govern digital technologies before they govern us, some of the chapters in this book look at the ways digital technologies can be incorporated into democratic institutions for the purpose of enhancing the performance of democracy itself.

Indeed, digital technology can be put in the service of democracy and expand how we think about the operation of democratic societies. For example, one of the co-authors, Hlne Landemore, a political philosopher at Yale, contributed a chapter about ways in which digital technologies might help us move beyond representative democracy itself. In essence, she explores alternatives to holding elections in which our elected representatives go off and do the business of the people and then citizens do nothing except show up again in a few years to cast another vote. Are there ways in which we might crowdsource, Wikipedia style, the writing of a constitution with people across the world contributing to the writing and editing of our very laws? Or ways in which citizen assemblies can happen online as a complement to or possibly replacement of elected representatives? She shows that this is not merely possible, but that it has already been done, and to some good effect.

Again, this is a way of looking further into the future as a way to enlist digital technology not as a threat to democracy but as a handmaiden to it.

The book calls for the training of public interest technologists. What do you mean by that and what role would these people play in our democracy?

Were all familiar with the idea of public interest lawyers people who get a law degree and then work on behalf of the public interest, whether its through a public advocacy or other civil society organization. At the moment, engineering schools and computer science departments tend to pay lip service to the idea that you should acquire technical skills and then deploy them on behalf of public agencies. Most people who receive computer science training go to work at tech companies. And our universities, including Stanford, facilitate that through their recruitment programs that give unequal access to tech companies. Its much harder to get a lower-paying job in a public agency as a Stanford computer science major than it is to get a higher-paying job at a startup or big tech firm.

So the option of being a public interest technologist would open up the computer science and engineering career pipeline to multiple destinations. Its clear that technical skills are extraordinarily important within public advocacy organizations and public agencies. Imagine what the world would be like if Amnesty International, Partners in Health, the United Nations, or various governmental agencies could hire people with the technology talent that Google and Facebook get. Wouldnt it be nice to have a world in which that was seen as just as important as or more important than deploying your talent for big tech or the promise of a payday in a startup company?

Technologists often complain that democracy is too slow and the people who impose policies are never sufficiently informed; they always use a hammer instead of a well-crafted tool; Washington, D.C., is always 10 to 20 years behind on the frontier of technology. Thats why we need a new generation of people who have learned technology alongside social science, ethics, and democratic theory.

The book suggests that multidisciplinary collaborations will be a fruitful research pathway. Why is such work so important?

Above all else, this is a book that we hope exhibits the enormous importance and promise of putting philosophers, social scientists, and technologists in conversation with one another.

Stanford HAI is premised on the idea that the development of AI will be human-centered when AI scientists work alongside social scientists and humanists rather than inviting the social scientists and humanists to study the effects of AI on the world after the technologists have invented and released it. The same is true for digital technology and democratic theory.

I would like to see a world in which democratic theorists dont offer lectures to technologists about what they should do better in order to support democracy, but instead work alongside them to understand their perspectives. And reciprocally, technologists shouldnt invite democratic theorists to admire their extraordinary innovations and disruptions and then say its their job to do something about it and to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Digital technology will develop in a better way when done in tandem with democratic theorists, and democratic practice will be better when pursued in tandem with technologists.

Stanford HAI's mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.Learn more.

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Democracy and the Digital Transformation of Our Lives - Stanford Report - Stanford University News