Well, I’m pretty excited about democracy as a social technology. I don’t think many people see democracy as a set of technologies yet, but I think that’s a very useful view, because when you analyze democracy in terms of social technology — of bandwidth, of latency, of things like that — then new modes of thought become more natural. If you think of democracy as mostly just juries and voting in ballots of presidents and so on, then of course you worry about non-representativeness, non-statistical balance, things like that. But if you analyze it in terms of a high-dimensional, high-bandwidth, collective sense-making apparatus that it is, then a lot more solutions and innovations would become possible to experiment with — at least before, of course, ratifying it as norms over laws.

Keyboard shortcuts

j previous speech k next speech