A New Era of Democracy Ep. 3 | Zizi Papacharissi
In today’s episode, we welcome Professor of Communications and Political Science Zizi Papacharissi who discusses her latest book, After Democracy with host Matt Prewitt. In this thought-provoking conversation, they examine how social media affects our culture, our relationships, and consequently our democratic processes, while exploring potential ways to imagine new and better forms of democracy by “living with technology, not through technology.”
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Transcript
This is a RadicalxChange production. Hello, and welcome back to the RadicalxChange's podcast. In this conversation, Matt Pruitt talks to Zizzy Papakaresi about her latest book called After Democracy. They discuss the ways that social media affects our culture, our relationships, and consequently our democratic processes. They not only touch on the negative consequences of this, but also explore the potential ways that we can use this technology to imagine new and better forms of democracy. Zizi is professor and head of the communication department, professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago, and university scholar at the University of Illinois system. This is a continuation of our mini season called A New Era of Democracy. And was originally filmed for our RXC TV program. We can't wait for you to hear from these brilliant innovators and the fascinating ideas being brought to the forefront. This is the Radical Exchanges podcast, and this is A New Era of democracy.
Thank you so much, Zizi Papakarisi, for joining today. My pleasure. I'm, super excited to be to be talking to you today. Zizi is a professor and head of communication department and professor of political science at University of Illinois Chicago and university scholar at the University of Illinois system and the editor of many journals and generally one of the most eminent thinkers in media and communications that we have and someone who's I I can't imagine a better sort of tour guide to help us think about how media and social media and technology are shaping our politics, and, very, very honored to be, to be speaking today. So thank you. Thank you. And I love that,
that title of an academic tour guide. You know, I've thought of myself as an academic fanor as I was working on my latest book, but an academic tour guide is even better. I'm gonna start using that.
Great. So I would love to talk a little bit about your most recent book called, After Democracy. But I'm thinking maybe before we get to that, it would be good to lay some of the foundations from your some of your earlier thinking. And in particular, I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit about the idea of effective publics and what what that means. Sure.
Sure. Sure. I'd love to. And, I can tell you a little bit about, you know, how that idea came about. I've I've been working on technology, democracy, and society for a long time, and, I had wrapped up a few projects, around 2010, 2011. And like all good ideas, you know, that idea and I'm hoping it's still a good idea. Most people find it a good idea. They come from a place of boredom. So I was, just sitting around on a lazy, Sunday afternoon for me. There's I was not lazy for the world at all. There were a lot of very interesting social movements going on. I was following, the Arab Spring developments as they were moving and transitioning from Tunisia to Egypt. And then I was also following, you know, the burgeoning Indignados occupy movements and what sort of presence they were attaining online and in particular, how they were using Twitter to attain that presence. And if you think back, you know, on 2010, 2011, Twitter was very different medium. I think before these movements, people mostly used Twitter to share personal thoughts, to often, post pictures of, you know, what they had for breakfast. And that led to many conversations in mainstream media about, you know, what is the future of this? What is even the relevance? But once we saw many, many movements starting to just make a more direct use of the medium. The question that came up very often, was, you know, is Twitter, our social media making the revolution, or is is the revolution making a different medium out of, Twitter? I think, a little bit of both has happened. I will I and I with more having heavily leaning on the ladder, I think that these movements have transformed Twitter into a completely different vehicle and connective, conduit that supports all kinds of publics. And this is the important thing to remember. I think when we first turned to Twitter as a medium, we were all very optimistic and enthusiastic about its promise, for contributing to societal change. But as more and more movements turn to Twitter, we see it being infiltrated with a variety of content that revolves around hashtag hijacking, infusing movements with false content, trolling, sort of staffing movements with, bots to create, you know, a false sense of engagement. So I try to talk about that with this concept of affective publics. And I define that very, very plainly and simply as networked publics, publics, people across the globe who are coming together and they're connected, they're identified, but they're also potentially disbanded, disconnected through sentiment, through bonds of sentiment. So it's not necessarily, you know, an idea a logical connection, and it's not necessarily a conversation, around shared ideology that's motivated. This connection is usually a sentiment, a mood, a sense that, you know, this is something that moves us and we need to create some kind of signifier that's usually a hashtag that allows us to stand up and be counted and be visible. And so we have this this this is something that's happening with movements like Me too and Black Lives Matter. But it is also facilitating movements that have deeply undemocratic consequences or tend to misinform the public. And I'm speaking, of course, to the MAGA movement. I'm referring, of course, to several anti boxing movements as well. So it's important to remember that effective publics support a number of different, and can develop in a number of different directions. It's not safe to assume that just because, you know, one movement used, Twitter to attain a certain kind of visibility and social media presence that all movements will be that same. Every movement is unique, and then every movement leaves its own unique digital imprint, its own unique societal imprint. I'm gonna stop here and let you get a word in. I have a a few more things to say about the impact of these things, but,
you let me know. So well, well, so when I hear when I hear you describe this, I mean, the way the thing that I picture, and you can tell me if I've sort of got it right or not, is is that groups of people who are sort of form forming into sort of clusters who who who cosympathize with each other, and they may or may not really be on the same page ideologically or but they are sort of signifying their membership in the same group in some way, so or signifying their kind of fellow travelerness with one another. And and this can sort of this can sort of point in any different direction. Right? I mean, it could be it could be bad. It could be good. It could be is is that is that about it?
Absolutely. You know? And I think, this is why you see some people floating in and out of these movements. You also see, you know, journalists, trying to interpret these movements in ways in traditional narratives or try to put them in a very conventional frame, that doesn't really fit the movement. You know? So often, I think that was the case with Occupy. We had so many, journalists asking, well, you know, what is what is the agenda? You know, what do these publics want? What is the ideology? And they were missing the point. You know, the point was specifically that there was not to be an agenda. The point was to just demonstrate, dissent, indignation, with a particular mode of running things, of, of doing things. Now, unfortunately, you know, that has also been co opted and become the modus operandi of other movements that are less, that have less of a noble, noble motivation. But one thing to say about all of these things, all of these sort of public formations, and I think we're gonna see more and more of them in the future because they are facilitated by social media. You know? The social media work by bringing out the sentiment in us and allowing that sentiment to, you know, just sort of run-in a very viral manner. I don't think we're gonna see with many of these change, that's instant or instantaneous or immediately political, socio cultural, economic, legislative. I think in most cases, we'll see, symbolic change or a symbolic meaning, symbolic value to some of these movements. And let me give you some examples. So for instance, for a movement like Black Lives Matter, that phrase taken literally, is interesting, obviously, makes a strong statement. Taken symbolically, it it attains a completely different, gravitas in terms of uniting people and also reminding societies, how little has been accomplished despite the years centuries of of civil rights struggles. So, you know, to take that to take that statement and interpret in a literal sense, you know, it leads to a deep misunderstanding of that particular movement. These movements also, they gain agency in ways that are discursive. So what they try to do is they try to change the discourse, to change the conversation, to say, well, we're using the wrong words to describe this institution with or we have this institution and we need to rethink how we're using it to take a movement like defund the police. It's not again, do not interpret it literally. No. I mean, I think that's the least you can get out of it. You know? Nobody's saying let's fire all cops everywhere. But what people are saying is, let's reconsider what it is, exactly that police officers do, what sort of training they do, what policing and law enforcement means in a contemporary democratic society because we've been, you know, we've been running law enforcement like we still live in the medieval centuries. And now even with a movement like MAGA, I will say that, you know, for a lot of these movements, this is both empowering and disempowering. The access to agency, the access to power, it's gonna be of a liminal transitional transitional nature. That's neither good nor bad. I mean, it's not an, it's not meant to be judged in that sort of evaluative manner. I think it concerned us, because when we saw crowds storming the Capitol Building on January 6, we were worried that that implied a lasting access to power. It does not. It's a fleeting access to power. We should be concerned if there's indication that there is, you know, a structural connection to power. And I think, many of us were worried about that because it took so long for law enforcement to respond. And I think that's something that's being looked into, that structural connection with the many of the hearings and the investigations that are undertaking the that are being that are taking place today. But there is that liminality of access to power that well, you know what I mean? Can become, you know, part of, permanent structures, but that is something that'll take time. You know, revolutions are long. Change is gradual. We have to be resilient and persistent.
I mean, it seems like if you compare these kinds of movements to to prior more traditional sorts of movements, one of the differences is that, you you know, more traditional movements might have had more of a sort of a discursive process going on within themselves to sort of define their goals or their ideology. You know? Whereas these these are more a little bit more blank slates, which means that they can, like, form quick more quickly, but then also their power, you know, is more more liminal, more sort of ethereal or something. Is it,
Yeah. Effervescent. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I've thought about this, as well. You know, I've thought about, you know, to what extent is what am I am I describing new or have we seen it in the past? And I think it's a little bit of both. You know, I think there are some of these trends, you know, some of this effervescence is a little bit more amplified, more pronounced, more visible. And that has to do with the media that are used, that sort of sustain, that aspect. They sustain that intensity. You know, it's it's very quick for something to to gain, to attain intensity online and for that intensity to spread. But then, you know, when I think about, you know, some of the civil rights movements of the sixties as they took form in The United States, but also in many different countries in Europe and Asia as well, You're right. You know, there was some, pluralistic conversation on what is our ideological agenda and this agreement often that took place in face to face, situations. I think there is some of that going on with these movements too, but online, in some ways, it's even more pluralized, even more inclusive. I can't say, you know, we'd have to think about whether the commitment is as lasting. But then when you read, you go back and read at how the the intellectuals of that era responded and reacted to those movements. You see a lot of people, you know, Daniel Bell in the sixties talk about the end of ideology. And then, of course, you know, ten years later, he writes about the coming of the information society. And then you also see some other similarities. You know, we used social media that have this, you know, this effective appeal to them. But movements of the 60s used music a lot, which again has this very effective way of appealing to the senses. So people frequently united behind a song. They may not have shared agreement on every single ideological point of that particular movement that they, supported. But, you know, maybe it was like a Johnny Mitchell song or Bob Dylan song that brought them together. And so they marched to that, singing that. So it's a different medium that helps sustain that kind of, you know, connective narrative.
And I so I I'm curious, you know, how how these sort of fit into your, like, hopes and fears. Because what one way I could see these things evolving is that we develop better methodologies for sort of achieving coherence of effective publics, right, and for helping that helping something a little bit more discursive go on within them. You know? And then they and then they just, you know, they they become a part of a healthy democracy. Right? They be you know? You know? But another thing there's obvious dangers as well. Like, for for example, because they sort of form so quickly and become because they form on the basis of affectivity instead of, you know, careful deliberation, you can imagine different effective publics forming that think they hate each other but don't. Right? You know, so if if they're actually talking to each other, they wouldn't they they would find they disagree about less than they than they think they do, but the basis of of their grouping is opposition to one another or something. So Mhmm. What do you what do you think about that? I mean Yeah. I you know, when I wrote, when I finished writing Effective Publics, I,
you know, I I was thinking, you know, this is really this could evolve in a number of different ways. And I turned that book in, you know, 2013, and it's a book that involved a number of big data analysis and also more qualitative analysis of, Occupy and the Egyptian uprising that led to the regime reversal of causing Mubarak. So, I had very mixed feelings. You know? The I was worried that, you know, while we're seeing some positive effects here in terms of visibility, but, you know, we really kinda have to sort of wait and see whether, you know, substantial regime change is going to follow. It's very difficult for me to write about that at the time because there was a lot of enthusiasm about what was happening. And I think there was a lot of, you know, perhaps in The United States, we have it played a part here because all too often, I think we have a certain idea of what democracy is. And we tend to sort of project and often almost impose it upon other countries. So I was very skeptical about, you know, whether that change that we're seeing was going to be lasting. I mean, you have to understand, I I I was born in Greece. When I was born, there was a dictatorship in the country. On the day I was born, there was a referendum to vote out, the king because, there was also a king together with the dictators. They weren't getting along, so the the dictators wanted to to kick the kick the kick him out. I think that's the one good thing that came out of that dictatorship. And so my mother, voted on the referendum, to vote the king out. And then the same night, I gave birth to me, which I think is weirdly symbolic when you think about, the work that, I do. But many of us who grew up in regions that have suffered through, you know, political upheaval, you know, have a country like Greece has, like, such a long but also fragmented history and experience with democracy. We just tend to be very apprehensive of just how quickly things can turn around. So I was worried, but, I nobody really wanted to to hear listen to my concerns. Although in the conversations that I was following with Twitter, a lot of the people on Egypt on the ground were very skeptical as well about Morsi, about that government, and for good reason, as we were able to see. And now, of course, we've evolved to, to a different sort of platform that is, hospitable and platforms that are hospitable to a number of different, causes that articulate themselves through a variety of different ways, ways that are frequently manufactured, you know, manufacturing consent, manufacturing visibility, if you wanna take, that Chomsky endpoint a little bit further. You know, making things visible, and these are often things that actually don't have very much support behind them. So, you know, there's this perception of visibility of support, but there's actually you know, once you did, beneath the surface, you do some some digital forensics work. You just find bots and spiders in their cobweb.
I'm also curious. I mean, I hear people talking about the idea of performativity a lot, and I'm curious how it relates to, you know, sort of affect affectivity in this context. So, you know, the idea of, I mean, I know there's a lot to say about this. I don't I'm I'm sure we can but the, idea of performativity is sometimes used pejoratively as if to suggest that, like, there's a way of communicating that is that is less performative or more authentic, you know, which is being displaced by a more performative kind of communication. I'm not I'm not sure what to think about that because, you know, on on on one level, I think that all communication is is performative. Right? We're always performing.
True.
Nonetheless, there are some distinctions that can be made. For example, it's if it's different to be you know, when two people are talking to each other one on one in private, there are, like, fewer people being performed to than than when people are are talking on social media, when people are talking in a public situation. And I'm I'm curious what you think about that. Do you think that there is some kind of quality to communication that happens in smaller settings or more one to one settings that is that we we should normatively desire, compared to the more sort of, like, one to many communication, which increasingly is what a lot of communication end ends up being?
Yeah. That's, you know, that's such a rich question. I mean, I probably have to start by saying that you're right. You know, performativity can be used in a pejorative manner. But, really, I think it comes down to questions of security and insecurity, which in my mind, insecurity explains 95% of the world's problems. But, so here's, you know, here's what I think. You know? I think people are forced to be performative in some way when for some reason they don't feel secure in the in in the in their environment. They don't feel that they're gonna come across as their true selves as who they really find themselves to be. You know, they're not going to present a version of themselves that really they feel represents who they want to be, how they feel on the inside. So they resort to a variety of different strategies. That that's not something to to blame individuals for. I mean, all too often, you know, think of the politicians, and all too often we have them communicate to publics in, stages and platforms that really invite the performative. I mean, show me one person who feels at home on a television screen. You know, how is that a natural environment, a natural habitat for the human being? Everything about that environment is fake. It's constructed, you know, down to the set, the lighting, the makeup, everything. So for somebody to go on TV, you know, as I say in, my latest book after democracy, politicians have to play a part in order to be to appear to be themselves on TV. You take someone like Hillary Clinton, she behaves, you know, normally. We don't like how she looks. She then tries to put on a different sort of performance, then we find that a little bit too affected. You know, it's very confusing. It's especially challenging for women to for women, for for publics of color as well. You know, it's a fascinating concept that a scholar named Ralina Joseph came up with. It's called strategic ambiguity. And there she talks about how women of color often, upon arriving to a room, they just have a practice of reading the room and just figuring out basically what it looks like and how how black can they be or whether they need to sort of put on a different kind of performance. It's sad, you know, because we are not providing the circumstances that allow people to feel secure enough to. To to communicate in a way that feels that feels authentic to them. But then now I will also say that it's very difficult to do that in mass society. And that gets to the point where, you know, the one on one, one to many. How can you do that in a conversation that involves more and more people? You know, an authentic and impromptu and prompt to an spontaneous conversation. It's very difficult for that to scale up. We can do it, but we have to figure out how to design technologies and design environments, not just technologies, you know, of spaces that support that. And the thing is that frequently when we're designing spaces, you know, the number one criteria is the efficiency economy. And then, you know, an afterthought is, oh, and by the way, does this work? This is actually is this appealing to people? Not, you know, that sort of thing. So in after democracy, I talk about that as, you know, let's make capitalism softer. Let's make democracy stronger by reversing reversing this trend.
Alright. So the I guess the first question I'd I'd like to to ask is, can you explain the, your thinking around the title of, After Democracy? In a way, it's sort of a provocative title, and, I'm I'm curious,
I'm curious how you arrived at it. It's, it is a provocative title, and it's often people are worried when they hear it because they think I'm speaking about some sort of, I'm I'm speaking about the end of democracy, basically, that I'm talking about. You know, I've seen some things, and, they're alarming, and they're gonna make democracy go away. But that's really that really wasn't my starting point for that book at all. My starting point was quite different. I started thinking about the book during the Obama presidency. And, you know, I would be giving a lot of talks on, effective publics, and I was thinking through the trends. You know, you mentioned some of them before we said, where are we? Are we really all thinking the same things, but we need to find a better way of talking about them. So as I was traveling the world thinking, and speaking to people about these things, I would get into conversations with random strangers, you know, like the cab driver who took me to a talk or just, you know, like the security personnel that I would chat with as I was waiting to go on stage. And I thought, you know, what if I could just pull all these conversations together, and turn them into a story about democracy? But I wasn't writing that story because I was worried about democracy going away. I was writing that story because I was seeing politicians who were interested in doing very different things with the world that we live in. And I felt often as I was observing them, and one of them, of course, is Barack Obama. I felt that they were trapped in structures that were old, that they were dated. I felt like it felt, you know, we were making them sleep in the bed that they slept in when they were six years old, you know, or get them to fit into the clothes that they were wearing when they were teenagers. And we were trying to do the same thing as well. So I thought we were running a very dated version of democracy. And here we had people, around the world, actually, not just in The United States, who had come from the future or who had come from, like, just a very energized present. And they were kept bumping, into very just sort of sort of stiff, rigid, structures that were pulling them back. So I wrote after democracy because I wanted to imagine. I wanted to ask the question, you know, of what what what about democracy? You know, is it the is it the best thing that we can come up with? Is it the only thing that we can come up with? It's been around, for thousands of years. It doesn't really scale up very well. It was invented within the scope of a society that was very different. Can we evolve beyond that? Is there something beyond it? Is there is democracy the final stop in our civic journey, or are there more stops? Are there stops, you know, three, four, five infinite number? And then we can kind of, use technology to build out railways, you know, in the same way that we did, you know, to support and invest in the railway infrastructure and then connect us to other worlds, use technology in the same way to connect us to others and help reinvent some of the way that we function civically.
Yeah. So, I mean, all of those themes are very close to my heart and close to what what we're we're working on at Radical Change Foundation. And, I mean, I'm also struck by the the way that the book is put together sort of instantiates a a democratic ethos because you center the voices of, a very large diverse group of people and let them sort of articulate a an an idea of what comes after democracy or or what's next. And I've I mean, I've couple sort of questions about that. You know, one is one is sort of how did you make the choice to structure the book that way, I guess? And and also, you know, having having gathered all of these voices together, how do we scale it up? Right? How do we how how do we take all of these ideas and, sort of translate them to to the next level of sort of organization and democratic infrastructure? You know? And it it kind of this you know, I'll I'll put a pin in it already. Like, it it it it already kind of touches back on what I was suggesting earlier, which is that there's something in the one to one conversations. Right? Because these interactions that that you had were the basis of the material of the book were one to one. Now they be also become public through the book, but there there's a certain sort of safety or security that the people, who you were talking to undoubtedly had there that is probably has something to do with the honesty and the richness and the and so, yeah, just curious. I I'm sure you have lots of thoughts about about this. No. Yeah. And you see, again, it comes back to that question of security and
and insecurity. You have to feel like you're in secure environment so that, you can tell your own story. And then as social scientists, we're we're trained in that. We're trained in facilitating that and and getting people to speak with us. Thank you. I mean, that's such a an interesting and intelligent way to to phrase that question. You know, you're kinda sort of telling me that I practiced what I'm preaching before I decided that that was what I was going to preach to begin with. I I did decide that at some point, you know, there's a lot of experts talking about democracy, and many of them are professors who are talking about what should happen and how it should happen. And, you know, I mean, who gave us the baton and made us the grand deciders? Let's use our position, to give voice to other people and try to just put together those stories. I also had written a number of, you know, conventional academic books, and I was just ready to do something very, very different, and to approach it in a very different way. And I had an even much more expensive plan of traveling to many different countries, but, many more different countries. But that was not, that was not possible. Again, I came up with the idea because I had those one on one conversations. And like you, I thought, well, this can really come up to a they can be pieced together into a very interesting narrative, but we need someone to tell the story in a way that's loyal, to what people actually said. And we have ways of guaranteeing that that happens, you know, in terms of our methodology and how we run the interviews to ensure that we're not misquoting people and, we're not misunderstanding something and all of that. But what I'm trying to say is that, you know, perhaps there's a way to translate that into the way we run democracies or what might follow democracies. Again, we see a lot of professions that are not becoming relevant, But we haven't made room and we haven't allowed ourselves to imagine new professions might that might be created solely for the purpose of serving democracy and facilitating those kinds of connections, you know, so we could have conversational moderators. We could have, community conduits. We could have people whose job it is to, you know, go and, speak, have these one on one conversations. But they're trained to pull them together in, in an authentic and reflective and reflexive way and then share them with other groups and then eventually share them with politicians. I think we're asking people of too much. You know, people are working more hours than they ever have and especially and they're going through a pandemic. And they're also saturated with information. So they have to work. They have to process information. They have to know everything about the world. And then politicians, of course, we want them to run the country and be educated about everything, but at the same time, they must campaign. And, you know, in The United States, they start campaigning so early. So I think in order in order to run something and scale it up, we just need more people for the operation. And we need to just really think about, you know, curators of content, storytellers, you know, rethink the role of the librarian in an information society. Grow that out, you know, parse it out so that we have these interlocutors interspersed throughout democratic societies who are making sure that that communication channels, the communication lines are not broken. I mean, I think we've always assumed that the media would do that. The media business and, you know, they haven't been doing a very good job at that for many reasons. I don't want to put everyone. I mean, I don't want to point the finger at all the media. There's you know, there's journalists. There's people working in those organizations, and they do many of them do a very nice job. But it's the general mentality. You know, there's a financial foundation structure of the media organization that's not very friendly to, to doing these kinds of things. That telling these stories that take time and take space and are not, you know, cannot be, shared with the public on the scroller.
Yeah. So, I mean, what you said just excites me and resonates with me a lot because I I think that this idea that this sort of democratic infrastructure that we need to build needs to be, like, human is is really important. Right? So that you you you can imagine I mean, there are certain functions in society that that humans are will always be better positioned to serve. Right? Like, the sort of the interpretation of information, basically. So just to share a sort of a personal thing. So, I mean, I I used to, I spent a year clerking for a judge, And it was very it was a interesting eye opening experience for me because the I think that that function that judges play, like, what what judges do, is a very, very unique ex an important thing that has to happen in society. Right? Somebody needs some people need to sort of make there's certain kinds of interpretations and judgments that people need to make. They need to be they need to sort of happen with embedded within the social fabric. And, like, that's what that's what judges are doing. And and it occurs to me it occurred to me when I was working there that, like, there's, like, a several 100 federal judges or whatever. You know? Why aren't there more people doing this? Right? There needs to be more of this happening. Right? It needs to be happening at all these different levels of society. So the idea of kind of a a, you know, a network a proliferating network of, like, facilitators who are helping, you know, democracy happen, who are helping, you know, democracy sort of roll up from the from the ground level to the medium level to the higher level, is a is a really compelling, compelling vision to me. And I think, you know, the, if we if we think about the positive potentials for, you know, technology and democracy, I think it has a lot to do with, like, helping that happen.
It's true. Otherwise, we end up simplifying, you know, everything, and then we present people with these just sort of false binaries or, you know, questions that have only yes or no option or options or, you know, do you like? Do you wanna vote for this candidate or not? And there's I mean, what questions in life can you ask, answer with a yes or no? I mean, there's even, like, the simplest of questions. You know? Like, are you hungry? You can't really answer with a straight yes or no.
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm I'm not sure if you have ever come across the idea of, like, quadratic voting, which is, you know, what we're, you know, big part of our of our work. But, you know, that is in a way an attempt to to increase the richness of information, you know, to make it to to so that the information that's being passed from voters to, you know, the democratically responsive authority
is richer than yes, no. I agree. And I I mean, I crossed paths with that idea, and it's enthusiastic ambassadors while I was writing the book. And that was part of the connection that we formed and how we started conversing together. I, I agree. I I mean, I think it needs, you will forgive me. I will say that I think it needs a name that's more relatable to the general public. But I think the general idea is fantastic, and it's all about offering a wider menu of options for citizens to select from. But still, I think, you know, in order for that to happen, we need a lot of support people on the ground. We need the sort of facilitators who are going to be able to then work with the micro communities and figure out what are the trigger points? What are the important issues for that community? What are the what is the balance between the issue, the issues and the candidates and those communities so that the quadratic aspect of that can be configured accurately. I do think that, you know, there is there's a positive part that, you know, AI can play in all of this. I think it can help us enhance our abilities to process things, but it's not something to be cast to AI on its own. I think, there's many ways in which I think we might be able to use, AI to enhance our memory. I think there's also many ways in which we may use AI to help us train ourselves better when it comes to reimagining ways of doing things. I think we're very focused on, cultivating critical literacies, and that's very, very important. We still have a long way to go there. No doubt. But I think we also need to start doing and start teaching our children and future generations the important work of once literate, then you have to be able to imagine different ways of doing things. You know, we're doing so many things. We're like sleeping, eating, dating, loving, living in the same ways that we've been doing for centuries. And, again, I I mean, I I have to ask, you know, does this really match? You know, we're using all these habits that are dated and don't really seem They're retrofitted so that they can, work in our society. What, you know, what does the institution of marriage, for instance, mean in societies where women are much more autonomous? So that needs to be, thought over.
Yeah. I think there's a lot of interesting potential for AI to help people understand each other, actually. Like, there's a you know, it which is it's funny how rarely you hear people talking about that as a potential application. Right? People it's always sort of, like, AI will help us manipulate the inert external world, you know, as opposed to, you know, helping us actually see what one another mean. You know, give a sort of context so that we can bridge misunderstandings between ourselves and things like that. There's no reason AI can't do that.
I think so. You know, if you get me started on this, I think people will start thinking that I've been watching too many sci fi movies. But I I mean, I think back to, the late nineties and when I first started studying these issues, mid nineties, actually. And when, Wired was a fascinating publication to read, and we were just running to look at it when it was published. And I as a as a young professor, I had, you know, a whole display of all the white magazines and their colorful spies. And it was just such a wonderful, techie, artful background and backdrop to my office. And, of course, I don't read wired the same way that I, did then. But they were doing a lot of stories on, you know, transhumanism and prosthetics and, you know, just sort of chip implants and much of the, because there was so little work on society and the Internet done at the time, I mean, I had to draw we had to draw a lot of inspiration from, from places like Wired, but also from science fiction novels that, we read on how So that's very much influenced, you know, in my my thinking of how, how AI can enhance our ways of being and communicating. You know, there was I remember in, I think there's a novel by Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire, and, the characters had a wig that they could put on that enabled them to speak all kinds of different languages. So I'm still waiting for that for that technology to appear. But so when I talk about transhumanism and, you know, using AI to work in those ways and imagining different things, and I think and, of course, we can imagine things better than wigs and definitely things, better than robots that look like pets. I'm thinking about things that, you know, looking at AI and right now I'm working with some of my students on thinking of ways in which, we use AI to or we train intelligence to after, not human intelligence, but after the intelligence of nature. So we try because it's, you know, we've been, you know as humans, we think a little perhaps we're a little bit too important and a little bit too superior. And I don't think we, certainly a form of intelligence, but I think we have a lot to learn from the intelligence of trees and how they nurture nature and perhaps we can, you know and and a lot of AI scientists are actually following that model, looking at microorganisms, looking at other, organisms of nature that support, fungi, for instance, to support nature in a variety of different ways to learn and design those kinds of things. So this is what I'm thinking. That's the line of thought that I'm very interested in when I talk about a certain, you know, transhumanism coming into the conversation. Maybe one day we'll come come up with a better word for that. But, you know, finding a way to use technologies to, to build better bridges. You know, bridges are wonderful because we cross them for a variety of reasons. You know, we we cross them to conquer. We also cross them to for commerce to get closer to each other. But the whole time we're crossing them, we we can still see the rivers that are separating us. So we're not losing sight of of our differences. We remember, why we built them. You know, we remember what separated us. We don't so we don't forget our history, but we are still using something that enables us to to move forward.
Now the question for me is those bridges that we build, can they be built for profit?
Yeah. So it's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. And then the question, that I have back for you is can they be if they're built for profit, can they also support democracy?
No. No. No. I don't think I'm not saying yes.
No. No. No. No. But I'm asking the question. Yeah. And we come up with a way that, you know, they're built for profit, so they're sustainable financially. But, they're not just profit oriented. So they're not supporting, commodification and commercialization and and the reasons or the purposes why we cross. They're also supporting a number of different activities. So I think it's a question of the afterthought. You know? If we design them, with democracy as the the precursor, as the reason, as the rationale for this, I think we'll end up seeing a very good impact on, for profit organizations. I think we'll I think we'll be able to get capitalism to work in ways that we haven't seen it work, yet and might surprise us and might make it more efficient. I mean, there is you know? Again, we are running capitalism. I don't think if we ever if we ever ran it properly, but we're definitely running, like, you know, the sixteenth century, you know, like, fifteenth century model version of it for a society that's really using very, very different tools and, has is based in an economy that's really, really much reliant, much more reliant on the on the politics of the stock market
than it should be. So, I mean, my my worry is that if we try to build these bridges between ourselves in the service of democracy with technology, I worry that the profit motive in the stewardship of those bridges or the construction of those bridges is distorting. It distorts the signals that we're able to distorts the way that we're able to understand each other. Sort of it's like in it's an it's an interposition between the communicating subjects, and its interests will never be the same as the interests of of democracy. And that sort of distortive effect can get looped in on itself exponentially. Right? So so I actually I mean, I have just speaking for myself, I mean, I have very serious worries about whether capitalism is is compatible with the construction of the of democratic infrastructure at all. I mean, I I for example, I think, you know and this is kind of going back to the idea of, like, a judge. Right? You can't have a judge for profit. Right? You can't like, you couldn't have a judging court. The the judge has to be loyal to something else. And, similarly, I think, like, a facilitator of a of a town hall, you know, or the or a facilitator of of a democratic deliberative process that we're trying to roll up to a larger consensus or something like that, cannot have any conflict of interest. Right? That human role has to be answering to something that has nothing to do with shareholders.
I I mean, I share the same concerns, you know, primarily because I haven't seen any examples in our history, past or recent that, might indicate otherwise. But I am hopeful, but I think that that is because, again, we've been using this very dated model of capitalism, and we have this conviction that this is, this is the cap the model of capitalism that works the best, and we're forgetting that, you know, it's a model of capitalism that was, was developed when societies were not really very democratic. You know? Democracy really wasn't a thing. So we're using something. Of course, you know, we're using something that wasn't created to support democracy was something that was put in place in feudal states. You know, it supported monarchies. It supported a completely different kind of leadership. So, yes, absolutely. Capitalism in in its current form cannot it runs contrarian, to democracy, and we let it run-in a way where it just sort of becomes much more autonomous and stronger. And this thing that just kind of runs on its own, whereas at the expense of democracy. So it would be one thing if the two were separated, but all of this is happening at the accept expense at the softening of democracy. So my argument would be that we also revised capitalism, and then the way that I would sell it to the capitalist is that there's a way to do this better and also serve democracy. There's actually a way to to run things more efficiently. And if you wanna make more money and make more profit, there is a way to do that while also having a very, direct democratic conscience. I Yeah. That you know, that's my point of view. But, yes, in its current iteration, in its present form, No. You know, we're running something that really just doesn't
that really just doesn't fit democracy at all. I think, ideologically, we're on almost exactly the same page, but we're trapped in two different effective publics because my what I what I wanna do I wanna say capitalism, let's not use that word anymore.
Right? What word should we use? Yeah. Let's come up with a better word. I'm not opposed to that because it does create a lot of negative sentiment. Yeah. Then on the other hand, if we use, you know, socialism that, you know, is so misunderstood in The United States. Right. Right. In the European Union, all of the countries have had their love affairs. And then, like, every love affair, there's, you know, at a point in the end where you're, like, tragically depressed. Yeah. And it's over. Yeah. So all the European countries have had their love affairs with socialism. So,
yes, let's let's come up with better vocabulary. I mean, when they say do over capital, come up with a better word. Yeah. Of course. Exactly. I I just I just I don't and I don't know what the word is, actually. But the, I mean, maybe the word is democracy.
You know? But But but I was thinking the same thing.
You know? But the I guess, the problem is I don't want to say let's fix capitalism because I feel like in the contestation for that word, I'm the hedge fund people will always win. You see what I'm saying? Like, I can't I I don't have enough purchase on that word to to to play tug of war over it, so I wanna find a new a new
vocabulary. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think so. And I think there's a way to you know? I mean, yes. Because it it's no longer capitalism. It's like, you know, hedge fundism, actually. It's it's transformed into that. You know? It's really basically, it's not even a stock market. It's it's a massive globally operated gambling market that's based on expectations and how those are read. And then at this point, manipulating those expectations and using social media to manipulate those expectations, you know, ever more expertly. Yeah. So yes. But, I mean, I think I I have faith, you know, in the brains of scientists and also in the in the brains of young people, to come up with something that might be appealing to hedge funds. Right. Because, you know, they're also at some point, you know, I mean, they can't keep outsmarting every each other indefinitely. I mean, at some point, they're gonna get tired, and they're gonna need to move on to the next, best thing. And then so then, you know, perhaps, there we might be standing ready to offer that. It is you know, if you watch these economic cycles, they just keep moving from one to the next. But at some point, you know, everybody learns each other's tricks, and they have to invent new ones. So let's invent the next new one. Let's have it involve democracy. And without being corporate, you know, I say because when I say sell it, my academic friends say, oh, we don't wanna be corporate. And I'm not you know, just because I'm presenting something in a particular frame doesn't mean that I'm being corporate. Let's, let's frame it in a way that that's appealing.
Yeah. Corporate, that's a word that is not doesn't have a good reputation.
And
I'm curious. So, I mean, one one of the most interesting takeaways from after democracy that or that left me just sort of wondering, I guess, is is the idea that, you talked to people who are apparently at opposite ends of the political spectrum who are just saying things that were shockingly similar to to one another. What do you think is going on there? Why do you think it because I've candidly, I've noticed the same thing, actually. You know, when I talk to people who Mhmm. Are on the the the right or on the left, it's like they're telling me the same things. Yeah.
And what's happening? I think it's populism. You know, I think, again, it's that, you know, manufacturing of a particular, voice or presentation or, point of view and presenting it as the, as the voice of the many, as the point of view of the many, and often, you know, misrepresenting many of the micro points of view that came together or lie behind it. This is why I write in the book about this idea of forgetting messiahs because all too often, you know, we look at people and we do this in our personal lives as well. You know, we, we seek out friends, you know, we seek out partners in this way who will complete us, who will make us feel, like they will solve our problems. And the the truth is, you know, I mean, you wanna talk about it from a philosophical point of view. You wanna go see a therapist and talk. Everybody will tell you. You're the only person who can complete yourself, and you're the only person who can solve your own problems. And until you reach that level of, you know, self knowing and self reliance, you you're not gonna be able to make decisions that will serve you well. And that's fine because, you know, there's a lot in that process of learning. But I think it's a mistake that we make in our personal lives. I think we make it in our civic lives. We we use criteria, that are not fit for electing leaders. We look at them as as if we're expecting, you know, the the next, messiah to to come come up and emerge and save us from all of our problems. And that's it. Not just a deeply problematic expectation. It's a deeply unrealistic expectation. And I'll mind you, I'm not saying that, you know, I mean, there's nuance here. I'm not saying that these people are not charismatic. They can be a little bit charismatic. But, you know, there's charisma. And then there's the Messiah. And, you know, the Messiah is essentially a b s artist. I think as a person who's able to, you know, take a story, an idea, a truth, that they have heard and distorted into something else in order to make false promises, blown out of proportion promises and then shift, energize public opinion. So I think, we have to when we when we talk to each other, we find out that we have a lot in common. But when we're described by messiahs, it, we're made to think, like, we're, you know, sort of standing, like there's only binaries. You know, there's only dichotomies in this world, and we're just sort of standing on opposite on opposite ends. So I think we have to be very distrustful of people who present as messiahs, and we have to be very distrustful of people who want to pit us on opposite sides. I think we have to be a little bit more trusting of people who are ready, who acknowledge our differences, but, you know, want to do the hard work of connecting us, while reminding us, you know, what it is that separate that separated us, to begin with.
Well, I guess what I'm thinking when I hear that is is that,
that being naive?
No. No. No. No. No. I just well, I do I guess, I I'm worried there's a deeper problem than messiahs actually because mess what I think messiahs are doing is they're making it worse. They're telling a story. They're telling really clear stories that sort of divide people, but the sort of symbolic material that they're using to create those stories, like, exist without the messiahs too. So, for example, to make concrete what I'm saying, like, if you just think about the idea of, like, nationalism or national identity. Right? Like, that, you know, I don't know. I mean, Germanness and Italianness are there even before the demagogues show up in Germany and Italy. Right? So there's, like, all this material that is is already dividing people before the messiah figures come along and, like, exacerbate it.
Yeah. They certainly, they're, you know, they're, they're not in I mean, there have been some cases where they invent something out of nothing that there are such example. But in many cases, they're taking a a problem. Again, they're taking a fear. They're taking an insecurity, basically, and they're exploiting it. They're turning it into something completely different. In many you know, they're taking historical background. You know, you talked about, you know, Germany. You talked about Italy. No. Italy, has seen its own share of civil wars. Germany has also seen divisions. So there's a lot of binaries there that are, you know, right for, the picking. You know, they're ready to be exploited by messiahs, and we have seen that happen in the past. And then therein, I think, lies our own responsibility. In the book, I make, 10 recommendations, but I say they must all work together. You know, we can't just follow one and forget about the other ones. They're in lies our own responsibility to be civic adults, you know, to just sort of own up their own responsibilities and, be distrustful of those people and, and question them. I mean, those things are always gonna those tensions will always exist. We can only hope that they will become a little bit softer as we grow as as societies. And Yeah. As we make democracies stronger, as we replace capitalism with a better word and a better system, as we put in all these interlocutors that help make these conversations better so that we can be better civic adults, so that we have other people to speak with and tune these messiahs out as we also develop media that facilitate these slower conversations instead of, like, you know, tapping along to the rhythm, to the very stock marketing rhythm of this, like, new scroller that just sort of minimizes everything into a click baity headline. All of these things need to come into play so that we're less vulnerable to these tendencies, so that we have all of these things in our civic environment that are nudging us out of out of traps like that. So, on the one hand, it's on us. And then on the other hand, we need to build a better architecture that helps us, helps us be less vulnerable to these all of these tendencies that, you know, will will be vulnerable and will exist, add infinitum. You know, they're part of human nature. It's kinda like how you build a house. You know? Do you build a house just so that you can keep others out, or do you build a good solid house that will help you live a better life?
You you make a a a really great point that people seem to be sort of retreating into a into more private spheres to make politics more meaningful or to sort of practice politics in a way that feels more meaningful to them. They do. You know? They I think they're often,
they're often let down, and especially, I think, with the the the they've been doing so for a long time, but I think especially with the politics of this pandemic, we've been forced to retreat into microspheres, that guarantee our own public health, I'm sorry, our own health and security, and also, and also our sanity to, to a certain extent. You know, the reasons behind behind that are manifold. But I think the takeaway point from that is is this, that, you know, we've been using technology we're using something like the Internet for the wrong kind of thing. You know, we've been using the Internet to do to enable broadcasting of many to many and one to many and all of that. When we know, as you pointed out, that we're trying to scale things up that are not really you know, they're gonna lose context. They're gonna lose substance as a scale up. When in fact, we could be using technology better, in different ways to just sort of take these one on one conversations and layer them up, build these, like, implicated layers that eventually add up to something that's much more sophisticated. So it's using using the Internet in a very simplistic way. Just because somebody told us that, you know, we can all communicate across the globe with it, we assume that, you know, we're gonna upgrade. You know, this is a great platform. And it can certainly be that, but it can be many other things as well. It seems like what we're
well, I guess, like, when I think about what messiahs do or what demagogues do is Mhmm. They, like, they take these private stories and they
unify them. They aggregate them into a big story. Right? I don't I don't know if it's it that they take a private story. I think they they take insecurity and fear. I think if, historically, if you looked at when messiahs have thrived or where, it's usually in, publics that feel very financially insecure. So they Yeah. They take somebody's problems, somebody's financial insecurities. They take people who feel like they've been left behind for a variety of reasons. You know, part of it is a flawed capitalism. Part of it has to do with a very soft democracy, and they they exploit those fears. They exploit those insecurities. And, I mean, these people are vulnerable enough to begin with, so it's it's very difficult to to hold it against them. But, you know, that is that is precisely what they do. They get elected into office and very soon they forget about the people who put them into office. But, you know, if you look at how, you know, Hitler employed rhetoric, to rise to power, he, he exploit deeply held financial insecurities of the Germans that were associated with the stock market crash and use them specifically to target Jewish populations who were involved in banking. If you look at what Donald Trump did, he went, he he went around and he was advised to do so in in areas that have historically been, not just financially unstable, but vulnerable to persuasion, vulnerable to to the rhetoric of messiahs. I mean, a lot of those counties that, you know, put him into elected him into office and then elected him out of office have traditionally been counties that, you know, flip flip back and forth because of financial instability. Much of it is related to globalization, and much of it is related to to the inability to, you know, coal industry, you know, to decide what to do with certain, energy resources and how to redirect the industry there so that we don't lose jobs, but at the same time, we're preserving and more we're preserving and helping make happen a more sustainable future. So a lot of a lot of those problems have been ignored for some time. They were ignored during these campaigns that, again, are supposed to last for a year and a half when somebody is also running the country. So it's many different things contributing to that. But and then it points down to I don't think, you know, they're exploring stories. I think they're exploiting fears, vulnerabilities, insecurities. And that's gonna keep happening. Interesting. I guess, because fear fear is a part of human nature. So we just kind of have to to train ourselves to just deal with it in different ways. Yeah. That's We have to become more secure societies too. Right. Right. I mean, definitely
I mean, no question. Financial insecurity is, creates the ground for demagoguery. But I guess I'm just I I think what I'm grasping for is is, like you know, without disagreeing with anything you said, so sort of like yes yes and. You know? Mhmm. The there's like, it does seem to me that there are people who are vulnerable to demagogues who are not financially insecure, for example. Right? And and and
Yeah. Just talk about those
rascals. Those are the tough cases. Right? And there are other forms of insecurity besides financial security. Right? I mean, people are there are people are made insecure. People can be insecure about the future. People can be insecure. People feel a sense of incoherence in the world. People are afraid of death. People are always gonna have fears. Right? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I took away from after democracy, which is it's almost like we need to be comfortable with less of a clean story. Does that make sense?
It does. It does. You know, especially when we're, when we're judging politicians, I think we have to understand, you know, what's important and what's marginally significant. Because when you were saying before, you know, well, there's the people who are, you know, financially vulnerable, and then there's those who are not, and they support the messiahs. And, and and then my response would be, well, then and you mentioned judges, and I would say, well, then that is where diplomacy comes in. And that's where we have to, elect leaders who who know how to do their jobs. And, perhaps we need to understand that these people have to be good negotiators in some ways, among other things. But I I don't know that we're always, ready to elect, you know, the the person who's going to be able to represent our interests in a way that's fair while at the same time being able to hold, court to a very noisy conversation that at the present time, in the present model, includes, you know, lobbyists. Eventually, we can start you know, we can move forward and make lobbyists a little bit less relevant to to these forms of decision makings. But based on how, you know, we run elections, how we fund elections, and then, how we run campaigns. And when we have campaigns take place at least at least in The United States, we're, you know, we're just encouraging diplomacy and we're sort of encouraging this sort of clientelism, you know, basically. Yeah. And yeah. That's that's also something that needs to go. Do you have thoughts on the the role
that artists or media makers can play in, you know, supporting democracy or bringing about sort of a, a a different way of understanding how we how we can relate to each other? Yes. I have so many thoughts.
You know, artists, media makers, and scientists, I think, can play a huge part. I think, I think journalists need thio develop more of a habit of talking to scientists and also helping us sell better stories because I think often, you know, we're not trained. Thio speak speak in plain terms. We have thio, and that's not a priority in our field, you know, because we have to get tenure and do all these other things. But then, once we do those things, we have to train ourselves to speak in terms that are relatable and understandable to the broad public. And we could definitely use the help of journalists and that in communicating our findings. But we could also, you know, we would also be appreciate, you know, developing more of like a sacerdotal relationship with journalists who are not like really rushed you know, to give you a sound bite in, like, you know, ten seconds, but we can have, like, a slightly longer conversation, not, you know, like hours, just, like, ten minutes where we share key findings and perhaps we get some advice from journalists on how to share those in the best ways. But, I think that would lead to a much better informed public. Artists and media makers, I think, have already done so much in terms of informing the public and, telling, telling stories that draw from science. And there's a lot again. You know, when I say that over the past twenty, thirty years, I mean, this this sort of balance between a strong capitalism, soft democracy, there's just this this distance has been widening. I mean, I remember when I first started as an academic, they were they were government dedicated funds that went to support, research in education that, was focused on how how to use technology to make democracy better, to support the arts, to support media making, to support those forms of storytelling. There are actually grants like that, like, that we could apply for. Ever since, you know, our most recent meddling post nine eleven with The Middle East, all of those funds have been gradually taken away. And then all the grants that we see have to do with cybersecurity or cybersecurity infrastructure, as if that is, you know, the only avenue that, a society can pursue in terms of research and that a government can support. So, not only can they play a big part, I mean, they can they are the people who help us reimagine. You know? They're the the imaginary repositories of a society. That's where we go when we need to think of better ways of doing things, you know. And, so absolutely, that play a big part. You know, I applaud technology companies who bring in media makers who support artists, and I would only encourage them to make them a more a bigger part of the conversation, more vocal part of the conversation when it comes to how how to design a platform how to design an interface. And then also how to design the next thing because I mean these things that we're using today were just you know, in a couple of years, we're just gonna evolve out of them. So into something different, and it'd be wonderful if, you know, an artist can imagine, what that could be. Perhaps there's, like, a sheet that I shake or, like, a curtain that I draw and then Internet appears or something like that. Or or none of those things and it's in the air particles.
So what,
what good question have I not asked? I don't know. You asked me excellent questions. The one about art, you know, that's, like, straight to my heart. That's always, you know, whenever I don't know what to do or I've run out of inspiration, I always just go look at some art, go to a museum, go walking around, go look at public art. I
Which artists have you lately, like, you know, are inspiring you? I like Theaster. A lot of black artists.
Theaster Gates, I mean, Virgil Abloh, Simone Lee. I like, while I'm looking up my, Kerry James Marshall. That is my most favorite, I would tell you. Kerry James Marshall because, there's not it's not culturally rich and historically sensitive and informed, but there is this this really weird, very new surrealism, that's very unique that I just I just love. I I I like all of our liaison. I've always been a fan of his work. It's just a little bit more removed, though. Carrie James Marshall, I love because it is you know, there's a it's life. You know? There's the there's warmth and there's joy and there's a a little bit of pain in there and there's hope. There's everything. Lisa Butler is wonderful as well. There's a variety of different ones, but Harry James Marshalls and it took me I can't believe it took me so long. It you know, my my brain for a minute, you know, died and then just sort of came up with a with a name.
No. That's great, though. Thanks. I will, I look forward to to to digging in on those. Thank you thank you so much for the time. I mean, what a what a privilege to be able to speak to you. Really grateful. No. The privilege is mine. I it's it has been such a wonderful conversation. So interesting, and I I learned a lot. You helped me think about many things.
Help you help me advance my thinking.
Thanks again to Zizi Papakarisi and Matt Pruitt. This conversation was produced by g. Angela Corpuz and Aaron Benavides and was shown at the twenty twenty one Radical Exchange annual conference. The Radical Exchanges podcast is produced by g. Angela Corpuz, Jennifer Marrone, and Matt Pruitt, and is co produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. And finally, we'd like to extend a big thanks to listeners like you. Radical Exchanges is a Radical Exchange Foundation production. You can help support the Radical Exchange Foundation by visiting radicalexchange.org.
