Essays from the Second IWORD
The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023).
- Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators
- Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation
- Claudia Chwalisz, Moving Beyond the Paradigm of “Democracy”: 12 Questions
- Riley Wong, Privacy-Preserving Data Governance
- Christine Tran, Recommendations for Implementing Jail Voting: Identifying Common Themes
- Niclas Boehmer, The Double-Edged Sword of Algorithmic Governance: Transparency at Stake
- Manon Revel, Can We Talk? An Argument for More Dialogues in Academia
- Aditi Juneja, Ensuring We Have A Democracy in 2076
- Nick Couldry, Resonance, Not Scalability
- Jon Evans, Experimentocracy
- Nathan Schneider, Democracy On, Not Just Around, the Internet
- Eugene Fischer, The Enrichment and Decay of Ionia
We are starting to think about IWORD 2024 this December.
echo • March 8, 2024 2:27 PM
I sampled four items: “Democracy as approximation”, “Moving Beyond the Paradigm of Democracy”, and “Can We Talk?”, and “Experimentocracy”. I can’t endorse any one of them. All of them have too many problems. I didn’t look at the rest.
Zeroing on to “Can We Talk?” it simply doesn’t pass safeguarding or ethics considerations. It’s an argument for tenured egos to throw their weight around with license. It’s just neo-liberal “free speech” wriggling its way into institutions under the shield of “academic freedom” to hide the “War on woke” and the “Deep state”. In other words codified and indemnified institutional capture. It’s worse than this which a number of women can attest to. Too many UK universities have too many problems and are refusing to engage with the underlying causes both academically and professionally. Just because a woman wrote the essay doesn’t mean I’m going to accept it because “thumbs on the scale” have become adept at co-opting as a shield to disguise the agenda. That makes me start asking questions about the management and funding sources and what we are not being told.
The rest look equally dodgy and are not many steps removed from why I say NIST is useless.
Harvard has been suffering from some dark money thumbs on the scale recently one of which corrupted their law department.
I would tread very carefully with this lot and make sure the safety rope is secured firmly.