• Five ways to fix the knowledge crisis in the age of Trump - "Elites must not be complacent about a widening epistemological gulf which threatens democracy."
• Trump's Early Actions Mirror Project 2025 Plan He Once Dismissed - "Criticism of Project 2025 featured heavily in Democratic campaigns, but Republicans said few people are even aware of the policy book. 'The truth is that my Democratic friends are on the back foot,' said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), 'and they don't know what position to take, except to flail.'"

-Trump uses mass firing to remove independent inspectors general at a series of agencies
-White House says Colombia agrees to take deported migrants after Trump tariff showdown

• Donald Trump in fiery call with Denmark's prime minister over Greenland - "US president insisted he wants to take over Arctic island."
• Welcome to America's techno-military future - "No less important, this new generation of techno-militarists is also shaping public discourse."

The fundamental problem is this: we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise. That in turn leads us to focus on how social media shapes individual knowledge, for better or worse, and to mistake symptoms for causes.

A lot of argument about democracy - both in public and among the academics who inquire into it - makes heroic claims about the wisdom and intelligence of individual citizens. We want citizens who are wise, well informed and willing to think about the collective good. Sometimes, we even believe that citizens are all these things.

The problem is that actual individual citizens are biased and, on average, not particularly knowledgeable about politics. This mismatch between rhetoric and reality has created opportunities for a minor academic industry of libertarians and conservatives arguing that democracy is unworkable and that we should rely instead on well informed elites to rule. The problem with this elitist case against democracy is that elites are just as biased, and furthermore are liable to use their greater knowledge to bolster their biases rather than correct them (for the extended version of this riposte, see this essay by Hugo Mercier, Melissa Schwartzberg and myself). The problem of human bias goes all the way down.

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias suggests that people can actually think much better collectively than individually, offering prospects for a different understanding of democracy, in which my pig-headed advocacy for my particular flawed perspective allows me to see the flaws in your pig-headed arguments and point them out with gusto, and vice versa, for the general improvement of our thought.

This is a particular version of an argument that is made more generally by Herbert Simon. There are sharp limits to individual human cognition, but we have invented collective means to think better together. Brad DeLong has a nice phrase for the specific advantage of the human species - “anthology intelligence” - which captures this. Markets, bureaucracies, and indeed democracy can all serve as collective means of problem solving and compensation for individual deficiencies, under the right circumstances. But the qualifying phrase, ‘under the right circumstances,’ is key. All of these institutional forms have failure modes.

To understand the particular success and failure modes of democracy, it is better not to focus on individual citizens, but on democratic publics. Democracy is supposed to be a system in which political decisions are taken not by kings, or dictators, but by the public, or by representative agents that are responsible to the public and can be removed through elections or similar. In principle, then, the public is the aggregated beliefs and wants of the citizenry as a whole.

The problem is that we have no way to directly see what all the citizens want and believe, or to make full sense of it. So instead we rely on a variety of representative technologies to make the public visible, in more or less imperfect ways. Voting is one such technology - and different voting systems tend to lead to quite different manifestations of the public. “First past the post” systems like the U.S. and United Kingdom tend to produce publics in which political contention is channeled through competition between two opposed parties, as opposed to many smaller parties.

Opinion polls are another. They now seem quite natural to us as a gauge of public opinion, but as Andy Perrin and Katherine McFarland argue, they seemed strange and unnatural when they were first introduced.

More importantly, all these systems are not just passive measures of public opinion but active forces that rework it. As Perrin and McFarland say, “Publics are evoked, even shaped, by [the] techniques that represent them.” Human beings are coalitional animals. We appear to have specialized subsystems in our brain for understanding what the group politics are in a given situation; who is opposed to who, and what the opportunities are...

Again: none of this is brainwashing, but it is reshaping public debate, not just in the US, but in the UK, Europe and other places too. People’s sense of the contours of politics - what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought respond - is visibly changing around us.

That poses some immediate questions. Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space? How can that control be limited or counteracted, even in principle? What practical steps for reform are available in a democracy shaped by the people who you want to reform out of power?

It poses some more general questions too. If you want to work towards a better system of democracy, which is both more stable and more actually responsive to what people want and need, how do you do this? It is easy (I think personally, but I am biased too) to see what is wrong with the public at X/Twitter. It is harder to think clearly about what a healthy public would look like, let alone how to build one.

To the extent parks and squares are the site of protest and collective action, we might well search for a digital public square, a function many platforms have purported to serve.^[14] Sites on the original World Wide Web offered unprecedented opportunities for a range of people to make their messages available. But as Economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously observed, this deluge of information created a paucity of attention.^[15] Soon it became hard to know if, who and how one was reaching an audience with a website and proprietary search systems like Google. Proprietary social networks like Facebook and Twitter became the platforms of choice for digital communication, but only partly addressed the issue as they had limited (and usually pay-for) affordances for understanding audiences. The digital public square had become a private concession, with the CEO of these companies proudly declaring themselves the public utility or public square of the digital age while surveilling and monetizing user interactions through targeted advertising.^[16]

[...]

Luckily, in recent years some of the leaders in open standards technologies of both privacy and publicity have turned their attention to this problem. Lemmer Webber, of ActivityPub fame, has spent the last few years working on Spritely, a project to create self-governing and strongly connected private communities in the spirit of ⿻ publics, allowing individual users to clearly discern, navigate and separate community contexts in open standards. A growing group of researchers in the Web3 and blockchain communities are working on combining these with privacy technologies, especially ZKPs.^[27]

[...]

In 1995, one of De Tocqueville's most prominent heirs, political scientist Robert Putnam, began documenting the decline of American civic life starting in the 1960s in his essay "Bowling Alone". He attributes this to a corresponding reduction in participatory community associations such as fraternal organizations, religious groups and parent teacher associations, leading to his quip that there are more people bowling and fewer bowling leagues. He argues that the decrease in associative behavior directly affects the development of social capital and trust which "facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit."^[28]

Putnam addresses several possible reasons but focuses in particular on television and the "privatizing" of our leisure time, noting that "television has made our communities ... wider and shallower." His essay preceded the modern Internet but we might import into his argument a phrase from our contemporary digital lives: there's an app for that. A challenge then for the extraordinary reach of 21st century digital technology is the harnessing of that power to form meaningful communities and deeper social interactions. Strong community engagement also cultivates robust civic discourse where social and political problems can be hashed out by constituent citizens.

• Introducing the Collective Intelligence Project - "The Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) is an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology. CIP will focus on the research and development of collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group's capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals."[3,4]

-Reboot Democracy: A conversation with Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan[5,6]
-Democracy Rising: Making 2025 the year we recover from Peak Polarisation with Audrey Tang[7,8]

• To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up - "[A]s democracies falter in the face of complex global challenges, citizens (and increasingly, elected leaders) around the world are losing trust in democratic processes and are being swayed by autocratic alternatives. Nation-state democracies are, to varying degrees, beset by gridlock and hyper-partisanship, little accountability to the popular will, inefficiency, flagging state capacity, inability to keep up with emerging technologies, and corporate capture."[9,10]

Imagine a world of abundant public goods, funded via consortium-based taxes coupled with active participation in investment based on shared need. Right now, many projects with incredible social-value returns, from transportation infrastructure to small businesses that would benefit many in a community, can languish in an innovation valley of death because they’re not well set up for pure public funding, and yet are misaligned with the incentives of private capital. CI mechanisms for pooled funding could address this gap, redirecting state and philanthropic resources into financially supporting these projects in proportion to their deemed benefit to a given community, and dynamically reallocating when necessary. This could better direct scientific and research funding, creating massive positive externalities not well incentivized in the current system, or direct public funding for industrial policy (instead of direct subsidies, which can miss necessary local information or be prone to capture and cronyism).

Or imagine a world of CI-enabled firms prioritizing collective provision at scale through effective economic democracy. Advanced CI mechanisms could expand collective input and ownership beyond voice in a single workplace, or a vote every four years. Imagine networks of production run with input from local and global stakeholders, using transaction fees as taxlike sources of funding for long-term investment—radically updating the regulated monopoly. Or AI assistants helping communities navigate value trade-offs, scaling up commons-based governance practices while computing a range of quantitative and qualitative measures to optimize—instead of just maximizing share price. Or platforms that enable individuals and communities to track the effects of new technologies, internalizing externalities from environmental degradation to pandemic risk.

Of course, getting there won’t be easy—changing power structures never is. Scholars from John Dewey to Helene Landemore have emphasized the material changes and conditions of “education and freedom”—from access to basic necessities to economic security—needed for democracies to truly enable collective intelligence. Incentive-alignment work, political shifts, base-building, and public advocacy are essential for conveying the urgency of shifting transformative technology toward collective intelligence and input.

-SolarPunk: What is that?
-Dear Alice

• New solar plants expected to support most U.S. electric generation growth - "U.S. renewable capacity additions—especially solar—will continue to drive the growth of U.S. power generation over the next two years."[11,12]
• Giant Batteries Are Transforming the World's Electrical Grids - "Global energy storage capacity has tripled in recent years, thanks to an industry that barely existed a decade ago."
• Vienna Embraces Heat Pumps to Ditch Russian Gas - "The Austrian capital has a $21 billion plan to end its dependence on imported natural gas with heat pumps, boreholes and energy efficiency."
• How Australia became a test bed for the future of farming - "Experimental fungi and 'robotic bees' are among the ag-tech innovations being trialled in a country on the frontline of climate change."