Deep Futures

Deep Futures Episode 1: Democracy - Malka Older

Annalee Newitz: For decades—for centuries, really—people have been talking about how fragile American democracy is. But the last few months prove it: We've just lived through a moment where the U.S. president tried to overturn an American election—where armed extremists stormed the Capitol building. And those terrifying facts are coming on top of everything else that feels like a disaster right now. Our climate is screwed, our political systems are broken, and the pandemic exposed just how precarious our lives are today. So what are we going to do about it? If we want to build a better world together, we have to start thinking about the future.

Annalee: That’s what this show is about. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science fiction author and a journalist, and I’ve criss-crossed the planet covering scientific and technological breakthroughs for publications like the New York Times, io9, and New Scientist. My latest book—Four Lost Cities—took me back in time, to report on new archaeological discoveries about ancient urban life, and on this podcast, I’m time-traveling again, to get a glimpse at Deep Futures. I’m going to spend the next six episodes talking to some of the smartest people I know—to imagine how we might escape the disasters of today and dream up a better tomorrow.

Annalee: Today on Deep Futures, I’m talking to someone who knows a thing or two about disasters—she’s a former humanitarian aid worker whose work in places like Darfur and Sri Lanka inspired a trilogy of sci-fi novels about the future of our political systems. In this episode, find out why she thinks the next stage of democracy just might mean going micro.

Malka Older: Disasters give us a kind of compressed, speeded up, heightened view of really all the things that go on normally in government. That's what government is, you know, government is us saying, “Gosh, there are things that we can all do together that we wouldn't be able to do if we don't get together.”

Annalee: This is Malka Older: sociologist, aid worker, sci-fi writer. She started to think about the link between disasters and democracy back in 2009, when she was working for an NGO on the Indonesian island of Sumatra right after back-to-back earthquakes killed almost 1,200 people.

Newsclip VO: “[A mag]nitude 7.6 earthquake rocks Indonesia, reportedly killing at least 75 people and trapping thousands of others under rubble.”

Malka: This was a pretty severe earthquake that occurred. There were mudslides, buildings falling down or people being injured. It was a fairly serious disaster.

Annalee: The quake destroyed schools, hospitals and hotels. Whole villages were demolished by landslides. Water pipes burst, flooding city streets. Dozens of organizations descended on the region, all trying to help as fast as possible.

Malka: It was pretty chaotic afterwards because there was a lot of international attention. There were a lot of people who came in very quickly. This weird sort of extra governmental government springs up after these large disasters when the government itself is not fully equipped to deal with them.

Annalee: But it was hard to know who needed what and where. So the UN brought in a guy whose whole job was information management.

Malka: He just came in and he sat in an office, he didn't go to the field. He tried to get all the information he could from the people who did go to the field. And he found ways to make that information really accessible to everyone else. He plotted it on maps, and he made printouts and he gave it to people.

Annalee: It sounds like a boring desk job, but his work was vital. By centralizing information, he uncovered needs that nobody would have anticipated. He helped all the different aid groups to figure out which roads were still passable, who needed supplies, and where those supplies actually were.

Malka: One of the requests from the government was for metal detectors, because they didn't actually have a map of where the pipes were supposed to be.

Annalee: Having good information made their humanitarian work easier.

Malka: For me, it was a really eye opening example of information management as a public good.

Annalee: Malka had hit upon an idea that has shaped her thinking ever since. If we want democracy to thrive in the future, it’s going to depend on information.

Annalee: But before we get all excited about the awesome democracies of tomorrow, we have to face facts about the democracies we have today. Though these political systems are supposed to be for the people, by the people, most of them are not.

The Economist VO: “The 20th century’s most successful political idea is under attack. Democracy is facing a crisis of confidence.”

Annalee: Authoritarian leaders are silencing dissent in nations across the world—

Newsclip VO: “Turkey now ranks 149th on the World Press Freedom index, somewhere below Zimbabwe.”

DW VO: “Recent years have seen Viktor Orban’s right wing regime ordering a crackdown on Hungary's free press.”

Annalee: —while Brexit casts doubts on the future of the European Union.

Euronews VO: “The UK has voted to leave the European Union”

Annalee: Here in the U.S., we’ve got our own problems, like an armed insurrection after the 2020 election, voter suppression, and open hostility toward the democratic election process.

News VO: On January 6th, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol complex. The insurrection was the worst breach of Capitol security since the war of 1812. More than 50 police officers were injured and five people died.

Annalee: Some analysts, including Malka, are skeptical about whether democracy ever really existed in the first place.

Malka: I don't think democracy really exists in the world right now. I think we've got some pseudo-democracies, but we have not done a very good job of advancing democracy at the pace that we could be.

Annalee: Some nations are trying to do democracy better, though—starting at the voting booth.

Malka: If you're used to only the way that the US does it, it can be really striking to see how many different forms of democracy there are. In some places, it’s mandatory to vote. In Australia, for example, you are required to vote. If you don't, you pay a fine.

Annalee: And while people in the United States squabbled about mail-in voting, citizens of Estonia have been able to vote over the Internet since 2005.

Malka: We need to question the way we vote along so many different axes, everything from deliberate voter suppression to things like the way the votes are counted. There's a movement right now for ranked choice voting in the United States, which even if exactly the same votes are cast for exactly the same number of people, would change the results significantly in a lot of cases.

Annalee: Where I live in San Francisco, we started using ranked-choice voting years ago, while voters in Maine used it for the first time during the 2020 presidential election. Voters rank their top three candidates, and if there’s a tie, their second and third choices are used to do what’s called an instant runoff vote. It’s perfect for local elections, where people sometimes win by a very small margin. Being able to do an instant runoff lets the city speed up the process of breaking a tie between runners-up. It also lets voters express a preference for more than one candidate.

Annalee: Meanwhile, Colorado is trying something called quadratic voting, which lets people cast more votes on issues they care about, as long as they cast fewer on ones that don’t matter to them.

Malka: So you have a certain number of votes. The more votes you want to put towards something, the more expensive it gets. If you care enough about something, you can vote for it a bunch of times, but you have no voting units left to vote for anything else. So it's a way of making preference expensive. These are just examples of some of the things that we can play with, with trying to figure out how we can do democracy better.

Annalee: Still, all these voting systems suffer from one basic flaw. People can’t make good choices on their ballots if they don’t understand the policy issues they’re voting on.

Malka: All the frustration that has been building, I think for a lot of us over the past 15, 20 forever years of how information was becoming very siloed in the United States and in a lot of other places. And often very separated from any factual basis, making it incredibly difficult to have an argument about policy. I was really frustrated and I wanted an adult in the room for information and media, someone who could just cut through all of the bluster and say, “Okay, here's the truth, and here's the false.”

Annalee: It was out of that frustration that Malka’s book Infomocracy was born. It takes place 60 years in the future, right before an election. In that novel, she imagines a radically different kind of democracy; a system she calls micro-democracy. So I asked her to step into our time machine and tell us all about it.

Annalee: The first thing you need to know about Malka’s micro-democracy of the future is that nations and states don’t exist anymore—they’ve been replaced by something called a centenal. No, these are not like the Sentinels from the X-Men. That’s cent as in century, from the Latin word for 100.

Malka: The basic unit of jurisdiction is 100,000 people. So it's a population-based unit, which means we could be talking about a couple of really dense city blocks, or you could be talking about hectares and hectares of a rural area that's sparsely populated. And each of those units, which is called a centenal, can vote for any government that it wants.

Annalee: So in San Francisco, instead of having a mayor and a board of supervisors, we would have a collection of centenals. There are almost 900,000 people here, so that would be around nine centenals. In Malka’s world, hundreds of governments would compete for our votes. At election time, you’d walk down the street and see a bewildering array of virtual political ads.

Malka: You've got augmented reality everywhere. So you're seeing sort of pop up ads for different governments, particularly as the campaign heats up.

Annalee: And these governments—they’re not just liberal and conservative: there’s a Burning Man-style one called Free2B, and another called Hipstaland, which fetishizes all things handcrafted and locally sourced. Some might govern just one small island, while others would run a majority of centenals across the globe.

Malka: If you're a government, you may have constituents in these little dots all over the world. You may not, you might be very local and just focus on local interests and only have one or two in a specific area, but if you're a large government you're likely to have citizens all over the world. And if you're in a dense city, you can step into another country when you're crossing a street.

Annalee: I wanted to see what Malka’s vision of the future might look like here in San Francisco—so I went out for a walk around the Mission District, a neighborhood that in 60 years would probably be big enough to be its own centenal.

Annalee VO: “So the Mission District is a sunny, warm neighborhood in San Francisco that has been an immigrant neighborhood for decades. It used to be a German immigrant neighborhood, now it's full of Latinx folks from all over Central and South America. You can hear people listening to music in Spanish, speaking in Spanish.

Annalee VO: So as I walk up Balmy Alley, the whole alley, every single fence, every single garage door, every single wall is covered in murals that show the history of Chicano rights, the history of Mexico. This neighborhood is incredibly politically engaged and every piece of art on the walls has some political element to it. I can hear construction going on. It turns out that at the mouth of Balmy Alley, where it intersects 24th Street, they're building an enormous condo complex, and it's very likely that the people moving into this building will not be the folks who live in the neighborhood right now. It'll be people who have come here to work in tech… Most of the folks who live in this neighborhood now work in essential jobs and the neighborhood is in the process of being gentrified.

Annalee VO: I'd say the border of the Mission is really here where I'm standing right now, which is Mission and 24th Street, and as you cross the street, you start to notice more people speaking in English, signs are in English, there’s an artisanal bakery. Just up the hill are houses that belong to people who work in the tech industry. So today when you cross Valencia Street you're just moving from one neighborhood into another one, but in the future they really could be two different countries. It already feels like you're crossing from one country to another and it doesn't seem like it would take much to make that a reality.

Annalee VO: If this was voting day in Infomocracy, you could easily imagine a lot of folks in this neighborhood wanting to vote for La Raza, which represents Latinx folks here in the States. And they would be going up against folks who've just come to the neighborhood, who are probably voting for Hipstaland because they want more artisanal shops all around, and their interests don't really align with the folks who've lived here for many decades.

Annalee: You might be thinking this sounds insanely complicated. Hundreds of different governments ruling people all over the planet? Who would manage it all? Well, remember the guy with the spreadsheets in the Sumatra earthquake? Here’s where he comes in:

Malka: The whole thing is facilitated by this very large international bureaucracy called Information. And this is that information manager I was talking about from the UN.

Annalee: Malka says Information is sort of a cross between the UN and Google, and its main job is to assure transparency by fact-checking everything—from campaign ads and memes, to political debates.

Malka: if a politician says something questionable, it will be annotated. If it's super questionable, it will probably be removed and they will be fined. And the same thing actually goes for advertisements. So it's a bit of an information police. It's not just that they say, you know, “Three Pinocchio's”, they go through and try to really tease out the nuances of what's correct, and what's suspicious, and what might be true, but we're not sure. They have these spreadsheets where you can look up what your taxes are going to look like, if your centenal goes to any of the 600 governments that are competing, and what it might do to the economic area that your job is in.

Annalee: In a micro-democracy, those political debates look a little different.

Malka: There's no video allowed in debates, they're audio only, to try and reduce the impressions that people get from appearances.

Malka: They also don't allow live football matches or other high audience spectacles to take place at that time to try and increase people's focus on these debates and this whole process of democracy.

Annalee: And then, for the 24 hours before an election, it’s quiet time.

Annalee: Candidates have to stop campaigning. People get to process what they’ve learned. In Malka’s world, nothing takes attention away from the election. It’s just too important. And instead of waiting in line for hours at a polling place, in this future, you’ll be able to vote securely right from your phone.

Malka: There are 24 hours that are designated for this election, I mean this is global so it has to encompass all time zones, and it's very easy to vote using your digital technology and everyone has a vote, there's no disenfranchisement that’s allowed, and then you find out what happens in some massive watch parties.

Annalee: I really want to go to that watch party, where no one has been disenfranchised and everyone has access to fact-checked information. Still, Malka says her books aren’t meant to be utopian; they’re just a thought experiment to figure out what might work, and what might not.

Malka: I never intended it to be like, a perfect system, because I don't think those exist. It's about people in a different system from ours, and a lot of people who are trying to make it better with different definitions of better.

Annalee: And as much as she likes the idea of an all-powerful Information center entrusted to separate truth from lies…

Malka: I was very aware that that's a really dangerous proposition, as well as an interesting one. It is also immediately obvious that when you have such a powerful organization, if it gets corrupted, then you're totally screwed.

Annalee: For Malka, the point isn’t to create a perfect world. She just wants us to get creative, to reimagine what government can be. She wants us to experiment with democracy, and update it for a high-tech world where our apps deliver everything from campaign promises to election ballots.

Malka: I like the idea of micro-democracy, I think there's a lot of good stuff in it, but I certainly don't make the claim that it's the best possible system or that there aren't other systems we should try first. I think there are a ton of really interesting things that we can do with our government and we should be doing them. We should be experimenting, we should be talking about our principles, and not just saying, “Oh, we live in a democracy, we're done.”

Annalee: Thanks so much to Malka Older. You can find Infomocracy and the rest of the Centenal trilogy at your local indie bookstore, and follow her on Twitter @m_older. Her latest book—a short story collection called And Other Disasters—is out now.

Annalee: Next time on Deep Futures, I talk to a surgeon who can 3-D print functional human organs. It’s so futuristic, even his own peers didn't think it was possible.

Anthony Atala: I'll never forget that the very first time I put together an abstract, which was flatly rejected, and I went up to him and I said, “I don't understand why it got rejected.” And he turned to me and he said, “Well that’s easy, that’s because it can't be done.”

Annalee: You won't want to miss it. Subscribe to the podcast, and if you liked this episode, leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners find the show.

Annalee: Deep Futures is an original podcast made in partnership by Campside Media and Mailchimp. The show is hosted by me, Annalee Newitz. Our associate producer is Natalia Winkelman, research help from Callie Hitchcock, fact-checking by Aleah Papes. Sound design and mixing by Mark McAdam, and our executive producers are Maya Kroth and Matt Shaer. Beep-boop-boop-boop!