lab10

2016 has seen a lot of discussion about the fate of democracy, especially liberal democracy as we know and have it in the West.
There's a strong trend towards illiberal democracy, as seen at different times and to various degrees e.g. in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and now probably even in the US.
One reason (of many) for this may be the limited ability of our democratic system and institutions to adapt to and embrace technical advances.

What needs to be preserved and be updated to better function in the 21th century?
What's obsolete and needs to be replaced? And by what?

A core question is what type of democracy makes most sense: we currently have a mostly representative system, with varying degrees of direct democracy (e.g. in the form of referendums).
Currently many argue that more direct elements are needed in order to combat lobbyist interests and detachment of the public from political processes and decisions. A counter-argument is that most political decisions to be taken nowadays are too complex for that approach.

An intermediate form is Delegative Democracy, nowadays better known as Liquid Democracy, mostly in the context of Pirate Parties.

Part of the debate is also the role of a democratic state in the 21th century.
Traditionally (in the pre-digital world) the concept of territoriality was central. The mix of digitalisation and globalisation lead to a situation where the territorially defined state is limited in its power and ability to enforce rules. Examples for this are tax avoidance tactics (mainly associated to international companies) and difficulties to enforce state-specific limits to free speech in the virtual sphere.

It's popular (and easy) to blame increasing shortcomings on incumbent actors (or the political class in general), but this just leads to growing de-legitimisation and questioning of the democratic system and principle itself.

Probably the world and its complexity have out-grown the capacity of the existing political system to handle it.
Digitalisation highly increases complexity because of the resulting increase in interconnection and speed. The wide adoption of the Internet has additionally amplified the non-linearity inherent to human beings (being complex systems themselves).

So, unless we are willed to roll back complexity (meaning: giving up individual freedoms, transitioning to more collectivist forms of society, something which hasn't worked tremendously well in the past century), we need to find something which resembles a Complex adaptive system.