The Antidote to Social Media Is Already Invented
Nicky Case — creator of The Evolution of Trust, Parable of the Polygons — just posted a Patreon update with rough illustrations for Audrey Tang's upcoming book on democratic tech and AI. That's what sent me down this rabbit hole. Audrey Tang is the Digital Minister of Taiwan. Built something called vTaiwan — a platform that uses software called Polis to find genuine consensus online. Not compromise. Actual agreement, surfaced from noise. The opposite of what Twitter does. Here's what bugs me about the social media problem. It's not just misinformation. It's structural. Every position you take online is a performance. You're playing to followers, to opponents, to the algorithm. Nuance gets punished. Outrage gets rewarded. The whole system is engineered against the kind of thinking democracy actually requires. A citizens' assembly does the opposite. Random sample of citizens — stratified to actually reflect the population. No cameras. No party whips. No Twitter. Experts present, small groups deliberate, and then people reason their way to a recommendation without an audience to perform for. Ireland used them twice. Abortion rights and same-sex marriage — two issues their legislature couldn't touch for decades. The assemblies moved. Both went to referendum. Both passed. Ordinary citizens got there before their politicians did. We need this in the United States. Now. Not as a replacement for elections — as a circuit-breaker for when the legislature is captured, the courts are politicized, and the media environment is broken. Which is now. Madison worried about factions. He'd recognize exactly what we've built. — James Fishkin, Democracy When the People Are Thinking. Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy. Nicky Case at ncase.me.