FTP070: Pia Mancini – Upgrading Democracy For The Digital Age

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Our guest in this episode is Pia Mancini, a political scientist and activist from Argentina, who has spent most of her career researching and experimenting how we can upgrade democracy for the modern world. She is the co-founder of Open Collective, which supports groups to quickly set up a collective, raise funds and manage them transparently, and Democracy Earth, an open source and decentralized democratic governance protocol for any kind of organization. Today we talk about how democracy can function better in the age of internet, why we are seeing signs of the return of the city-state, how to build a self-sovereign identity, pros and cons of liquid democracy, and how to enable large scale cooperation in decision making.

In This Episode of Future Thinkers:

• Why democracy is outdated and which aspects of it need to be upgraded
• How the trust in society is shifting from present political systems to technology based solutions
• Flow and access to information as a primer purpose of future political systems
• Pros and cons of liquid democracy and how to build it on a global scale
• How nation states are being challenged by cryptocurrency
• The rising power of cities and possible return of city-states to the world
• The minimum capabilities and structures that a city of the future needs to provide for its citizens
• The challenges of building a self-sovereign identity that is resistant to civil attacks
• What structures are useful to test and implement in order to deal with problems such as climate change or extremist governments

The nature of power is conservative, and it’s very difficult to devolve it unless there is enough stress and pressure on the system. - @PiaMancini Click To Tweet

Mentions and Resources:

• Open Collective and Democracy Earth websites
• Pia Mancini’s TED Talk: How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era
• Kiva organization
• Lawrence Lessig: How the Net destroyed democracy, TEDx Talk

A currency is not just money, it’s a system of belief. If you buy a Bitcoin, you buy into a set of certain economic, environmental, social assumptions, you are buying into a vision of the world. - @PiaMancini Click To Tweet

Book Recommendations:

• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, a book by Benedict Anderson
• Deliberation Day, a book by Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin
• The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kind Society, a book by Frans de Vaal

For the first time in history we have opportunity to organize human collaboration on a global scale. It’s insane that we are not using it. - @PiaMancini Click To Tweet

More from Future Thinkers:

• FTP064: Developing and Practicing Your Self-Sovereignty
• FTP055: David Katz – Solving Plastic Pollution and Alleviating Poverty
• FTP054: Toni Lane Casserly – Paradigm Shifts of Culture and Consciousness
• FTP051: Vít Jedlička – Liberland: Prototype for a Decentralized State
• FTP049: Daniel Jeffries – Decentralized Government and Identity

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