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Democracy Rising

How the Rojavan democracy was made to happen should be of deep interest to everyone seeking a democracy built and nurtured from the bottom up.

How about it: Shall we leave the establishment of a steady state economy to the pro-growth “representative” democracies?  Or should we sort it out ourselves?

I would argue our best long-term hope of improving our national system is for  more and more local communities to build up robust and productive deliberative systems, to the point that people see the viability and positive impacts of the deliberative alternative, build up their skills to engage each other, and re-establish their trust in each other and key institutions.

If we set out to design processes to ensure horrible, unproductive conversations that keep us from addressing shared problems well, our current national system would do very well.

At this point in the ongoing democratic experiments in the United States and around the world, two things have become exceedingly clear: democracy requires high-quality communication, and we do not get close to the necessary quality naturally.

ChatGPT and its successors and rivals, whatever their virtues, are the latest agents in the corruption of the public sphere by digital technology, threatening to extend and deepen the misinformation, fabulism, and division stoked by Twitter and other digital media.