7 Lessons on Democracy – the roadmap to 2030

The Metaverse is 30 years old this year and in celebration of Neal Stephenson’s invention (“Snow Crush”, 1992), we used the opportunity to discuss the elections today and imagine how they will look in 2030, where we may all be living in one of the Metaverses that Big Tech is busy building for us (or land-grabbing virtual territories, depends on your point of view).

Watch Video from the panel here:

Takeaways from the discussion here – summary and Q&As

Local Elections 2022 

The 2022 local elections brought about the most changing of hands amongst councils in history. This included surprise Labour wins in Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet. Tower Hamlet going to the Bangladeshi Aspire Party demonstrated a trend of ethnic organisations edging out traditional party politics. The Green Party progressed in some areas traditionally led by the Conservative Party.

To capture lessons learned and build up a box of tips for more democratic futures, Cybersalon organised a post-election discussion bringing together winners from Canning Town (Areeq Chowdhury), the Westminster election team lead by Simon Wyatt, digital democracy experts Dr Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s College) and Dr Richard Barbrook (Dept of Politics Westminster University) as well as speakers who focus on near-future democracy for elections in 2030. Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex University) and Gaye Dadabit explored new tools and shared experiences from emerging DAOs.

What have we learned?

1. It’s the turnout stupid!

In the week before the elections, Areeq Chowdhury (victorious Councillor in Canning Town) noted that close to the elections, it is not about persuading new voters, but motivating those that already support your party to get them off the sofa and go to polling stations to cast their vote. The idea that canvassing is about having political arguments on the doorsteps turns out to be something of a myth. 

In practice, it is about converting your sympathisers into a vote – the last mile and the hardest job considering that in the UK, local elections take place during the working day, unlike in most European countries. The system is skewed against working folk – one to review before 2030!

2. Know your voters

As noted by Simon Wyatt (Westminster Labour), it is all about data preparation. You can use different sources such as the Electoral Roll to identify who is eligible to vote, then gather local data on the addresses that are worth visiting for your specific party. Local campaign organisers need to supplement this basic information with other sources that may identify the political preferences of people in specific areas.

Building a local FB Community group, contributing to Neighbourhood Apps and the local digital scene helps to fish out those who lean towards your party. The battle is often micro-local, so preference data needs to be as granular as possible to focus resources. In many areas, 100 meters may mean a different party allegiance, and you may be ‘waking up’ the wrong voter if you get your data preparation wrong.

3. Optimise the deployment of your (limited) troops

The key to using your limited human resource well, is as Areeq explained, the ability to focus your “boots on ground” on canvassing on those who support you, and who may have forgotten to get to polling stations. If you knock at their door, there is a good chance that you will remind your supporters to vote on the day. It also means you need correct information on what time of the day the potential voters may be at home. There’s no point knocking on a teacher’s door at noon. Instead, wait until after 6pm, things may look more promising. Timing is everything!

4. It’s not over till the fat lady sings (at 10pm)

The polling stations are open late, and the battle is on until the polling stations close. In fact, about 7% of voters voted in the last hour, in many places those votes made all the difference. In Westminster, as Simon pointed out, some wards were won by less than a handful of votes, so canvassing goes on till the end of the day as every vote matters.

5. Mum is the not the word

Traditionally, students were registered by their Mums, as young people may be away at Uni and not sure where to vote. After the Conservative Party forced the change in 2014, parents could no longer register student voters anymore. This change led to the loss of nearly one million votes as many students never made it to the Electoral Roll. To combat this, we need to ensure that local University representatives chase everyone who is eligible to register in the ward. The Level of students’ activity is high on social media, but turning it into votes is one of the biggest challenges for local democracy. Don’t be a keyboard warrior, what matters is casting the vote in person or by post.

6. DIY Trust

For candidates like Areeq Chowdhury, it was very much about building their own trust, not simply relying on party reputation, which was not great in Canning Town. The data sets on voters for his area were completely useless. Many voters were ill informed, including those on the doorsteps who were still raging against previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn – no longer the party leader but that was news that was lost on many.

In Canning Town, on the doorsteps, “Trusted Politician” was an oxymoron, with both parties inspiring mistrust and a post Covid period negative sentiment casting a long shadow on election process.

One way to solve it is to focus on building candidates’ individual trust based on local problem solving as relying just on your party reputation is no longer a winning strategy.

It helps to live in the area, event better if the candidate is engaged in regular and visible problem solving for the locals. Being active, helping to overcome micro-local challenges facing the community and communicating the achivements on digital media wins trust.

7. Be Social and emotional in a group – building trust is a marathon not a sprint.

Social media is still a big help in canvassing, even in less affluent and less digital areas, but it is not Twitter or Linkedin where the trust is built. Local Facebook Groups or Neighbourhood WhatsApp groups are where people huddle and where local problems are discussed.

If a Party’s candidates can show they can address local issues and provide evidence of local activity, trust can be rebuilt and centered around the individual candidate. Dr Paolo Gerbaudo noted people still love leaders, they want to be offered promises that they can then monitor, with ‘affective relationship’ that describes People-Party and leaders interactions. Dr Richard Barbrook warned that both digital and IRL groups are needed, as relying on digital comms only creates ‘weak’ and not very durable links.

Q&A on Democracy 2030

Could we use DAO for local governance?

With remote work and digital nomads tribes growing fast, voting by geographical location is likely to become a thing of the past. Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex University) sketched a vision of elections 2030 where the candidates emerge from blockchain collectives like DAOs.

The collaborations will be about topics, campaigns and not necessarily by where you happen to live. Councils may be replaced by Digital Commons where services are either provided through the process of collaboration or outsourced to third parties only if all voted in favour.

As it is becoming easier to be a Citizen of the World, some countries like Estonia, Salvador or Belize already have an open door policy and can register people living abroad for their Digital Citizenship. State belonging by 2030 may be not the main definition of identity, more likely one of many identities based on work, professional alliance, parenting status or tax status.

DAOs can be created for number of reasons, as explained by Gaye Dadabit. The best known DAO was the group that has raised funds to acquire the US Constitution that came up for auction. Ultimately an anonymous billionaire bought the volume, bidding up the price, but nearly 40 million dollars were raised for the purpose.

This money was repaid as the bid failed and the DAO was dissolved but the learnings stayed in the community. Gaye notes that to gather individuals into a DAO, the first step is to define the aim of the group (her examples listed investment, city areas recovery activity, educational services, events), then to allow a period of developing ‘soft consensus’ with pitches, discussions on Discord channels and arguments to arrive at a shared view or shared goal.

After achieving a Soft Consensus, the plan is defined in White Paper and in code, set in motion to support the governance of each DAO. If things change and need to be amended, the process of that needs to be agreed upon too, explains Gaye.

 Combining Democracy Today with the vision for Digital Democracy 2030 – are we going to vote in the Metaverse or will Zuckerberg rule those virtual worlds?

Will we be able to vote with emojis?

Dr Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s College, London) and author of ‘The Great Recoil’, noted that people already practice Digital Democracy, by Liking or Hearting certain political comments on their Facebook Wall or Twitter Feed. An average Social Media user “Likes or comments” about 25 times per day according to Facebook. This is 25 votes, upvotes or love-votes for friends’ photos but also friends’ political statements.

The behaviour is there, we just need to hook it up to it for accessible Digital Democracy.

Some DAOs have platforms that invite members to vote using emojis, so again, helping them to engage in voting in a way as familiar as possible, as noted by Gaye Databit.

The experience with voting in DAOs shows that people often seek only the most relevant decisions, and not keen on facing the effort of participating in all decisions. That is why Gaye notes, Mother DAOs and Children DAOs are formed, to give an option for members to only be involved in top decisions but not allocating time to less relevant decisions. Voting every 4 years is not often enough, but voting daily is too much -what is the right balance depends on the community. Voting is hard work, regardless if digital, on chain or not, so it needs to be easier to decide which decisions are relevant to each person.

Can we get rid of the outdated Election Process ?

Current election practice has not been reformed since after the war, as noted by Simon Sarginson (Improbable Games). He argues that we need to prompt more innovation in Democratic elections as the democratic process in the current system seems very outdated to the younger generation and leaves them cold, resulting in low participation levels. 

However, as pointed out by Simon Wyatt, if politicians are elected in a First Past the post system, after their victory they are motivated to support the existing system, not to reform it. Catch 22. We are stuck till we drive the change.

Can high turnout guarantee a community consensus?

After Brexit, despite the high turnout, those who lost, have not yet accepted the outcome. The involvement of Cambridge Analytica, Russians and many other questionable practices eroded much of the trust in this case. Stephen Oram noted that high turnout may not always guarantee that the community will coalesce around the final decision, so it may not be useful to focus on turnout as consensus building too.

In many countries, for example Norway as noted by Karo Janicka (Cybersalon) , voting is mandatory and high levels of political literacy are instilled into the population at an early age. She raised a proposition that we should consider moving to this method of democracy by default in the UK and other Western democracies. There is an argument for paying voters to vote and also lowering the voting age, not least to train young people on the process of democracy and elections from an early age as noted by Dr Richard Barbrook.

Italy has an app called IO (me), that offers digital tax submission and many digital paths to communicate with the state. This also offers a tool to call for referendum, and if the level of participation is high enough, the results are binding regardless of government position. Dr Paolo Gerbaudo recommends that framework should be adopted to enhance engagement for 2030.

Are we awaiting a better Future Democracy or consumer-rights only Meta-o-cracy?

Invest in monitoring for fissures, cracks, for moments of change when the political system may offer openings for change, recommends Paolo Gerbaudo. There is an argument for the disintermediation of politicians, as proposed by Nick Rosen, leveraging blockchain and trust-less platforms to allow us to make direct decisions together with no MPs involved. 

In a digital world, digital identity and online voting are not nice to have but fundamental requirements to the operation of a democratic Metaverse, Eva Pascoe notes. In order to ensure that we are Citizens in the metaverse, not just consumers with limited rights, we need an open source tech framework.

Despite technology changing rapidly for every daily activity, the conclusions show that the basic election system is exclusive, discouraging vast sections of populations as it was in the mid fifties. It is simply inadequate and should be reformed as soon as possible.

The future of democracy may be enclosed in the Metaverse by Facebook, or open-ish in Otherside, made for the Bored Ape Yacht Club community by Improbable, or in new, yet to be invented virtual worlds. One of the ways to ensure it is democratic, and everyone has meta-citizen rrights, is to build your own community and host it  independently, just as Well.com, Echo NY (“East Coast Hang Out” hosted by Stacy Horn) or Cix.co.uk built up their virtual worlds during the First Era of Social Internet. Trust-less is good but control is better, see you on the other side!