The Digitalist Papers, hosted by Stanford Digital Economy Lab & Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), presents an array of possible futures that the AI revolution might produce. Below we include excerpts from the chapter “Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation.” The full chapter is available online with excerpts below.

The authors explore how AI can foster new forms of civic engagement and direct democracy at both local and national levels. They propose designing digital infrastructure to enable collective decision-making and reduce polarization by encouraging interactions across diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

I. What Pluralist Societies Need from Digital Civic Infrastructure 

Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups. Discussions about community issues could take place among small numbers of people with similar concerns. As coordination across larger distances evolved, the costs of travel required representatives from each clan or smaller group to participate in deliberations and decision-making involving multiple local communities. Divergence in the interests of representatives and their constituents opened up opportunities for corruption and elite capture.

Technologies now enable very large numbers of people to communicate, coordinate, and make collective decisions on the same platform. We have new opportunities for digitally enabled civic participation and direct democracy that scale for both the smallest and largest groups of people. Quantitative experiments, sometimes including tens of millions of individuals, have examined inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. Their findings suggest that large networks of nonexperts can make practical, productive decisions and engage in collective action under certain (1) conditions. (2) These conditions include shared knowledge among individuals and communities with similar concerns, and information about their recent actions and outcomes.

We will need to be careful to keep these technologies from reinforcing the nationalization of politics and political discourse that has taken place over the last few decades. Even before the onset of social media, citizens in the United States were increasingly turning away from both local politics and grassroots organizations that have historically tried to address the everyday problems in local neighborhoods—teenagers skipping school, empty storefronts, broken windows on the street. Instead of spending time reading the town paper and going to town hall meetings, today we are transfixed by who might run for president and what their family members do, what national politician is under investigation, and what case is being heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States, this nationalization of politics has led to partisan “mega-identities.” (3) The cleavage between political parties has come to overlap with and reinforce social and economic cleavages. (4) Liliana Mason writes, “A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store.” (5) We now have many reasons, not just a single one, to distance ourselves from those we see in the “other camp.” And not only do we disagree with their views, but we treat them like the bad guys. Polarization didn’t happen just because of social media.

“Even before the onset of social media, citizens in the United States were increasingly turning away from both local politics and grassroots organizations that have historically tried to address the everyday problems in local neighborhoods.”

But both ideological and affective polarization play out on platforms that have increased the speed and scale of communication and ramped up the emotional intensity of confrontation. Some people leave in search of digital spaces filled only with like-minded people. Others get drawn in and double down on conflict. Neither is good for negotiating differences and either coming to a compromise or agreeing to disagree. Both reactions further reinforce the walls between our partisan mega-identities.

We agree with those who think revitalizing place-based identities and local engagement may help to break down these walls. If we redirect people’s attention back to local politics and working with fellow community members on projects that have a tangible impact, perhaps we can restart a positive feedback loop and regenerate the crosscutting connections that were once used to moderate conflict.

But it also seems clear that reinforcing local community structures should not be the only approach. So many towns and neighborhoods in the United States are effectively mini-one-party states. With the demographic sorting that has taken place over the last 40 years, focusing our attention primarily on local politics and participation in local decision-making might inadvertently reinforce social and political blocs. We might want to “break up” these blocks with cross-cutting connections between localities. Many studies suggest that connecting communities can be a major source of innovation and change. (6)

“With the demographic sorting that has taken place over the last 40 years, focusing our attention primarily on local politics and participation in local decisionmaking might inadvertently reinforce social and political blocs. We might want to “break up” these blocks with crosscutting connections between localities.”

Unfortunately, since the 1970s, we have experienced a decline in the churches, fraternal organizations, unions, and other forms of associational life that once created crosscutting connections both within and across localities. (7) Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and advocate for the policies that we want. (8) We no longer have regular practice in meeting to have discussions about how to make a decision that affects everyone in a group to which we belong. We still “talk” online about policy and political issues, but our talking is not tied to a need to come to an agreement about something that our group needs to accomplish.

With technologies that can now facilitate discussion and decision-making among groups both big and small, we must ask if we can build new kinds of intermediating digital spaces, ones that provide perspective, attention, and action on shared rather than personal problems, while at the same time accommodating discussion and deliberation at local as well as national scales. Could we design digital civic infrastructure to enable collective decision-making and direct democracy for both local and national publics, while dampening the polarization that has come with the nationalization of politics?

Before we explore this question, it is important to note that online spaces for civic participation and democratic decision-making must be rigorously tested and regulated and/or operated by public actors to avoid unwanted and unintended effects. We have elsewhere proposed a framework to ensure that such platforms and technologies are designed and regulated according to democratic values and principles. (9)

But what do we need to think about from an ordinary citizen’s perspective if we want to design platforms that enable and encourage people to come together and make decisions that affect everyone in a local or national community? We would have to solve for two problems.

The first challenge is how to get people to want to talk and work with one another. The second is how, once people have gotten onto the platform, to get people to want to understand the needs and concerns of others and to consider these concerns as we make decisions that affect all of us.

How do we build digital infrastructure for civic participation that addresses these problems? We might need to create new kinds of mediated civic participation, ones that could make us more comfortable and more curious than discussing and deciding on difficult public issues in person.

II. Digital Intermediation and “Reserved” Civic Participation

Alexis de Tocqueville, often quoted in discussions about revitalizing American democracy, talked about town meetings as schools for teaching people how to “use and enjoy liberty.” (10)

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Read the complete chapter online.

Artwork from The Digitalist Papers.