Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - The Path to Digital Democracy

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

In this digital age, counting ballots by hand, as recently seen in the US Presidential Election, is very analogue and behind the times. Although the US constitution is over two centuries old and hasn't had a major version update since 1992, European democracies are much more recent and utilizing the technology available today. This panel discussion looks at how open technologies and new systems of governance could be a path toward a future of democracy. We also hear about the avenues for improvement with modern voting techniques and liquid democracy.Topics covered in this episode:Introductions to all panel membersThe state of democratic processes in G20 countries today and which are at the forefront of innovationWhat are the incentives for different stakeholders in liquid democracyHow can digital voting systems be trusted?Implementing and reviewing new democratic systemsThe journey forward for digital democracyEpisode links: An information-theoretic model of voting systemsHacking Democracy with Fabric VenturesJon Nash on TwitterSantiago Siri on TwitterProfessor Amrita DhillonDr Grammateia KotsialouFabric VenturesCogXShow notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/372

Hi, I'm Sebastian Buccio, and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. On this show, we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level, and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends. If you like Epicenter, the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you're on a Mac or iOS device, the easiest way to do that is to go to Epicenter.rocks slash Apple. And if you're new to the podcast, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Well, it's been a pretty interesting year. And as I mentioned last week, we're taking a well-deserved break over the holidays. But we've got something for you, nonetheless. So last month,

just days into the U.S. election, the Cogax and Fabric Ventures teams organized hacking democracy. This was an event that explored how open technologies and new systems of governance could be a path forward towards a future of democracy. I had the privilege. to moderate a panel on the future of voting. Panelists were John Nash, who's a fellow at demos, an independent think tank, Santiago Siri, president of Democracy Earth, Dr. Gramataya Kutzielu, a fellow at the Mathematics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, and Professor Amrata Dillon, who is a professor of economics at King College London.

One of the really interesting insights from this panel is this notion that democratic technologies are centuries old, and the systems of governance around them are slow and perhaps ill-adapted to the 21st century. If you think of the U.S. Constitution as the operating system for American society, consider that that software is over two centuries old. The U.S. Constitution was written in the 1700s, and that it hasn't received a major version update since its last constitutional amendment in 1992. So first of all, there's no way that the considerations and preoccupations of the 18th century perfectly overlap with those of modern times. Take one example. I think that the time between Election Day and the time at which elections are certified in

December was meant to leave enough time for people to ride on horseback from the West Coast to Washington. And much like software, if it's left unpatched, it can and it will be attacked. And I think that perfectly illustrates what's been happening to our democracies in the last two decades. And certainly, that's accelerated in the last five to ten years. By contrast, the foundations for many European democracies are much more recent. For instance, France and Germany's constitutions were adopted in the last 80 years. Now, maybe that gives them slightly better protections for now, but certainly they're not immune to attacks. And I think that European democracies will be increasingly under pressure in the next few decades.

So what's the outcome here? Well, I don't know, but I think this panel provides avenues for improvement with modern voting techniques and things like liquid democracy, which we've discussed here on the podcast before. Certainly, this is something that we need to be thinking about in a conversation that we need to have at a global level if we want our society to continue to flourish. So I hope you'll enjoy this conversation. And with that, I'd like to wish you very happy holidays and a happy new year. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Hacking Democracy, which is indeed brought to you by Fabric Ventures in conjunction with COGX.

I am Richard Neuahead, Fabrics, managing partner. We're an investor in this open web, open economy space. It's great to welcome you from wherever you're joining us today. And in this next session, we're going to reflect on something that I think even the most lay observer can note, which is that counting ballots by hand couldn't be much more analog. And, you know, we saw it at the turn of the century in 2000. We also saw it just recently now. We get the question of hanging chads back in 2000.

We also had now people staring at numbers trying to decipher what had been written, or even debating how close observers should be with their binoculars to observe the actual count itself. And with the rest of our lives, you know, increasingly digitized, indeed dependent on digital platforms, surely the voting system is ripe for some kind of update. So in this next session, we're going to explore that, and I'm delighted to welcome Sebastian Couture, who is the host of the Epicenter podcast, which I must say has something that has been very welcome as my running partner around High Park now for many years. And he's going to introduce a panel of most esteemed experts and get a live with conversation going, I'm sure. Sebastian, are you there?

Yes, I'm here. Thanks, Richard. and I'm glad I can make your run more enjoyable. So we are here today to talk about, well, what Richard was introducing earlier, which was this very analog process of counting votes. And it does seem quite analog, given the technological innovation

that has just exploded in the last three or four decades. I'd like to welcome our panelists for this conversation. they are academics, activists, engineers, political scientists, and experts in this field. We're going to be talking about liquid democracy, digital voting, and so on. So I'd like to actually get our panelists

to introduce themselves. So if we could bring them up on the screen and we'll just do a round of introductions first before we get into this conversation. Hi, everyone. I'm John Nash. I'm a fellow at Demots. We're an independent cross-party think tank. and I work on democratic innovation here.

I'm Santee City. I've been an activist, a hacker, developer, trying to figure out how to do digital democracy since 2012 with several pilots and experiments in my back and looking forward to this discussion in this panel. Hello, everyone. I am a grammatia coach at Lou. And I am a fellow in the Department of Mathematics

in the London School of Economics and Political Science. The last three years I have been working on liquid democracy and in blockchain voting. Hi, everyone. I'm a professor of economics at King's College, London. My interest in this topic is because I've been working a lot on strategic voting games. So basically applying game theory to voting. I've done a lot of work on equilibrium and so on. And my interest here is because I've been working on boating and innovations in voting, you know, systems that you can have with blockchain.

Thanks. And of course you are Amarita Dillon. So I'd like to start off by, you know, right off the butt, getting sort of an assessment, your assessment of what is the state of the democratic process in, let's say, the G20 countries. And which of these countries are driving innovation in the space of digital voting and the liquid democracy space as a form of more direct suffrage for policymaking? So I can go on that first. So we have that the vast majority of democracies there around the world operate through a representative democracy system where every member of the electorate can, vote for a candidate to represent them in the parliament, Congress, etc. So that system was introduced many, many years ago when it made a complete sense to do that.

For example, the populations were too big in order to have an agora-like assembly, where anyone could just turn up to vote. However, now we have the rise of the internet, and this system to elect a good. government seems every year more and more outdated. So we have that more and more services go online, so why voting is still not there. So before in the recent years, I believe that a kind of direct democracy where everyone can vote on a specific issue becomes more and more popular. And Switzerland, for example, is a good example for combining.

some type of representative and direct democracy, because I think they gave some votes to people, so some referenda in specific topics to vote on. However, from the UK, I think they have been coping a bit less well with combinations, so we can see that also from the EU referendum. Estonia also is a country that is some type of example in digital voting as they allow citizens to vote online. However, they also have the backup process for paper ballot election at the same time. I'd like to chime in.

Usually when the discussion goes around introducing technology in an electoral process, very rapidly that can go into a discrete where it's technology yes or no, like a binary choice. And in reality, it's really a spectrum, how much technology and where do we apply technology? It's interesting, if you go back in history, for instance, the origin of IBM in the 19th century as a tabulating machines company,

it was created as a company to actually tally the U.S. election that back in the 19th century could take as long as several months to actually count the votes. So IBM was born out of a need to address the scalability of figuring out fraudulent votes on a national election. If we go closer to our times, an interesting case is India. Speaking of G20 countries, India is the largest democracy in the world, 800 million voters.

It has an election that lasts for six weeks. it takes a long time to count those votes. And since 1994, they actually introduced an electronic device to put the input of the ballot. This is a very simple device, closer to a calculator than to a computer. So it reduces the cost of auditing the technology. But an interesting fact is that until then, on every election in India, an average of 200 people died because of the violent events, ballots being stolen, ballot boxes being burned, all kinds of events that happen in such a big country like India.

Since 94, the deaths occurring on electoral processes have gone to near zero. And in last year's election, it was the first election in India's history that had more women voters than male voters for the first time in history. And that's a consequence of introducing some degree of technology into the process. And I think, you know, we have to start paying attention to how we can use civic tech and blockchain-based tech to improve the quality of electoral processes. And there's a great quote by Leo Strauss that comes to mind here.

He said that political science fiddles while Rome Burns, and they're excused by two things. They know not that Rome burns and they know not that they fiddle. So I'm somewhat less optimistic about the answer to this question in that I see a lot of fiddling. representatives giving citizens, say, 1% of the budget in participatory budget exercises or remote canons in Switzerland exercising abroad direct democracy. And I would like to see more, but I don't think we've quite arrived at a comprehensive answer. I think once we figure this out, then we can start to see movements in this direction. But in terms of the state of play today, it's not great.

I tend to agree with that. So, you know, with regard to the question about which countries are at the forefront of innovations, actually what we see is that although there has been some social science research on how electronic voting can improve outcomes, so one is the case of Brazil where economists Thomas Fugavara showed that the fraud measured by the number of residue votes goes down and health spending, especially for the poor, goes up. So it had some clear benefits there. And in the case of India, too, there have been studies showing that, I mean, of course, Sandy mentioned the violence, but they've also been studies showing that ballot stuffing,

which used to be a big feature of elections when they were held at, without these electronic voting machines, that has gone down tremendously. On the other hand, in some developed countries like the Netherlands, you know, they have actually reverted from electronic voting to paper ballots. So obviously there are deep fears about hacking of these, you know, of electronic voting. So I think one of the big questions is how we can ensure that voters trust the system of electronic voting. Thank you for those answers. And I'm kind of confident to see that there's sort of both sides here, one that's perhaps more optimistic and one that sees things perhaps in the more pessimistic like.

But that'll make, I think, for a good debate in this conversation. So during this answer was mentioned, some of the benefits of electronic voting. One was the reduction of bowel stuffing, voter fraud, obviously more access to underprivileged populations, et cetera. I believe in India, you know, these electronic voting machines are even carried into the forest and into the deep, yeah, the deep forests of India to deliver them to people so that every single participant can vote, which is great. But looking more at the broad benefits of direct digital voting and just, you know, to a broader extent, liquid democracy, what are the incentives here for the different stakeholders in democracy that is individual, you know, voters, but also

governments and, you know, to a third extent, corporations? that also participate in our in our democracy to some extent. In my personal experience, when I did activism back in Argentina, along with some colleagues and friends, we did a political party, and we tried to change the system from within. My conclusion after several years of political activism in Latin America is that if you want to be successful in that system, it's more likely that you will end up being changed by the system first.

you will end up becoming yourself an efficient player of a system that tries to persist and be preserved throughout the decades and throughout the centuries. My philosophy today, it's a personal take, is that we rather figure out how to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And in that regard, the rise of blockchain networks or trust networks that allow for the creation of new kinds of entities, for instance, the creation of distributed autonomous, organizations or, you know, entities that are operating cyberspace, you know, that do not rely on any traditional jurisdiction and execute their decisions by means of smart contracts. It's an entirely new canvas to explore governance and what governance is in the 21st century that does not need to ask for any kind of special permission. And it just takes a new generation to start piloting and trying and experimenting with this new

technology, and that can work for public goods and for private entities as well. Yeah, I see several good features of a system like liquid democracy. For example, in referenda, which Gremature mentioned for Switzerland, there are referenda where, you know, for example, like there was the Brexit vote, there are various, you know, policies that the government might want to take on how to control coronavirus. And, you know, in all of these, I think that the rule of being able to delegate votes to people that you think know more than you, that should be a good feature of liquid democracy. This is something that I've worked a bit on. And, you know, what we show mathematically is that actually the information aggregate, it is possible to construct mechanisms of liquid democracy so that information is better aggregated in large elections.

I would like also to mention here that thanks, Santiago for sharing your experience with trying to change the system from within. And I would like here to say that there are more and more people in academia that they are getting into exploring the liquid democracy mechanisms. So I believe that will be very helpful and it's going to have some good results that we can rely on. later of how we can move something like that into practice. I also believe that one of the main ways to do something like that is a blockchain technology. So this technology could potentially move politics into the 21st century. And there are many projects and teams that they are looking into that, of how you can create a secure and trusted online voting systems.

and that's mostly to create the trust for the public to trust the online voting systems. As I said, using this technology, yeah, could help us implement some type of liquid democracy and that should also allow the political system to be more fluid and hopefully quicker to react to influential people that might act maliciously because we might not have to stay with representatives for four or five years. And, of course, at the moment, they are some examples of companies or projects that they use, or they have done some experiments on liquid democracy without using blockchain technology. For example, there was an experiment on running liquid democracy in Google.

However, in that cases, you have to trust the election authority behind that, so the company in that context. But using the blockchain technology, the election running could be just distributed to various stakeholders, including the whole electorate themselves. So this is a question that we come up, we come out sideways, or from a different perspective. So at demos, we've got a big paper that's publishing tomorrow proposing a concept called Combined Choice, a way of thinking about democratic decision making that argues that

throughout history, at least the last 30 years, the digital revolution, digital technologies have had a fundamental effect where they've, on sectors from whether it's finance to music, whatever it is. And so when we think of digital voting, that always feels like a fairly superficial, cosmetic change, when the more interesting question is, what's the fundamental change? And so the argument that we make in this paper is that we need to move away from a system that looks at laws and decisions individually, incrementally, right? This is a byproduct of sort of 900-year-old system of putting forward a proposal and making a yes or no

decision and to look more holistically at the law. So while someone like Lawrence Lessig argued that we should think of code, as law for the way that it structures society, our argument is the other way around, that we should think of law as code. They're not write it as code or make it mission readable, but think of it as the nation's operating system. And so the proposal we're putting forward continues that logic out and says, if we take all of the rules that structure society, we bundle them together in one place, then change, suggestions of change, ideas can be put forward as an alternative version of that bundle, rather than as an incremental yes or no decision.

And our group of decision makers, whether it's every citizen or a smaller group, can choose the bundle of stuff they want and the one with the most support is adopted. And this is something we're putting into practice with a housing estate in East London and we hope to soon be used in Birmingham to make various local level decisions. And so in relation to this debate, the point isn't to say, how can we use technology to do this one surface level thing within our system? but how can these digital technologies change the way the system works? And that's what's always happened.

And so we're confident that approaching it in that fundamental way will produce surprising and unusual results. I like this idea of looking at democracy as a technology stack, and there are different components in that stack, and you may upgrade one component, like you may upgrade the kernel on your operating on your system, or you might upgrade certain software. And voting is definitely one of the components in that,

in that broader stack. One of the things that was brought up during this last segment was the idea of trust and that digital voting systems need to be trusted by the greater population. And perhaps they have suffered from lack of trust. And in fact, this was probably the case in the Netherlands, as was pointed out. Like, what are some of the good standards or good normative properties for liquid democracy systems? And perhaps what are some ways in which technologists, but also those who are promoting these systems can help essentially the trust behind them.

There's a well-known paper. Sadly, I will Google it right after my intervention here and try to remember it. But there's a paper that tries to address the problem of voting systems coming from strictly from an information theoretic perspective. and ultimately, like, the desirable system for any electoral game is you want a system where you have guaranteed vote secrecy, you want the privacy of the vote to be an element that, so you prevent the coercion of the consciousness of the voter

and the voter can vote freely. Then you have to guarantee the integrity of the vote, meaning that from emission to tallying, you know, you have the guarantees that the vote will be the vote that the voter exactly wanted to vote, that there's no middleman or attacking the middle that will try to change that vote.

So integrity is very important. Lastly, the element of verifiability, allowing for the voter to effectively verify that his or her vote has been counted the right way and that the tally meets the number of voters and so on. So secrecy, integrity, and verifiability are three key properties for any electoral system, but when you analyze it from a strictly information theoretic lens

and looking at the problem from a mathematical theoretical standpoint, not from real-world challenges, the paper comes to a conclusion that is very hard to reach all three, that you end up having some kind of trilemma where there have to be concessions. You might want to, you can have a private secret vote, but then guaranteeing the verifiable is not that easy, or there's only two out of three that you can gather.

So it's a very complex problem. It dates back also to Arrows a famous paper on the challenges of elaborating a perfect democratic system, at least from a mathematical standpoint where we have to deal with the green reality that the perfect voting system might not exist. Yeah, and to that I can add some other requirements of such a system. is, you know, we were discussing the blockchain earlier. So one important feature to ensure trust in the system would be to think very carefully about who are going to be the stakeholders. So you have mostly in, you know, national elections, you would have an election authority. So if you have,

instead, if you have this blockchain-based electronic voting system, who are going to be the stakeholders who will control the code and everything else? So ideally, you know, people from different parties who have opposing interest should be the stakeholder. So that's an important question. And the other question that I would, I mean, the other problem I would add is from a social science point of view is that of vote buying, which becomes much easier with electronic voting. And I think Sandy did mention that to some extent that the secrecy of the voter or to prevent a coercion of voters. How do you do that in these systems?

And this is where economics and social science can contribute in the design of such. systems. I just found the papers called an information theoretic model of voting systems. If you want to Google it. Some other good properties of liquid democracy is that it combines the advantages of representatives and direct democracy. And in theory, could also increase participation.

For example, those people that abstain because, let's say that they don't know what to vote for in continuous referenda, then they might have the option to choose the person that they trust. And that could also happen for different topics. So more knowledgeable people can influence the final outcome. However, if the trust is broken, then citizens could deviate faster than what we currently have, the vote to some others. Also about them. We might have also the issue of vote buying, but I believe that that also could be a nice mechanism design problem.

For example, we know currently that there exists some blockchain that they are anonymous blockchain. So, for example, if you have a transaction, let's say, of votes towards your, I don't know, favorite trustee, then the person that will read. receive the votes might not be able to see where these votes come from. So maybe something like that could also solve any potential vote buying problem. But that also, again, it depends on the application, the voting applications that you want. You might have other voting applications, for example, in the corporate system that

vote buying, for example, between shareholders is acceptable. When it comes to this question of liquid democracy, and I'd be interested to hear what Santiago has to say about this, as he's looked at this probably closer than we have. But when we looked at this structure, the big problem that we found what came when you try and divide things into different areas. So is something a health question? Is it an education question? Is it a finance question? Is it a budget question? Often it's all of those things. And then, of course, the complexity that it emerges as you're delegating, delegating and delegating and delegating. And so we came to the conclusion that liquid democracy isn't a good idea. And I wonder what my fellow panelists may disagree. And then in the sort of same exercise, we looked at a lot of blockchain-based ideas. And one thing that struck us was that there is an inherent distribution to a democracy, right? You're asking lots of citizens. And so rather than involve sort of distributed ledgers, distributed computation, a currency, an exchange, all these kind of things.

We came to the position that the best form of distribution we could have in a democracy is a situation where the decisions of each person are held in different locations and then aggregated to reveal their preferences. Whether that passes Santiago's three tests, I'm not sure. I think that's perhaps impossible, but that's our view. So I'm on the other side of the fence when it comes to liquid democracy. It's a fascinating topic. I think that one interesting thing about electronic technology is that it gives us a new canvas to advance the game theory on how voting systems work.

And we no longer have to be limited to strictly first-past-the-post voting and people raising hands and that's it. We can go many, many steps further. And probably since the rise of the smart contract economy and where there are a lot of governance experiments happening, we are starting to see how these experiments play out. There are several ideas. We have a democracy earth experimented with many of these. We have tried liquid democracy in the past. We have seen liquid democracies being implemented in some other protocols.

Usually there's a nice case that I always quote that is a blockchain project called LISC and you have the ability to do what it's called delegated proof of stake. It's not exactly democracy because there's no way of formalizing human identity on blockchain's yet, but people were voting directly with their tokens or delegating tokens to other participants, and the community ended up having two large parties, Republicans and Democrats all over again, competing for the decision-making process. And this is actually a pattern that happens in a lot of token voting schemes on Ethereum today, for instance, where if you look at Uniswap, for example, It has two addresses each holding 32% of the tokens,

which means they have two thirds of the voting power in the protocol, which means that whenever someone goes to a decision in the UNISWAT protocol, the only decision makers are those two whales, rendering the whole voting process irrelevant, because what whales usually do is they just see how everyone is voting on a decision, and at the last minute or the last block of the blockchain, they just tumbled the election according to their own personal interests. So until we don't get a way of formalizing human identity over decentralized networks

in a way that is privacy preserving, so we don't recreate Facebook or the Chinese Communist Party, which are essentially the same thing, we still have a very open problem about how to achieve digital democracy in these networks. From the game theoretic point of view, we have been exploring, Several ideas, an interesting approach we like a lot that gave us good results in Colorado in the United States, where we did a big pilot, was a quadratic voting, which is a system where it captures not only the preference of the voters, but also the intensity of those preferences. As the cost for giving your votes to an idea increases quadratically rather than linearly, and that pushes the voter to decide whether he or she will support, with, all of his voting power, a minoritarian idea, or with a weak voting power, several ideas. And every election in the world is really a challenge of that, the weak preferences of the

majority versus the strong preferences of the minorities. And being able to capture that with novel game theory is really interesting, but at the same time, it's very important in democracy that every player understands the rules. So we still have a long way to go, I think. That's a great point. And I think it points to something which we were talking about before this started. And I kind of chimed into the previous talk. And I just came in when Vinay Gupta was saying that we need to divorce democracy from the current governmental framework.

And I wonder to what extent, you know, liquor democracy and the things that we're discussing here and that we're talking about here in this panel are framed in the context. in the context of what we know and understand as what a democracy does and should look like, I wonder if this current framework perhaps needs to evolve and isn't, is no longer adapted to our current, to our current reality. To what extent does, do you think that, you know, democracy itself, you know, needs an upgrade at every, you know, point in the stack, including this idea of, you know, one vote, one person, one vote. One example which was mentioned in the previous panel was, you know, statistical models to determine people's interests and broader trends in society.

What are your thoughts on some of these ideas as democracy continues to evolve? And I like seeing these ideas sort of battle it out. And I think we have to be quite blunt when we're comparing them and testing them and looking at them. The thing that I'm most excited about is this idea. idea of a sort of two-sided network or a two-sided market where instead of having to go down the quadratic road or instead of having to randomly select citizens, you've got a group in which people are free to choose the thing they want, but they're also free to propose alternatives.

This is kind of how the free market works. And it produces great results because if you don't like what you see, you can put forward something else. So the freedom to choose tells us which is best, and the freedom to propose increases the quality of available options. And so, So I think rather than making democracy more complex for citizens, asking them to do more. We can ask them to do less, but add that second side and increase the sort of improve the quality of what's being decided. There's a famous president from Uruguay, very loved by everyone in Latin America, except by Uruguayans, as usually happens with politicians. No one is a preacher in their homeland. called Pepe Mujica once told me one day I was able to meet him in Washington.

I asked him, well, what kind of advice would you give to a democracy activist? And he said, you're going to get tired a lot because it's a never-ending process. Democracy is always a working process. If democracy was an absolute idea, a totalitarian idea, it would be pretty much a fascist model of the world like every other. ideology that is out there that gives you a complete idea of the world. Democracy is the one exception is the system about how we make decisions and not necessarily about a conclusion about how the world should work out. So it's always going to be a frustrating process because it's a process that should

have first and foremost the goal of including everyone in a decision-making process and that takes education, that takes technology, that takes a lot of tools and I guess it's an ongoing evolutionary process. The good thing is that every government in the world claims to be a democracy. North Korea is called Democratic People's Republic of Korea. In the Chinese constitution, it says like the second paragraph, China is a democratic dictatorship, whatever that means. So it's interesting that it's an idea that subversive that can penetrate every government

in the world. yet everyone has very different ideas of what it means. Yeah, I see that the evolving of the evolution of democracy and technology. It's a huge challenge because the incentives of politicians to implement any of these new systems, which might distribute power more equally among people, is going to be resisted, it seems a lot. So even if we think, you know, ideally the blockchain might solve the problems of secure electronic voting or that liquid democracy is much better in this complex world where, you know, you need experts to make decisions. So liquid democracy might be ideally very useful, but it's probably going to be resisted a lot.

And so I don't know what the projection is, what we can expect in terms of implementation of any of these technologies. So what I have to add in all these nice comments that I totally agree with is that, yeah, some type of liquid democracy could maybe start from smaller scale. So for example, some trials or from local authorities, as John mentioned before, and from the bottom to the top. So I think that should probably have some type of effect in order to make more people come together for the decision-making as well for their everyday life. Yeah, I mean, my fear here, my concern, I'd say, is that there is very little incentive for

politicians to implement new innovations in the democratic system. And the rate at which technology is advancing and the rate at which largely corporations are benefiting from that speed of evolution of interest. technology that democracy starts to lose its power in the sort of more global order of things and that we see power falling into the hands of non-elected corporations. And to some extent, this is what we've started to observe. I want to come just as we start to come towards the end of our conversation here, you know, bring it back to the recent U.S. election. One of the things that stood out to me as I was following this was the extent of the extent of the, you know, the extent

to which people seem to be so incredibly attached to the democratic process and the framework for the U.S. democratic process or the U.S. Constitution, it seems almost sanctified, right, that this document that was written two and a half, three centuries ago still is upheld in some sanctimonious fashion. This is the case here in France, for example, as well. The Constitution isn't nearly that old here. But obviously, that has its flaws. The world has changed since then. And, you know, I feel that there's a reluctancy to replace the systems that are already in place and have systems that are more adapted to a modern society. You know, why are there some signs that we might observe that things could change in the future?

Or, you know, are we headed towards a more bleak outcome where we perhaps go more towards a conflict than more just democratic system. I had a conversation recently with a China analyst, and we were sort of semi-joking that there seems to be these two options between a highly efficient authoritarian regime or a highly inefficient democratic regime. That's like it doesn't totally fall into those categories,

but that seems to be the kind of the dichotomy. And so I would say that the big challenge, the big exercise is to create the efficient democracy, And that is the nuts and bolts. It is the system. It is the processes. And demonstrating something that works so much better than the system we've got in whatever use case that it starts to spread. Those are my two cents.

Every American election to me is an interesting case study on how to exploit democracy in one way or another, whether it was Cambridge Analytica for years ago or mailing ballot. on this year's election. The one thing that we do know is that we usually go to a vote when it's a hard, difficult conflicting decision. We don't go for a vote for easy choices or easy decisions. So by definition, democracies have to thrive in very hostile environments. And hostile environments means that there will be players willing to cheat, willing to corrupt, willing to take over the election,

whatever it takes. So the systems that we build have to be extremely resilient to be able to survive these kind of hostile actors. And the reason we go to democracies is because the higher the risk in a decision, the higher the need for legitimacy in the decision-making process. That's why we choose the root of democracy to address the need for legitimacy in a very conflicting environment. Democracies are not meant to rule over easy, easy decisions.

or simple decisions. So in that regard, I think we will keep seeing exploits over democracies every four years or every two years around the world as technology also plays an important role in manipulating and setting the agenda. And I know from experience on every pilot we have done in Democracy Earth, we had attempts from hacking,

coming from governments, coming from activists, coming from insiders of an organization. If the decision is important, there will be experts. Yeah, I think I am also quite pessimistic about the adoption of, you know, good democratic practices or changing the current system. As I said before, I think I'm quite cynical about politicians wanting to give up their power. But looking at, you know, how change happens might be a good way to go. So looking across countries to see which ones have adopted better systems that how they did might be one way to research on this.

And what you notice also is the large number of protests that are going on from ordinary people across the world. And what question that is really outstanding out for me is when do such protests succeed? And if they do succeed, then I think that gives us a hint about what conditions are needed in order to change democratic processes. And three, one more challenge I can see in all. this evolution of democracies, that it is a topic that involves many different disciplines. So it's not only computer science, mathematicians, economists, social scientists, lawyers, activists.

So it requires the effort of all these disciplines together. But the good thing is that at least in academia there is some new trend for in their disciplinary research that I believe that could deal with this, at least with this challenge as well. But there is a lot of ways to go. One of the things that stood out for me here, Santiago, is the parallels between, you know, your statements about the attacks on democracy and, you know, software. And if you think of, you know, the U.S. democracy as software, which was written 300 years ago, and the last update happened in 1992 with the 27th Amendment,

Well, no wonder it's getting attacked with like these very modern exploits, right, that exist in our current reality. Is it safe to say that democracies that don't update at a quick up pace, right, that don't apply the software patches are due and are bound to be exploited and, yeah, and whatever consequences that has? to me the most salient fact of the week of the american election and of this last couple of weeks is that the rise of the price of bitcoin and crypto in general is going significantly up in a very fast pace and that's the strenuous effect of people exiting a system and engaging in something else you'll be you're being quite generous in referring to it as old software in the UK we still right laws on bits of dried animal skin. And so I think the question isn't how we vote, but what we're voting for.

And so I would encourage a bigger framing of the issue. Any last words before we close up here? I know we've been a bit pessimistic, but I choose not to surrender. You know, it's going to be a battle of generations. And the more we keep fighting, eventually the better things will get. And I think it's an exciting time to be working on technology around this. There's tremendous potential,

tremendous creativity being applied to this. And I recover my optimism when I meet young hackers around the world building on Ethereum with Bitcoin and on these new networks that are daring to create an institutional reality for the world. Thank you.

Thank you. Amita, any final thoughts? No, I think the U.S. election demonstrated to us how similar the US is to countries like India. I mean, we have, or even Africa, you know, we have like, you know, coups going on and very similar sorts of problems, which we were really, you know, you're really shocked to see that the US could have these issues of trust in elections as developing countries have.

So indeed, you know, many of my friends have mentioned how, India could actually help the U.S. by providing them these electronic voting machines to help them next time. So I think, Wendy, there is this convergence happening in politics, if not in economics. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for

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