We are living in a strange era. Globalization brought promises of connecting us humans across state borders, but instead, we ended up in an attention war in which an oligopoly of media companies weaponize machine learning against us in order to sell our time to the highest bidder.

There are several potential extinction scenarios that require that we, as a race, are capable of coordinating and taking difficult decisions together. Climate change, deadlier pandemics, the increasing power of artificial intelligence, the potential for nuclear war... How are we to act together given the current climate?

Existing political systems are not based on understanding or improving the lives of citizens, but rather they are a game of staying in power through the polarization of us voters. These systems incentivize the creation of artificial boxes of political opinions that confront us – left vs right, liberal vs republicans – instead of allowing us to freely express our complex spectrum of thought. We are forced to take sides in an artificial match of ideas we don’t agree with to have our team win.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We should be capable of expressing opinions across the political spectrum and not be forced into an artificial label. We should be capable of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time with the same people across topics, learn and evolve our opinions, and express them in real time.

We need new ways of decentralizing political power, but at the same time empowering citizens to make better and faster decisions. If we can speak to and coordinate with each other, there's no need for strong, centralized political figures. If we can express our individual preferences on single topics there's no need to cast a vote into a heterogeneous package of political ideas. If we can express ourselves freely and see how our neighbors do the same, we will feel more empowered to speak to and understand each other.

Recent advances in technology, such as distributed ledgers and zk-SNARKs, unblock possibilities in the realm of digital voting, and recent NLP breakthroughs (GPT3) may allow us to process the full complexity of human thought to improve our coordination at scale. These might allow us to truly explore new, alternative governance models such as liquid democracy and tools such as quadratic voting, allowing greater individual expression and the ability to coordinate with others in order to create a better future.

I want to explore tools and organizations working towards the decentralization of power and the empowerment of citizens. I’ll discuss technology, activism, and political philosophy, hopefully helping more people connect the dots and pushing towards a better future of human cooperation.