[Summary: assorted thinking aloud about emerging technologies and democracy in 2025.]
In a Linked In post reflecting on the Copenhagen Democracy Summit Blair Glencourse includes the question:
Where are “Crypto Bros for Good?”
following up with:
(Apparently this group does actually exist). There are some fascinating new ways that tech, AI and crypto are being used to support democracy- but we need to better support coordination of, narratives around and amplification of the positive pieces of the tech ecosystem.
It’s an interesting question to unpack – and I though I should have a quick go at capturing some thoughts, as it relates to some of the work I’m currently doing supporting World Bank’s Coalitions for Reforms program on research and writing for a brief around Emerging Technology and the Social Contract, and ties also into a mapping I was working on earlier this year for the Open Government Partnership on participatory governance of digital technology.
I read the question as fundamentally pointing to the gap between communities traditionally thinking about the protection and development of democracy, and the latest computerisation movements, exploring the potential application of emerging technologies to questions of social and political organisation. However, invoking the ‘crypto bro’ idea, pointing to an often derided, tribal, hype-centred, male-dominated, technically skilled, and seemingly well-funded community (drawing often on private rather than state or philanthropic capital), might more be asking about why this wealth of resource for, experimentation with, and excitement about, ‘democratic’ innovation is nowhere near the traditional democracy field. Although framed as ‘crypto bro’, the same question might also be posted around AI innovations. There is marginally more talk of artificial intelligence in spaces near to traditional democracy reform groups, but much of the work around technologically enabled collective intelligence or AI & Democracy is focussed more on governing the power of technology firms than on addressing the democratic quality of states.
I also read the question in light of the much closer connection between the past computerisation movements, such as e-government/e-democracy and open data, and the democracy and open government fields. In the past, where the ‘natural resource’ of interest to technologists was government data there was perhaps a tighter collaboration between governance reformers and technology innovators. In current waves of technological innovation, that link feels less apparent.
All that said, where are the, “Crypto bros”? Or perhaps, I can say ‘techno-idealists’ for want of a better terms that allows us to look both beyond crypto, and the ‘bros’, for the promising practice around democratic renewal through technology? And how can the democracy field amplify positive pieces of the tech ecosystem?
Crypto unpacked
Perhaps the best known manifestation of crypto culture is the blockchain, and BitCoin in particular. BitCoin has roots as a political project: one rooted in libertarian ideas of freedom from centralised government control. Central to many crypto projects is the idea that instead of relying on the coercive power of the state (or on any other form of centralised power) to stabilise social systems (including money), cryptography and decentralisation enable allow ‘trustless trust’. For example, distributed cryptographic signatures can provide assurance that some value or vote has not been counted twice, without needing to trust in the guarantees of some external authority. This leads in a couple of different directions.
Firstly, within crypto-communities, there has been effort to extend the distributed organisation idea from currency to other forms of social practice, resulting in ideas such as Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) often deploying textured forms of internal democracy to govern collective associations without hierarchy or individual ownership . However, generally these new forms of organising are rooted in “one-token, one-vote”, rather than “one-person, one-vote’: reflecting both bitcoin cultures of both anonymity/pseudonymity, and a tight connection between crypto-libertarian ideas and an ideological faith in markets. Widely discussed innovations such as quadratic voting (which seeks to weight votes based on strength of preference, rather than token holdings) can be ready as essentially attempts to re-introduce elements of fairness/equity into systems bootstrapped from unequal holding of initial resources.
The second direction is the use of cryptographic approaches to improve more traditional democratic systems, such as models enabling digital voting. A recent OECD report on emerging technologies for civic participation includes a case study of Vochain, a digital ballot platform that’s been used for non-binding referenda at the municipal level, and in voting within voluntary associations. However, as critics of digital voting have long noted, replacing legible processed backed by public authority, with processes that demand citizen trust in complex and, to most, illegible code, may have a long path to travel before they command trust at scale.
The third path is the use of decentralised/crypto approaches to addressing emergent problems of our digital public sphere, such as misinformation, or asserting identity and credentials in the digital world. Here we find perhaps the most promising elements of a crypto offer to democracy communities: holding out the possibility of checks-and-balances when governments seek to expand their powers (such as in the creation of national identity schemes) by proposing technical architectures that enforce the distribution of governance power. We saw some of this in place in debates over whether COVID-19 applications should rely on decentralised cryptographic models, or on centralised government systems. Ultimately, the realisation of such models rely on governments participating in schemes that, ultimately, constrain their power and involve trade-offs against other policy objectives (e.g. fraud prevention). And to date, we’ve seen limited willingness to do this, nor advocacy from democracy communities to argue that the legitimacy of governments extending reach into digital identity (for example) should rest on having new forms of cryptographically enforceable controls.
At the end of this brief survey, I’m left more or less in agreement with the the OCED analysis that “Blockchain has yet to demonstrate substantial real-world impact in the context of participation”, and with interviewees I’ve spoken too who argue that some of the inherent market ideology and logic of blockchain thinking is hard to get away from. It’s not clear that many of the Blockchain for Good projects that exist are addressing the right problems, or the right part of problems. Whilst the possibility of bootstrapping trust through crypto may have value in environments (e.g. post conflict states) where trust and economic systems have collapsed, in practice it may act as a shortcut to the wrong destination.
A-Idealists
So – if I’m more-or-less dismissing crypo, what of the other part of Blair’s question about the need to “to better support coordination of, narratives around and amplification of the positive pieces of the tech ecosystem”, including work with AI amongst other technologies.
Drawing on a social contract analysis framework, and a focus on the alignment between citizen expectations, and the outcomes produced by states, much of the potential of emerging technologies may turn out to be on the delivery and outcome side of the equation: offering opportunities for states to deliver services in new, more efficient and more tailored ways – increasing satisfaction with democratic governance. However, automation of delivery comes with trade-offs, often with minority needs and rights being the first loss in the trade. Substantial critiques exist of inherent biases in AI-driven automation of public goods, and the extent to which current arrangements around AI involve greater surveillance, datification and corporate capture of state services.
This presents a challenge for democracy communities: do we amplify a narrative about AI-driven public service delivery – potentially over civil society critiques of the limitations of these emerging technologies? Do we focus attention on the need to govern, or build alternatives to, big tech led delivery? Or do we focus more on narratives around technology at the citizen-state interface?
In this later space, there are a couple of particular roles of emerging technology worth considering.
Firstly, the role of technology in safeguarding or building an informed public sphere. Ironically, the focus of many projects here may be on undoing the damage done by past waves of technology. Despite the belief, shared by many at the time, that the Internet and social media might usher in a more inclusive, and global, public sphere – supporting democratic dialogue and debate – many current assessments would point to algorithmically-driven social media as a driver of disinformation, division and at least part of our current democratic crisis. Groups like Full Fact have been exploring the potential of AI to scale fact-checking practices, and a 2024 systematic review found that AI systems with human oversight could be effective in tackling misinformation.
When it comes to more proactively building an informed public, there are some interesting experiments going on with using LLMs to increase the accessibility of existing democratic processes (see for example the AI-driven summaries of UK local council meetings at Open Council Network), as well as to inform citizens taking part in deliberative democracy fora such as citizens assemblies. Projects coming out from Google Deepmind researchers such as the Habermas Machine hold out a promise of machine-facilitated dialogue, although in practice they are very early stage experiments.
Secondly, we can look at the role of technology in facilitating ‘listening at scale’. Ethan Zuckerman points out that “listening at scale” is “one of the hardest problems of democracy since its inception”, noting that:
From listening to those voices in the agora, to thousands of citizens crashing the Congressional phone system, ensuring that every voice in a democracy is heard has been an unsolved problem. Many of the systems we associate with democracies – voting, polling, petitions, the structure of representation itself – are technologies designed to enable listening at scale.
Aggregating inputs at scale has long been a design goal of many e-democracy projects, but Large Language Models are offering a new set of tools with some capability for summarising, categorising and sense-making across large volumes of content from citizens. Government-led projects to streamline consultation analysis, and start-ups providing tooling for deliberative dialogues all look to AI to speed up, and potentially deepen, citizen engagement in shaping or making policy – and the legibility of citizen inputs to policy makers.
Thirdly, there is work on the role of technology in bridging perspectives and building consensus. This is where we find the relatively high-profile work of vTaiwan, ably represented globally by Audrey Tang, using tools such as pol.is to build forms of civic engagement that prioritise bridging between different interests, rather than polarising into conflicting positions. Tang reports that digitally-supported citizen participation in Taiwan boosted levels of civic trust from 9% to 70%. This narrative, linking structured, at-scale and digitally mediated citizen participation to strengthening trust, is perhaps one of the most powerful at play today: although digging into both the theory and practice behind the Taiwan experience suggests that it is as much about leadership, values and organisation – as about technological fixes.
Governing (with) AI
As I set out to write this reflection, I was hoping I might find more to be excited about in emerging technologies for democratic renewal: more bits of the tech ecosystem to amplify. I’ll still be searching for those in the ongoing work for the research projects I mentioned above. But I’m increasingly brought back to reflecting that the need is not to seek out ‘at scale’ tech-fixes for democratic crisis, but to recognise the prevalent power of tech (and big tech firms) within our democracies, and to focus some of our attention on governing this power as a means to strengthen citizen feelings of control over their lives.
Here, perhaps, the work of groups like the Public AI Network is offering one positive narrative to amplify: of collectively resourced and public interest-based AI infrastructures. Growing movements for community-level AI practice – cutting out big-tech platforms and building capacity to use the power and potential of AI tools in citizen groups and civilc society, also feel like promising territory.
When it comes to accessing the kinds of venture funding for democratic innovation that an initial turn to ‘cypto bros’ may have been seeking, there are perhaps lessons from the open data movement, where it was not the largest incumbents, but finance seeking to disrupt incumbent industry players, that was aligned with reform.
Returning to the question
Looking back at Blair’s post that sparked off these reflections, the answers to where tech narratives fit into protecting democracy may in fact be found in many of the earlier bullet points. Rather than leading with tech narratives, we should show how technologies can be shaped to support action on corruption, outcome delivery, communicating the poetry, engaging wider groups shaping policy, and driving better coordination between progressive regimes. I’m leaving these reflections with a slightly different question, of how we can better bring those seeking to develop new narratives of technology closer to those working on narratives on safeguarding and charting a future for democracy.