Citizenship Forecast: Partly Cloudy with Chances of Algorithms

Abstract

Exercising citizenship has always involved some forms of technology, from voting pebbles in Ancient Greece to ballot boxes and electoral districting algorithms in modern representative democracies. However, the high levels of sophistication and, ultimately, opaqueness of technologies such as blockchain must be a real concern should we decide to entrust these technologies with the role of embodying democratic self-government. We are asked to take for granted the promises of new digital technologies and are kindly invited to take our places in shiny new cloud communities. However, we rarely understand how these technologies work, who designs and oversees them and whether we would be able to dispense of them if we find them wanting.