This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy, but know we’ve got serious work to do to save it.

This conversation is making me understand how important it is to have ethical political leadership aligned with good technologists to build the kind of platforms we need to advance democracy.

That’s so inspiring. The joy in this conversation for me was knowing that these tools, these approaches, are available and are also starting to get picked up.

I think this UberX story is a powerful example showing how the design of a tech platform and the values it is promoting can influence the outcome of dialogue and the real possibility to reach consensus to eventually become law.

“I will always think it’s my problem, it’s not their problem.” She says so many things that are full of wisdom, and I would love to stop and meditate on almost every sentence. We have a political leader who sees conflicts as a possibility to grow by sitting and learning ...

The private sector is guilty. To be honest, when you think of it, our technologies today are not designed to see people as citizens, but mostly as consumers—as people who need to buy and be addicted to the products they buy. The more addicted, the more we can sell them ...

Looking at Tunisia under dictatorship and Taiwan under democracy, I’ve come to see the relationship between civil society organizations and public servants as a kind of thermometer for the health of a democracy. The more trust there is between them, the healthier the system tends to be. To repair our ...

It becomes a race to the top. I think this point really stands out. One of the most striking realizations I had when I joined the Tunisian government as an advisor to the minister of finance was the deep distrust high-level state officials had towards civil society organizations. I hadn’t ...

I want to go back to this powerful sentence: ‘To give no trust is to get no trust.’ I’m wondering where it starts. Someone needs to be the first to give this trust in this atmosphere of suspicion. Again, we can think of it as this unique place, but at ...

I think this is unique. I would love to see that in more places in the world, but again, I want to acknowledge the political leadership there. Seeing citizens as resources, trusting collective intelligence, understanding that it’s a crisis—a humanity crisis—and that they don’t have the solution and need everyone ...

Would that be the contrast between an idealist and a pragmatic person or group? An idealist would have this idea and want to implement it exactly as it is in a utopia. The pragmatic person or group would say, “Okay, I have this beautiful vision, it’s still a utopia, but ...

So, if they had been more pragmatic? If they would have accepted the situation as it is and not tried to implement their vision from the beginning and impose it? Like, accept that maybe the political leadership was not ready yet for that, but see the citizens’ assembly, as imperfect ...

So what actually happened was, because the citizens’ assembly that was commissioned was not quite what XR had asked for, they basically decided to ignore it. Hm. Big mistake.

There is this delicate moment in time that the movement can totally lose in front of the existing power. In Tunisia, I think one of the failures of this transition was that people who went to the streets didn’t have the tools or the collective capacity to bring this new ...

It makes me think of what happened in the Tunisian revolution, where the social movement was, at the end of the day, co-opted by political parties because they didn’t have this vision. They didn’t have this new proposal, this alternative system. Slowly but surely, political parties who were more structured—even ...

Absolutely. There is a very delicate place where there is this maximum tension between the protester/demonstrator movement that is gaining attention and really pushing the political leadership to its limit, and the political leadership seeing that they lost power and the trust of the public. So what do they do? ...

Yes, and then comes the second point, where the political leadership was not violently repressing the movement as they did everywhere else. In Tunisia, people were shot by the police and killed. In the Occupy movement, people were taken off the street and arrested. Right. But here, the political leadership ...

Yeah, I see two main powerful things in what she said right now. One is the demonstrator part of the Occupy movement in Taiwan, and second is the political leadership. I want to start with the first one because it’s really this fundamental difference between protester and demonstrator that she’s ...

And I’m Omezzine. For this episode, we’re going to look to a place where the relationship between humanity and democracy has actually improved over the last 10 years, which isn’t the picture in most of the world. A place that has grown stronger and stronger, where trust in government has ...