The Pandemocracy.Net
Good progress with Pandemocracy.Net Platform and book. We are still on target for publishing the book in Q2 2021 and launching the platform inspiring us from the amazing content our group of experts are sharing with us via the different webinars we are organizing. https://www.wisekey.com/wisekey-webinar/videos/
The Pandemocracy
We, the world, find ourselves living in an uncertain season marked by an unexpected fragility. The last two decades have seen steady progress toward shared global goals like clean water, the eradication of poverty, social equalities, and renewable energy. Now, in a matter of months, our notion of global progress and, more important, our notion of global democracy seems to have been inflated. We might feel a bit naïve for having felt so hopeful that the “better world” we claim is within reach, perhaps isn’t quite so close. Or, at least, it’s more difficult to see now with our recent problems blocking the view.
The only reality in sight at the moment is the world still chasing down an unruly pandemic and, in its wake, navigating the consequences of an infected global democracy. A global democracy headlined by a fraying of the world’s most symbolic representation — the United States. The annual “Democracy Perception Index” from Dalia Research revealed in June that the world’s confident view of the US as the great champion of democratic process has lost a step in 2020, largely due to the mixed feelings about the country’s response to COVID-19. The US clearly wasn’t the only democracy that struggled with how to respond to a virus the world had never battled before. But witnessing any country at the forefront of our global republic stumble in uncertainty and discord, appears to have initiated a global trend away from decentralization and back toward a geopolitical, pre-Cold War dynamic of us and them.
Like humans are wired to do, our survival instincts are in overdrive at the moment. We spend many waking hours thinking, worrying, and strategizing about how to combat an invisible threat we can’t simply shoo or spin away. And when we’re not consumed with our defense, we wonder about life as we know it or, perhaps, as it once was. We’re collectively asking, What is the best way forward? Collectively wondering, Has this seismic shift created a new normal?
The answers and opinions are aplenty. The real question is where our collective instincts will ultimately lead us.
Will we move together toward a broad solution, not merely to the pandemic that has chipped away at our lives and livelihoods, but ultimately to the problems this pandemic has shoved into the light? These problems, after all, are our real issues.
Through our actions, one nation at a time, we will collectively decide whether we’re looking to simply return to the way things were (or, more correctly, the way we thought they were) or use this painful pause to learn and grow. The pandemic has trained a spotlight on the fault lines in both national and global collaboration. We simply don’t work well together. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we are prone to act too self-interested — politically, financially, nationally — to heed the major reasons we must work together. If it takes a catastrophic, global event to show us why collaboration isn’t just a grand ideal, then we still have work to do to apply collaboration as both a necessity and an antidote to future problems.
While some nations like Iceland, Switzerland, and Singapore shined during the pandemic, the notion of positive global momentum now feels like a stretch — especially when considering that a once-a-century catastrophe, which could have been an extraordinary proving ground for the world’s democratic prowess, has only proven that we aren’t on the same page where humanity’s well-being is concerned.
One of the most telling subplots to this drama unfolding before us is that the very thing we built to save us — technology — failed us. But we can’t blame technology. While it is perhaps today’s most influential global force, our inability to slow or stop COVID-19 any sooner has not been a technological failure; the waiting game is not the expected result of the world’s rudimentary technological prowess. This isn’t the 1980s. We already possess the wherewithal for a swift solution, at least, one much swifter than we’ve experienced.
The problem — the critical problem — is that our technological competence is fractured both nationally and especially internationally. Together, we have the tools for a solution. We just haven’t figured out how to combine them. So, we are left to apply them ineffectively and apart. We aren’t proven to possess a collective willingness to use our aggregated resources for the greatest human good. The pandemic is case in point.
Pandemic + Democracy = ?
This term “pandemocracy” that we’ve chosen as the title of our coming book, is an obvious nod to the combination of the two words: pandemic and democracy. While it’s a memorable play on words, it’s not the primary reason we coined the term. There is a more hopeful motive.
These illuminated fractures within the national and geopolitical landscape can still be the light at the end of this unprecedented tunnel if we so choose. The latest lessons and the brightest case studies of this year tell us that if we know where to look and what to learn, the pandemic that exposed the major weakness in global democracy could be used to define what we can call a pandemocracy — a global electorate committed to the broadest availability of global knowledge and resources, as a means to meet humanity’s greatest needs and uphold humanity’s highest values.
In our 2018 book, The transHuman Code, we offered readers a picture of the sort of decisions we must make together, as one world, in order to use technology to produce a better humanity instead of using humanity to produce a better technology. Our premise here is the next step in this process, namely, that the pandemic has both shamed the global state of democracy and showed us the way to improve it. And we’re not merely talking about figuring out how to work together more nicely.
As with any societal underpinning, getting global democracy on the right track and closer to where we want it to be is not as simple as an online course in manners and diplomacy. Ultimately, the way forward will require us to understand the story that got the world here in the first place, so utterly unprepared to save ourselves in our latest, greatest hour of need. The antagonists aren’t as obvious as one might think. In fact, once we understand the whole story, our view forward will be much clearer, including the ways in which we can get there.
But first, the story, best told through a simple analogy we can all understand.
Prior to the pandemic, the free world was living, working, and collaborating with an operating system we will call Democracy 1.0. This OS was stable enough to make some very important progress where our egalitarian goals are concerned, especially as the world ushered in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Democracy 1.0 OS enabled us to share information and knowledge and collaborate across borders and ideologies with a frequency and efficiency we once thought impossible. We’ve seen numerous advances in agriculture, medicine, and nutrition. Important progress toward global goals has already been made as a result. Three examples from the United Nation’s 2020 Sustainable
Developmental Goals Report :
• As of December 2019, over 17 per cent (or 24 million square kilometres) of waters under national jurisdiction (0 to 200 nautical miles from shore) were covered by protected areas, more than double the area covered in 2010.
• Coverage by mobile networks is now nearly universal.
• According to 2019 data from 102 countries, 98 per cent had a youth employment strategy or plan to develop one in the near future.
Of course, Democracy 1.0 has prompted other major global benefits like stem cell research, gene editing, electric cars, and 3D printing. But like all operating systems, Democracy 1.0 eventually needed an upgrade. Truth be told, the upgrade was needed more than a decade ago, as giant platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon were rapidly expanding, and big pharma was building silos for its discoveries. We didn’t see the danger in continuing to run the world on the old OS back then. In the last three years, we’ve seen the need for better oversight of our global developments, especially related to technology. But we didn’t see the need to upgrade our democratic OS until the pandemic hit, and our global frailties were laid bare.
We can now see that the OS on which global democracy has been running for centuries is outdated. It does not know how to efficiently account for a world in which technologies like AI. machine learning, and cybersecurity exist. It does not efficiently operate in a world in which national voting systems can be hacked, identities can be stolen, and global new can be fabricated. And, now we know, Democracy 1.0 certainly cannot thrive in the midst of a pandemic.
This pandemocracy period in which we find ourselves can be, if we allow it to be, a challenging but critical transition between Democracy 1.0 and Democracy 2.0. In other words, the pandemic can, and should, prompt the OS upgrade global democracy so desperately needs. The upgrade will bring democracy up-to-date with the latest advancements and threats, as well as the current cache of global trends, human knowledge, and humanitarian desires.
Like every upgrade, there will be bugs in the new operating system. That is to say, Democracy 2.0 won’t be without new deficiencies and frustrations for which we hadn’t planned. It will also introduce us to new efficiencies and developments we hadn’t imagined were possible. But if the pandemic has taught us any global lesson, it has taught us that the only way this will be realized is by enhancing our willingness and wherewithal to work together. This is as true for defeating the pandemic as it is for deploying Democracy 2.0. To upgrade will require an enhanced collaborative effort. Such an effort must continue for democracy to flourish and a new global operating system to reap its full benefits.