Grassroots digital democracy: an alternative architecture for the digital realm
The digital realm today is dominated by two architectures: centralised autocratic global platforms that have adopted surveillance-capitalism as their business model; and up-and-coming blockchain-based global platforms that are decentralised but fundamentally plutocratic. Global platforms exacerbate inequality and undermine the fabric of human society by depleting the social, economic, civic, and political capital of local communities, worldwide.
The talk will review the work of Shapiro’s group at Weizmann with colleagues around the world on a third, alternative architecture for the digital realm, termed grassroots digital democracy. The architecture and its engendered grassroots applications (including social networking; cryptocurrencies; social contracts) aim to provide scalable foundations for grassroots digital economies that can emerge without initial capital or external credit, and for sovereign democratic digital communities, both operating solely on the networked smartphones of their members, independently of any global resources and platforms.
The publications that form the basis of the talk are collectively available here.
About the speaker:
Professor Ehud Shapiro (Hebrew: אהוד שפירא; born 1955) is an Israeli scientist, artist, and entrepreneur, who is Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With international reputation, he made fundamental contributions to many scientific disciplines, laying in each a long-term research agenda by asking a novel basic question and offering a first step towards answering it, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for fault localization; how to unify parallel, distributed, and systems programming with a high-level logic-based programming language; how to use the metaverse as a foundation for social networking; how to devise molecular computers that can function as smart programmable drugs; how to uncover the human cell lineage tree, via single-cell genomics; how to support digital democracy, by devising an alternative architecture to the digital realm. Shapiro is also an internet pioneer, entrepreneur, and a pioneer and proponent of digital democracy. Shapiro is the founder of the Ba Rock Band and a founder of the Israeli political party "Democratit". He is a winner of two ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants.