Fractal Democracy with Marta Poblet Balcell

Session Summary: Fractal Democracy – Marta

• Crowd Intelligence: Designing new institutions for the digital era by harnessing collective knowledge through digital tools and blended environments.

• Defining Politics: Encouraging reflection on personal and collective understandings of politics.

Case Studies:

• Haiti (2010): Diasporic Haitians used satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap to update digital maps post-earthquake.

• Libyan Crisis Map: Created for the UN, leveraging verified social media sources to aid humanitarian efforts.

• Hologram Protest (Madrid, 2015): In response to the Gag Law, activists protested as holograms, symbolizing the limits of free speech.

• Crowdsourced Constitutions: Iceland pioneered crowdsourced constitutional input. Morocco used Facebook for broad participation, but digital access was uneven.

Key Reflections:

• "I don’t want to be a hashtag"—a critique of symbolic activism.

• Aristotle: "A mob judges many matters better than any single person"—emphasizing the value of collective intelligence, contingent on independent judgment and diversity.

• Hobbes: "The agreement of men is by covenant only, which is artificial"—highlighting the constructed nature of governance.

Governance Models:

Paul Baran’s Communication Structures: Centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks—useful for understanding communication but not governance.

Fractal Governance: A model for governing distributed networks, inspired by fractal patterns in blockchain growth.

Elinor Ostrom’s Nested Enterprises: Small, interlinked governance units working within larger systems.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Self-governing digital collectives. Example: Ukraine DAO, which fundraised via Ethereum to support humanitarian aid.

Open Questions:

• How do we govern distributed networks on the internet?

• What are the limits and possibilities of decentralized governance structures?

• Can blockchain-based governance truly be democratic?