This is the first of three talks I gave to John Allsopp's Web Directions NEXT conference held in Sydney in late 2024. The three talks introduce a new project of mine - a series of short videos called Awakening our better angels.It’s about our institutions—how they shape our behaviour, our politics, and our civilisation.How they can bring out the worst in us—or the best. And how modern institutions all start from the premise that we're self-interested. That creates misery, inefficiency and dysfunction. But what's the alternative? Some institutions bring people together to get them to solve problems. They play to our better natures. You’ll meet Chris and Finbar—two very different people chosen by lottery to help decide a polarising question in Ireland.It didn’t begin well. But it ended with friendship, insight, and a better public conversation. If you'd like to watch the presentation, you can find it on my channel on YouTube here.
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International councils of citizens: can they moderate the madness?
As readers may know, in contrast to most folks promoting citizen assemblies, I am not too optimistic that running temporary, special purpose citizen assemblies will achieve much. They come and go, serve up some recommendations to the government and then become ‘issues management’ fodder, and in so doing rehearse the role of the people as supplicants to their government. I think we need to develop an activism of sortition. By that I mean we need to find ways to assert the legitimacy of the deliberation of a representative sample of the people as a check and balance on the government. Had a citizen assembly voted against the abolition of carbon pricing in Australia or against a hard Brexit in the UK, it would have markedly strengthened the hand of those elected politicians who were resisting bad policy within the legislature. Given the case for an activism of sortition, it seemed to me that Donald Trump’s trade war on the world offered a promising environment in which to improvise. I discuss this idea with Leon Gettler in the recording above.
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Me on Alex Kaschuta's Subversive podcast
From Alex's blurbTogether, we examine how the internet’s kerosene amplifies wish-casting, why monarchic fantasies seduce tech elites, and what bottom-up meritocracy - citizen juries, sortition, and ‘small-scale hacks’ - might offer a polity that feels increasingly unmoored. We grapple with Burnham, Yarvin, and the uneasy marriage between markets, monopolies, and truth-telling institutions, asking whether stability can be coaxed from competitive chaos.
Rory Sutherland suggested that the host of Simplifying Complexity have me on his podcast a while back. In that interview, I was critical of those who peddle ‘complexity’ as a new paradigm in economics. It's not. It's a bunch of new models. But the idea of 'complexity' as some new lens really runs rampant in numerous discourses around society and, for instance, new approaches to social disadvantage. The idea is constantly peddled that the current system is blinkered in its thinking. The word 'linear' will be thrown around. However, to me, this misdiagnoses the problem. The reason existing systems don't work very well is that they're not, ultimately built to work for users. They're built to address the needs of those building the system. Building them so they do work takes more than some consultants coming in with a new 'holistic' view of the problem. And if the consultants do have a better view of the problem and how to fix it, how are they going to get it to stick and to grow once it's been developed and all the forces that produced the initial dysfunction remain.
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Me on ABC Hobart on the proposed Hobart Stadium (after Minister Abetz)
An interview that took place with me at 5.20 on the 1st April 2025 on the release of the Tasmanian Planning Commission draft integrated assessment report.
Ireland