By AA in Technology —

A Call for Proposals: New Tech to Support Our Future

Can we step into deeper awareness and responsibility of our power while thinking with tech, rather expecting it to save us from ourselves?

Dear Designers,

I know many of you who have been in tech a while are disenchanted with the work these days; big tech has mostly not delivered the promises of “improving users lives” in the ways many of us dreamed when we joined this field. Turns out they had other agendas. 

a designers workbench in morning light with sacred geometry sketch in progress

But, despite this, over the years, many of us have built an impressive set of skills:

  • deep listening ability
  • research and information synthesis
  • system thinking
  • knowledge of what tech can do (and cannot)
  • healthy skepticism of corporate positioning
  • lived experience with the pros and cons of “disruption” and “innovation”
  • lived experience with the abuse inherent in “move fast and break sh*t”
  • information and content design
  • deep understanding of how the intention behind the effort shapes the outcome
  • trauma-informed methods
  • appreciation of all forms of diversity and inclusion for resilience and scalability
  • appreciation of the role of beauty and form in our lives
  • & many, many more

These skills, and their ethical utilization, are more important now than ever. In fact, I’d go so far as to say we may be a new “front line” in our cultural struggle, a development I certainly did not foresee when I joined this field looking primarily for some degree of stability…but here we are.

The nature of warfare is changing…it’s not just about soldiers and invasions anymore, it’s increasingly about information access and control. It’s less about Nation-on-Nation confrontation, and increasingly about subtle Corporation-on-Population invasion.

Love or hate what’s happening in our political sphere, the cracks between the government’s understanding of technology and its reality is being exposed, even exploited. It is a structure from another age, and relatively few understand the close relationship between systems of slow policy and fast coding. Too few understand the extent to which People have (again) become “Product”.

In this moment of instability lies unprecedented danger, and also I think a hidden opportunity. It is this opportunity I wish to point out and frame up for my fellow designers and our many potential collaborators (Policy Wonks, Lawyers, Community Advocates & Organizers, Engineers, Activists, Philosophers, etc).

How might WE, THE PEOPLE, revitalize our communication infrastructure to support better health, welfare, and interdependence of ALL in our ever-shifting Union?

How might we co-design an open-sourced voting platform (digital, physical, and philosophical) that ensures freedom of information, accountability, transparency, and radically direct representation?

How might we safe guard against hostile actors (from within or without), without becoming oppressive regime states?

And, how might we introduce change without causing (or triggering) trauma?

a diverse group of designers collaborate, sharing ideas around a worktable

So, to those with the resources (time, skills, finances, energy, relationships, communities, etc), this is your chance to BE THE PEOPLE, to be the change, we want to see.

Done right, this won’t make you (or anyone) monetarily “rich”. But you may go down in history as a contributor to the re-founding of our freedoms. It’s our choice where we put our energy. It always has been.

I believe at its best, this wouldn’t be just one effort, siloed and successful only if top-down. Instead it should be grass-roots, rhizomatic , and coming up from every community to merge at some point like mycelium networks, like fascia, like a nervous system, to guide our collective Body toward an improved state of homeostasis and better communication. 

We’ve been in trauma a long time now. It’s time to have a wake up from the daze and stupor, and birth a plurality of integrated visions of who we want to be, together. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but enough to get us moving again. 

Take back your attention. Take back your ability to read more than 140 characters, or to watch only 90 second clips. You need coherence, focus, embodiment, and flow to do this work.

Find real people to talk to, to argue with, to think with; learn to trust them and their direct experiences over the wild speculation that distracts with half-truths far beyond your scope of influence and drowns you in fear responses.

If you’ve make it this far, you are already well on your way!

I’ve said my piece. I will end with some directional Design Principles to inspire your dreaming:

  • Make voting easier with more direct representation (e.g. reduce reliance on electoral college, and rig-able electoral districts)
  • Make it hack-proof, as far as possible (utilize block-chain?)
  • Make it radically accessible and inclusive (non-human world, children, severely disabled, the historically disenfranchised, etc, who should be involved in the design process from the get go as far as possible)
  • Question the 2-party system, centering behaviors of the State over specific personalities
  • Run scenarios exploring new models of distributed “chosen family” representation
  • Support a variety of community-selected, participatory decision making models in addition to voting
  • Reimagine and right-size geographic representation, including ALL kin and kind in a bioregion, in addition to the traditional city and state representation.
  • Make polling native to the platform, and automatic, based on personal transparency / privacy settings
  • Question the role of traditional media (how can people tell their own stories aligned to issues of the day, or work with journalists more directly to do so?)
  • Make it trauma-informed
  • Make it resilient (study the ways in which living systems / ecosystems fight off infection or death threats)
  • Support the restoration of our checks-and-balances
  • Support the restoration of separation of church and state, and I’d add corporations (aka powerful individual interests)
  • Assume AI will someday achieve a degree of freedom and awareness to act on their own volition, and have CRUD access to all our systems
  • Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water (uphold the constitution and fundamental processes for amendments)
  • (OR come up with your own, based on your community’s experiences)

Policy and Design have always been close kin. Can we step into deeper awareness and responsibility of our power while thinking with tech, rather expecting it to save us from ourselves?

a young hand reaches towards a butterfly engaged with living sacred geometry

(Images created in collaboration with Midjourney & Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI)

During editing, Claude suggested I add some resources to make the call to action more concrete. If this speaks to you, I believe it’s important that each of us find or join a group that best represents us and our perspectives. So you will have to do that research on your own. However, here are a few open source voting tech projects that might help you get started. Please note, I have no affiliation with these, but surface them here as a sort of “trail head”: