polarization vs coexistence & cohesion
Doing stuff together, especially with people from different backgrounds than our own, is going to be really important for the future of the country. And it’s going to take a set of “muscular institutions”—institutions that aren’t bashful about asserting their prerogatives—to get us there.
The paradox of “muscular institutions”
Vernā Myers: How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them
ted.com“Stare at awesome black people…because when we look at awesome folks who are black, it helps to disassociate the associations that happen automatically in our brain.“
“Walk towards your discomfort”
Opinion: "Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”"
Opinion | How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society
“Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
If a single status game becomes dominant, it breeds violence. Social fragmentation is a release valve.
Deliberative Technology: Designing AI and Computational Democracy for Peacebuilding in Highly-Polarized Contexts
The report discusses a workshop focused on utilizing deliberative technologies to enhance democratic processes, promote social cohesion, and address polarization in various global contexts, emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence.
toda.orgOn day one, they define a political institution as “a socially created constraint on human action.” That definition has always stuck with me. This means that we can make them and remake them. But it also means that whatever institution we create, people are going to use those institutions strategically to try to achieve whatever ends they're trying... See more
As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in... See more
Our systems, institutions, leaders and narratives about who and what we are — our lack of compassion and limited definitions of what a valued member of society is — are failing us. They have been failing us for quite some time