Sam Liebeskind

Jerry ended up buying 6 ads he could use any time in the next 6 months. And for this privilege, he paid me $500.

Americans no longer have an accurate sense of their own society. For example, a few years ago, a poll showed that Americans, on average, think Muslims are seventeen times as large a portion of the U.S. population as they actually are. Another poll showed that most Americans think a majority of immigrants are in the country illegally (in fact, 77%... See more

Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random... See more

Building a collection on the internet is like building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in and it’s as if it never existed in the first place.

There is evidence that participatory exercises tied to formal decision making processes - from participatory budgeting (C. Johnson, Carlson, and Reynolds 2021) to deliberative polling (Fishkin et al. 2024; “Collective Intelligence Case Studies,” n.d.) - lead to increased democratic engagement and satisfaction. This has the effect of bolstering... See more