And that's a bottom-up way almost through the technologies themselves, people gathering together to change the kind of paradigm. Yes, yes. What do you think of a top-down approach? I mean, there's issues that are the big conversation moment America is regulating them as public utilities, like the telephone or like railways or antitrust laws, anti monopoly ones. really the same. You could end up in a situation like China where you have the government is essentially in control of algorithmic recommendation and decides what people see. So I think there's a strange kind of, what seems like a viable alternative or a viable approach might not be very democratic or very in keeping with our values in the way. Right. So I

was just at an amazing symposium on democracy in the 21st century. And they were very interested in my work on relevance, realization within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and things like that. And so it was a great pleasure to be there. But I also got to hear some very powerful talks. And I can't remember the name of the person. I know his first name is Carol, but I can't remember the last name. But he and his group and the Institute are proposing ways, one of the best proposals I've heard, it's's called d21 ways in which we could actually change elections um and what happens in d21 is basically people have like they have more than one vote usually they'll have like three or four votes and and you can't cast you can't you can't pile your votes on one person you have to distribute so if you have four votes you have to vote for four different people and what you can do you can show it mathematically. You can also not only in simulation, you can show it in practice is what this does very rapidly is it removes polarized. So that's our current system. First past the post rewards, you know, populism and polarization. D21 actually punishes polarization and punishes, you know, the populist who works by trying to get 20% of the vote and only 20% and then count on the rest of the vote being diluted. So there's all kinds of things in that sense we could implement that are procedural, top-down, that would improve democracy's capacity for being self-correcting and for actually being able to zero in on the consensus majority, as opposed to being captured by populism that is polarizing and basically strangling the democracy. So I do think there are, and notice that that, what I just said, has nothing to do with any political side or position. This is, if we want democracy, we can make it better. And here's a powerful way of making it better. So I do think there are top-down things we could implement in how we make our decisions and select our decision makers that could afford the bottom-up that we've been talking about here. I like to think that, you know, we should be pairing D21 and Dialogos together. And if we put the two together, we could have a real powerful capacity to transform our sense of participation, our sense of connectedness, and our sense that we are cultivating wisdom and virtue. And that would be powerful. That would really help. So I do think there are top-down strategies, and you can justify

them both operationally and morally. Yeah, and it kind, I mean, it was kind of reminding me there as well. One of the main things with social media is the banning of targeted ads, because obviously it's the attention engagement business model. But there's a question about in elections, you know, if you can advertise to millions or billions of people and you can swing 10 percent of the vote or even a couple of percent, you know, how democratic is the vote if you unconsciously influencing people by, you know, manipulating them through advertisements. And that seems to be another kind of, yeah. Well, I just want to respond to that. The thing about D21

is because people have multiple votes, they generally feel more obligated to learn about multiple positions and multiple perspectives, which tends to water down the ability of any one position to get that kind of rapid capture. So that's another advantage of it. So what I'm saying is we can redesign some of the dynamics of the grammar of how we're doing this that can ameliorate some of these challenges. Now, imagine if you did that top down, and then bottom up, you were encouraging people to be more multi-perspectival, more concerned about self-deception. Imagine doing those together in a coordinated fashion. The capacity for people to be so easily manipulated by the bullshit of average political advertising would be significantly reduced. It wouldn't be eradicated because you can't eradicate it, but I predict it would be significantly reduced.