The COVID-19 Crisis of Legitimacy | E. Glen Weyl Interviewed by Emmanuel Midy

COVID-19 has dramatically shown the failure of political institutions in the West to facilitate rapid and responsive consensus in the face of crisis, leading to millions of avoidable deaths and unprecedented economic calamity. As these political systems increasingly lose legitimacy and dissent moves to the streets, we must resist the natural turn the towards technocratic authoritarianism of the largest country that responded successfully. Despite the limited success of some authoritarian regimes, the digitally-enabled radical participatory democracies of countries like Taiwan and Estonia have shown us a far more effective and appealing path, one that can unite us across traditional political divides. RadicalxChange should be seen as an effort to spread, live, elaborate on, formalize and port these stories across the world.

SPEAKERS

E. Glen Weyl is a political economist and social technologist whose work focuses on harnessing computers and markets to create a radically equal and cooperative society. He is the Founder and Chairperson of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a lecturer at Princeton University. Glen was recently honored as a Bloomberg Top 50, one Wired Magazine’s 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology, and one of Coindesk’s most influential people in blockchain for 2018. 

Emmanuel Midy is the Community Lead of RadicalxChange Foundation. He is a writer and consultant on the intersection of media and technology.