The Nobel Price for literature goes to “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse”. How fitting. But a great choice none the less. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

#Wethepeople is a fascinating process started in the US last month. Citizens from every congressional district will express and develop their ideas on fundamental democratic topics with help of GenAI and reflect on ideas of others. Looking forward to first results. wethepeople-250.org

❤️🍞 youtube.com/watch?v=k315...

Brilliant podcast by David Runciman and @cchwalisz.bsky.social asking all the right questions on deliberation, random selection and citizen assemblies. Best enjoyed in combination with @oliverescobar.bsky.social insightful paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We are going to have to live here with each other In Germany as in the US, this is one foundational idea that: - needs consensus in our democracy (we can argue/fight about most of the rest) - is currently under heavy attack, - is were democratic renewal starts.

Die Figuren des Horst Krause sind etwa so sehr Teil meiner inneren Heimat wie für andere Ostdeutsche Ute Freudenberg oder für Westdeutsche Asterix. Das hat vor allem mit einem einzigen Film zu tun: „Schultze gets the blues“. (1/2)

Großer Film, und eine große Identifikationsfigur des Ostens, ohne jemals stereotypischer „Ossi“ zu sein. RIP Horst Krause.

Ja! ähnlich @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social Buch #abundance. "Vielleicht liegt der Weg, mehr Menschen zu erreichen, darin, (...) zu zeigen, dass Dinge möglich sind, an die sie selbst nicht geglaubt hätten. (...) Rechtsextreme können nur zerstören, die Aufgabe der Linken ist es, Dinge zu erfinden"

50 years after his death, Shostakovich reminds us that in authoritarian regimes, resistance & conformity often intertwine. Politics may be painted black & white, but people live and create in shades of grey. He was a genius whose art was shaped by his own ambiguities. youtu.be/c1j5IOZmh6g?...

„The statistical fixation of the early 21st century that’s made so many bad predictions and fathered so many puzzling defeats must be abandoned. We are not in an era of small calculations but of great movements.“

Lessons from Hungary for the US: „(To the) nation’s great (…) institutions: The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters.“ www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

A highly thought-provoking article, thanks for that @oliverescobar.bsky.social ! "Democratic innovations are conflated with deliberative democracy in policy and civil society discourses, media coverage, and even scholarly accounts (...). (This) reduces the actual diversity of the field."

Aweful.

Designing social media to improve public dialogue is possible. Better yet, platforms like Pol.is and Rappler Communities are already operational. www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/soci...

Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city?

Bluesky's near-consensus that AI doesn't work and won't be a technology that has major knock-on effects on society is…not grounded in reality. No mater how loudly and repetitively people say it.

🌈💪💪🏻💪🏽💪🏿🌈

Quite disenchanting, but highly informative and rich forecasting report on the future of AI: ai-2027.com To all deliberative democrats around here, it is a particular pun that the authors have given their vision of the ultimate global AI doomsday machine the name "Consensus-1".

💥🇭🇺 Police have given up guarding Budapest’s Liberty Bridge as anti-government protesters shut down traffic on four major bridges, rallying against Viktor Orbán’s new law curbing freedom of assembly and banning the Pride march. They vow to escalate with a 24-hour shutdown next week.

Danke lieber Ilko-Sascha für diesen bewegenden Nachruf. Wem jetzt und in Zukunft die liberale Demokratie in Deutschland am Herzen liegt, sollte Gerd Poppe nicht nur ein Begriff, sondern Inspiration sein.

Question to #Pol.Is community. When analysing Pol.Is discussions, we seek group-informed consensus. But is consensus really the right term nowadays? Shouldn't we seek scope for compromise in societal debates rather than consensus? @colinmegill.com @patcon.bsky.social @societyspeaks.bsky.social, etc

The kind of news we need right now. Thanks @jagodamarinic.com for sharing in your podcast! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The #EuroStack Report is out! It is about building a European alternative, to empower citizens, workers, industries to reclaim control of their digital future. Read the report! www.euro-stack.info @bertelsmannst.bsky.social @ucl-iipp.bsky.social @ceps.eu @stiftungmercator.bsky.social

The art of the deal. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

Der Vorsitzende des Sachverständigenrates für Migration und Integration (SVR) Winfried Kluth

Zum 80. Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz sei der so klare wie zutiefst erschütternde „Roman eines Schicksahllosen“ von Imre Kertesz empfohlen. Wer dieses Buch gelesen hat, den lässt es nicht mehr los. Man muss es gerade deswegen gelesen haben. Hier nun als Hörbuch: www.mdr.de/kultur/radio...

Es war abzusehen, dass die AfD die CDU bei der nächsten Gelegenheit umklammern und nicht mehr loslassen wird, um die demokratische Mitte zu zerreißen. Nicht abzusehen war, dass die CDU-Führung ihr diese Möglichkeit so schnell und so großzügig einräumt.

As the CDU tries to preserve the illusion of a closed, pre-migrant, Germany (that never was) it seemingly manages to shatter an open, liberal, rational, European Germany that still is and if worse comes to worst may just have been. A watershed moment yes, but unfortunately in line with the Zeitgeist

"Hungary is a living example of how vulnerable democratic institutions actually are and how easy it is for ill-intentioned leaders to exercise control over citizens. And that’s on steroids when they control all of the media ecosystem." Good NYT interview with US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman👇

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! To kick off our 🚨 NEW SERIES!! 🚨 on revolutionary ideas past, present & future David talks to 2 regular PPF contributors – philosopher @leaypi.bsky.social and scientist @adamrutherford.bsky.social – about what makes an idea truly revolutionary. Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

Very thoughtful and important read on how from a democracy perspective, disinformation may be less of a problem on social media platforms in comparison to malformed publics online.

Interesting move by Meta. Studies as my colleague’s @felice.bsky.social show community notes type tools can be effective in bottom-up participatory moderation. Yet EU will likely insist on centralized top-down moderation. Will be interesting to see this play out. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! The second David Fincher film in our series is The Social Network (2010), the Aaron Sorkin-scripted take on how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and the price paid by everyone else. Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! Our great political films series reaches the 21st century with Paul Thomas Anderson’s unforgettable There Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis in one of the all-time great screen performances. Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

Nice long read on a citizen assembly experiment in Oregon 👇

Off to a new year. Plenty to explore.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! David talks to writer & journalist @helenlewis.bsky.social about David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the film that launched a thousand memes. Does this tale of thwarted masculinity & corporate malfeasance code left or code right? Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

Very informative thread on an important paper on LLMs and participatory democracy featuring my colleague @felice.bsky.social 👇

Psychische #Erkrankungen vor allem junger Menschen haben sich dramatisch und anhaltend verschlechtert. Während sich diese bei Über-50-Jährigen nach der Pandemie schnell erholt hat, fiel sie bei den Jüngeren unter den Wert von 2002. 🧵 Unsere neue Studie DIW Berlin: www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c....

Contemporary campaigning.

„People need a sense of belonging and a compelling and credible vision of a future worth fighting for.“ www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Christmas came early. A dossier by Lea Ypi in my favorite German weekly. First thing tomorrow morning: go to the station and fetch a copy.

#CitizenParticipation and #PublicDebate are often treated as separate. In our latest shortcut we demonstrate how our "Forum against Fakes" combined both - through the sequential integration of large scale public consultation into the #citizenassembly model www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/en/our-proje...

Wonderful article on a wonderful hobby: amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle... “Life can be tough. Games don’t fix that. But they do, while the spell lasts, offer me a reprieve – permission to step out of the swirling, intimidating maelstrom of reality into something smaller, more manageable.”

Oh what a joy, thank you so much @idislikestephen.bsky.social. An advent calendar of tolerable Christmas music is the kind of holiday season gift I didn’t know I need, but turns out I do. If I only knew about this “Last Christmas …”

The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what strategy they adopt. www.journalofdemocra...

For more on councillor views on citizens assemblies - we did a big survey a few years ago research.mysociety.org/html/partici...

😳 "Willow ran a benchmark task in five minutes that Google said would take ten septillion years (10^24) on Frontier, which until a few weeks ago was the fastest supercomputer in the world."

And here is the starter pack for another more niche research interest at the intersection between Political Philosophy and Democratic Innovations. Please tell me if I missed anyone go.bsky.app/2rJ9y16