Democracy today and in the future

The early years of the internet were marked by a profound optimism about the liberating and democratizing potential of new digital technologies as tools for greater human connection and civic interaction. Yet over the subsequent decades that optimism has curdled into a skepticism—often well-founded—about their impact as the scourges of disinformation, polarization and fragmentation have taken hold on political systems around the world. Meanwhile that same period has revealed the failures of many conventional methods of democracy promotion, including ones using the topdown exercise of hard or soft power. This is what makes democracy-enhancing technologies essential: new applications of cutting-edge digital developments that once more harness these to the cause of open and pluralistic political systems, in manners widely illustrated through the Tech4Democracy Global Entrepreneurship Challenge