“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."

Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).

www.piamancini.com

https://opencollective.com

https://democracy.earth

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