Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder

I became newly worried about the state of democracy when, a few years ago, my mother was elected president of her neighborhood garden club.

Her election wasn't my worry – far from it. At the time, I was trying to resolve a conflict on a large email group I had created. Someone, inevitably, was being a jerk on the internet. I had the power to remove them, but did I have the right? I realized that the garden club had in its bylaws something I had never seen in nearly all the online communities I had been part of: basic procedures to hold people with power accountable to everyone else.

The internet has yet to catch up to my mother's garden club.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s, he made an observation that social scientists have seen over and over since: Democracy at the state and national levels depends on everyday organizations like that garden club. He called them “schools” for practicing the “general theory of association.” As members of small democracies, people were learning to be citizens of a democratic country.

How many people experience those kinds of schools today?

People interact online more than offline nowadays. Rather than practicing democracy, people most likely find themselves getting suspended from a Facebook group they rely on with no reason given or option to appeal. Or a group of friends join a chat together, but only one of them has the ability to change its settings. Or people see posts from Elon Musk inserted into their mentions on X, which he owns. All of these situations are examples of what I call “implicit feudalism.”

Implicit feudalism

“Feudalism” is a term for what the Middle Ages never really were: a system of rigid fiefdoms where local nobles wield absolute power. But as I describe in my book, “Governable Spaces,” feudalism describes life online quite well. Admins, moderators and influencers rule their communities with powers that the software grants them. They suppress conflict through the digital equivalent of censorship and exile. Big companies and their CEOs are like the kings and popes. But people experience feudalism most directly among fellow users who happen to hold moderation roles.

I call this feudalism “implicit” because people carry it out unconsciously. People use their online spaces to talk about democratic politics, and tech companies often say they are “democratizing” something, whether it is free speech or food delivery. But in practice, democracy is usually missing in these spaces.

I believe that implicit feudalism is becoming a template for politics more broadly. Admin power is political power, and the two are blending in the public imagination. After the 2016 election, some observers speculated that Mark Zuckerberg would run for president.

Donald Trump came to power not by holding office but as a viral influencer; after leaving the presidency, his consolation was to start his own social media fiefdom, Truth Social. Controlling his own server means he doesn't have to follow anyone else's rules for acceptable speech, and it lends him the status of a platform owner. The archetype of a leader is shifting from a responsible and accountable elected official to an unelected, minimally constrained tech CEO.

Various pathologies of online life also become easier to understand in light of implicit feudalism. Take the phenomenon of so-called “cancel culture.” Critics often blame the people who participate in online pile-ons against public figures they disagree with. But under implicit feudalism, what better options do people have? You can't elect a new admin. If you submit a report about the harm someone caused, it goes into a black box – not a jury of peers or any other clear process of adjudication.

In her book “We Will Not Cancel Us,” the writer and activist adrienne maree brown observed that the problem with online callouts and takedowns is that many people don't have a better choice. She contrasts this to her work as a facilitator in offline groups, where she can guide people through a process to resolve their conflicts. Online platforms, however, aren't designed for problem-solving. Instead, they make problems either disappear or go viral.

Digital democracy

In the hopes that online life can catch up to my mother's garden club, I have looked for places where people are exploring the possibilities for democracy on and through the internet.

Hidden behind the scams and meme coins, the advent of blockchains has enabled a new industry of online governance tools to help users co-manage systems holding billions of dollars in digital assets. There are experiments with delegated voting, continuous voting and reputation-based voting. There are crypto-juries and crypto-guilds.

Closer to planet Earth, governments have started encouraging technology for online democracy. The city of Barcelona, for instance, supported Decidim, a governance platform now used both by other cities and civic organizations. People have built modules on it to support digital versions of a wide range of democratic processes, from debates and assemblies to petitions and participatory budgeting.

The fate of democracy anywhere, I have come to believe, depends on experiments like these.

People around the world are losing faith that democracy is responsive to their needs. As the technologist Bruce Schneier has argued, “The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.”

Online communities can start this work on their own. They can adopt basic charters that keep the people with admin powers in check. Founders can make plans for transitioning their power to other group members, what I call “exit to community.” Different communities can share their rules and learn from each other.

Practicing democracy

Groups of users, however, cannot defeat implicit feudalism alone.

Policymakers have a role to play. They can facilitate online communities that are user-governed for the public interest. Decades ago, the U.S. Congress filled the gaps in rural electrification by creating a framework for financing user-owned cooperatives. Successes like this can guide the future.

As artificial intelligence systems become more widespread, democracy can help keep them useful and safe. For example, the Collective Intelligence Project, a technology incubator for guiding progress toward the common good, has shown that assemblies of ordinary people can bring insights to AI governance that even experts miss. As policymakers design rules around these new technologies, they can emphasize the voices of those whose livelihoods are at stake.

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his classic history of the Civil War's aftermath, “Black Reconstruction in America,” he landed on a choice phrase: “abolition democracy.” The idea is that abolishing slavery and racism is not a one-time event; a just society requires the vigilance of democratic participation as a way of life, wherever people find themselves.

That is why Du Bois devoted himself not just to legal advocacy through the NAACP but also to supporting Black-led cooperatives, where workers could practice democratic ownership and governance every day.

Online spaces have become the new schools of association. Unless democracy reigns there, it is in peril everywhere.

Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cole Mathis, Arizona State University

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on how life is on Earth? Couldn't there be totally different kinds of life on other planets? – Henry, age 13, Somerville, Massachusetts

Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It's much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can't even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?

That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we're trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we're looking for life by looking for life like us because that's what we can imagine.

Looking nearby

The closest place to look for extraterrestrial life is on planets within our solar system.

NASA's Viking 1 mission began orbiting Earth's neighbor Mars back in 1976. Looking for life on Mars was one of the most important scientific questions for the mission. The spacecraft included a lander that could go to the planet's surface to see if there were any life-forms in the dirt there.

Scientists knew that life on Mars could be really different from life on Earth, so they didn't look for specific life-forms or molecules. Instead, they tried to design experiments to look for what life does, rather than what it makes.

For example, plants and some other life-forms on Earth do photosynthesis, a process that uses sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air to gather energy and grow. The Viking 1 scientists designed the lander to look for signs of photosynthesis happening on Mars.

To do that, the lander scooped up some dirt, shined a light on it and made measurements to see if any of the carbon dioxide in the air was transferred into the dirt. This experiment did not show any signs of photosynthesis in Mars' dirt.

The lander had two other experiments that looked for evidence of organisms growing in the dirt on Mars. One used carbon dioxide gas and another one used sugar and amino acid molecules that life-forms on Earth like to eat.

The combination of these three experiments and other measurements led most scientists to agree that there probably is not life on the surface of Mars, at least life that does something like photosynthesis or eats sugar. But we still don't know if there are signs of ancient life-forms on Mars, or even current life deep below the surface.

The Viking lander experiments were the most direct tests for life on other planets. In terms of a game of hide-and-seek, though, these experiments were basically like looking in the closet: It's a pretty obvious hiding spot, but you should check there just in case. Even so, it took scientists a long time to interpret the results.

Looking far away

Looking for life outside the solar system is even harder and requires different techniques.

The closest exoplanet – a planet orbiting a star that is not our Sun – is Proxima Centauri b, and it's more than 2 million, million miles (that's 2 followed by 13 zeros) away from Earth. These distant worlds are so far away that scientists are not going to send landers to do experiments on them for a long time.

Looking for life on exoplanets is kind of like trying to play hide-and-seek in your neighbor's house, but you only get to look through the windows and can't go inside. You might get lucky and get just the right angle to spot someone hiding, but you can't know all the spots you're not able to see.

Tools like the new James Webb Space Telescope can reveal the size of exoplanets, how close they are to their stars, and maybe the gases in their atmospheres. But that's it. How would you look for life with that?

Astronomers have thought about looking for life on exoplanets by looking for oxygen. They started with this strategy because on Earth, life-forms made most of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Maybe oxygen on another planet was made by alien life.

We've learned, though, that there are other ways to make oxygen that don't involve life. So now, astronomers don't look for just oxygen – instead they're on the hunt for a planet that has oxygen along with water and other gases, like methane and carbon dioxide. Together, these combinations might indicate life because we don't think planets without life would have them. But we're still uncertain about that, too!

Looking for life by looking for these gases is kind of like looking behind the couch in our hide-and-seek game. Do we know anyone is going to be there? No. But we only get to look through the windows, and we can imagine people hiding behind couches. We might as well try – where else would we even look?

What game are we playing?

There are two big differences between playing hide-and-seek and looking for aliens.

First, when you're playing hide-and-seek, you usually know that you're playing with someone else. We have no idea if there are aliens out there to find! It's possible there's no other life out there, and it's possible there are aliens right next door. Until we find examples of life besides our own, we won't know how common life is in the universe.

The second difference is that most scientists don't think alien life is hiding from us; it's just that we haven't spotted it yet. There are some ideas that more advanced civilizations might avoid being detected, but researchers don't think that's happening in our solar system.

Most astronomers and astrobiologists know that if we only look for life that's like Earth life, we might miss the signs of aliens that are really different. But honestly, we've never detected aliens before, so it's hard to know where to start. When you don't know what to do, starting somewhere is usually better than nowhere.

Looking for life using experiments like the Viking lander or searching for oxygen might not help. But we might get lucky. And even if we're not, we'll get to cross a couple of obvious possibilities off the list. Then we can focus on the harder question of imagining something we've never thought of before.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Cole Mathis, Assistant Professor of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scott Coyle, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Waves are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Whether it's the rise and fall of ocean tides or the swinging of a clock's pendulum, the predictable rhythms of waves create a signal that is easy to track and distinguish from other types of signals.

Electronic devices use radio waves to send and receive data, like your laptop and Wi-Fi router or cellphone and cell tower. Similarly, scientists can use a different type of wave to transmit a different type of data: signals from the invisible processes and dynamics underlying how cells make decisions.

I am a synthetic biologist, and my research group developed a technology that sends a wave of engineered proteins traveling through a human cell to provide a window into the hidden activities that power cells when they're healthy and harm cells when they go haywire.

Waves are a powerful engineering tool

The oscillating behavior of waves is one reason they're powerful patterns in engineering.

For example, controlled and predictable changes to wave oscillations can be used to encode data, such as voice or video information. In the case of radio, each station is assigned a unique electromagnetic wave that oscillates at its own frequency. These are the numbers you see on the radio dial.

Scientists can extend this strategy to living cells. My team used waves of proteins to turn a cell into a microscopic radio station, broadcasting data about its activity in real time to study its behavior.

Turning cells into radio stations

Studying the inside of cells requires a kind of wave that can specifically connect to and interact with the machinery and components of a cell.

While electronic devices are built from wires and transistors, cells are built from and controlled by a diverse collection of chemical building blocks called proteins. Proteins perform an array of functions within the cell, from extracting energy from sugar to deciding whether the cell should grow.

Protein waves are generally rare in nature, but some bacteria naturally generate waves of two proteins called MinD and MinE – typically referred to together as MinDE – to help them divide. My team discovered that putting MinDE into human cells causes the proteins to reorganize themselves into a stunning array of waves and patterns.

On their own, MinDE protein waves do not interact with other proteins in human cells. However, we found that MinDE could be readily engineered to react to the activity of specific human proteins responsible for making decisions about whether to grow, send signals to neighboring cells, move around and divide.

The protein dynamics driving these cellular functions are typically difficult to detect and study in living cells because the activity of proteins is generally invisible to even high-power microscopes. The disruption of these protein patterns is at the core of many cancers and developmental disorders.

We engineered connections between MinDE protein waves and the activity of proteins responsible for key cellular processes. Now, the activity of these proteins trigger changes in the frequency or amplitude of the protein wave, just like an AM/FM radio. Using microscopes, we can detect and record the unique signals individual cells are broadcasting and then decode them to recover the dynamics of these cellular processes.

We have only begun to scratch the surface of how scientists can use protein waves to study cells. If the history of waves in technology is any indicator, their potential is vast.

Scott Coyle, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.