This one's ours: on Tuesday 15 September, DOD is co-hosting a Melbourne panel with 888 Co-operative Causeway on democratic practices that go beyond voting.
Could a totalitarian regime conquer the entire world and lock in its power forever? This is a particular type of unrecoverable dystopia: a future in which humanity survives, but forever loses its potential to grow and flourish. In this video, we explore which technologies might make this possibility more likely, but also how we might shape technological development in order to prevent it, without giving up the global coordination we need against threats like misaligned AI and engineered pandemics.
Rational Animations' "Could a Global Dictatorship Last Forever?" (22 August 2026, ~20 min) asks whether a totalitarian regime could ever become genuinely permanent — global enough that no rival state can grow into a counterweight, stable enough that no internal reform ever succeeds. Philosopher Toby Ord calls this an unrecoverable dystopia: humanity survives, but permanently loses its capacity to grow, adapt, and self-correct. Ord, quoted in the video from The Precipice: a world "locked under the rule of an oppressive totalitarian regime... would have much in common with extinction: just a narrow range of terrible futures remaining, and no way out."1
Someone in DOD flagged this one around and the reaction has been consistently "wait, this is actually interesting" — so here's the heads-up version. Google DeepMind built an AI system, named after Jürgen Habermas, whose only job is to write a group statement that a divided room can agree describes their discussion fairly. In controlled experiments with UK citizens, it beat human mediators at that job more often than not — published in Science in October 2024, with a follow-up essay from the same team a year later if you want the caveats too.1
Loomio, DemocracyOS, Pol.is, Decide Madrid, Decidim, Democracy Earth, RadicalxChange — the Democracy Landscape already documents all of these individually. What it hasn't done yet is put them next to each other. Read as a sequence rather than a list, they tell one continuous story: a protest movement's decision-making problem, handed to software, again and again, for fifteen years.
If you're in Melbourne on Thursday 27 August, come meet RadicalxChange Foundation — the international movement behind quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and the "Plurality" philosophy — as it launches its Australian chapter.
The Democracy Landscape has a lot of advocacy orgs in it. Which is fair — we built it that way. But we're an Australian group, and at some point you've got to stop staring at the international reform ecosystem and take a good hard look at your own backyard. So we did.
We picked every Australian party with enough documentation to score, tossed in a few historical ones and international comparators, and rated them on three things: internal governance, external reform advocacy, and ideology. Then we put it all on a page with graphs and a data file and told ourselves we'd update it when things change.
The Australian Party Governance Comparison page is the result.
The Proportional Representation Society of Australia (PRSA) — tracing its history back to the 1890s and describing itself as Australia's oldest continuing electoral reform coalition — has circulated a formal notice of motion for its 12 November 2026 AGM: a 17-motion package that would rename the organisation, broaden its remit far beyond its traditional single-issue focus, and modernise its governance from the ground up.
Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" (June 2026) argues that democracy — even "real," direct, consensus-based democracy — is not a fellow traveller of anarchism but one of its obstacles. It's a substantial, well-sourced essay, and the argument is worth engaging with directly, including the parts that cut against how DOD itself talks about its work.
If you've visited DOD's Philosophy page before, it just changed shape. The full accountability framework that used to live there — the rigorous, AI-reviewed standard for what belongs in the Democracy Landscape — has moved. The page itself is now something different: an open space for DOD members to argue about democracy.
The DOD podcast archive runs from 2017 to 2023. DOD is a discussion forum — these were working conversations among practitioners thinking through how democracy functions and fails, not policy proposals or predictions. Revisiting them from 2026 is an exercise in calibration: did the observations hold up? Where did the analysis prove accurate, where is it still unresolved, and what did it miss entirely?