Democracy, politics, and technology

A pile of copies of Fracture at an exec education workshop

Technology, democracy and politics are increasingly intertwined, from the good, to the indifferent and the bad. This is a flavour of some of my technology policy work over the past three or so decades.

These experiences informed my book, Fracture. The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it, now in its second edition.

Introduction

Another day, and yet another list of “Top 10 technologies” appears. Some of them, such as MIT Technology Review’s annual lists, are useful. They provide insights not only into the technologies and trends viewed as important each year but also whether those items that successfully made the cut remain important when we look back with the benefit of hindsight.

*My summary of MIT’s “Top 10 technologies” 2001-2021*

The divergence between expectation and reality provides useful insights. This includes the timescales over which some predictions may (eventually) hold true, or more often fall by the wayside.

As Bill Buxton observes, the time-lag between research and development to mainstream commercial realisation of an idea averages around 20 years.
Democracy, technology and the art of the bonsai

Many “top technology’ lists, however, have little short- or long-term value other than as advertorial click-bait. Few consider their socio-economic implications or context, let alone their impact on politics and democracy.

Part of my work involves trying to address this gap by analysing technology and its impacts on democracy. It’s informed by personal reflective practise and the policy and technology initiatives documented in my UK digital government archives, together with international geopolitical trends and developments.

My work with governments, Parliaments, and other organisations, including civil society, is reflected in my public blog posts, articles, and papers alongside private and incomplete drafts that have unaccountably accumulated like bad habits over the years. I also have a library of squirrelled-away research, articles, blog posts, videos and government and Parliamentary proceedings built up over several decades.

Overview

This is an overview of the approach I take to baseline, research, and analyse the intersection of technology and democracy. It’s nothing particularly complex or fancy, but it seems to work.

This approach is built on good situational awareness of the state of current and emergent technologies, and related technology trends (Discovery); an analysis of the second order impacts of these technologies and trends on democracy (Analysis); and finally an exploration of how democracy needs to better understand and direct technology as a force for good (Adaptation)

Discovery: core technologies

Technologies in research and development fall into a diverse range of categories. It’s impossible to find a single effective way of visualising them on a page given many interact with and often depend upon each other — but here’s an attempt at a simplified overview.

Or to visualise these another way.

There’s more detail on each of these here.

Discovery: technology trends

There’s multiple interesting developments taking place within each of these research strands. But it’s often the way they’re combined and clustered together in novel or unexpected ways that helps to create the most significant technology trends.

One obvious example over recent years is semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, and how they cluster technologies such as GPS, Lidar, actuators, sensors and machine learning. Along with their interaction with human beings too, of course.

Technology trends I’m tracking include the fourteen illustrated below.

I sketch what each of these is about here.

Analysis: likely impacts on democracy

The core technologies and associated technology trends I’ve outlined above are where many “Top 10 Technologies / Trends” lists usually stop. Which is disappointing.

They miss out on what, for me, is the most interesting and important stage: their impact on democracy. By which I mean not just their impact on the three fundamental democratic cornerstones of the separation of powers — Government (executive), Parliament (legislature), the Courts (judiciary) — but also their wider societal, economic, and political impacts. Tech doesn’t operate in a vacuum (although the world might be a better place if some of it did).

Some years ago, I started mapping and evolving an outline of the consequential issues likely to affect democracy. I’ve continued to develop this as my work continues, along with trying to work out how to visualise the complex relationship between them. Below is a subset of some issues on which I’ve advised and continue to education governments, Parliaments, and senior officials:

There’s a brief explanation of these here.

Adaptation: how do we respond?

This is the hardest part. We can debate endlessly whether the core technologies, technology trends, and analyses I’ve partially mapped out above are the most important ones or not. But in a sense, that doesn’t matter.

There will always be new technologies and new trends displacing or updating lists and analyses like these. But the underlying issue — of how we ensure technology reinforces and helps democracy flourish rather than undermining or usurping it — will remain.

A variety of approaches can help us to discover, map, anticipate, and adapt to emergent and future technological trends. Some of their impacts will be in the near future, and hence easier to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to. Others are further off, less well-defined and hence less certain. It makes sense to use several broad-brush timeframes (near, mid and future) mapped against impacts (low, medium, high) as part of the process of adaptation.

The graphic below shows how near, mid and future timeframes can be considered alongside their potential impacts.

The UK Government’s Office for Science Futures Toolkit contains useful guidance on this type of modelling, including emphasising the importance of flexibility. Obviously, it’s not a one-off exercise either, but frequently and regularly revisited.

The graphic below is adapted from the Toolkit, and sets out processes for monitoring and adapting to change.

Getting into detail

The above is only a very high-level overview of more detailed work at the complex intersection of technology and democracy. Some details of this work are linked to in context in the sections above—for convenience, those links are also brought together below.

I’ve also developed a more comprehensive approach to how democracies can take advantage of technology (see the overview image below). These are ideas I’ve worked on for decades (you can see my archived blog here), seeking a more integrated and informed approach to democratic policymaking.

Your feedback matters

As ever, feedback, constructive criticisms, etc. are always welcome. I’ll update all this from time to time, as I will my book Fracture.

Page history

Last updated: December 2025.

Copyright, etc

© Jerry Fishenden ~1989-2025. I’m happy for re-use compliant with the Creative Commons licence below. Note that all the above summarises a long-running piece of work that appears in my new book, Fracture. The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.