Aug 2026· Journal of Linguistic Anthropology· Vol 36· 0 citations· 21 references
TL;DR
This article examines how the digital platform Polis and its experiments with large language models (LLMs) reconfigure democratic participation through a particular vision of consensus, arguing that developers reframe consensus from a discursive achievement to a computationally surfaced pattern.
Abstract
This article examines how the digital platform
Polis
and its experiments with large language models (LLMs) reconfigure democratic participation through a particular vision of consensus. Through analysis of media coverage of Polis and developers' public discussions of the platform, I argue that developers reframe consensus from a discursive achievement to a computationally surfaced pattern, turning deliberative democracy into a computing problem which LLMs are perfectly fit to solve. Under the guise of “saving” or “improving” democracy, Polis produces “illusions of consensus” that depoliticize purported public opinion and further abstract it away from the individuals assumed to have produced it.
Those who debate democracy should know what they are debating. Yet "populism" and "illiberalism" – ubiquitous in academia and the media – fail as analytical tools: empirically dubious, they dramatise legitimate positions and thereby downplay genuinely undemocratic ones. The book counters these concepts with a pragmatic...
Scholarship on social media and deliberative democracy has converged on a single, repeated claim since roughly 2015: that social media both enables and undermines democratic discourse. This claim no longer advances the field, because it does not specify which architectural feature of a platform produces which deliberat...
Aswasthama Bhakta Kharel· Humanities and Social Scienc...· 0 citations
It is argued that many of the ways in which computer scientists, deliberative democratic practitioners, and others are using LLMs to do this threatens the non-instrumental value of a collective's ability to determine its own future.
Lorenzo Manuali· Philosophy & Technology· 0 citations
Disagreement about democracy's noninstrumental value often sees the opposition between two competing approaches.
Liberty‐based arguments
assign normative priority to a principle of liberty, thereby focusing on democratic self‐government as the core principle through which political authority can be reconciled wit...
Citizens differ not only in how strongly they support democracy, but also in what they expect democracy to be. Yet we know less about whether these democratic expectations shape satisfaction with democracy (SwD) and, through it, political participation (PP) in established European democracies. We first develop a mech...
Bernd Schlipphak, C. Şimşek, Oliver Treib· European Political Science R...· 0 citations
