Berggruen Nicolas - Renovating democracy: governing in the age of globalization and digital capitalism

The two of us, one an investor and the other a journalist and editor of an intellectual quarterly, had traversed the planet for decades and landed in Southern California, yet our paths had never crossed. That was until a casual introduction in 2010 by a mutual friend, Jacques Attali, the polymath futurist whom Francois Mitterrand called his personal computer when Attali was chief adviser to the late French president in the 1980s.

Like our French connection, we were worried about where our society was headed. Our shared sense that a world that had once worked was now broken bonded us like Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple. In the opening scene of that great film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, Felix asks Oscar, who is stomping around the apartment, why he is so upset. Oscar replies, There is something wrong with the system, thats whats wrong.

We sat together for long discussions in Los Angeles that year, puzzling over what had gone so wrong with our adopted home state. California had long been the bellwether of Americas bright future, where citizens dreamt of building a society equal to the magnificent landscape. Yet Californians at the early turn of the twenty-first century had settled instead for mountains of debt, D+ schools, public spending on prisons greater than on higher education, and an outdated, crumbling infrastructure. Because of partisan gridlock, the state legislature couldnt even produce a budget. State workers were paid with IOUs. In the years since the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, and the Eagles had sung their globally resonant hymns about this culturally open, sunny frontier of the times ahead, it had all stalled, or even gone backward.

Having traveled extensively in Asia, we were both keenly aware that, during the same decades, poor little Singapore had risen from a Third World to a First World country. And that China, astonishingly, had lifted hundreds of millions out of destitution and built megacities with state-of-the-art subways and some of the worlds tallest skyscrapers rising up into the clouds like calling cards of the new century. Was there a way to adapt some of their best practices of effective governance to our democratic values and individualistic, free-wheeling ways? That inquiry launched us on a journey of both theory and practice that has led to these present reflections.

What concerned us most was that, as the public sphere so appallingly withered, the new global epicenter of creativity, innovation, and vast wealth creation was flourishing in Silicon Valley. It was just up the road from Salinas, where immigrant farmworkers were still to be seen bending their backs in a setting not far removed from the days described in John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. Google had been founded a little over a decade earlier; Facebook and Twitter a few years later. Much more was in the pipeline. Elon Musks inventions were taking shape on the drawing board. Snapchats Evan Spiegel, then only twenty, hadnt yet dropped out of Stanford to start what would become a company worth tens of billions, but his ideas were percolating. Down near San Diego, genetic pioneer Craig Venter was just setting up labs to advance the reading and rewriting of the human genome.

Visiting newly minted tech titans in the featureless industrial parks around Silicon Valley, we asked ourselves a central question: Can this simultaneous rise and demisenot only in California but across North America and the West, and even around the worldsomehow be reconciled, bringing societies back into balance? Inevitably that question pointed to the political culture that had led California into its 2010 cul-de-sac.