"Democracy is No Longer Expanding Agency"—Reimagining Governance, the Human, & Intelligence in the Machine Age - Indy Johar | #59
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Liquid democracy
14 min read
The article's title directly questions whether democracy still expands agency, and discusses reimagining governance. Liquid democracy is a specific alternative governance model that blends direct and representative democracy, offering readers concrete context for thinking about democratic innovation.
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Transdisciplinarity
14 min read
The host explicitly discusses transdisciplinarity as 'one of the most vital approaches to perceiving, asking, and knowing' and describes Johar as having a 'truly transdisciplinary mind.' This epistemological concept is central to understanding the conversation's intellectual framework.
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Indy Johar.
is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company).
He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School. Indy was a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization.
Indy was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20.
He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.
He was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE for Services to Architecture in 2023.
I talk a lot about transdisciplinarity on this channel because I think it’s one of the most vital approaches to perceiving, asking, and knowing. It’s something that I believe is not only important but necessary for making our way through these, ahem, urgent futures.
As you’ll instantly find here, Indy is a truly transdisciplinary mind. It makes sense to me that he’s trained as an architect, itself a collision of multiple different fields. But as a public intellectual today, it’s much more likely you’ll know Indy from his truly vast and entangled thinking about humanity, consciousness, intelligence, democracy, and all things planetary. In this conversation, we spend extra time on the idea of resisting perfectionism, another call that feels especially important as we leave the absolute monster of 2025 and head into what’s looking to be another doozy of a year.
I’m going to leave it there and let you just enjoy this resonant
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.