In What Is Democracy? Astra Taylor, a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and organizer, poses that question to Greek scholars, Guatemalan immigrants in North Carolina, Syrian refugees, a Miami barber who’s a convicted felon, and many others. In one scene, black middle-schoolers discuss how their voices are often ignored by teachers. “What you say to us all the time is, ‘Go to college so you can do what you love,’ but you don’t even love what you do,” says one student, to the applause of her classmates. What Is Democracy? is a fluid visual essay, an investigation stitched together with quotes from Plato’s Republic. The film, in violation of one of the most common tropes of filmmaking, is actually interested in listening to what its subjects have to say.



  When people think about democracy, they think typically of government and of elections. They think of the rule of law. They think it’s the protection of minority rights as a sort of principle, individual liberties. But there has to be an economic component, right? You can’t separate politics from economics.



  Somebody tweeted that at me. He really wanted a euphemism? Wait till he hears the word “capitalist.”



  There’s just a problem with the business model. The current pathologies of democracy, whether it’s electoral or technological, derive from the incentives that are driving it. There has to be an economic fix. There has to be a breaking up of tech monopolies. There has to be a de-commodifying of things. It’s not about privacy. It’s about the status of this private data as the sort of raw material for an extractive form of capitalism. A lot of our leverage over these tech companies is actually more as citizens than consumers. But because we are not the main consumers, because we’re not really paying for the services—the advertisers are—we have almost no power of the purse. No ability to boycott. We have to think about them politically. So that’s why it’s ultimately more of a democracy problem than a technological problem.

Thu 2/15, 5:30 PM, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 800 S. Halsted, 312-397-4010, publicfiction.org.  F