This Smartphone Pioneer Is Fighting to Create a Transhumanist Superdemocracy

Jun 1, 2018

David Wood, a man that helped revolutionize communication in the early days of the smart phone, now wants to make the government smarter too. The British transhumanist helped pioneer today’s smartphone industry when he co-founded mobile operating system developer Symbian in 1998, and now he’s calling for changes that would radically rethink how people and politicians interact.

“Technology is presenting new opportunities, and politicians can’t keep up,” Wood tells Inverse. “In part because they don’t understand, but sometimes they have vested interests that encourage them to maintain the status quo.”

The early days of the smartphone augured the rise of a fully-informed populace with information at their fingertips. But as the rise of “fake news” or the example of the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows, these new tools are as easily appropriated by bad actors as they are to anyone else. The answer, Wood argues, is a democracy that can “engage more people, more fully than ever before.” It’s a tall order.

Read full article in Inverse here