Dialog with Harry C. Boyte

In August, 2021 Harry C. Boyte posted the following on Academia.edu and asked for feedback. Our exchange follows:

Background paper for “Tomorrow’s City Manager,” a session at the 2021 ICMA conference, October 3-6, 2021

Beyond the Vending Machine

Citizen professionals as agents and architects of a productive democracy

Harry C. Boyte, Institute for Public Life and Work, Augsburg University

Revitalizing the legacy of public work

The recently released United Nations report on climate, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “code red for humanity,” is a signature for the epoch. Climate change joins with Covid, polarization, rising inequality, intensifying bigotries, loneliness, and other vastly complex problems. No government can fix these by itself. Even to ameliorate them requires tapping energies and talents of diverse groups and generating widespread civic activation and civic responsibility.

To meet such challenges, we need what my colleagues and I call “public work,” effort by a diverse mix of people who work across lines of differences – partisan, racial, economic, religious and other -- to solve public problems and create our commonwealth. Here, the public work of the New Deal era is especially instructive.

governmentalWade Lee HudsonAugust 15, 2021civicsComment

Ezra Klein Interview with Barack Obama

politicalWade Lee HudsonJune 1, 2021civics, democracy, economic policy, racism, tribalism, mediaComment

Promoting Nonviolent Civic Activism

politicalWade Lee HudsonFebruary 18, 2021civicsComment

John Dewey and Citizen Politics

How Democracy Can Survive Artificial Intelligence and the Credo of Efficiency

Harry C. Boyte, 2017 John Dewey Society Lecture

San Antonio, April 27 2017

“Without some kind of oversight, the golem, not God, might emerge from machines…it is naïve to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Business is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here…”

Sue Halpern, “How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over”

“In the past the man has been first. In the future the System must be first.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

From “Invictus,” Nelson Mandela’s favorite poem

Citizen politics, John Dewey, and the crisis in “modernity”

Can we become masters of our fate in an age of smart machines governed by an efficiency creed, with its conviction that “the system is the solution”? In this 2017 Dewey lecture I answer affirmatively the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific American essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” I argue that we need a different kind of politics, citizen-centered, educative, and empowering, as well as places to learn such politics and put it into practice. Drawing on Dewey, I use schools embedded in communities as a case study for developing civic power….