This summer, a record-breaking, estimated 220 million U.S. tourists—85% of American adults—have been on the move. Many of them will head to Tulum, Mexico, which I also recently visited. Businesses across Tulum cater directly to U.S. tourists’ Instagram accounts. They offer decorative twinkle lights to provide flattering lighting, swings instead of seats, and neon signs—like the bright pink cursive at a bar on the town’s main drag that declares, “I’m in Tulum, Bitches!”

Where tourism was once a way to broaden our horizons and gain a deeper understanding of other cultures, social media, and the global economy together have changed that. The point is no longer just to consume new experiences—it’s also to be able to show that consumption to followers back home. Now, traveling often feels like an Instagram feedback loop. Meanwhile, our search for Instagrammable views has remade whole local economies and environments, and changed the lives of thousands of people in the process.

Tulum is in southeastern Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, in the state of Quintana Roo. The region’s original inhabitants are the Indigenous Maya. The stunning archaeological ruins at nearby Chichén Itzá—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—are an accomplishment of their civilization. The ruins show an astronomical acumen, including an ability to predict celestial events such as eclipses, which they incorporated into their architecture to stunning effect; sophisticated agricultural techniques that allowed them to farm the seaside land; and a road network system that predated the European road network system.

I’m a third-generation Mexican American who’s been traveling back to my family’s hometown of Acaponeta, Nayarit, my whole life. I’ve been to plenty of other destinations in Mexico, too, including Tulum in 1988, when it was still a small fishing village. Then, in 1999, hoping to ride the tourism prosperity wave underway in Cancun, the government rebranded the region the Riviera Maya. Entrepreneurs, developers, and immigrants from the U.S. and Europe soon followed. They set up hotels and residences, and hosted yoga festivals and dance parties. In 2004, the New York Times dubbed Tulum a “countercultural haven,” even as it pointed out the dangers of commercialization.

Since then, development—often fueled by foreign investors—has unfolded without much forethought, government oversight, or planning so fast that it has outrun the local government’s ability to provide basic services like electricity and sewage. You won’t see the squatter camps where imported workers find themselves living on Instagram. And stunning images of divers and snorkelers in the Mesoamerican Reef System, the second largest coral reef in the world, rarely feature the human waste that’s increasingly turning up in its underground rivers. The impacts of tourism will only get worse, with a train project connecting Tulum to Cancun on track to bring more people, plow through the jungle home of endangered habits, and destroy caves that may contain important Maya relics.

In the face of such massive changes, locals find themselves—as Matilde Córdoba Azcárate’s marvelous book about Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula puts it—“Stuck with Tourism.”  Contemporary Indigenous Maya have few options but to work as construction workers, maids, and taxi drivers serving the 22 million people who arrive each year at the nearby #cancunairport. When we spent the day at a beach club, I met Rodrigo, a charming 22-year-old bartender from Tulum. He told me that the days were long, and the tips were often lousy—but he still feared the day when some new best thing would take Tulum’s place. Rosalya, my guide at Chichén Itzá, likewise told us that when she began giving tours 17 years ago—as the first woman to do so—fellow locals critiqued her for joining the tourism industry. But, she said, she didn’t see any other options.

What are the responsibilities of U.S. tourists in the face of this global inequity? Multiple articles published this summer have proposed that we stop traveling. But mitigating the negative impacts of unchecked development requires larger, structural changes, including investment in local markets and government oversight.

While I don’t want to suggest that people simply stop traveling, I do want visitors to understand our impact—especially the very material impact of our use of digital technology. Social media now drives tourism at an unprecedented pace and volume. Government tourism boards hire influencers and celebrities, from Lionel Messi to TikTok’s “Corn Kid” to brand and promote destinations. Travel bloggers and TikTokers make their living using algorithms and hashtags to guide travelers to remote sites of natural beauty or supposedly unknown, authentic restaurants. Businesses race to make themselves ever more attractive to visitors’ phone lenses. As visitors follow and share their experiences in real-time, the images circulate faster and faster, like an accelerant to a bonfire. While governments and developers rake in foreign dollars, locals—many of whom are poor and/or Indigenous in the case of Mexico—pay the price.

But there are other ways to travel, too, including with an understanding of its impact and sustainability, with a curiosity about the history of a place and its people, and by making conscious choices about where your money is going. So instead of staying home, consider another, perhaps equally unthinkable, proposal: traveling without posting to social media. If we focus more on inquiry and less on how our trip looks to others, we can be not just consumers but participants in a cultural exchange with those whose labor makes our experience possible.

The post What Should We Do About Instagram <br>Colonialism? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This article is a co-publication of Zócalo Public Square and State of Mind, a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University focused on covering mental health.

It was 2:30 a.m., and I was lying in bed with my phone in my hand and my TikTok “For You” page fired up.

I knew I shouldn’t be awake. A month into my junior year of high school, my workload was already piling up. If I didn’t get at least a few hours of sleep before my alarm went off, I would pay for it in class the next day.

Close out of the app, I told myself. But my thumbs didn’t stop. I kept swiping, paging through one video after another, like a person possessed.

Eventually, I ended up on a TikTok where someone played the game Subway Surfers while a voice-to-text narrator dictated an obscure Reddit post.

I snapped out of my trance. What the hell was I even watching?

It was at this moment that I knew I needed to take a break from TikTok. I owed it to myself to see how my life, and my mental health, would change without the app and the hold that its algorithm had on me.

I had been using TikTok for nearly three years at this point. I was still in middle school when I first downloaded the app as a way to view and share funny videos. Just a couple of months after I started using it, the COVID-19 lockdown happened, and all of my normal ways of interacting with the world stopped. School went virtual. I stopped playing basketball with my friends. Everything had shut down, so I started to open up TikTok more and more.

Once I began using TikTok more frequently, I found I couldn’t stop. According to my iPhone’s Screen Time reports, at one point I was logging six hours on the app a day.

When the lockdown ended and my world started to open up again, my consumption of TikTok didn’t slow down. It was when I was supposed to be doing homework or studying for a test that I found myself scrolling on the app the most. I attend Davidson Academy, one of the most academically rigorous schools in the nation. The push to excel is high, as is the feeling that you don’t want to waste your opportunity. Whenever I started to feel overwhelmed by the pressure of it all, I knew that TikTok was just a few clicks away.

Many of my peers share my experience with TikTok: A recent report by the Pew Research Center found that 67% of 13- to 17-year-olds use TikTok, and 16% said they use the app “almost constantly.” There has been a lot of talk about the negative mental health consequences of social media, and this was one of the main focuses of the recent congressional hearing on TikTok. Many teens—36%, according to Pew—recognize we spend too much time on social platforms, but sometimes it’s hard to know how to bring that time down.

When I decided to take a break from the app, I chose to make it a month-long experiment. My hope was that this time without TikTok would help me to balance school and extracurriculars while finding a healthier way to be on my phone again.

The first week was freeing. I instantly felt more productive and I was getting more sleep. But by the second week, I felt that familiar compulsion creep back in, and craved the dopamine hit from TikTok’s tailored “For You” page.

Fortunately, it was around this time that my history teacher gave my class an assignment: Write a literature review on research in a specific field. I decided to look into the neuroscience and psychology of TikTok, in hopes of better understanding the hold it clearly still had on me.

Because TikTok is relatively new, there’s a limited amount of peer-reviewed literature around it. When I started browsing Google Scholar for answers, a lot of what I came across felt too jargony. But then a term from one paper jumped out at me: “escapist addiction.” It was used by Sebastian Scherr of Texas A&M University and Kexin Wang of Zhejiang University in a paper that argued people mainly use TikTok so they can avoid doing something else.

It was a light-bulb moment. While TikTok is designed to show you what you want to see and keep you on the app for hours, I realized I had my own reasons that were fueling this cycle of addiction. Rather than be mindful of the pressures that were weighing me down, I was using the app to avoid all of the things in my life I did not want to deal with.

I needed to face up to my own reality. I had once thought that I could do everything if only I managed my time better. But I’m not Superman; there are limits to what I can do. I wasn’t giving myself any grace and kept pushing myself beyond my limits. The more pressure I put on myself, the more I sought out TikTok to escape from it.

I never thought that my break from TikTok would turn into something more permanent, but six months have passed, and I still don’t have it on my phone. After the data and privacy concerns that have been raised about the app, I don’t have any desire to continue to use it.

From my time on TikTok, I’ve learned that the app can be a powerful tool for people my age to connect, find community, organize, and learn. But my brush with TikTok’s algorithm has also made me realize how often people don’t understand what they’re getting themselves into on social media. The more these things become embedded in our lives, the less we’re likely to question their impact on us. That’s scary. As users, we can’t always control these companies, but we can try to be mindful of what’s going on when we find ourselves unable to stop checking social media.

Deleting TikTok from my phone hasn’t totally solved my “escapist addiction.” But now, when I end up down a YouTube rabbit hole or catch myself lingering on Instagram for too long, I ask myself why I’m there, and what I want from what I’m doing. I’ve also tried to give myself outlets offline to help relieve some stress, like my school’s tennis team. Playing with my teammates, instead of just scrolling on my phone, feels good.

Occasionally, a couple of my friends will still send me TikTok videos. It’s become kind of an inside joke between us now, because they know I don’t have the app and can’t react to them. It doesn’t bother me. And rather than making me feel like I’m missing out on something, they’ve led us to some great conversations about how we can all be more mindful around our screen time.

The post What I Learned From my Breakup with TikTok appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Synonymous with the highly edited lifestyle post, Instagram has long functioned like a high school in a John Hughes movie: accruing “likes” is a popularity contest for visibility—except that if you’re voted “prom queen” on the platform it can translate to some serious brand and sponsorship deals.

But TikTok has tailored its algorithm in a radically different way. A home for short-form videos (the concept first pioneered by its predecessor Vine), its aim is to deliver “content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user.”

Of course, the real goal of all of these platforms is to keep us scrolling. But TikTok’s emphasis on individually curated feeds and niche material has taken over today’s media landscape. And its dominance has forced other social media companies to adapt (to varying degrees of success), if they want to stay relevant, or at least keep their backers happy. The result—a smorgasbord of content that’s emerged across platforms—feels like a constantly changing, pluralistic pit of variety theater. And it’s ushering in a new era of popular entertainment. The closest equivalent to it that I can think of is vaudeville.

Hear me out.

The original vaudeville rose up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid a moment of profound change in American life, offering its own constantly changing acts in response to a country in flux.

At its height, the vaudeville machine was putting more than 25,000 on stage daily to perform their routines for millions. “It was the largest entertainment system the world had ever seen, held together by railroad and telegraph and ordered by form and filing cabinet,” historian Samuel E. Backer writes of the business of vaudeville. And before you could wrap your head around any of these “fast-paced succession of individual performances,” they were already being cycled out for something new.

A typical show ran for about as long as a blockbuster film’s duration today, but people could choose to watch the whole thing or just sit in on the “turns” on the program bill that most appealed to them.

Those performances ranged dramatically. Singing and dancing numbers were on almost every bill, but you never knew what other kinds of other acts would show up on the ticket. Take the silent comic Chaz Chase, who gained acclaim for eating everything from cigarettes and roses on stage (you could argue it was a precursor to the Korean-inspired food-eating mukbang genre, except here the effect was achieved by slight-of-hand trickery). Or Edgar “Painless” Parker, a dentist who was famous for extracting (very real) teeth on stage. They’re just two of the many, varied performers who found a voice on the vaudeville stage.

However unique the routines seemed, there was always a shared DNA to the performances, a lexicon of stock jokes, comedy routines, and other materials that the performers traveling on the vaudeville circuit were constantly in conversation around. What made certain ones shine were the extra flourishes added, “what cannot be transcribed in words, the physical comedy, or the ‘business’—the humor of inflections and body language at which so many vaudevillians excelled,” as the Library of Congress put it.

Vaudeville quickly gained a reputation for being a highly populist, highly optimistic form of entertainment. The vaudevillian impresario E. F. Albee sounds positively Pollyanna about the medium in one interview, claiming that in vaudeville “there is always something for everybody, just as in every state and city, in every county and town in our democratic country, there is opportunity for everybody, a chance for all.”

That’s a bit of a stretch—but there is something to Albee’s sentiment. Performers on stage often reflected the diversity of the people in the seats watching them. One of the most influential scholars on vaudeville, David Monod, created an online database of vaudeville acts that highlights this range of talent and scope, which reached people from different race, ethnicity, gender, and economic class (with the notable exception of the poorest Americans, Monod notes, who couldn’t afford the price of a ticket). But that didn’t mean vaudeville spoke for everyone—its comedy, especially, was often built on tired routines that stereotyped and dehumanized people based on their race and ethnicity. Especially for African American performers, racism was an omnipresent reality of the business, which is why some Black artists eventually broke away from the predominantly white vaudeville circuits to create their own shows.

If there’s a name to know behind the mélange of tastes that became the vaudeville voice, it’s Tony Pastor, a devout Catholic who’s remembered as the “Father of Vaudeville.” In 1881, he opened up the Tammany Hall theater on East 14th Street in New York, where he set out to make vaudeville family-friendly. Because of his influence, burlesque, a staple in early vaudeville “hot shows,” was increasingly pushed out in favor of “clean shows” that attracted less police presence. “Pastor’s shows became so clean that ‘a child could take his parents into his theatre,’” quipped one observer.

Bostonians B.F. Keith and Edward Albee expanded on Pastor’s vision, opening theaters that continued this “focus on respectability,” according to vaudeville scholar Mark Hauser. Hauser notes that Keith and Albee, who received funding from the Archdiocese of Boston, even had Sunday school teachers standing at the back of the theater to watch for vulgarities.

Because of this, while vaudeville is often said to have mirrored the public’s tastes, historian John DiMeglio cautioned that “it also exercised a considerable power in shaping its viewers’ feelings” including their moral attitudes and ideas—a theme that echoes today in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, which has played an invisible hand in determining what videos can gain traction on the platform.

Back in the early 20th century, the vaudeville form seemed unstoppable. And then, one day, a new emerging entertainment medium came along: film. Suddenly big- and small-time performers alike who had been incubated on the vaudeville circuit found their heyday had ended, and had no choice but to adapt to fresh performative conventions or fade out of relevancy.

As I scroll through TikTok today and stop to watch a cat in a chef’s hat make a latte or catch up on the latest Gen Z drama acted out via plastic figurine, am I all that different from the audiences these theaters cultivated a century ago? I, too, am watching as new trends rise and fall, and seeing creators learn from one another to create, recycle, and reimagine their acts to meet and shape our moment. Only this time around, the talent pool is worldwide.

How long TikTok will have us in its grasp is impossible to say. But the reason it captivates us is no surprise. As Monod, the vaudeville scholar, writes, vaudeville was “a playful expression of early 20th century modernity” that appealed to people seeking “not just escape but stipulation.” This sentiment easily captures TikTok’s appeal a century later.

And just like audiences watching Chanticleer cyclists harmonize their way across stage in the early 1900s, when I open TikTok and see the latest video appear on my screen, I can’t look away.

The post Are We Entering a New Age of Vaudeville? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lizzo has a lightning-in-the-bottle talent for capturing catharsis in a song, and the moves to this early summer anthem—clap your hands three times to the words “About! Damn! Time!”—are pure fun, even if you’re bungling the choreo, or for that matter, the slipperiest of the song’s lyrics (as the pop star reminds us, the shoes she’s singing about? It’s “Balenci-ussies, not Balenci-encies”).

There was a point where the internet was saturated by these dance challenge numbers. But in the last few days, just as the algorithm seems to have moved on, I’ve found myself actively seeking them out. It’s not just the welcome playfulness these homemade performances offer. Watching them is also a reminder of the power this form of group movement holds.

I’m thinking specifically about an early 20th-century analog of these viral routines that swept through America before World War I.

Whether it was the grizzly bear, the bunny hug, the camel walk, or the chicken strut, so-called “animal dances,” set to ragtime tunes, called on you to do exactly what you’d expect: move your body around like a wild thing.

Notable for encouraging improvisation and unblushing sexuality, the dance style ushered in a new way of movement for a new generation, and helped young women, especially, claim agency over their bodies.

The origins of the ragtime dance movement are somewhat murky, but San Francisco is often part of the tale. In The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances, author and choreographer Mark Knowles credits Johnny Peters, an African American professional dancer, with being one of the first to bring these dances (also known by other names like tough dancing, new dancing, and half-time dancing) from the South to the Bay.

The dance was quickly embraced by “factory girls”—young, city-dwelling, working-class women—who flocked to dance halls, after long underpaid hours on the job, to let off steam by drinking, dancing, and enjoying themselves. Progressive social reformers seeking to regulate these dance halls to “save” these women from themselves naturally bristled at these newfound animal dances, which they viewed as “plain hugging set to music.”

“We urge the importance of recognizing the distinction between legitimate dancing and this hideous perversion,” wrote New York social reformer Belle Linder Israels in a 1911 article, “[G]enerally speaking, [it] is not dancing at all but a series of indecent antics to the accompaniment of music.”

By 1912, New York City had placed the grizzly bear, one of the most popular of the dances, and other “huggly-wiggly” numbers under the sanction of a social ban. Cities across the nation followed with their own attempts to regulate the ragtime dances that had cropped up in regional styles. To offer perspective on just how much of a cultural threat the craze had become, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly canceled his inaugural ball because he worried it would promote “indulgence in the turkey trot, the bunny hug and other ragtime dances and thus provoke what might amount to a National scandal.”

“Passé in the ballroom, but a novelty on the beach,” reads the caption to this July 10, 1912 Puck magazine cover art titled the “grizzly bare,” which riffs on the popular animal-style dance, the grizzly bear. Courtesy of Keppler & Schwarzman/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Alongside moralistic fears that young women would fall to ruin by dancing these steps, the attack on ragtime-era dancing was also a direct assault on race mixing. In Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917, musicologist Dale Cockrell details how Black and white working class people in New York “commonly drank together, danced together, and lived and loved together.” Which is why government officials and reformers targeted places like dance halls where races “could mix and mingle and where interracial sex was available.”

But even removed from dance halls, the grizzly bear and other ragtime-era dances were considered an existential threat to whiteness. As dance scholar Danielle Robinson explains, ragtime dance’s “animation of the whole body through a loosening of the torso and freeing of the limbs” was understood to have come from African American culture. The movement was all about “change, difference, discontinuity, and disruption,” Robinson continues, which is why so many tried to shut it down.

The crusade against animal dancing can be seen as a clear attempt to regulate young people’s choices on matters affecting their bodies—how they moved and whom they chose to move with. This held true not just for working-class people but also the “smart society” set who wanted to dance ragtime dances at swanky parties, like the one at the Hotel Astor in 1912, where the fashionable young people were informed: “Should there be any of you who have an inclination to dance the ‘grizzly bear,’ the ‘turkey trot,’ or an exaggerated form of the ‘Boston dip,’ the members of the Floor Committee will stop you.” When a New York Times reporter present asked for a reason, the host’s response was clipped: the dances were “vulgar.”

A century later, the animal dance craze—and the issues it raises around body autonomy and regulation—is part of the legacy of social dancing that continues to this day, embodied now through these viral dance challenges like the one to “About Damn Time.”

Imitation and synchronized movement taps “into the deep-seated psychology of how we connect,” writes ethnomusicologist Niall Edwards-FitzSimons on the science around why humans respond so powerfully to social or group dancing. But while Edwards-FitzSimons’ research explores how such connections can be fostered online through a technological platform like TikTok, his observation that “these dancers are separated through time and space, but they create solidarity and positive feeling by moving together” can also easily make that stretch across history as well.

One of my favorite details about the grizzly bear is that while doing the dance, people would all cry out, “It’s a bear!” For someone stepping out of convention on a turn-of-the-20th-century dance hall floor, I like to imagine this non-sequitur offered a moment of levity and an emotional release, the same that a teen today might channel as they move their body about to Lizzo, screaming “It’s about damn time!”

The post Why Americans Love a Dance Challenge appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is a new kind of war, waged by a new kind of citizen.

The failure of the Russian forces to subdue Ukraine quickly has astonished experts, officials, and journalists worldwide. It shouldn’t. The Ukrainian resistance is just the latest example of the new attitudes and abilities of 21st century citizens.

While social media has been getting a lot of attention in this “TikTok War,” the real story is the growing determination and capacity of ordinary people. Around the world, ordinary people are fundamentally different from people of generations past. They have dramatically higher levels of education, far less deference to authority figures, and much greater facility with technology.

These trends have changed citizenship itself. We need to understand this shift so that societies, especially democratic ones, can figure out how to adapt, both in war and peace.

The war in Ukraine is instructive, in at least four ways.

First, citizens now have the ability to make their own media; Ukrainians, under attack, are mass-producing reality TV. Thanks to footage produced by thousands of people and viewed by millions, the war has a constantly unfolding cast of characters. Ukrainian farmers towing Russian vehicles, a soldier moonwalking in a field, people joyriding on a captured Russian tank, and a little girl singing “Let It Go” in a Kiev bomb shelter have become relatable, inspiring figures in the conflict. Seemingly every time Ukrainians have success on the battlefield, they upload videos of burned tanks and downed planes.

Perhaps most poignant are the videos of Russian POWs—young, hungry, and confused—being fed by their captors and allowed to call their mothers. These conversations, in which they tell their parents they are OK and aren’t sure why they ended up in a war, may be the best hope for affecting Russian public opinion. The Ukrainian hotline set up for Russians trying to get information on their loved ones on the front lines has also produced heartrending recordings. These videos expose the one thing Putin can’t easily hide: Russian deaths on the battlefield.

All that citizen-made media has been fuel for a second major trend of 21st century citizenship: crowdsourced community organizing.

Nonviolent protests have sprung up around the world, both on the internet and on the streets, including in Russia and in occupied Ukrainian cities. The capacity of citizens to make this civil disobedience visible has rallied millions of others to their cause. People are filming the crowds that slow Russian convoys, and mapping protests around the world in precise geo-located detail, so that others can join in.

This organizing happens rapidly and shows advanced collective thinking. People aren’t simply protesting the war, they are focusing on specific priorities and pressuring Western governments to move on them: singling out Russian oligarchs, denying SWIFT access to Russian banks, banning Russian oil, and shaming international corporations into halting their Russian operations. Community organizers call this “finding winnable issues.” Many of these economic sanctions are unprecedented, and it seems unlikely that Western governments and businesses would have taken all of these drastic steps if not for large-scale public pressure.

In addition to pressuring governments, many citizens are also sidestepping civil society institutions. They are supporting Ukrainians not just through traditional means like donating money to the Red Cross, but by using networks like AirBnB to send money directly to Ukrainian families. This is international aid without institutional intermediaries.

It isn’t just the aid that is do-it-yourself. The warfare is DIY, too.

The contributions of Ukrainian citizens to the war effort includes all generations: grandmothers making Molotov cocktails, mothers brandishing assault rifles, young couples getting married at the front, schoolchildren sewing camouflage nets.

Some of the combatants aren’t even in Ukraine: a small army of hackers is helping to disrupt Russian technologies, interfere with defense communications, and broadcast news about the war to Russian citizens. In an interview with Politico, Ukraine’s deputy digital minister Alex Bornyakov reported that there are 300,000 people worldwide contributing to these efforts.

“We don’t have a chain of command or any structure at all,” Bornyakov said. “So, [Russia] can’t fight it. It’s impossible to disrupt it or break it down. You can’t bomb it or cut off connections or take down a top person—because there is no top person.”

Of course, such warfare isn’t entirely new. For thousands of years ordinary people have taken up scythes and muskets against invading armies; for hundreds of years there have been propaganda campaigns; for decades people have been able to see in real time events happening on the other side of the world.

But the war in Ukraine is revealing how much things have advanced in the last 20 years: the full flowering of a gigantic global network of person-to-person connections; the blurring of the lines between professionals and amateurs; the ability of almost everyone to make their experiences visible and immediate to millions of other people.

Five years ago, the American writer and democracy advocate Eric Liu wrote that “We are in the midst of a profound global Great Push Back against concentrated, monopolized, hoarded power.” Today in Ukraine, we are witnessing not just the decentralization of power—along with knowledge, skill, and authority—but the ability of the “crowd” to wield those decentralized resources in coordinated ways.

The changes in citizen attitudes and capacities are not all positive. Just like previous generations, 21st century citizens can be selfish and unwilling to compromise, saddled with bias and racist assumptions, and fundamentally misinformed. There is no guarantee that the crowd will wield power in ways that are wise, equitable, or just.

But these dangers are unavoidable when people are empowered. And the best way to reckon with them is to seize the related opportunities that this change in citizenship creates for democracy.

We are already seeing what is possible when democratic governments support, inform, and collaborate with 21st century citizens. Countries like Colombia, Iceland, Taiwan, and Brazil have been leaders in democracy innovation: reforms and practices that strengthen relationships between people, give them a meaningful say in decisions, and support their volunteer efforts. Many of these ideas, like participatory budgeting and citizen’s assemblies, create situations where people can learn about an issue, talk with people who have different views, and make decisions together. (Some Ukrainian cities have also been hotbeds of this kind of democratic experimentation.) Others, like crowd-resourcing, inspire and coordinate volunteer efforts to solve public problems.

The desire of citizens to connect, be heard, and get things done seems universal. Even in Russia, the “demand for democratic input” in governance has been on the rise.

Governments should adapt to the shift in citizenship by explaining these potential democracy innovations to their citizens, offering different democracy options and working with citizens to implement them, and measuring their impacts.

Putin’s regime seems more like a criminal institution than a political or military one. And it still may be effective enough to win the war, because of the overwhelming Russian advantage in traditional military resources. But even if the Russian military is victorious on the battlefield, it seems unlikely that the Russians can occupy, let alone govern, Ukraine for long.

Whenever peace comes to Ukraine, and the rest of the world, we need to appreciate the new realities of what citizens want and can do. The greatest hope for democracy, justice, and peace is for leaders and institutions to interact more productively with the people they serve.

The post Ukraine Shows Us the Power of the 21st-Century Citizen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.