Can theatre change an algorithm?

Platoniq — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:16:00 +0200

It’s taken us three issues, but here we are. Now that so many of you have subscribed to the Wilder Journal and Platoniq newsletter, it’s a true pleasure for us to share the first one with you. In this newsletter, you’ll find the latest news from Platoniq: our projects, the most recent interviews, and the most creative experiments in citizen participation.

As you know, at Platoniq we explore how to transform participation into collective capacity to decide and act. In this regard, we work at the intersection of democracy, culture, technology, and social innovation, combining research, creative methodologies, participatory design, and the development of open digital infrastructures.

Through European projects, citizen labs, Teatro Legislativo, and platforms like Goteo and Decidim, we experiment with new ways to distribute power, recognize knowledge that is often excluded, and connect people’s experiences with concrete institutional and social changes.

Next week, our entire team will be involved in several events at Barcelona Open Tech Week. So we couldn’t think of a better way to kick things off than with the week’s schedule and a few surprises.

Thanks for subscribing. We’ll be in touch ;)

Let’s start with the latest news from the Journal

We’re launching a new video section to bring images and voices to the debates surrounding democracy and technology. There, you’ll find content related to the Journal’s articles and interviews.

We want to add new perspectives—not to create a repository of videos that no one wants to watch—so we’ll be creating audiovisual content specifically designed for this section. We invite you to explore it regularly and to bring any questions that arise to your own spaces for debate and action.

Four gatherings during Barcelona Open Tech Week. Four ways to challenge the rules of democracy and technology.

🔬 Open Technology Research Symposium | 26 October

What if user experience (UX) were also a political experience?

Olivier Schulbaum presents Political User Experience (PUX), a framework developed through our research in the European INSPIRE project.

Rather than treating people simply as users of digital participation platforms, PUX asks how interfaces distribute political agency, shape collective decisions and determine which forms of knowledge and which voices become visible.

An interface is never just a point of access. It also determines who can intervene, how, when and with what consequences.

We want to shift the conversation from designing easy-to-use platforms towards designing truly democratic infrastructures.

🔗 Session link

🧩 DecidimFest | 29 October

Democratic technology needs more than good code. It needs new ways of organising collective power.

At DecidimFest, we bring our approach to participatory design, combining civic technologies with creative methodologies that make power relations visible, open up space for different forms of knowledge and connect participation with institutional transformation.

This year, we are taking part with two complementary contributions.

First, we present our work on Safe(r) Spaces, developed within INSPIRE, which examines the conditions that allow people with different experiences, capabilities and social positions to participate more safely and meaningfully.

We also explore the Democratic Stack, a way of thinking about the technological, social, institutional and political layers that make collective democratic action possible.

Because the future of democratic platforms depends not only on what they enable people to do, but also on who has the capacity to design, govern and change their rules.

🔗 Democratic Stack workshop

🌐 4D Conference: Mocking Power, Making Change | 29 October

What if digital sovereignty began with collectively funding and governing our own alternatives?

At the international 4D conference, Democratic Tech Fund and Goteo present a practical proposal: to stop renting our digital lives from big tech platforms and start building infrastructures that communities can manage and sustain.

We are talking about community clouds, connected social spaces, shared tools, learning and care. But also about the economic mechanisms that allow these alternatives to exist.

Through Goteo, we explore how civic crowdfunding can become an infrastructure for collectively funding technologies that serve the common good.

Imagining alternatives to big tech platforms is not enough. We need to build the material conditions that allow us to sustain them.

Digital sovereignty is also a matter of ownership, funding, governance and collective capacity.

🔗 4D Conference

🎭 Mozilla Festival | 30 October

What happens when we stop debating technology and start rehearsing its consequences?

At MozFest, we bring our experiments with Legislative Theatre and embodied participation into the realm of technological power.

Through collective storytelling, theatrical performance and democratic rehearsal, we explore how young people can question the rules governing their digital lives, imagine alternatives and turn their experiences into proposals for change.

Legislative Theatre allows us to experience the consequences of a rule before accepting it as inevitable.

Who decides what we see? What happens when an algorithm classifies our emotions? What opportunities do we have to intervene in systems that influence our decisions without us knowing their rules?

Rather than responding solely with diagnoses, we invite participants to step into the scene, intervene in conflicts and rehearse other ways of organising technology.

🔗 Discover our activity at MozFest

Investigating power. Rehearsing alternatives. Building democratic infrastructures.

Across all four gatherings, we pursue the same question:

How do we move from understanding participation as an invitation to making it the collective power to change the rules?

📚 A new publication: from floods to forums

We are in a book, too.

HOPE: Reclaiming the Future, published by oekom verlag, brings together different voices to consider what it means to speak of hope amid climate crises, political disaffection and digital infrastructures that increasingly mediate our collective lives.

Not hope as optimism.

Hope as a practice, a capacity and an infrastructure for action.

Platoniq contributes the chapter “From Floods to Forums: Reclaiming the Future Through Digital Democracy”, by Olivier Schulbaum.

The question running through the text is one close to our hearts:

What infrastructures do we need to sustain democratic life when crises are no longer exceptional?

Drawing on experiences with Decidim, INSPIRE and Legislative Theatre, the chapter explores how civic technologies can move beyond being interfaces where institutions ask questions and citizens respond.

What happens when they become spaces where communities can govern data, build agency and transform shared experiences into decisions and collective action?

From floods to forums: a reflection on digital democracy, crisis and our capacity to build the political infrastructures we need.

🔗 HOPE: Reclaiming the Future

📖 INSPIRE research: how can hybrid participation become more inclusive, creative and transformative?

Platforms and procedures are not enough to guarantee meaningful democratic participation.

Participation also depends on culture, relationships, emotions, space, time and the forms of knowledge that institutions consider legitimate.

Our report Cultural Strategies and Devices for Hybrid Dialogic and Deliberative Spaces, developed within the European INSPIRE project, examines how to combine in-person and digital participation without losing care, accessibility, democratic depth or accountability.

The report explores cultural strategies, creative methodologies and participatory devices that broaden the ways people can express themselves and deliberate.

Because not everyone participates in the same way. Some people express themselves better through speech; others through images, performances, narratives, gestures or shared experiences.

And not everyone has the same material, social or emotional conditions for taking part.

What changes when we stop asking people to adapt to procedures and start designing procedures around their realities?

This question is especially relevant to hybrid spaces, where technologies can expand opportunities for participation but also reproduce existing inequalities.

Digital tools are not neutral. Neither are deliberative formats.

The report proposes paying attention not only to who participates, but also to how collective knowledge is produced, how it is translated into decisions and what responsibility institutions take for the consequences.

🔗 Read the INSPIRE report

🤕 What would Fanon say about a mental health chatbot?

Our next stop takes us to Morocco.

Drawing on the reflections of Rim Hallal, we are exploring an uncomfortable question:

What would Frantz Fanon think of a generation whose identities, emotions and relationships are increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence?

Chatbots can expand opportunities for support in contexts where access to psychological care remains difficult.

But the question does not end there.

There are also risks of dependency, isolation, the processing of sensitive data and responses built on cultural models that may have little to do with the lives of the people using them.

A Fanonian perspective therefore changes the starting point.

Fanon, a psychiatrist and anticolonial thinker, challenged the idea that psychological suffering could be understood separately from the social, cultural and political structures that produce it.

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he explored how colonial domination shapes the formation of subjectivity. In his later psychiatric and political writings, he emphasised the relationship between alienation, institutional conditions and possibilities for emancipation.

Bringing these questions into the present does not mean attributing to him a position on technologies he never encountered. It means using his thought to interrogate the conditions of power that run through our relationships with AI.

Rather than asking only how an individual can use a technology better, this perspective requires us to ask about power, alienation, structures and collective agency.

If AI plays a part in how we interpret our emotions, what idea of wellbeing is it reproducing? Who defined it? Within which cultural frameworks? And who has the capacity to question it?

The question is not only whether a technology can offer psychological support. It is also whether it helps expand autonomy and relationships of care, or ultimately adapts people to social conditions that remain unchanged.

And if mental health is shaped by structural inequalities, can an individual, automated response be enough?

It is not just about designing AI that understands our emotions. It is about collectively deciding what relationships of care we want to build and what place technology should have within them.

🌊 What connects all of this

Theatre, AI, mental health, safe spaces, free software, books, data, participation.

These may seem like different conversations.

For us, they have something in common: democracy is also at stake in the infrastructures that organise what we can know, decide, imagine and change.

At MozFest, we intervene in scenes to question the rules of technology.

At DecidimFest, we bring the conditions of participation and the digital infrastructures we need to transform into the discussion.

At 4D, we work to build and fund alternatives that communities themselves can govern.

At OTR, we question ideas of the user, the interface and experience from a political perspective.

Through INSPIRE, we research how cultural, material and relational conditions can expand or restrict democratic participation.

In HOPE, we explore how to sustain collective action in times of crisis.

And through Fanon, we ask what happens when even our emotions begin to be interpreted through systems we do not control.

These are different ways of approaching the same question:

Who has the capacity to define the rules that organise our collective life?

That is why we keep experimenting with formats that go beyond diagnosing problems.

We want to step into the scene, get our hands on the rules and see what happens when we change them.

See you in Barcelona—and in the physical, digital and editorial spaces where we continue building a #WilderDemocracy.

Newsletter · Wilder Journal by Platoniq