As soon as it seemed on the night and early morning of November 5^th and 6^th that Donald J. Trump was on track to win the presidency, postmortems of the Democrats’ failure began to pop up like so many fungi. (Some were even written in advance of the election.) Varieties of optimism, from the cautious to the overconfident, disintegrated into hypotheticals and cases. Once the outcome was known—the recent past fixed—it became fair game for meddling. The dice had rolled to a stop; the gears of retroactive prophecy began to turn.

The Future Democracies Laboratory, a project by artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose through February 23, 2025, adopts a tongue-in-cheek version of this counterfactual curiosity and turns it toward the future. The laboratory is semi-participatory, its central attraction an interactive computer model that simulates the outcome of changes made to the current structure of the U.S. government. A cluster of non-interactive, in-progress experiments forms this centerpiece’s mise-en-scène: a station for generating laws from collaged scraps of the United States Code Annotated (the “Regulatory Mutation Board”), a Calder-esque scale deployed to literalize the process of weighing votes and vetoes (“Legislative Balance”), and several setups designed to monitor stress in the electorate (“Electoral Pulsilogium”) as well as in houseplants—with the latter’s stress measured in terms of how quickly their ethylene emissions ripen a banana (“Banana Differential Polling Units”). The question of the extent to which any of these devices resembles a Rube Goldberg machine is part of what’s at stake: how much complexity can a governmental technology incorporate before it loses sight of humanity?

With the popularity of ChatGPT and other large language models, anxiety about algorithmocracy is hardly conspiracy-theory discourse. Keats’s experiments speak to the darkness and precarity of our politics in late 2024 (though they debuted before Trump’s reelection), even when those experiments verge on the comic. After four pandemic years, the exhibition invites us to reconsider not only our conceptions of political action (might running a simulation count?) and political agents (houseplants, anyone?), but of what gets to count as a political concern at all. “If the average stress of voters reading a newspaper is no greater than their stress while assembling a jigsaw puzzle, then the political status quo is deemed adequate,” states the description of the Electoral Pulsilogium in the exhibition’s inventory. While utilitarian-inspired approaches to governing aren’t new, it’s refreshing to imagine assessing the political order by how physiologically or psychologically stress-inducing it is, rather than in terms of moral or economic abstractions. Interestingly, doing so invites us to consider a broad conception of health as something both political and necessarily central to questions of governance. As health becomes political—as disability theorists have long held—politics becomes partly a matter of empirical investigation: how stressed out is the average voter reading the newspaper, and what about her houseplants?

The aleatory and the purposeful entangle in Keats’s laboratory. Randomization can be a means, wholly or fractionally, of automating a process, like that of choosing a law. But what makes automation valuable in many cases is its exclusion of randomness—the reliability with which it can reproduce a sequence of actions. Keats’s experiments ask us whether we want to make randomness an explicit part of our political machinery, and implicitly ask us if it isn’t already. They also ask whether automation—specifically the kind that expedites lawmaking and administration—has a role in democratic governance. Human legislators are slow, prone to error and bias; would speedy, unfeeling algorithmic legislators be an attractive alternative? In a sense, this would be begging the question. For settling political issues would then be a matter of programming these algorithmic legislators, and that would require decidedly human inputs.

The participatory component at the visual center of the exhibition makes clear, in any case, that Keats isn’t simply dreaming, or having a nightmare, of a posthuman future. Once a simulation has finished running, one can compare its result to those of other visitors’ simulations—a feature that cultivates what the critic James Phelan, writing about literary interpretation, calls “metapluralism.” Metapluralism, adapted to the questions raised by The Future Democracies Laboratory, asks about the differences that emerge when we compare different versions of political projects, imagine how our fellow citizens might make those comparisons, and ask ourselves which of those comparative judgments we can tolerate. The question of metapluralism, in other words, is the question of how many different—even contradictory—visions of society one can and should tolerate, as well as how to relate these visions in light of how others relate them. At stake is not only philosophical coherence, but the matter of deciding, with others, what possibilities to embrace for the future.

The philosopher Alain Badiou, speaking after Trump’s first election in 2016, described the battles over the last two centuries between versions of liberalism and socialism as an argument about the nature of the notion of humanity. Less happily, he continued, recent decades are characterized by the disappearance of this choice. Keats’s project combats the emergence of what Badiou called “democratic fascism” by envisioning a populism defined not by a set of enemies but by an expanding and expandable set of possibilities. The United States of America has been regarded, wrote an anonymous op-ed author for the New York Daily Tribune the year before the Civil War broke out, “as engaged in trying a great experiment, involving not merely the future fate and welfare of this Western continent, but the hopes and prospects of the whole human race.” Maybe not, in 2024, the hopes and prospects of the whole human race. But the point about the experimental, fragile nature of a young country still applies and in an uncomfortably timely way.

Keats, whose past projects include an attempt to pass the logical Law of Identity as an enforceable statute in Berkeley, California, takes up the mantle of this experimental tradition, shifting it from a rhetorical frame of analysis to the construction of actual experiments. What these experiments highlight is the prospect that the new republic, or parts of it, might be computed—and that our concepts of political action and political agents might expand at the same time. One of the exhibition’s many implications is that the raucous world outside the white walls of the art gallery is a laboratory, too, one in some senses different but in others the same: it’s messier, but in both contexts democracy is always in the making. We can emphasize the uncertainty of this making or emphasize its generative potential, but both aspects coexist. If we can see democracy as always incipient, then perhaps, Keats seems to suggest, we can see large language models and other algorithmic products not just as simple commodities but, as the theorist Holly Lewis contends, as outcomes of material social relations. The participatory element in The Future Democracies Laboratory drives this point home: we should continually make and maintain democracy with whatever tools come along. But just as pressing a few buttons to create a new possible government would indicate, we should keep in mind that those tools have long social histories, that their shapes aren’t timeless but appear as they do for historical and human reasons.

Keats’s “experiments in progress” are each labeled with signs requesting, somewhat undemocratically, that they not be touched. When I visited the exhibition in November 2024, however, I noticed that someone had written their initials and a date on the chalkboard that forms a part of “Mechanical Legislature.” Evidence of just how pervasive an insistence on self-representation can be, and perhaps also of the anarchy and chance the philosopher Jacques Rancière locates at the heart of the democratic impulse. That bit of erasable vandalism punctured the faux sterility of the laboratory while proving just how close its experiments stand to the unruliness of our present moment. It was such a perfect addition that I had to wonder if it was Keats himself who had put it there.