A Story Almost Lost to Time
In September 2006, a massive wooden table 50 meters long was built in Berlin's Bebelplatz, the square once used for Nazi book burnings. Around this Table of Free Voices sat 112 people from 48 countries—writers, philosophers, artists, activists—each with a camera pointed squarely at them. They gathered to answer 100 questions crowdsourced from people around the world.
Every participant was asked to respond to every question, simultaneously, over the course of a single day. The result was an unprecedented archive: over 7,000 responses recorded on film, capturing a moment of global reflection at the dawn of the 21st century. The event was produced by the German nonprofit Dropping Knowledge, and it stands today as one of the most ambitious efforts ever attempted to collect the world's most pressing questions—and the many, often contradictory, truths those questions reveal.
The questions ranged from the timeless—"What is peace?"—to the urgent—"What will we do when the oil runs out?"—to the deeply personal—"How do you find hope in despair?" These 100 questions were asked not of politicians or CEOs alone, but of a deliberately diverse group: a South African human rights lawyer, an Indian feminist, a Palestinian poet, a Brazilian indigenous leader, a German historian, an American jazz musician.
The Table of Free Voices was not a conference, not a debate, not a panel. It was an act of radical listening: the simple, audacious belief that if we could just hear each other, across languages and borders, we might begin to see the possibilities for a more just, peaceful world.
Yet in the years since, the world has moved in the opposite direction.
We Are Losing Our Capacity to Ask Together
We now live in an era where polarization is a business model, and disinformation is a geopolitical weapon. A few powerful actors can shape public narratives with unprecedented speed. Social media platforms, once heralded for democratizing speech, have instead become engines of division, confusion, and rage.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence threaten to further warp our ability to understand each other. AI can now generate synthetic voices, hyper-target propaganda, and flood our feeds with plausible but false stories. Tools that should connect us are instead optimized to manipulate us—because they are trained, not on our best selves, but on what keeps us scrolling.
This is not inevitable. But it will remain our reality unless we choose a different path.
From the Table to Today: Our Voices Unbound
Our Voices Unbound draws directly from the DNA of the Table of Free Voices, but it updates the practice of radical questioning for an America—and a world—in crisis.
Where the Table gathered a curated group of global thinkers in one place, Our Voices Unbound invites everyone, everywhere in this country, to contribute the questions that hold their truths, fears, and knowledge.
It does not ask only: What do you want to know? It asks: What question can carry your lived experience? It asks: What silences have shaped your neighborhood, your family, your sense of what's possible?
This isn't a search for immediate solutions. It's an effort to map the civic moment we're in—to wrestle together with what's working, what's broken, and what might emerge if we give ourselves permission to imagine.
Technology With Values Baked In
At the heart of Our Voices Unbound is a pair of technologies designed not for control, but for collective reflection: the Civic Data Transformer and the Centrelog.
The Civic Data Transformer doesn't just count words or predict clicks. It organizes thousands of questions from across the country, clustering them by themes and patterns while retaining the messy, necessary nuance of human language. It visualizes these clusters so communities can see themselves in the broader civic landscape—and recognize unexpected connections across lines of race, class, or geography.
The Centrelog goes further. It is designed to detect the tensions in our questions: the contradictions that reveal real divisions or surface unspoken fears; the echoes where communities far apart share the same concerns; the silences that might indicate what people are afraid to ask. It helps us confront not only what's said, but what's unsaid.
This is how technology can amplify what people already know—if it is invented with values of democracy, empathy, and accountability. Because the real danger of AI is not that it becomes conscious, but that we deploy it carelessly, embedding bias and division in the very systems we trust to tell us what's true.
That's why Our Voices Unbound's AI tools are being designed transparently, with community input, and for public benefit. They are not closed black boxes. They are civic mirrors.
Why Now?
The same forces that threaten democracy—polarization, cynicism, and disinformation—are not waiting for us to get organized. They are well-funded, tireless, and effective.
Meanwhile, nearly every indicator of institutional trust is in decline. Americans increasingly doubt the legitimacy of elections, the integrity of the courts, the honesty of the press.
Yet when you walk block by block, as one recent grassroots candidate in New York did to stunning success, you find something else: people hungry for someone to simply ask *what matters to you?*—and to carry that answer forward into the public sphere.
Our Voices Unbound aims to do this at scale, but without sacrificing intimacy or care.