New Rules of Democracy

 I'm thinking about how the traditional defences of democracy seem to fade away during the internet age. 

I used to wonder – human civilisation has been around for thousands of years, and only 200+ years ago, did people create a workable system that's based on democracy. Something must have happened to create the conditions to make that viable. 

Some people say it's because the pilgrims who went to the New World after the defeat of the Spanish Armada realised they couldn't do the Spanish thing of pillaging and looting and they had to build a society for themselves. 

Some people say it's because they met the Indians of upstate New York and found the distant ancestor of a working democracy there. 

In the end, a new myth grew around democracy, and I'm here to think about the myths that surround democracy.

1. Democracy is freedom and freedom is democracy.

2. Democracy is not perfect but it's better than all the other systems.

3. Democracy is inherently more virtuous than other sysems, (“dictatorships”)

4. Leaders are naturally tyrants, and when you don't have the power to vote them out, they become despotic leaders and you will get poor governance. 

5. When you have democracy, the interests of the people are aligned with the system of laws and government, and therefore (leap of logic here, because I can't see why) paradoxically America has the best system because you don't need government. 

6. America is the shining city on a hill and an examplar of good system

7. It behooves the USA to remake the rest of the world in its image and create regime change to enable the peoples of the world to live free. 

Maybe at some point I will unpick these 7 tenets, but for now I'll just move on. 

The characteristics of the world has somehow changed with the advent of social networks and social media. It needs to be said that we're living in a really different world from the late 18th century. 

1. Attention is the source of democratic power, not suffrage

You have some kind of free speech, whether you have suffrage or not. If you can attract the attention of the world, then wonderful (and powerful) things can happen. Therefore the currency of power is not so much suffrage, but rather attention. 

Attention is a different kind of power than suffrage. It is a power that can be bestowed upon anybody at some point in time. But it can be taken away very quickly as well. 

This creates a very interesting (and volatile) landscape where 

Institutions have become very very vulnerable and slippery things. 

2. Surveillance is everywhere. 

It's true that just about everybody has the potential to be extremely powerful for a short time span through grabbing the eyeballs of the world, and that tends to suggest that we live in a very democratic world. 

At the same time, data gathering has given great surveillance powers to platforms. Nominally, this data gathering is used to feed into machine learning generators that will predict future behaviour and deliver better service, but 

3. Centralised control of the world is feasible

People usually learn the wrong lessons from the events of 1989. Why did communism fail in the 1980s? People just assume that it proves that liberal democracy is a superior system. Which is true. But why? They always assume that people want their freedom. 

They don't want freedom in of itself. The people in communist regimes wanted a way out of their drab lives. They didn't have good entertainment. And on the economic front, the centralised control of the economy was a disaster, because you can't really impose price controls on an economy for too long. 

But back in the day, people didn't have the internet – as a very grim irony, the world wide web was also invented in 1989, the year when the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were toppled. Who knows what would have happened if they had access to technology invented 30 years into the future, that would make it possible for governments to be competent and manage state owned enterprises better than before. 

4. Disinformation has replaced concealment

It used to be the case that dictatorial regimes could operate in utmost secrecy. The Soviets, the North Koreans and Maoist China could keep their activities a secret. It's much more difficult these days to keep a lid on things, in countries that have embraced the internet. You couldn't make people disappear anymore in a society that is sufficiently connected to the world. 

If you brought people out to the middle class, they would have some access to the internet, and there would be a large amount of vibrant chatter going around. You can't really keep anything a secret: even if things didn't go out on official channels, you can't stop people from gossipping about what's going on in the world. 

But how dictatorial regimes maintain control over the conversation is to feed their citizens with a lot of distraction and misinformation. The idea is not to prove your side of the story, but to cast so much doubt on whether anybody's version can be proven correct. Then it works like a charm – you've kept your citizens politically infantile and meek. 

5. Brave New World rather than Nineteen Eighty Four

The big question of Brave New World was: if you were living in a society that took care of everything for you, where everybody was perfectly integrated into that society, would people still choose liberty? Back then, I could not conceive that people wouldn't want liberty. But ultimately, bread and butter issues always win. 

The communist regimes did not collapse because of “give me liberty or give me death”. They collapsed because the economy was mismanaged, and because some people desired liberty. And at the same time, what they really wanted was Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd LPs. The cardinal sin of the communist regimes was that they did not have a good enough opiate of the masses. It's very notable that Marx talked about the opiate of the masses, and Huxley talked about soma. In order to run a society well, you need to entertain them, and you need a palace of mirrors, or the means to endlessly distract itself. 

The internet provides for both of these flaws. You would never lack for a constant stream of cheap entertainment on the internet. And the price signals that make capitalism purportedly superior could come through the internet. It might even make some form of centralised stewardship of the economy more feasible. It's true that certain systemic risks were not well managed in the past, leading to the Great Recession, but that's something that neither central control nor unfettered capitalism managed to take care of. 

6. Devolution of power

On one level, it doesn't really matter, dictatorship or democracy. These distinctions mattered when the might of the government could reach into all aspects of peoples' lives. In many parts of the world which are not free, the government could have the people under its thumb. But there are rival centers of influence, even though those centers work in very nebulous ways. Google knows more about you than the Stasi. Amazon could change the retail landscape by destroying all its competitors. These companies have in their own ways, won important battles against governments, and yet are in no way answerable to their stakeholders. 

Large corporations run the world economy. They have armies of lobbyists whose job is to circumvent the oversight of corporations. Any legislation prejudicial to many of them can be stymied in a court of law for years. 

7. Human bias is the new injustice. 

8. The four political centres. 

George Packer recently wrote a pretty good book about the 4 values system of the USA, and I'm wondering if a similar schism is taking place in other parts of the world. One of them is “smart America”, the belief that a technocratic system should rule, and that it's making life better for so many of us. Another is “real America”, the nativist reaction to the changes that are taking place to America. There is also “free America” and “just America”. This is slightly different from the recent “conservatives vs liberals” alignment between Democrats and Republicans. Although traditionally Democrats encompass smart America and just America, whereby Republicans traditionally encompass real America and free America.

So here, there are new ideas, new frameworks that challenge the Washington consensus about liberal democracy being the ultimate end state of what counts as progress in societies. Merely a few years ago, I would have agreed that most societies converge to that end state eventually. But there have been so many questions about the ability of average humans to self-organise in a way that leads to satisfactory outcomes.