The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
> It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP replacement protocols years back that were being developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
> It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?
This is the easiest time ever to be alive.
I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.
The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.
This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.