Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

This is why democracy is broken.

Attention is scarce. So when you combine all the resources and effort that marketing departments from Fox News to Charmin toilet paper, add Facebook as a primary medium, throw iPhones and ADHD into the mix, the only tactics that work appeal to base instincts. Make something flashy, attention grabbing, and short lived.

When that happens to ALL information, there’s no place left for balanced thinking that doesn’t come to some immediate divisive conclusion that just confirms what you already believed. There isn’t enough attention to get depth or thought provoking material in and have it win in your A/B tests.

So what happens? Democracy loses as base radicalization is mechanically forced by the attention economy to win out.

View on HN

I appreciate that this is the top comment, and starts with 'This is Why' which is the second most engaging phrase apparently.

This is fairly well understood, as is the fact that none of the parties involved - Facebook, the media, or the political parties - have an ounce of incentive to change.

So, what do we do? It may be becoming apparent that the theory that democracy does not work in a world with social media is correct, but what can be done with that information?

For every Buzzfeed you kill there's another, for every social network with detailed discussion there's a bigger, dumber one.

I would love someone to propose something radical, but the only new ideas I've heard are monarchy (from people that also tend to think minorities are a problem) which is terrifying, or Chinese style rule, which honestly sort of seems to be working? I have no idea, I'm a software developer, not a political theorist, but you have hit the nail on the head.

> democracy does not work in a world with social media

Two misconceptions in one short phrase.

Democracy always worked perfectly well, just not as advertised, a common phenomenon with heavily advertised products.

Social media is just making things harder and more expensive for advertisers. They'll figure something out, with much groaning and moaning.

How is it making things harder for advertisers?

Have to hire more people, things are a lot more distributed.

Here, I have a proposal for you:

Imagine a world government wherein the killing, torture, and imprisonment of people is illegal, as the core clause of the state. In this state, the core clause does not permit the interests of the state over those of the individual; the state exists to support an individual.

Imagine a political party which comes to power through the co-option of the public sphere to support the above goals, while preaching that this party alone is capable of bringing about the revolution. Imagine a single leader which is the beating heart.

Imagine this party preaching that the global economy must be reverse-engineered to adhere to the above-mentioned goal. Imagine that technical renaissance is trumpeted.

Imagine this totalitarian state and its transparent principles. Transparent enough to call itself totalitarian.

Now imagine the orange flag flying on the marble arch on a clear day.

Sounds impossible on many levels, the least of which is absolute power corrupts absolutely. Laws to protect individuals are rarely the problem, from North Korea and China to Mexico and the US. People, positions of power, the lack of accountability, the distribution of problems and the unequal voices of those issues, the total cultural and reality differences between the great leader and the realities of everyone everywhere, trust, etc don’t get solved by the one true government.

Sorry, what is the orange flag a reference to?

Sounds like a useless government. I mean, if such a state can't kill or imprison people, how are they going to get other people to comply with their laws? And if they can, why would any other government cede the ability to do so themselves?

Banishment?

Sortition. Rule by random citizen.

One of the best articles I've read in the past decade:

"If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly"

https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...

Sounds nice but pretty much guarantees that anything of any serious complexity will get contracted out (or hired in) to an increasingly entrenched oligarchy.

Politicians are already incapable of handling everything of any serious complexity, except maybe for a narrow domain of their own expertise. For everything else, they need to rely on other's advice.

It seems to me that often, those people tend to be lobbyists that just happened to volunteer themselves when the politician was out of their depth. If the politician is any good at what they do, they will consult several experts, but there is still room for significant bias to creep in.

Now the question is whether the average random citizen is more or less likely than the average politician, to succumb to this kind of external influence. My guess is that random selection will yield less people who are only in it for the power, but also less people who are genuinely driven by the need to solve problems within society.

Governments ran by algorithms

Electing somebody and then not having any control over the decisions they vote is not 100% democracy... More like 1%.

"This is why"

ooh the irony...

That's not the reason democracy is broken. Democracy was broken since the time of the ancient Greeks. That's what Socrates set out to prove with his trail. Democracy is not a good system, the sooner you come to that conclusion the better it is!

CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, are at the top of the fake news paradigm. Everything they report goes through a process that removes all details that do not match the narrative they are pushing at the time.

The underlining problem is that fair and honest journalism - that reports the facts and lets the viewer/reader make up their own mind - has been replaced by a sided & weaponized news media, owned and operated by those with high-level agendas (those that want to impose control on the public, engage in geopolitics, fight petrodollar wars, consolidate power, etc).

> fair and honest journalism - that reports the facts and lets the viewer/reader make up their own mind - has been replaced

When did this exist except in theory in a classroom?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com