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Comment by jl2718 | Hacker News Reader

> collective action... the best form of which is bounded by the popular will

This notion is dangerous. Popular will brings fascism, authoritarianism, discrimination, instability, and uncertainty. Popular will is not and never has been a sustainable form of authority.

Political economists have a term, ‘institutions’ to describe sustainable forms of authority, like laws, morality, family structure, culture, language, literacy, technical education, career stability, and pedagogy.

Institutions like “don’t be evil”, and “we will never sell your data”, are the entire reason why the current batch of tech earned enough trust to exist at all. “Do the right thing”, and “bring people together”, however nice they sound, appear to be easily manipulated by popular will, which will be either their downfall, or ours.

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I think he's saying something different in this context: that the reason democracies are generally the least bad forms of government is that they are bounded by the popular will, that is the consent of the governed puts limits on the exercise of power. He's not advocating for the tyranny of the majority, rather saying that the power of Google and Facebook is particularly dangerous because it is not constrained or bounded in the way that a democratic government's power is bounded.

I think you make a good point about institutions though. In practice they may be more important on a day to day basis than the popular will in placing constraints on government power.

This is a good point. Sustainable growth requires a balance of power, which is why things have developed in this direction. Collective action at large scale has traditionally been controlled by governments. The most successful governments are bounded by popular will, which is directed by institutions, which are informed by traditions that have developed from previous successes and failures.

Disruptive innovation requires disturbing some part of that chain of influence. Microsoft and Apple have found success mostly by providing tools to people who exist in established parts of that chain. Google and Facebook and many other current-generation startups are more likely to use the power of collective action to create feedback loops where collective action directly informs further collective action with limited checks and balances. This sometimes leads to imbalances which spark mass outrage over policies that do not fit into people's concepts of how things ought to work.

Is this kind of power sustainable? It's likely to follow a more volatile path of quick growth followed by outrage over the outcomes that make people uncomfortable, but it might find equilibrium regardless, as it still has to exist in the world that was formed by traditional institutions.

I really love how you described this. Democracies run on their institutions, but are held together by the bounds the popular will sets on power.

In reality, Google and Facebook grow more unbounded, as they continually use their power($) to buy more companies and become more horizontally-integrated organizations to add to their business models. This by proxy also absorbs the members/users of those other companies and brings them under their corporate umbrellas.

It would be like if the U.S. decided it would be good for them to own the entire Caribbean in addition to Puerto Rico, so they acquired all the islands (through power or other means) and then those citizens became some sort of pseudo-citizens of the U.S. as a result.

Isn’t this just the story of all corporations though? They start selling a niche product, and then they have three axes for growth: vertical, horizontal, and addressable market. All corporations take “breaths” on each of these axes as they see opportunities. But a corporation that grows too wide finds a more focused competitor stealing their share. A company that grows too tall sees a competitor using network effects against them. Growing the addressable market generally lifts all ships, but hits a limit once you max out global marketing.

Every company will eventually flex as far as they can on all these axes. I’m interested if you have some insight about something that makes Google particularly dangerous in the horizontal direction?

Which, in reality, the US did do with manifest destiny... Deciding to get the whole space from sea to shining sea...

But Google and Facebook are constrained and bounded by the popular will of the users.

At least when it comes to Facebook, for a significant number of people, participation in Facebook is not an actual choice. It's similarly to living without electricity: Yes, you could do it, but the costs are too large to actually do it in practice. It's still freedom of choice on paper (because no one points a gun at people and forces them to use Facebook), but not in practice. This is maybe one of Facebook's most crucial achievements: It has turned itself into something which people feel they cannot live without, even if they might hate it.

Google is a bit different story. Living without Google is doable with some but not gigantic sacrifices.

I think that's overstating it. Who literally needs Facebook as much as electricity? I'm saying this as someone who has a Facebook account, but never logs in to it or posts anything.

It's certainly overstating it, but take this example from my own life.

My step-sister spent years fighting cancer. I knew this, and would talk to her occasionally, but I wouldn't find out about significant events until after the fact.

As soon as I surrendered and finally joined Facebook, I discovered she was in the hospital again, and was able to go visit and spend some quality time with her. As it turned out, it was the best conversation we ever had, the most time I spent 1:1 with her before she passed away.

Are there other ways of keeping in touch with family? Sure. Once your family is invested in using Facebook, however, that's where you have to be to know what's going on all the time.

I dislike Facebook, and look forward to getting rid of it. I cannot, however, dismiss the unique value it offers.

That's not value that it offers; that's value that it takes away from you by displacing better means of communication and then holds for ransom.

Yes and no. Mostly no.

The only other means of communication which might have led me down the same path on that occasion was a family message board on QuickTopic.

However, frankly, Facebook is much better, for a wide variety of reasons. The message board was never ideal, privacy was a binary choice, people regularly struggled with it, photo sharing was a joke, etc. It's not at all obvious that the short hospital stay would have been communicated there.

Email, phone? Nope, wouldn't have happened.

Has Facebook displaced other communications mechanisms? Sure. But for the most part, the alternatives were far from ideal. Facebook has won by being better.

It's just unfortunate that they aren't satisfied with being a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family.

Its unique value derives only from its ubiquity (2+ billion users), not from any specific feature it offers.

How often do you call her? Lots of relationships still run on weekly phone calls to this day.

uh, what? take care not to overgeneralize your personal experiences

anyway, their pool of available actions is still constrained by user preference, even if you believe facebook is that crucial.

I recently wrote a blog post in which I described the various lock-in effects that are at play. This statement from above has little to do with my personal experience (I'm almost gone from Facebook, although not completely yet) but with actually understanding how crucial Facebook is for most people.

Here is the relevant part:

- The need to supplant emotional labor with Facebook (read Sarah Jeong’s essay on how she tried to stay away from Facebook and really felt bad about it. For many, not having Facebook means an extremely weakened social support network)

- The need to use Facebook to get required information (such as parties, events, gossip, personalized news).

- The need to use Facebook to run a business/make a living (Read: Emerging Markets Can’t Quit Facebook)

- The need to use Facebook for work-related tasks.

- The need to use Facebook to maintain and reach a personal audience (particularly relevant for influencers and people from the fields of media, marketing and communication, politicians etc.)

- The need to login to 3rd party sites with Facebook credentials"

Not everything applies to everyone. But I bet that almost every active Facebook user would recognize themselves in some of these. And unlike what the general tenor at HN suggests, most people are not willing to accept any sacrifice in order to remove Facebook from their lives.

Here's the full post https://medium.com/@martinweigert/most-people-cannot-leave-f...

> Google and Facebook are constrained and bounded by the popular will of the users.

Really? What constraint is the popular will of users exerting on what Google and Facebook do?

Can you elaborate how popular will brings authoritarianism? Seems like a complete non-sequitur.

Tyranny of the majority is a well known concept in political science. For example, initially the civil rights movement (both the civil war era, and the 1960s) and laws was quite unpopular. From a certain point of view, they were strong armed thru by activist judges and politicians who were violating the popular will.

> From a certain point of view, they were strong armed thru by activist judges and politicians who were violating the popular will.

Not just "from a certain point of view", Obi-Wan: The whole point of a constitutional system is to check the majority, to say that some laws are impermissible, no matter how much the majority wants them, because they violate some principle we regard as more important than majority rule.

But who is the "we" in this regard?

Still the majority of the population, as it happens. If serious percentages (say, 60%) of a democracy want something enough that they make it a voting issue, it'll happen eventually. You'll get a candidate who is happy to do 'everything the other guy would do + X'.

The big thing with constitutional changes is that they will normally require serious unity amongst the population, most of whom will likely by default agree with the constitution.

The majority isn't greedy and evil, they just don't put up much of a fight when the politicians 'misunderstand' and implement policy that favours the majority without accepting the damage to a minority. There are a lot of policies like that, and in many cases one suspects the politicians know exactly what they are doing but the public is intellectually lazy.

For instance, through supporting the most charismatic leader up to the point he gains enough power that not supporting him becomes dangerous.

You can’t fool all the people all the time. With the wrong political structure you only have to fool about half of them.

> Can you elaborate how popular will brings authoritarianism? Seems like a complete non-sequitur.

Someone once said, 'Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner'. Democracy, in its purest form, is arguably mob rule.

That's why constitutional democracy - democracy with limited government and the rule of law, including human rights - is the ideal and the foundation of modern government. The majority, the popular will, can't vote to take away your free speech and other rights, no matter how unpopular you are. Remember the foundation of the U.S. is the assertion that 'all men' have "inalienable rights", and that governments exist to protect those rights.

It's not proven that " constitutional democracy" is the ideal. The "foundation of modern government" says that a Black person as no rights, but counts as 3/5ths of a person for their master's voting rights.

Modern constitutional democracy and republicanism were developed during the 17th and 18th century by Enlightenment authors (Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu). They setup some fairly novel concepts for enabling representative government, including the idea that rights derive from the principle of authority (Locke) and the idea of separation of powers to limit authoritarianism (Montesquieu).

Ideal is hard to quantify here, but if we focus on maximizing representation and effectiveness at the same time, then it's fair to say that these forms of government were uniquely successful. Despite their flaws and failures, they still seem to be the best at maximizing those two variables. Prior to the U.S., people accepted Plato's sensibility that all forms of democracy devolve into authoritarianism -- which obviously is a meme that persists today. (It's worth pointing out that at the same time the U.S. was forming, France had its democratic revolution which ultimately settled into Napoleonic rule.)

The racism of the Enlightenment authors I mentioned is fairly staggering. It's hard to reconcile that with their work, even at the time it was written. Despite that, America now has 100% suffrage and managed to retain its government structure (via a civil war).

> It's not proven that " constitutional democracy" is the ideal. The "foundation of modern government" says that a Black person as no rights, but counts as 3/5ths of a person for their master's voting rights.

Great point; I agree that I shouldn't have used the word "ideal", because it's not at all ideal. Constitutional democracy sucks; it's just much better than any alternative. (I think Churchill said that.)

>...Constitutional democracy sucks; it's just much better than any alternative. (I think Churchill said that.)

He said something like that, but he didn't say he originated the thought. In the house of Commons, he once said:

"...Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government

I was under the impression that it was "liberal" democracy that gives rise to principles-over-majority rule in practice. The idea being that government authority is derived from the will of the majority just as strongly as it is derived from the rights of the minority.

This seems much more closely aligned with the principles of liberalism than it does constitutionalism. Any dictator can write a constitution and derive authority from it. They can't, however, practice authoritarianism through the practice of liberal principles.

> "liberal" democracy

I see this as a matter of terminology, not meaning. Here's what I know:

I've seen "constitutional democracy" used by experts, though not often enough to say it's a term of art in that field. Certainly I've seen experts say that the basic formula = (democracy) + (constitution that protects minority rights and limits government).

And certainly "liberal democracy" also is used to describe that form of government. Those liberal principles are enshrined in the constitutions; I don't know if that defines "liberal democracy".

> Any dictator can write a constitution and derive authority from it.

That would omit an essential component of the 'formula', democracy.

I think you're right, at least in an academic sense. I just associate "minority rights" with "liberal" by applying the principle that people should be allowed to do whatever unless there is a (relatively) objectively justifiable reason to do otherwise. So enshrining that principle in a constitution makes for a liberal and minority-rights protecting component, while the democracy makes for the authority-of-the-majority component which counterbalances it.

> enshrining that principle in a constitution makes for a liberal and minority-rights protecting component, while the democracy makes for the authority-of-the-majority component which counterbalances it

Very interesting way to think about it. Thanks.

Such blather just gives people a guaranteed argument in favor of their opinion. If the majority is in agreement, great--majority rules. If the majority isn't in agreement, great--they are suckers for fascists.

The devil's in the details. There isn't really such a thing as popular will - there are a lot of people who all want different things and who can change their minds. What can happen in practice is you have a referendum like the brexit one where there is a lot of misinformation and the vote goes 48-52 one way or the and then the more fascist tabloids go on that the result is the will of the people and anyone who questions it is an enemy of the people etc. Much of the language originates with Hitler and Stalin who used that stuff in worse ways.

> Popular will is not and never has been a sustainable form of authority.

This is a strange claim. It could mean a number of things, but the senses in which it is defensible seem like stretches.

Popular will brings fascism and authoritarianism because it is a source of authority. It has been the well-documented foundation of extremely powerful dictators going back to the ancient Greek tyrants. It was the basis of Julius Caesar's authority, and while it proved unsustainable for him, it was also crucially important for the emperors that followed him for the next few hundred years.

At the other end of history, it has been a bedrock of the authority of recent dictators in Germany, Italy, Latin America, China, Russia, Africa, Korea, etc. etc. etc. etc.

You could make the argument that governmental authority, over the course of centuries, doesn't generally derive directly from the popular will. But there are three problems with that argument: first, people generally don't care about whether the popular will 300 years from now will endorse the institutions of today. Second, while it is true that governmental authority over long periods does not derive from the popular will, it is always pretty harshly constrained by it. Third, religious organizations routinely do derive substantial authority solely from popular support, and they do this for many centuries at a time.

> Institutions like “don’t be evil”, and “we will never sell your data”, are the entire reason why the current batch of tech earned enough trust to exist at all.

And then, once they had earned our trust, they broke those institutions. So if they are the only alternative to "popular will", then it looks like we're screwed.

Yeah, a pure democracy would be an absolute shithole. You don't want to live in a world where people's reddit votes determine every action of state, from legislation to foreign policy and war to incarceration. Kind of like that episode of The Orville.

How do you have democracy without popular will?

This is a very american centric perspective due to decades of propaganda by libertarians who want to set up an artificial divide between government and people. See 'Democracy in Chains' by Nancy Maclean.

The government is you in a democracy, it's there to protect your and everyone else's interests, that what democracy and rule of law means. It's what guarantees a somewhat civilized society. It is not this simplistic 'majority can do what they want' illiteracy spread by market fundamentalists.

Markets have existed for thousands of years, it did not lead to any civilization then and cannot now. Discrimination, segregation, slavery, plunder and exploitation are the result of uncontrolled capitalism and free markets, not democracy and 'popular will'. Anyone who knows history and human greed understands this instinctively.

It appears some people become rich and increasingly alienated from people, society and government and begin to believe they don't need government. This is the kind of hubris that leads to tyranny and quasi feudalism, which is of course what they want.

Please explain the difference between “don’t be evil” and “Do the right thing”.

”do the right thing” requires taking action

“Don’t be evil” can be achieved passively

For example, if you spend all day watching TV you probably haven’t done evil, but you probably also haven’t done anything ‘right’

Right and evil are both words with a lot subjective meaning

It's easier to agree on what's evil than what's right

The author is obviously alluding to democracy.

> Institutions like “don’t be evil”
Google is evil. Maybe they weren't at some point, but they absolutely are now.

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