Local rules instead of global censorship

While the combined wealth of all voters exceeds that of the few lobbyists, in theory votes should win.

It's good to recall that democracy didn't come about in a vaccuum; It came about to displace monarchy. Because democracy is "fair", the aristocrats are among us with at least as much power as any of the rest of us.

The greater the wealth disparity, however, the more power they can purchase by bribing the poor politicians. Which in turn begs the masses to pay politicians well enough that corruption becomes at best unnecessary. The only remaining cure for greed is transparency, accountability, and journalism.

Therefore it is in the wealthy elite's interest to lobby for laws that erode any established amounts of the aforementioned qualities, steadily inching the power structures towards secrecy, carte blanche, and censorship.

Can you think of any government agency that has such powers? I'm thinking of several, and most of them are in the US. Capitalism is allergic to wealth redistribution, which is the true name for the action that begins to solve the issue. The only question is: How much?

One practical example is speeding tickets. AFAIK in the US speeding tickets are flat fees. So a wealthy person barely cares about speeding in traffic. In Finland, a more socialist republic, speeding tickets are proportional to income. So a wealthy person speeding will feel the hurt. Every so often some asshole with a Ferrari gets a million dollar speeding ticket. (possibly exaggerated, don't recall exact amounts)

Democracy is to place power into the hands of each individual, every form of centralized power necessarily pulls this power away from people and into the hands of a limited number of individuals. Democracy isn't so much threatened but actually harmed by the mere existence of centralized power.

Also to add, centralized political systems cannot be truly "democratic". The middle ages were far more democratic than our modern enlightened times. Canadian historian Francis Dupuis-Déri writing in the book "Démocratie: Histoire politique d’un mot aux États-Unis et en France":

"During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, thousands of villages had an organized assembly where communal decisions were made. The 'community of inhabitants', which even had legal status, functioned for centuries by a process of self-management. Kings and nobles were content to manage affairs related to wars or their own private property, to administer justice, and to now and then mobilize their subjects for common chores. The hierarchical or aristocratic authorities did not interfere in the affairs of the community, which met to deliberate on political communal, financial, judicial and parochial issues. They discussed the sharing of the harvest and sale of the surplus, the cutting of wood on communal land, the repair of bridges, wells and mills, and the hiring of instructors, shepherds, watchmakers, forest guards, sometimes even parish priests, and guards when brigands, wolves or epidemics were rampant. They designated those who would serve in the militia, debated the obligation of lodging the royal court should it visit, or the utility of sending a notable to submit to the court of grievances in the nature of community."

A focus on individual responsibility for security and for integrity refocuses the issue on foundational Confucian principles (for every individual, be: benevolent, righteous, have propriety, build wisdom, and have fidelity), creates a culture of trust, diversity and competence. These things are much better for a thriving society, whether the label for the systems is democratic, dogmacratic, bureaucratic, or plutocratic.

(p.s. I am Australian, not Chinese. I just have an appreciation for learning from your rivals)

Lobbying does hurt, societies more in centralized governments due to stronger trickle down effects. As the top of the organisation is linked to multiple parts of the system.

But, there is however another reason why centralized governments are really not as effective as we want them to be.

There is the notion that, a centralized system (top down) simply cannot process requests of a society as well as a ground up system (decentralized).

This Idea was articulated by F. A Hayek in his essay "The use of Knowledge in society" [0].

To summarize Hayek's case in point, his reason was that, as requests to process tasks make their way up to bureaucracy, information about the granularities and complexities of the needs are lost. The more bureaucracy the less effective the service delivery.

[0]: https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/

It is not only the "super rich" who lobby and benefit. All advocacy groups trying to make voices heard are lobbying.

The key in a democracy is that lobbying be conducted legally and transparently.

Lobbying is a consequence of a professional political class. Those who make and implement laws need to be knowledgeable about laws, which is why such large numbers are lawyers. In a government that values competence and experience, those in high positions get there by spending years if not decades doing similar, lower level jobs. But if you spend your life in government, when would you have the opportunity to learn the intricacies of non-government life? What fraction of congress has actually worked on a farm? How many cabinet members have ever worked in a factory? How would a president know what it's like to be a refugee? Politicians need information from non-politicians to form and implement coherent policies that work for the people. Enter the lobbyist.

At its core, that's all lobbying is: relaying the views of interest groups to the people in power. We talk about it as a dirty thing because it is so easy for it to become a dirty thing, but it isn't inherently one. Unfortunately it's a slippery slope from legitimate lobbying to graft: even an honest politician will be more easily swayed by better presentation, more money allows a lobbyist to make a better presentation, lobbyists seek to align themselves with those who have money so they can make their better presentations, and soon enough the original cause is an afterthought.

That said, there is nothing about a centralized governance which makes lobbying easier, nor anything about decentralized governance that makes lobbying less necessary. Your local city councilman is just as clueless about the infinite number of things they didn't do instead of pursuing their path, and they are generally just as open to being wined and dined. Indeed local governments tend to be much more prone to graft than the central ones (though this may simply be due to the fact that there are so many more people to potentially corrupt).

Getting professionals in government the information they need to govern without giving undo influence to those handing them that information is a serious open problem in modern democracy, but decentralization doesn't seem like a solution.

One of the most widely respected lobbies in America is the Fraternal Order of Police. And I don't think anyone would consider them super-rich, or even "rich".

There's two types of articles around politicized topics like this:

1. Those dealing with Why: for the unconverted

2. Those dealing with How: for the converted

Both types are necessary, but I feel often articles that are being read by "the converted" spend far too long trying to deal with the "Why" (preaching to the converted). So this article is refreshing in that sense.

Democracies are incompatible with censorship.

> Currently lobbies have more power in the decision process than voters (any political sciences professor will agree). So democracy is a hollow word, or worse: a facade, a lie.

I agree that lobbies have far more power than citizens, and that this is a problem. However, maybe I'm misreading you, but it seems like you might be implying that since we don't have democracy anyway, censorship is fine? Of course, that's not true; we don't want to actively invest in preventing ourselves from getting back to something we can meaningfully call "democracy" by way of legitimizing censorship. Again, probably not your intended meaning, but I wanted to address it anyway.

While we're talking about corporations having too much power, let's talk about social media companies--they can influence our society directly. They don't have to pay people to petition congress on their behalf; they can pay Twitter and Facebook for access (think "Social Dilemma"). Indeed, they have so much power that we were concerned circa 2017 that the Russians were able to indirectly use their influence over us to corrupt the 2016 POTUS election; how much more influence must Twitter and Facebook (and now Chinese-owned TikTok) have over our democracy given that they have direct access to those algorithmic levers? The super rich can now lobby and pay Twitter/Facebook/etc in order to pass their policies.

The current state of content moderation - or lack thereof - on these platforms didn't happen by accident. It's the direct consequence of their business model.

If you create a digital space and you host millions of people, you will also pull in the fraught complexity of human relationships. The digital space isn't free from the same challenges regarding governance of communities you'd encounter in the physical world.

However, the businesses that provide the infrastructure and engineering that underpins digital spaces aren't in the "building communities" business. They are selling advertising and business intelligence. Which is a very different proposition.

As such, the very design of the large platforms never quite incorporated proper tooling that models the complexities of (self) governing millions of people in a central digital space. On the contrary.

Recommendation engines - people who you know, people to follow, this might interest you as well, this article was shared x times,... - do the exact opposite. They have helped shape emerging social dynamics which are spilling over in the real world, with real world consequences, creating social feedback loops that escape control.

Rather then acknowledging this fundamental issue, these centralized platforms assumed that they could solve this through centralized content filtering, or through centralized human moderation teams which have to follow company policies. Which is an incredibly difficult proposition considering the amount of digital data produced daily by billions of people.

So, why did they chose this type of content moderation? Because the social issues that stem from these platforms are seen as an expense which ought to be externalized. There's only an incentive to invest in content moderation to the point where the issues caused by the people they host are threatening the performance of the business model.

In that regard, I think that a "social media market" were platforms provide affordances for equitable (self)governance of communities involves a fundamental reflection/reshaping/rethinking/overhaul of the business models and business incentives that underpin such a market.

I am glad to see the community continually re-discover this site now and again.

I think this is dangerous thinking, lies are bad but censorship is worse because someone has to decide what is a lie and what isn't, and that quickly becomes politicised. That never works out well. Since you mention Turkey, look at the current government's suppression of journalism. Freedom of expression must be protected as a legal right to maintain democracy.

On the other hand, freedom of expression includes the freedom not to facilitate other people's speech if you choose. I fully support the Parler people's right to propagate whatever bullshit they like as long as it isn't planning or inciting crimes. Equally I completely support Twitter, Facebook, AWS, etc's right to choose what they do and do not allow on their platforms. That's freedom too.

This is all part of the process of civil discourse. However uncivil it might seem right now, it's something we all need to work out as free citizens.

Turns out people really like the big monolithic websites with the most users though...

My understanding of the term is that RSS & Webmentions are part of the Fediverse. Email is probably the best-known part of the Fediverse. ActivityPub is just a new/upcoming technology that's as much a part of the Web as RSS.

Not everything in the Fediverse is part of the Web: email, mastodon & matrix are examples that exist outside of the Web (though mastodon is mostly Web-based, and there is also webmail, Element webapp, etc.).

And obviously, not everything in the Web is part of the Fediverse: mainly Facebook, but also most SaaS out there.

In fact it's precisely because democracy worked so well that the MAGA core lost their shit and tried to over-rule it. They failed, democracy won, a few extremists are dead or will end up in prison and it's time to move on. I just feel bad for the cop who lost his life, and his family.

The factor Switzerland seems to have in common with other liberal democracies of that size is being based in Europe, something it also shares with a larger liberal democracies. Exceptional features like the canton system, regular referenda and not going to war are unique to Switzerland (and arguably not as attractive as they superficially sound)

- Germany vs France in regards to Corona: similar sized countries, yet I venture that Germany has been doing far better than France in dealing with the pandemic. Maybe it is because the local governors have a better idea of what are the real challenges of their regions than some bureaucrat sitting in Berlin?

- Bavaria takes too much money from the federal government: maybe that would be an argument to have less federal taxes and more to the state-level. Remove power from the central entity, and there will be less of an incentive/risk of abuse?

- EU: you say probably to something that every Euro-skeptic has been saying for decades already. People outside of the Germany/France/Italy circle are getting more and more tired of losing autonomy over their lives, business and even who they get to have as neighbors to someone in Brussels, who has more to gain by listening to lobbyists than their voters.

> there is at least the chance that the central governance actually represents all of the population.

No. Not at the scales that we talking about and not at this globalized world that we have. In today's world, all that central governance does is foment polarization in order to run divide-and-conquer of the people. Maybe (if you are lucky) you get some alternance of power so that no single group gets to be in control and some equilibrium gets to be established.

You can also think of it like a terrorist wanting to bomb people, would you have more success in a dense area or if everyone is spread out?

With more small sites, instead of a few large sites it spreads out communities and insulates them. With centralized networks, it create a "mother vein" where it's easier to plug into a large stream of users with little effort. No doubt capitalist extremists want centralized services too because they can convert everyone to their ideology, consumerism.

It is 2016 election all over again, media chooses their favorite "evil" and promote it to death.

Decentralization stops radicalisation, because it allows free discussion.

It's really not. The most perfidious thing centralized platforms do is promote controversial content to increase engagement. This is a double fail of centralization because, first, that's their business model, and second, everything they screw up happens at scale.

Decentralizing things would create, let's call it, algorithm diversity. Not everybody is finding things the same way as everybody else, so esoteric garbage mistakenly promoted by somebody's bad code doesn't have as much reach.

And the business model could be different. Or at least there could be more than one.

The sad reality is that humanity is not ready for something like the Internet. If you said dumb shit in your town's square, you'd get hit upside your head. Say it on the Internet, your little numbers go up and you get a dopamine hit.

What does it mean to "remove the cancer before it decentralizes" in this context?

I have a slight different idea that is also very unpopular. I don't think you should be able to "broadcast" anonymously. When you say things that are illegal, like death threats and hate speech, you should be held responsible.

I think privacy is important, and I think you should be able to consume content anonymously, but I don't think you should be able to "post" anonymously.

Allow politicians to censor? Well it will be available for for both Joe Biden as well as the next Republican president.

This is why one needs to be careful.

You also seem to think that decentralization would lead to less emphasis on local happenings. Why? If we moved away from a handful of services for the whole planet, wouldn't the logical next phase be a service or two per city? A decentralized web means knowing the guy who runs the server you're connecting to. A decentralizalized internet means configuring your router to peer with routers in the houses that you can see from your house. Relocalization seems like an obvious consequence of decentralizalization to me.

And make no mistake, what they mean in reality by the above is always the same, namely that "free speech" will mean you are freely allowed to repeat the talking points of the Party.