Comment by singingbard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by singingbard | Hacker News Reader

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The founders were skeptical of direct democracy because it assumes people have time and expertise they mostly don’t. People should not be voting based on their understanding of tariffs. It’s why we ended up with a republic.

But social media changes the equation entirely. It gives us the speed of direct democracy without any of the structure or responsibility. It pushes people to judge candidates issue-by-issue, often on topics they don’t understand well, while eroding the deliberative layers a republic is supposed to have.

The problem isn’t people or education — America didn’t get this far because Americans are any smarter or dumber than anyone else. It’s the design of the systems. The founding fathers built a system that has so far lasted almost 250 years.

You cannot expect people to change — safety protocols, procedures, govenments — it’s about the systems.

In my book it is the duty of a democratic state to keep its population educated to make educated decisions. If you look at countries with more direct democracy like Switzerland not all the decisions are perfect, but they are by no means worse than if you had replaced the public vote with politicians that are heavily lobbied by corporate interest and have a time horizon that ends at their next election.

In fact you will find that in many cases the population will even vote for unpopular measures if they are discussed and understood well ahead of the decision.

But in the end that requires a decent education of the masses, a well functioning and uncaptured media landscape and a certain amount of democratic practise, all of which are missing in big parts of the US.

Democracy is something everybody actively needs to work on, otherwise it withers. If you want to have a nice village it works best if everybody perceives themselves as an agent of creating a nice village. If you want a shit village, you best give everybody the impression it is somebody elses task.

I think you've hit on a good point. As a society we're still trying to figure out how to rule ourselves in the age of Social Media.

Let's pray we're able to figure it out before more blood is shed.

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