Euthanizing Democracy: The Assisted Death of Liberalism

[rangerrebew]

Euthanizing Democracy: The Assisted Death of Liberalism
Author:
Vedran ‘Maz’ Maslic

Authoritarian states have weaponised the vulnerabilities of technology and unchecked power of social media to exploit the very tenet of democracy that they despise – free expression – to undermine democracy itself.
Abstract

Democracy is on life support! At least, that appears to be a dominant narrative in our public discourse. Driven in large part by populist upheavals motivated by genuine grievances against the established status quo and its ruling elites, technology—in particular social media—has taken extreme and polarising voices to scale. In a world of near-ubiquitous and evermore intrusive connectivity, fuelled by micro-segmenting algorithms, democracy as an idea remains ill-equipped to defend itself against the powerful and persistent centrifugal forces of technology. Although fundamentally a crisis of our own doing, or at least our acquiescence, the vulnerabilities of technology have now become weapons of choice employed by militarily and economically weaker authoritarian states such as Russia and China in their seemingly unrestrained struggle against the West. Hence, the aim of this paper is to highlight the threat posed by social media, and those who seek to exploit it, to democratic ideals, as well as to propose a model to protect them, represented by the acronym DARE (Defend, Assist, Regulate, and Educate). Although a significant challenge, as this paper describes, standing up against the forces seeking to undermine democratic values is ultimately a matter of choice, rather than capability. While not a panacea to the underlying tensions enabling polarisation within our societies, acting swiftly to stem the damage caused by such technologies must take centre stage if we are to save the democratic experiment.

‘…if Russia tries to fly a plane in the United States, there's a Pentagon whose job it is and will successfully shoot down that plane before it gets anywhere near the United States, but if they try to fly an information plane into the United States to sow division, Facebook and Google's algorithms say, "What zip code do you want to target?"’ (Harris, 2020, 41:32min)

https://theforge.defence.gov.au/publications/euthanizing-democracy-assisted-death-liberalism

[Kamaji]

Of course.  And I said, many, many years ago, that encouraging everyone to speak their mind, no matter how trivial or stupid the point, was a much more potent means of suppressing political dissent than was putting dissidents in prison.  Because if everyone is consumed with having their say, they don't have any time to pay attention to what anyone else is saying, except insofar as they grab the first few words, or a couple of key words, to use as a strawman in their own incoherent speaking.

Social media has proved the point, unfortunately.