I do not think we have enough historical evidence for such an extrapolation. Human societies have been getting more and more complex, necessitating more and more complex governance. We are at a point of crisis, where the electorate is supposed to decide through voting, and our elected politicians are supposed to decide through legislation, on topics that neither the electorate, nor the elected are able to fully understand. It is not clear to me that democracy will triumph.
Sure we do. Go read H.G. Wells "The World Set Free". It's pre WWII, covers these exact topics, and could have been written yesterday. When it was written none of the problems were new.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
That's a non sequitur. Just because human societies have been getting more and more complex doesn't necessarily mean we need more and more complex governance. We might be better off with radically less governance, and just accept the consequences that sometimes bad things will happen due to lack of governance.
The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
> It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP replacement protocols years back that were being developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
> It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
What was this based on?