Is democracy dying?

It's easy to view the past as some romantic fairy tale.

In reality the world has probably never been more democratic than it is today. The current political trends might flip in a few years. Things might be moving backwards, but the US might still have stronger oversight of it's intelligence agencies than it did in the 70'ties?

As long as people aren't silently outraged we'll be okay :)

Don't get me wrong: i won't be happy with 0.001% ruling over me. This is the case in Russia, and i left it.

But i am fine with anywhere from 1% to 10% ruling over me. These will be better voters than the average Joes. It's not OK that propaganda trickery, playing on people's instincts and knowledge of psychological crowd behavior laws is what defines election outcomes. Elections should not be like clicking on Facebook ads. Or only ways to save Western societies would be adopting some like of Putinism when elections are kept but made irrelevant.

Just imagine that Zuck may just decide who will the next President be, by slight adjustments to Facebook feed algorithms? Who can blame him, it is a private business after all right? With people with no property and nothing to lose, who kill their time on nonsense jobs browsing facebook, voting (and they actively vote!), this may very well be possible.

50 years ago when the U.S. was a wide middle class society with most people having something like a career and some property, and feeling that they have a good future which can be optimised by choosing their leaders wisely, and technology of TV manipulation was in its infancy, it may have worked better. But today in the world of mass precariat, who have no good future and know it (and any politician promising them one is a liar), and with whole generation of best engineers and data scientists spent years perfecting mass manipulation through mining people brains, i just can't see it working anymore. It is a threat to itself.

No. It's true that democracy was weakened when the early "wild west" internet interfered with broadcast media's ability to steer public conversation. The temporary result was a rise of anti-democratic populism in the west.

However, democracy is already reasserting itself, as governments and capital learn how to shape consensus formation on the internet.

Think about this: Looking at the past few years it's becoming more and more clear that data has an enormous value and grants a lot of power to the entities that are able to extract knowledge out of it. In turn, this knowledge could shape a policy that will yield the desired outcome much more reliably. Up until now, democracy, with its distributed governance system has had a significant advantage over more concentrated forms of governance systems. Simply since making decisions involved more people, and therefore, the decision process was much more controlled.

Now, it seems like dictatorships is on the verge of getting the upper hand. In democracies, there are limitations on data accumulation (privacy laws) and data is distributed across government entities in a way that is (sometimes even intentionally) hard to consolidate. In dictatorships, data for all entities could be concentrated in one location, granting the government a lot of power if it will use the data to its full extent. China is a great such example, they are working towards this goal as we speak, by putting cameras everywhere, monitoring all Internet traffic, and more...

The Sovereign Individual and Atlas Shrugged have interesting alternatives to democracy. Just work in ones rational self interest and watch the world collapse as you rebuild your own.

Not saying that’s a good alternative to democracy, but it sure is interesting