In a article in Vox¹ summarizing a podcast with Yuval Harari, I noted the following quote from Yuval:

For most of history, there was no possibility of creating large-scale democratic structures because the information technology was missing. Democracy is basically a conversation between a lot of people, and in a small tribe or a small city-state, thousands of years ago, you could get the entire population or a large percentage of the population, let’s say, of ancient Athens in the city square to decide whether to go to war with Sparta or not. It was technically feasible to hold a conversation. But there was no way that millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers could talk to each other. There was no way they could hold the conversation in real time. Therefore, you have not a single example of a large-scale democracy in the pre-modern world. All the examples are very small scale.

Large-scale democracy became possible only after the rise of the newspaper and the telegraph and radio and television. And now you can have a conversation between millions of people spread over a large territory. So democracy is built on top of information technology. Every time there is a big change in information technology, there is an earthquake in democracy which is built on top of it. And this is what we’re experiencing right now with social media algorithms and so forth. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of democracy. The question is, will democracy adapt?

This thesis explains why democracies such as Greek city states and the Roman Republic were not followed by the continued development of democratic government. Instead we wait until the USA is created in 1776 after low cost printing has become widely available. Until the press, there were no meaningful communications developments or inventions that lowered the cost to spread information to a large audience or group.

So if democracy is built on information technology, which is currently changing (or maybe already changed) to be social network based, that means the topics we discuss and how they are framed are controlled by algorithms designed to maximize "engagement". Engagement (aka clicks and reads) are best increased from driving strong emotional responses—essentially outrage—so that's what we get in abundance in social media. How can democracy work when the underlying information is primarily designed to drive outrage but not an understanding of alternative viewpoints and truthfulness is of little value? The outrage factory undermines an effort to seek compromise, which is the life blood of democracy. In a democratic group we don't get what WE want, instead we must consider the views of others and reach a compromise that all can live with.

Is it any wonder that our politics and government feels broken no matter who is in charge?

1 Yuval Noah Harari on whether democracy and AI can coexist, “If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?" by Sean Illing, Sep 27, 2024↵