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I hope that at some point American society as a whole will collectively reflect on the fact that it appears that swaying public opinion is not hard. What are t
by sykh 9y ago
I hope that at some point American society as a whole will collectively reflect on the fact that it appears that swaying public opinion is not hard. What are the implications of this in terms of having a republican form of government? If collectively we can be swayed, or nudged in such a way that we will back certain policies then in what way are we free? Each of us tends to think we have free will and that we make our own decisions but it's clear that, statistically speaking, this isn't true when speaking about the population as a whole.
Of course attempts to say public opinion have been going on for thousands of years but what is new is the scale and ease at which this can be done. It was much harder back when there were hundreds of independent newspapers and when information exchange was much more costly both in terms of time and in expense. Now that vast amounts of information about hundreds of millions of people have been collected it's much easier to influence opinion.
What implications does this have for free speech? For instance, should algorithmically generated text garner the same free speech protections as I do? Should a couple of companies be in charge of the vast amount of data collected about us?
I'm reminded of an Isaac Asimov story about the future where only one person votes for President. The person has been chosen by a computer as being representative of the general population and he/she has the sole vote.
- anonnel 9y agoThe implication could be that democracy is in real danger. Beyond the ease of swaying public opinion and effecting traditional elections, mass "voting" on social media provides an alternative infrastructure for political "consensus" which could replace traditional voting in a worst-case situation. Just a scenario: Say you want to galvanize an entire population into submitting to autocratic rule. It could be done like so - 1) Grab the attention of the public with a salacious controversy. Bolster widespread memes and juvenile conversation regarding that controversy on social media, engaging a large share of the population. 2) Perform some action which causes street protests (fire a well known investigator, etc.) Use social media to brigade violence on the protestors. "On the street" protesting dwindles as people would rather be safe, causing protest and attention to move online. 4) The online realm would now have high attention, split into a contrived binary contest: protest-related content versus salacious controversy-related content. At this point it is easy to start to drown out protest content by brigading salacious memes and cracking normalizing jokes. 5) As the population watches this happening, start hacking power outages in cities which have the most protest-related content, causing riots and chaos in those regions. Seeing this, hold-out regions will convert for the sake of their own safety. As hold-outs are marginalized, their scale becomes more manageable and it becomes possible to direct energy toward individuals. 6) People begin to understand that the online vote is basically a demand for loyalty at the threat of violence. Videos of Hold-out individuals being attacked begin to surface. ... without going further down a Black Mirror-esque rabbit hole, I just mean to point out the worst-case type danger that the apparatus of social media and internet tracking can present. The scale of social control that could be on the horizon should be quite concerning.
- mnm1 9y agoThe republican form of government is clearly an unsuccessful form. Where is evidence that it works at all? Every single country that has it has huge corruption problems, election problems, or both. Maybe it's time to let go of this dumb idea that should have been left back in high school: "let the popular kids in school rule." We have the technology (USPS) and have had it for well over a hundred years to do direct democracy and have the people actually rule instead of this metaphorical "rule by the people" that is a joke. As far as I can tell, other republics are no better. Whether the corruption is legal (US) or not (most other countries), the outcome is the same. But perhaps it is not man's nature to desire freedom. I think few people actually do and too many pretend to.
- mercer 9y agoI don't see a need to be partisan about it. The dynamics of power and corruption are strong enough that whichever 'side' they pick is relatively irrelevant.
- scrub_tier 9y agoPerhaps the poster isn't particularly articulate. There are hawks on both sides of the isle, but I'm not necessarily convinced that they're comparably equal. I personally would be interested who's backers benefit most from policies of force, and perhaps map it to their economic incentives in state economies and campaigning. I get the impression it's at least publicly conceived that Republican appeal to a more hardline defensive policies looking back 4 administrations, at least at a policy level.
- mnm1 9y agoNo you completely misunderstood the argument like the other comment and capitalized republican when I clearly had it lowercase and am obviously talking about republics, not the Republican party.
- mnm1 9y agoThis isn't a partisan issue. I'm obviously taking about republics, not the Republican party.