4 ms·

I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of polit

I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one. The potential power from controlling them outshadows their profits.

jaybrendansmith 4y ago
This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they are entitled to their own FACTS. This is truly the challenge of the present, and I feel we are going to shortly lose our Democracy to bad actors who are more than willing to use our own intellectual weaknesses against us.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- abigail95 4y ago
  Democracy is majority rule. Democracy is nothing about facts or opinions. You are the one impacting democracy by saying we cannot survive if we keep current democratic rules. You can have the best argument for improving society by limiting who is allowed to vote, what things you're allowed to vote on, and what facts you are allowed to talk about. It can even be a true argument that would make everyone better off. But if it's less democracy, then it's anti-democratic. If you care about minorities and people generally, that's good, if you care about democracy, that's bad. The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. The intelligence of the population has nothing to do with it.
  - prewett 4y ago
    Well, you can also loose a democracy by governing so ineptly that the country falls apart or gets invaded. Also, Plato foresaw democracy descending to the point where people elected a dictator to bring order to the chaos, although that's covered in your post. If the population cannot/will not distinguish reality from what they wish were reality (a disease afflicting both the American left and the right, although in different areas), then the chances of inept leadership or believing the lies of leftist authoritarians or rightist authoritarians increases.
  - bigbacaloa 4y ago
    The US is a republic not a democracy. Representation is not proportional.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    > The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. Or for the people in power to ignore the actual vote and do what they want to do anyway. See the large group of election deniers currently in government or running for office.
  - jaybrendansmith 4y ago
    So the winner in a Democracy or Republic should be the one who most successfully implements weaponized propaganda? The one who fills the airwaves and has the loudest megaphone and the money for the most ad buys? That is emphatically not what the founders of the United States intended, however much they may have initially limited the definition of a citizen. They expected the citizens to make reasoned choices, to be educated, to be well-read and to be rational actors. I highly suggest 'Common Sense' by Tom Paine.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  I had a similar realization, and then I realized this is even worse. It's not about being duped. Getting to the truth is a really hard problem. I also suspect at this point there is fault injection. There are actors spreading false information with the intention of catching others believing it. I saw some cases where fact checkers had access to suspiciously hard to get information "disproving" a claim someone else picked up. The kind of information you're more likely to know because you created the lie in the first case. In the specific case I could even quantify the probability that they stumbled on that information (it required a choice from thousands of items, with very low probability of being the disproving item), and it had a very low probability.
buscoquadnary 4y ago
> I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. I think these men were more aware of it than possibly anytime in history. One of the biggest reasons that the US was able to become independent was because of the ability of people to spread their ideas through the mass media of newspaper that had recently become something that pretty much anyone could get access to. Or would you argue men who saw the power of the word with Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or made their arguments to the people through the nationally published "Federalist Papers" really were unaware of the power available when people could freely communicate ideas. To pretend that mass media is a new phenomenon is to ignore that there have always been massive changes and shifts in society as media has evolved from the printing press to the radio each one marked a period of turbulence, and each time we have adapted and moved forward. To pretend that we are uniquely privileged in all of history as inherently understanding more than our forefathers merely because we can do it faster, is in my mind, the height of arrogance. No person thinks they are the intellectual superior of Newton at physics just because we have relativity, I don't know many who would argue they'd surpass Turing as a Computer Scientist just because we have structured languages, I think we could assume that there is at least some wisdom in those who revolutionized (no pun intended) their field?
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things. It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership. I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest. And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code. I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good. I'm just not sure if the 1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?

jaybrendansmith 4y ago

This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they are entitled to their own FACTS. This is truly the challenge of the present, and I feel we are going to shortly lose our Democracy to bad actors who are more than willing to use our own intellectual weaknesses against us.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abigail95 4y ago
Democracy is majority rule. Democracy is nothing about facts or opinions. You are the one impacting democracy by saying we cannot survive if we keep current democratic rules. You can have the best argument for improving society by limiting who is allowed to vote, what things you're allowed to vote on, and what facts you are allowed to talk about. It can even be a true argument that would make everyone better off. But if it's less democracy, then it's anti-democratic. If you care about minorities and people generally, that's good, if you care about democracy, that's bad. The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. The intelligence of the population has nothing to do with it.
- prewett 4y ago
  Well, you can also loose a democracy by governing so ineptly that the country falls apart or gets invaded. Also, Plato foresaw democracy descending to the point where people elected a dictator to bring order to the chaos, although that's covered in your post. If the population cannot/will not distinguish reality from what they wish were reality (a disease afflicting both the American left and the right, although in different areas), then the chances of inept leadership or believing the lies of leftist authoritarians or rightist authoritarians increases.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
  The US is a republic not a democracy. Representation is not proportional.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  > The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. Or for the people in power to ignore the actual vote and do what they want to do anyway. See the large group of election deniers currently in government or running for office.
- jaybrendansmith 4y ago
  So the winner in a Democracy or Republic should be the one who most successfully implements weaponized propaganda? The one who fills the airwaves and has the loudest megaphone and the money for the most ad buys? That is emphatically not what the founders of the United States intended, however much they may have initially limited the definition of a citizen. They expected the citizens to make reasoned choices, to be educated, to be well-read and to be rational actors. I highly suggest 'Common Sense' by Tom Paine.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
I had a similar realization, and then I realized this is even worse. It's not about being duped. Getting to the truth is a really hard problem. I also suspect at this point there is fault injection. There are actors spreading false information with the intention of catching others believing it. I saw some cases where fact checkers had access to suspiciously hard to get information "disproving" a claim someone else picked up. The kind of information you're more likely to know because you created the lie in the first case. In the specific case I could even quantify the probability that they stumbled on that information (it required a choice from thousands of items, with very low probability of being the disproving item), and it had a very low probability.

buscoquadnary 4y ago

> I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. I think these men were more aware of it than possibly anytime in history. One of the biggest reasons that the US was able to become independent was because of the ability of people to spread their ideas through the mass media of newspaper that had recently become something that pretty much anyone could get access to. Or would you argue men who saw the power of the word with Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or made their arguments to the people through the nationally published "Federalist Papers" really were unaware of the power available when people could freely communicate ideas. To pretend that mass media is a new phenomenon is to ignore that there have always been massive changes and shifts in society as media has evolved from the printing press to the radio each one marked a period of turbulence, and each time we have adapted and moved forward. To pretend that we are uniquely privileged in all of history as inherently understanding more than our forefathers merely because we can do it faster, is in my mind, the height of arrogance. No person thinks they are the intellectual superior of Newton at physics just because we have relativity, I don't know many who would argue they'd surpass Turing as a Computer Scientist just because we have structured languages, I think we could assume that there is at least some wisdom in those who revolutionized (no pun intended) their field?

machina_ex_deus 4y ago
It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things. It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership. I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest. And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code. I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good. I'm just not sure if the 1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?