-OpEd-
ROME — Democracy has always been slow, complex, confusing. It is no coincidence that Plato criticized it fiercely with the metaphor of bad cupbearers in The Republic: “When a democracy that is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs,” the philosopher wrote. “Thus democracy dies: by abusing itself.” This was 370 B.C.
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Despite everything, we still think that democracy is the best model of government, or at least the least worst we have invented, as Churchill put it. And, yet, we continue to complain that our democracy functions poorly, that it is the fault of the parties that represent us, of the electoral law, of the lack of affection of us voters, who are basically by now quite satisfied with the level of affluence we have attained and indifferent to now monotonous political messages.
We are in post-democracy, as English sociologist and political scientist Colin Crouch put it.
We hardly think about it, but our democracy has been profoundly transformed, due to a much more mundane and everyday cause: the advent of digital technologies.
Pluralism and public confrontation
Traditional democracy was founded on the confrontation of ideas. On great speeches by Pericles, Demosthenes, Cicero. It is a model we sustained until a few years ago.
The confrontations in the public square or the political forums on TV, with the would-be leaders developing complex, theoretical, quote-rich arguments. Speeches for everyone, so that everyone could face the same ideas and projects. The pluralism of democracy, that is. In large city squares, with hour-long speeches, big ideas, big ideals.
Our democracy has been profoundly transformed by the advent of digital technologies.
Just think back to when one of the first debates between presidential candidates was organized in 1854, it was determined that Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas would each have three hours. Yes, you read that correctly: three hours!
But today the political message passes on a TikTok video or a tweet: 50 seconds at most. It is impressive that even a not-so-young politician like the late Silvio Berlusconi decided to start a TikTok profile that reached 350,000 followers and 4 million views in a few hours.
Failings of the digital revolution
We had dreamed that digital technologies could bring us direct democracy in real time. In 1996, French philosopher Pierre Lévy had hypothesized that the internet could transform democracy into a huge agora — the name given to the marketplace in Athens, used for assemblies — where each of us could decide and evaluate, in continual participation. An open, free democracy based on everyone’s immediate participation.
Instead, the digital world has made us increasingly lonely and isolated. In the virtual community each of us does not participate in decision-making, but receives one-sided messages that influence our behavior, including political behavior.
The most impressive part of this is that the messages received by each of us are personalized, in the sense that each of us is profiled by the network and thus election campaigns leaders can send each voter the right message, even on hot and divisive issues, such as migration or gender diversity. This was most evident in the campaign that brought Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, using the company Cambridge Analytica, which claimed to have a personal profile of each U.S. voter!
Election campaigns by algorithms
These profiles are not built on wiretaps or misappropriated information. Because each of us with our smartphones continuously transmits data, preferences, opinions. A continuous psychometric profiling. And the greatest paradox is that each one of us willingly submits to it, because each one of us worships our smartphone, which have become Orwell-style instruments of continuous control and submission.
The result is fragmented, superficial, personalized election campaigns, in which great reasoning, coherence, and rationality are not needed. Short, dry simple messages are enough. That is why “memes” or “reels” are proving to be tools of gigantic effectiveness. Communication by images and no longer by concepts.
Our smartphones have become Orwell-style instruments of continuous control and submission.
These electoral strategies are not decided by the candidates. Because while it is true that leaders indicate the basic outlines of the political program, then it is algorithms that process and disseminate them, in a skillful and personalized manner.
A technocratic democracy
If things really are as they seem to be, in the very near future our democracy can only be permanently transformed into a “technocratic” democracy. Not in the Platonic sense of government by technicians, that is, of the best, but rather of government by machines, because it will be the machines that will recommend the most effective programs, elaborate on them, disseminate them, and reach out to individual voters.
It will seemingly be a government “of the people,” but led by “the few” — technocrats and bureaucrats. It will be a society based on control, but also apparently increasingly palliative, as envisioned in Huxley’s Brave New World: “Community, Identity, Stability.”
These tendencies will be even more extensive when the control over our lives is not a result of personal smartphone use, but also of continuous environmental monitoring. I mean not only the spread of cameras and facial recognition tools as is already happening in China. But especially to the project of moving large portions of the population into entirely artificial, enclosed, protected, digitized cities, as can be seen by the Saudi plan to build The Mukaab and The Line cities — respecively a giant cube of 400 meters on each side near Riyadh and a smart city designed as a huge glass and steel straight line, over 100 kilometers long (!), in which to have up to 10 million people living in a completely protected, but continuously controlled environment.
The basic dilemma can only be one: will the democracy of tomorrow work better or worse than the democracy we have been trying to regulate our lives with for more than 25 centuries? Will the political system of the future see us as “subjects” who will delegate to an algorithm and technicians the responsibility of making the decisions we don’t want to (or don’t know how to) make? Or will the system succeed in harnessing digital technology to connect with citizens and make them more interested in and involved in public decisions?
