12/18/2023 0 Comments Vox popoli brainstorming![]() Meanwhile, both the Wikimedia Foundation and Facebook have US Supreme Court–like structures that operate with a degree of independence, providing inspiration for both oversight and a forum for appeals-hopefully overseen by trained professionals who are more liberated from the whims of crowds. ![]() And the Tribunal offers a glimpse of how a community can come together to adjudicate on how to deal with people who disrupt the community. Estonia’s model shows how it might be possible to authenticate individual users while preserving privacy and anonymity, which could prevent repeat voting or brigading. But they gesture in the right direction toward both security architectures and models for online decisionmaking that show how things might be done. There are plenty of flaws in each: The Estonian voting system is under continual scrutiny for security flaws, while Riot Games ditched the Tribunal because it couldn’t react quickly enough. There have been all sorts of experiments in online democracy, from Estonia’s i-Voting system, which allows for online voting in national elections, to Riot Games’ now-abandoned Tribunal for adjudicating on moderation decisions. Instead, what is needed is a way of channeling our better natures. As should be abundantly clear now, no technology alone can condition humans out of such crowd dynamics. Alcuin of York’s fear of the crowd’s madness is an animating anxiety in every intellectual discussion about democracy, and whatever his ancient intent, it is an admonition worth heeding. In practice, these spaces often lead to populist grandstanding and other histrionics. There is no forum, no social media platform, no wiki, without people talking. In theory, there’s no better environment for democracy than an online forum the space is already built for deliberation, with discourse as its very constitution. Whatever else may be said of Musk’s disastrous, fascist-enabling tenure at Twitter, it serves as a reminder that the other, slightly more benevolent dictatorships that govern social media also aren’t working-Twitter’s previous incarnation, as well as Facebook and others, have led us to one disaster after another-and the resentment this builds up leaves the public vulnerable to exploitation by a capitalistic hustler using the aesthetics of democracy to disguise their own imperial power. If the internet is to have a future, then we’re going to have to figure out how to do democracy here in an orderly fashion. I don’t think social media is condemned to this, however. ![]() Musk’s invocation of vox populi after his polls is almost too perfect a callback to Network’s nightly news carnival: a poll of public opinion with no methodology to be seen, masquerading as a meaningful vote on the polity’s future. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated the many peccadilloes of cable news that were just over the horizon, but also a bit of social media and its impulsive, libidinal urges thinly disguised by data. ![]() In the 1976 movie Network, a nightly news anchor goes mad and finds a gold mine of ratings by becoming the “mad prophet of the airwaves.” His show becomes a veritable carnival, with one of the side acts being Vox Populi, a segment showing the latest polls of public opinion. A more contemporary vox populi reference might better suit Musk’s Potemkin plebiscites. And why wouldn’t he? He’s not a democrat. One suspects Musk might like that interpretation. ![]()
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