Tech Fascism Has Come for American Democracy
techwontsave.usPeople least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it.
We are forever doomed to be ruled by those worse than us, for the simple reason that reasonable people don't seek power.
> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. (Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
Growing up on a diet of HHGTTG and Discworld just made me intrinsically distrust power in all it's forms.
Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service, so we perhaps should consider how to reinvigorate and reinforce that.
One possibility might be to specifically improve pathways into politics from sectors that still have high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
There are likely plenty of other approaches to help balance out the pure power-seekers too, so let's work out what they are and follow as many as possible rather than encouraging fatalism.
> Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service
At the entry level of politics, I feel this is actually true. And having known friends and acquaintances who have gone into low/entry level political offices I know they have been clearly motivated by trying to make things better for the common citizen.
So where does it go wrong?
To move up the ladder you can only really do it (with very few exceptions) by having full support of one or the other party. And to gain that support you can only do it by fully aligning with the party sponsors and contributors and their selfish interests. If you're not seen as a party team player who votes in block with everyone else, you won't have the support you need to gain higher offices. So either you burn out and leave (as all my friends have) or you stay at low level political positions where you can do some good, but very little influence.
That's why all the top-level politicians are so clearly thoroughly extremely corrupt, because you couldn't possibly get to that level any other way.
> high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
Many of these are mostly known for harbouring activists, not public servants. They serve a cause, not the public and as such are just as unsuitable for politics as the usual suspects.
Just because many people think they mostly harbor activists, doesn't mean that it's true. I regularly see people getting called "activists" or "ideologues" because they serve the public instead of whatever causes their detractors want to advance.
Yes - reflexively denigrating anyone who's not motivated by interests that align with their own as an "activist" is likely one of the reasons why politics has become degraded in the way that it has.
Yep, same goes for "ideologue" etc. IMO such thought-terminating cliches are a mind virus: ~10-15 years ago I noticed some people frequently using them in discussions. Today, these people are largely incapable of staying calm while listening to any opposing views, no matter the topic!
(EDIT: After posting, I had the idea below)
My best explanation would be: just like TikTok is harmful to our attention span, thought-terminating cliches are harmful to our tolerance for complexity.
How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?)
Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.
For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.
So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.
Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).
So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty.
However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.
Jury duty used to work: As immigration continues apace, it will fail. Lee Kuan Yew had to end jury trials in Singapore because as he notes, in a multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion"
Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?
We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day
That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.
>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ?
A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0].
Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket.
I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power".
I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.
Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign.
Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario?
And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.
These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well.
It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system.
I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game.
I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.
It's a known problem, for which we've also had a pretty robust workaround since Montesquieu : distribute separate part of power to _many_ craving people who disagree and can lock each other's.
I'm all for adding a branch that would be primarily picked at random (and I'm all for having a branch that is only recruited among peers of expertise, with fréquent rotation as a way to limit the risk of connivence, etc...)
In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try.
I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.)
Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it.
People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists.
Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest.
Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently.
Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
> People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it.
In the current system.*
There are systems that allow you to distribute power more equally. It requires a different setup, like for example randomised choice. The people in power don't like it. It's much easier to bribe 2-3 career politicians and guarantee their success.
It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US).
But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.
no it's just a "good times creates weak men" sort of thing.
Once you're back to hard times you'll have a whole crop of reasonable people willing to wrestle power at the cost of their lives.
Sounds like an argument for aristocracy.
against it, it's an argument against aristocracy
think about it how do people become aristocrats if not exactly by the mechanisms which make them least suited to rule given the comments argument?
Also one very common case of people being drawn to power but not suited for it if people which grew up with disposition that having that power is their "birthright" or similar. Such a disposition means from their POV losing the power, even if its due to them acting incompetent or misusing it, is no different then theft or worse "rebellion" and in turn they tend to be very willing to use a lot of violence and cruelty to keep it.
so it's really an argument against any form of government which (in it's most common ways) involves people "sizing" power and tending to at least somewhat pass it forward through generations. And aristocracy in how it normally is practiced definitely falls under that.
if anything it's an argument in favor of democracy, just with a lot of added rules against populism, spreading of misinformation, systematically railing up people, qualifications needed to get a position of power etc.
anyway if we don't fix modern attention economics being a perfect mechanism to propagate propaganda, misinformation and hate content we will not be getting there and any current attempts to fix this seem fairly limited in effect
We are forever doomed to beg on our knees to be ruled in general
The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments
> The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments
Fingers crossed, hoping for a genuinely benevolent ASI Overlord if we somehow find ourselves on that particular timeline (although, there's still a number of ways even that could go horribly awry).
Eh, I prefer to lean on the less dramatic Peter principle.
Flagged already, but I'll put this here anyway.
The root problem is much bigger than the big tech companies or the people running them, as I explain in this past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354
I think we're all overly wound up. Recently I find my adversarial tactics too frequently misfiring against people and ideas that, in hindsight, probably did not have explicit ill-intent. The reality is that other people, even those at the top, as individuals, are not as misaligned with you as you think. Your interests only conflict by a moderate amount. What's actually extremely misaligned with you are the superorganisms they are a part of. This doesn't mean we should absolve individuals of responsibility and consequences, since that would create the wrong incentives. But it's worth noting that while they may seem in control, even the dictator Kim Jong Un lacks the ability to single-handedly undo the authoritarian system in North Korea, even if he has a sudden change of heart. The moment he tries is the moment he gets replaced by someone else. Dismantling these systems, or preventing them from being built in the first place, will take more than finger-pointing ideological battle.
I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.
No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.
I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.
I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...
We may have to guide others to derive these concepts themselves in the same way we did rather than instilling the conclusion. I don't know how to do that yet, so for the time being, I just describe the problem.
Have them read The Nerd Reich is one crucial step.
In the end of the book we're the reasons why almost any and every topic on Tech fascism or The Nerd Reich are instaflaggged here.
> The reality is that other people, even those at the top, as individuals, are not as misaligned with you as you think. Your interests only conflict by a moderate amount.
I don't make anywhere near a million a year. Ever spoke to someone who makes 2x as you? Completely disconnected from your reality. Completely disconnected from reality at large. Multiply this for the average worker vs. the average tech bro and you get why the interest conflict by a very wide margin, not a moderate amount.
Stop creating excused for billionaires.
The only way to have a better democracy is to have better people.
Education is the entire slow, painful game.
Alternative take: education makes you a lot more efficient at exploiting people.
It is not education that is at the root of these things, but incentives. If the incentives are all wrong, so will be the outcomes. Take education as an institution. The way it is set up incentivizes cheating, and so nearly everyone tries to cheat.
Education makes you more efficient at exploiting people, but it also makes you more efficient at detecting and resisting the exploits. While no one is immune to it because the most effective kinds of exploitation are emotional rather than rational (see both religion and populism,) a solid educational foundation by the public makes it more difficult for the elites - who will by definition always be educated - to manipulate the public.
I feel like you're just arguing around education being an issue. When people cheat at their education, the outcome is they aren't educated. They can't practice critical thinking without a framework for understanding the world and so all they have is unfocused cynicism, which social media is designed to readily exploit.
There are some obvious improvements that can be made to the US system of democracy: Ban large donations, or publicly fund candidacies the demonstrate they have a competitive chance. Ranked choice voting. Make voting day a holiday. Promote voting. Etc.
None of these are painful, nor do they need to be slow.
Why is a long form conversation about techs influence on politics flagged here? How is it not relevant?
You need to read The Nerd Reich and the connection between Y Combinator and the rise of tech fascism.
Highly recommend and can't see a bigger root cause for the current human predicament.