Essay by Antón Barba-Kay: “…Consider the casual assumption that the scope and accessibility of choice is itself “democratic,” such that Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok might be called democratic platforms because everyone gets a vote and anyone can become someone. In fact, there’s nothing intrinsically democratic about participation as such at any level. Countries do not become more democratic when the people are more frequently consulted. Expertise and state secrets are part of it, as is the fact that states need to make long-term, binding commitments. Digital consultations (such as have been used by the Five Star Movement in Italy) give undue power to those who control the software through which they take place. There is also the better reason that, when questions are placed before a mass electorate to an extent that exceeds our capacity for deliberation, there occurs a populist or oligarchic reversal. In a direct democracy such as that of ancient Athens, everything begins to turn on who poses the questions and when and why.
The point is that mass populations can be good judges of what locally touches us but are not able to collectively pay attention to what doesn’t—and that this is an entirely democratic, republican situation. I mean that the will of the people is not a fact but an artifice: It is not the input of democratic government but the output of its codified processes. Intermediate institutions such as parties, caucuses, primaries, debates, and the Electoral College were designed in theory to sublimate citizen passions and interests into more substantive formulations than their raw expression allows. The Federalist Papers explicitly speak of it as a machine—a Newtonian “system” of “bodies,” “springs,” “energies,” and “balances” operating under universally observable laws. The point of this machine is to produce the popular will by representing it. The Constitution is intended to be the context within which popular decision can find its most articulate expression through the medium of good government—which is why any one person’s claim to immediately embody the will of the people is anti-democratic.
For digital services as well as democratic processes, there is a point beyond which the intensification of involvement degrades the objects of preference themselves. Just as social media has made us impatient for headlines spicy or outrageous, the focus on and capture of choice as such can destroy the conditions of meaningful choice themselves…(More)”.
