[chessturk]

> Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media.

I'm sorry, when was everyone equally franchised? Between Jim Crow, Women's Sufferage, and Civil Rights you've got what? The mid 60s to mid 80s as the heyday of American Democracy? Having Nixon smack in the middle of that doesn't really help the arguement.

If we define democracy as universal suffrage and equal vote weight, democracy has been more of an aspiration and less of a reality since the beginning of time. If you don't define democracy that way, then we're talking past eachother.

[rswail]

If deomcracy been broken since the rise of technology and mass media, then I assume we're talking about Hearst and his stoking of propaganda during the Spanish-US war of 1898?

Or perhaps you're referring to British propaganda during the Boer War?

Thinking that the advent of Facebook has radically changed the use of media for propaganda purposes is misguided. It may allow for more direct propaganda and greater ability to select and target a particular audience, but it is no different to the psyops and propaganda techniques that have been prevalent during the entire 20th century.

[Faark]

You don't need a radical change. A lot of small, incremental changes can throw a system out of balance. Take fishing as example. Mankind is doing it since pretty much forever and made many small improvements on the way. Now in hindsight we might have the necessary knowledge, models and simulations to determine what precisely what made us exceed replenishment rates. But that doesn't really matter in retrospect and now we have regulation trying to prevent overfishing.

So yeah, if you are trying to argue nothing changed in our media usage and systems interact just like they did 50 years ago, then that is most certainly a loosing battle.

[chessturk]

If 1898 Democracy is functioning Democracy to you, we're taking past each other.