[sn41]

Were you around when Internet 2.0 was supposed to bring democracy all over the world?

It has brought a slew of right wing populists.

We need to stop viewing technology as neutral, and "oh it will all turn out nice, like the railways did". These are tools which manipulate the human psyche, and not the same as stagecoaches to be disposed of.

[bigfishrunning]

"Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

I can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people...

[tptacek]

Populism is implicitly an argument that, on some issue or portfolio of issues, there is a coherent will of the decisive majority of all people, such that the opposing view on the issue(s) is democratically illegitimate (because it's an elite interest, or a concentrated interest in a collective action problem). Populism is thus an implicit rejection of pluralism, the idea that groups of people are complicated and contain multiple overlapping and often incoherent sets of issue preferences, and that the goal of politics is to accommodate that.

Populism can be tactically useful in a democracy, especially if the ground truth on some issue is that its politics really have been captured by elite interests, and that all of the variance in opinion on that issue comes down to "elite vs. popular". But those issues are pretty rare, and as a formula for the broader project of governing, populism is a disaster.

[JumpCrisscross]

> can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people

Populism, pejoratively, means rampant majoritarianism, a known failure mode of democracies. Unfortunately it’s a term, like liberal, that’s been expanded to the point of meaningless.

[Der_Einzige]

Railways were the reason the Holocaust could happen Not exactly "turning out nice"

[LawTalkingGuy]

The railroads did not enable the Nazi genocides, they merely shaped them.

Rwanda killed a higher percentage of people, more quickly, without any advanced infrastructure. Without railroads the Nazis would have put the camps closer to the population centers or killed people where they lived. During that period the same technology and eventually even the same rails enabled the Allies to break the Nazis and free the remaining prisoners.

Verdict: Neutral.

[hammyhavoc]

Reductio ad Hitlerum is tedious and irrelevant in this scenario.

Nothing like AI has ever happened before. Don't compare it to Nazi Germany, that's just complete shite and very offensive. Show some decorum.