Better to let ideas compete and build consensus than to surrender decision making abilities that effect everyone over to some arbitrary group of people that we are just told to trust (but don't worry they have good intentions).
We don't currently have a select group of people who share a vision of "common good" making decisions for us, and yet things keep improving. So I'd advocate we stick with what we know is working, rather than the above surrendering of autonomy in exchange for the promise of some utopia..
I have no doubt you could find some metrics to show a recent decline in, but (on the whole) is the average human not better off in the year 2024 than they were in 1954? 1924? 1824?
I do have a feeling we're not talking about the same thing here, so could you clarify how it's "obviously not true" that things have been/are improving?
I'm referring to the internet, not the whole of human existence. That would be too complicated a subject to make any such simplistic statements on. But actually I also disagree with your premise that we don't have small corrupt groups already deciding what's "best" for everyone, WRT the internet or life as a whole. Just because they're openly motivated by greed doesn't make them less harmful. It's the cabals atop Google and Facebook which ushered in an age of absolute surveillance on a mass scale, how cool and fun.