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by nine_k
79 days ago
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No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape. The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors. Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects. This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows. |
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Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182