Why the Internet Is Bad for Democracy
31st December 2025
Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
Of course, the nternet makes some political activity easier and cheaper. But it does so for everyone. And if everybody speaks, who will be listened to?
And that underlines the chief problem with ‘democracy’ as a concept and especially with the way people (who ought to know better) deal with it.
The major premise of democracy is that every person’s vote is of the same value. There are various philosophical justifications for this, but the simple fact is that none of us is willing to concede that somebody else’s vote ought to be of more value than ours. The problem with that approach is that every one of us knows people whose vote, we are convinced, is in fact of less value than ours. This inherent contradiction between philosophical theory and actual reality is the root of every conflict over what ‘democracy really means’.
The cognitive dissonace between those two mental states is what causes most of the trouble in the modern world. It’s entertaining at times, but rarely useful.