Highlights to the Comments on "Bring Back the Internet Gatekeepers"

Whether we should just abolish democracy and other queries

My article “Bring Back the Internet Gatekeepers” generated some interesting discussion, so I thought it would be worth replying to some of the comments here, broken down by category.

Philosophical Comments about Democracy

Daniel writes:

I can’t believe you wrote a giant screed against free speech (which hurts everyone’s epistemology by restricting access to information) instead of just saying we shouldn’t let stupid people vote.

Once we’ve accepted the premise that the masses are too stupid to form accurate models of how the world works, why let them vote? If their opinions can be swayed by top-down media pressure, then whoever controls the top-down media pressure can control the votes of the masses. It leaves a giant “press to subvert democracy” button on the table that someone will inevitably use to crush political dissent.

I think there are a few responses to this. First of all, you have to understand what I think I’m doing here with the entire writing for the public thing. I see the job of an intellectual as largely to make practical suggestions to help the world function better and move towards my preferred societal outcomes. Going back to social media curation on the major platforms is more realistic than starting to restrict the franchise. There’s no button that says “change the entire American system,” so I find little reason to consider the possibility. I think people who spend all their time talking about creating an entirely new system of governance are often intellectual frauds, enjoying the attention they get for proposing things that will never happen so they can never be proved wrong.

Putting that aside, we have no contemporary examples of systems with a restricted franchise to use as models. For about a century now, every country either lets everyone of a certain age vote, or has a dictatorship, where nobody votes or the voting is rigged and doesn’t matter, and even in those rigged elections everyone theoretically gets a say. No country in the world currently has restrictions on voting based on property ownership, education, or income.

This leads me to think that there’s an internal logic to democracy that leads to the expansion of the franchise. Even if there weren’t, once we’ve let everyone vote, I don’t see how we would get people to vote their rights away. So the idea of restricting the franchise is probably impossible. It would be so going against the spirit of the times and our cultural traditions to do such a thing, you might as well ask why I don’t advocate Americans convert to Judaism or something. At the same time, you can have a curated democracy, which existed in the US until five minutes ago and remains the system much of Europe maintains to this day.