“ In your TED talk : ‘ A bold idea to replace politicians ’, you talked about combining direct democracy and software agents . This reminded me of how the Five Star movement mobilised in Italy and how the Trump administration campaigned . How can we ensure direct democracy is nor hijacked by charismatic populists or people with bad motives ? ”
Continued
For instance , in England and France and many countries , I don ’ t know if you know , but in the 1600s coffee was illegal , and there was a whole movement to legalise coffee . And the people that had pubs were against this movement because they saw it as competition and there were pamphlets and manifestos written in that movement and eventually those same ideas helped in the emergence of democracy . The emergence of the public sphere allowed the connection that formed a government in which we are choosing among the best broadcasters .
We ’ ve since had radio and television . I would add , that with tv , it became more frivolous , and the scale changed . You can have a democracy with 5 million people or 100 million people . Your ability to manage and learn what people want changes . And recently , we ’ ve had another change in communications technology : the Internet , which can facilitate a many to many system . Everybody can broadcast . 30 years ago , only a few people had a spot on late- night television and everybody knew them , they were very famous . Now there ’ s a lot of people that are in between famous , due to social media and so forth . It ’ s created a lot of attention and people are fighting for that attention . And what you have is a democracy in which you have a change from having a competition between people on how to have the best ideas , to a competition you see on social media which is a competition about diminishing others , about lying , about winning a popularity contest and I think that ’ s the source of our crisis right now .
We have issues between democracy and technology because we have that mismatch . We don ’ t have a democracy that is many to many , but one to many , and we have communication that is many to many . In that democracy , in that many to many situation , there is a lot of incentive to cheat and get that one prize because the idea that giving an overwhelming amount of power to somebody who wins a popularity contest every four years is not a very clever idea . And today , in a world where we can see that information can spread very easily , and when attention has become more important than truth , you can hijack the system because of those conditions and because you ’ re putting too much power into one person .