Michael Den Tandt writes in the Globe and Mail that democracy is in trouble:
Simply put, democracy is losing. The reason: Western governments, led by the United States, have not come to terms with the reality that liberal and free societies worldwide are under attack from within – using the very tools developed by their brightest innovators to express that freedom.
Digitization and the world wide web, those promethean sparks of the late 20th century, are the principal vehicles for populist disruption. Yet even as Europe and the U.S. ponderously turn, like a pair of moribund wildebeest facing a pack of jackals, to impose governance on the 30-year-old internet, Web3 and artificial intelligence are set to whisk deliverance away. How can regulators, already neutered by transnational data flows, cope with a digital universe in which fake video and audio are indistinguishable from real clips, while being infinitely scalable and producible on a laptop?
“On the internet,” the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen said in a prescient jeremiad to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2019, “everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.”
The technology that many thought would democratize the world has been weaponized against democracy:
In April, 2021, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the foreign affairs department of the European Union, issued a report called Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation Around the COVID-19 Pandemic. The report, produced by the EEAS unit charged with countering disinformation, found that from December, 2020, through April, 2021 – with much of the world in lockdown and vaccines just beginning to emerge – Russian and Chinese information operations were in high gear.
Even as the two autocracies undertook an international campaign to promote their own COVID-19 vaccines – Sputnik V and Sinovac, respectively – they sought to “undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and Western/European vaccination strategies,” the EEAS report found. “Both Russia and China are using state-controlled media, networks of proxy media outlets and social media, including official diplomatic social media accounts, to achieve these goals.”
Further, it highlighted the ties between the far-right factions of the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, and far-right Christian Americans. In a 2019 paper for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberger and Thomas Morley explored how Russian links to global populist movements extend into France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. “Russian military strategists see cyberwarfare not as a distinct, separate form of military operation but rather one that is integrated into other means of asymmetric warfare, such as disinformation,” they wrote.
This isn’t to say that every keyboard warrior who shares an anti-vaccine meme is a Russian agent. But it is to say that authoritarian regimes have a clear interest in seeing that meme shared – just as Vladimir Putin’s regime had a clear interest in seeing Donald Trump become leader of the free world in 2016.
The old saw -- caveat emptor -- still applies. Approach the internet carefully.
Image: AZ Quotes
12 comments:
I always knew it was smart to stay off Facebook. Huge swaths of the adult population garner their entire news from that infantile platform as Faceberg the man child billionaire pulls the strings.
It's not about the information, zoombats. It's about the source of information.
This problem is surely made worse by the fact that so many people think all information should be free, Owen. The steep decline in newspaper subscriptions surely attests to that.
Misinformation is rewarded.
https://thehill.com/lobbying/3852515-corporate-america-donated-36m-to-election-objectors-in-2022-election-analysis/
TB
I agree, Lorne. Wisdom doesn't come cheap.
Thanks for the link, TB. Alex Jones shows just how profitable lying can be.
Democracy and neoliberalism are incompatible. In their 2014 paper out of Princeton, Gilens and Page documented that. The private sector insinuates itself between the elected and the electors. Globalism and its acolytes, including Trudeau the Lesser, transfer essential incidents of sovereignty to the corporate sector through trade dispute legislation that regularly forces governments to take the knee.
Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal speech of 1910 warns of the perils to democracy posed by special interests. Every point he made in that speech is as valid today as it ever was.
KPMG got caught red-handed with its Isle of Man tax evasion scheme. How many KPMG officials have been prosecuted by the Trudeau government? How many of their clients who knowingly adopted their criminal scheme have ever seen the inside of the Greybar Hotel? None. They have immunity and that immunity reaches right into the PMO and our trust fund prime minister.
Yes, yes, yes, the Tories would/will be worse.That's a given. However in a country where perhaps 60 per cent of the electorate show up to vote and where 38 or 39 percent of that 60 per cent is sufficient to award the victor a majority and where a reasonable segment of that 40 per cent of 60 per cent that vote in that majority government are duped by empty promises of electoral reform or social licence or every other vague and meaningless assurance, politics devolves from service to the nation and its people to a contest to gain or retain power. That pits the interests of our political parties against the needs of the nation. It's an "electoral cycle" reality spent mainly on looking down at one's feet. There's no reward in looking up to the horizon to see the looming future.
That's why I've withdrawn from Canadian politics. It's a load of nonsensical squabbling, hooey and partisan sophistry. My stomach churns at the mention of Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre, Doug Ford or Alberta's Danielle Smith. If they attest to anything it's that the A-class talent wants nothing to do with politics. To see how far politics in Canada have been degraded, compare these third-rate hacks to a Canadian who actually served our country, even if he never won a majority.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1957/pearson/facts/
I think we have gone too far down this road to hope for some sort of democratic renaissance. - MoS
I agree, Mound. Pearson was a truly great prime minister. And I understand your recent silence. I hope readers of your blog take note of your comment here.
Democracy is indeed in decline Owen, most clearly demonstrated by the activities and rhetoric increasingly spewing out in all directions from just south of our border, that this is clearly spreading world wide including our own country is very concerning. As you know I have for some years highlighted my concerns on my blog at Democracy Under Fire but like Mound find myself tired of beating my head against the wall, this is not to say that those, who like yourself, continue to highlight the decline of democracy are not to be encouraged to continue with your efforts. Keep up the good work Owen, and the various others who comment here and elsewhere, born in the final years of WW2 I truly hope that my final years will not see the start of WW3 but I''m sorry to say that I am not optimistic!
It's hard to remain optimistic, Rural. Mound's take on things is completely understandable.
MoS sighting!
Next: The albino unicorn appears 😉
Lots of us are hoping that he'll return to the fray, PoV.
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