On the Moral Case for Disenfranchisement

TL:DNR - What does Electronic Dance Music and Social Media say about our democracy? These tricks bring the treat of socialism with American characteristics.

By choosing to receive information primarily through the overly edited and deeply simplistic lens of social media,[i] Americans are selecting a political reality that is so far removed from free democracy that it is becoming more expedient to abandon contemporary electoral norms and treat smartphone users as a new peasant-class.? This is not correct, but it is useful as a descriptive for what the rapid proliferation of social technology is doing to the electorate.? If the mass of humanity is losing the ability to make informed decisions, after all, then someone is presumably going to have to think for them.?

Free democracy cannot persist in a state that is anti-educational where the voting populace is not expected to make informed decisions.? A state that exists where voters curate information-access based on their emotional preferences alone is one that is so easily manipulated by marketing narratives that it is functionally equivalent to a socialist state.? Therefore, if the practical reality observed is one of socialism, then it is only right that the electorate be made aware of this fact so that they may either embrace or reject it.? Socialism under the veneer of free democracy is less honest than overt socialism, and therefore has more capacity for abuse by leadership.? Honest socialism is better than dishonest, or mischaracterized, socialism.

Socialism is inherently unequal: a centralized body must make decisions for the entire society without asking the broader populace for its opinion.? Socialism allocates human bodies, capital and resources according to the whims of a centralized command structure.? That the central government has the culture's best interests in mind is assumed under this social contract. Socialism may ideologically and observably be incomplete, but it is at least logically consistent.? One can understand the aspirational desire to run a culture based on an algorithm, even though in practice this is inherently opposed to freedom of thought.? This is why socialism remains attractive to many people in free states despite being fundamentally at-odds with deeply entrenched cultural values of universal suffrage.? But the more complete the algorithm, the more it is true that there cannot be any privacy in a socialist state.

The privilege to vote is based ultimately on education, or rather on the ability for an electorate to make informed decisions.? Receiving information based only on what one is comfortable receiving is not informed decision-making; curating information based on ideological preferences means ignoring non-conforming information and thus depriving oneself of data that is potentially crucial to decision-making.?

This is not a Democrat/Republican issue, it is both a Democrat and Republican issue.? In other words, it is an electoral issue at large.? The framers of the Constitution envisaged this sort of problem in creating checks and balances between the three branches of government that mitigated the need for systemic trust.? The problem that the framers of the Constitution did not envisage was not that the system itself would come under pressure, but that the system itself would start to be based on an entirely new paradigm that everyone would participate in it.? The antebellum United States functioned as a stable political system precisely because the electorate was expected to be limited to a class of voters that would go out of its way to pursue education for the good of society and be relatively immune from manipulations targeting the undereducated. A free democracy that required the informed participation of every element of society was never considered.? The Tea Party that kicked off the Revolution was, after all, explicitly about maintaining existing elite profit-margins and autonomy in protesting taxation without representation in British Parliament.? We might question whether it is in part because of universal suffrage that the American electorate is losing its ability to mitigate socialist impulses.? Simply put, undereducated masses being handed power in a political system should result in undereducated social decision-making.? Especially if modern technology preys on and exacerbates pressure on educational standards.? This is unarguably the empirically observed reality in our current political climate as described by both left and right-wing commenters.? Both sides characterize the other as being under-educated, as is described to them through the new default information system.? But is it really a problem that more people are participating in democracy?

In order to argue that universal suffrage is exacerbating social media driven collapses in the electoral system, the opposite must be false: would an inherently unequal culture be able to adopt social media without resulting in worse electoral outcomes and lower institutional trust?? Socialist states do not have electorates, so these do not provide comparison points.? States that have structural inequality (i.e. large populations of disenfranchised persons living within the enforceable bounds of the State) suffer from the exact same partisan problems we see in the American economy.? This is Israel.? Palestinians do not have an external State from which to attack Israel with, they cannot vote in Israeli elections, and yet Israeli politics is still demonstrably fractured where even before the October 7th tragedy Tel Aviv has been severely disrupted by persistent protests against the current regime’s perceived undemocratic tendencies.[ii]? If Israel is to be considered as a functional comparison to the US (our current President has an unimpeachable track record in calling it a friendly value-sharing democracy in the region[iii], and President Trump is quite friendly with the Netanyahu Administration), then the thesis must be considered false.? Disenfranchisement cannot be a salve to social media driven fracture.

This presents a problem, as disenfranchisement is a necessary outcome of socialism.? No one votes under an algorithm.? Or rather, a very small group of people decide how to calibrate the algorithm and effectively vote on behalf of many others who do not get the right to participate in the political process.? If disenfranchisement does not work as a solution, and if we do not like the trajectory of our discourse, then the question is whether it is an incorrect but still likely outcome?? That the mechanism by which the electorate is losing the ability to make informed decisions is itself quite popular makes the idea that we are sleepwalking into a socialist form of government more believable, and I feel that we are seeing these effects manifest materially elsewhere in the economy.

I had a very informative experience over the weekend at Big Night Live in Boston, an electronic dance-music venue that a good friend of mine invited me to share his VIP table at (shout-out to DJ Hugel for crushing it).? The tables are arranged in a ‘fishbowl’ format where (by implication) poorer participants on the periphery are invited to stare down a level into the private table sections that surround a central gated dance floor.? The VIP sections include full bottle service and scantily clad attractive female servers assigned to each table.? This is all presumably structured to create FOMO and thus increase demand for higher-priced seating; normally, dance club VIP tables can be fairly visible but are inherently designed to be more private for their guests.? In practice, this new format exacerbates feelings of inequality on all sides.? This may be explicitly manipulative, but it is at least transparent with how it values VIP seating versus standard admissions.? This format is not uncommon nor necessarily problematic in other economies, like in the UK, where there is a well-established aristocratic social structure. There is also, quite obviously, high demand for this type of marketing given how successful and popular the club is.? If a liberal coastal capital city like Boston is embracing structural inequality in its dance venues, can one really say that there is no market for broader disenfranchisement in the States??

Ancient Roman inequality functioned similarly, where the aspiration to full citizenship and high social standing had established (if difficult) pathways to success among the lowest social strata.? To paraphrase Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ferengi do not want to stop exploitation, they want to become the exploiter.? The expectation of upward social mobility was present and even encouraged in the Roman Republic, and it would not be difficult for an American Imperial state that already thrives on broad themes of hopefulness to include these elements in a quiet restructuring of the electoral class.

So here we come to the point: I do not believe that there is a moral case for disenfranchisement, but I do believe that the American electorate is blindly marching towards it anyway.? If the US were to continue to pursue this path, there is plenty of precedent and marketability to the logical fallacy.? This means that even though it is a logical fallacy, it is still likely.? If one can manipulate an electorate into shadow-socialism without making it explicit, what better tool would exist than social media?? It all comes down to education, or its undermining with social media-driven reality curation. I recently ran a university study that alarmingly showed evidence that outsourcing mental function to machines like ChatGPT resulted in significantly worse educational outcomes.[iv]? The implication is that social media, AI and other Big Tech products are killing our democracy by observably making us stupider.? As the stated marketing of these products is the unlocking of new human potential, that the outcome is the opposite is even more tragic especially if the commanders of industry believe in their own branding.? If the new American peasantry is losing the ability to think critically and function within our established system, is it the elitists’ imperative to find ways to shepherd the masses into making better decisions?? Put more simply, is socialism a valid tool to fight socialism?? Because we cannot say that disenfranchisement helps, the answer is no.? In this case, apply fire to fire and one gets more fire.

The contemporary concept of American freedom is deeply opposed to the existence of a peasant-class, as a world where everyone is created equal means that no one should be elevated above others based solely on the circumstances of their birth.? Post-Reconstruction American Exceptionalism cannot coexist with American Aristocracy.? Perhaps the solution is the formation of a new political party specifically designed to provide opposition to a two-party system.? Opposition for the sake of itself, by creating a platform for consensus-building, can provoke meaningful non-emotional discourse.? Or just start taxing Big Tech more aggressively on profits derived from private consumer data.? But this is all theory and speculation.?

In the meantime, I do foresee the ‘dumb phone’ becoming the new status symbol of the awakened literati.? The peasantry cannot afford, after all, to take the time to confront themselves with uncomfortable knowledge and dissociate enough from the broader economy to discuss it critically.? I call this ‘advocating for one’s own inefficiency.’?

So, dear reader, are you a peasant?

[i] VandeHei, J., & Allen, M. (2024, October 28). Behind the curtain: The big media era is over. Axios. In Behind the Curtains column. https://www.axios.com

[ii] Laurent, O., Mellen, R., & Snell, J. (2023, July 24). Protests rocked Israel for 29 consecutive weeks. There’s more to come. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com

[iii] Dovere, E. (2013, September 30). Biden: Always Israel’s friend. Politico. https://www.politico.com

[iv] Cicchetti, C. (2024). AI in higher education: Does not help, might hurt. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10522526