i'm arguing that the situation is more complicated. we live in a world that is still somewhat e-communication naive, while the internet has completely rewritten the rules of the game bringing e-communication into focus.
when the us constitution was written, it wasn't written with the idea in mind that anyone in the world could anonymously participate in the local political process. that would have been crazy talk!
so i think maybe there may be some weirdness in terms of keeping the peace in the short term as more naive generations die off and more saavy generations come up. i also think that maybe some ideas we thought were principles were actually implementation strategies built for a very different world and that perhaps we'll need to look at what the underlying principles were and how they might be upheld in a world without information borders.
perhaps freedom of speech, which was written with the idea of preventing government from getting too powerful and controlling people, would need to be reduced to the idea of any entity amassing undue power by consolidating information capabilities to control people. from that, maybe you build up a freedom of speech paired with a required assertion of identity...
but honestly, i don't know. it sure does seem that the old principles were written for a different game though.
> when the us constitution was written, it wasn't written with the idea in mind that anyone in the world could anonymously participate in the local political process. that would have been crazy talk!
I thought the Federalist Papers were published anonymously.
I understand that you said "anyone in the world". I'm certainly not a scholar of American history, but surely there were European influences being exerted (and likely anonymously, too) on the Colonies around the time of the Federalist Papers.
Far-reaching anonymous political speech isn't a new thing. The speed and ease of disseminating speech is new, for sure.
> I thought the Federalist Papers were published anonymously.
They were not. They were published by three well-known political figures under a pseudonym that was widely known among their peers. Everyone knew it was one of three, and in most cases everyone who mattered in the discussion knew that Hamilton was the most likely author of most of them.
> Far-reaching anonymous political speech isn't a new thing. The speed and ease of disseminating speech is new, for sure.
yeah i suppose you're right, foreign intelligence operations designed to influence local politics have existed long before the internet. i think maybe the difference is, it can now be done at scale on a grassroots level at substantially reduced cost.
mix that with massive populations that are naive to common internet discussion traps and well, here we are.
Somebody bears ultimate responsibility for filtering fact from fiction.
It could be the individual consuming the news (which is hard work, and requires consciously counteracting confirmation bias as well as overt attempts at information manipulation).
Or it can be some centralized authority (social media companies, the government, etc.) and you have to ensure that the interests of that authority are aligned with the public interest.
The last several years have illustrated the downsides of the former approach but I'm not at all convinced that the latter is less brittle.
when the us constitution was written, it wasn't written with the idea in mind that anyone in the world could anonymously participate in the local political process. that would have been crazy talk!
so i think maybe there may be some weirdness in terms of keeping the peace in the short term as more naive generations die off and more saavy generations come up. i also think that maybe some ideas we thought were principles were actually implementation strategies built for a very different world and that perhaps we'll need to look at what the underlying principles were and how they might be upheld in a world without information borders.
perhaps freedom of speech, which was written with the idea of preventing government from getting too powerful and controlling people, would need to be reduced to the idea of any entity amassing undue power by consolidating information capabilities to control people. from that, maybe you build up a freedom of speech paired with a required assertion of identity...
but honestly, i don't know. it sure does seem that the old principles were written for a different game though.