alt Hacker NewsDemocracies in general are suffering the fallout of losing its information economy.
From the death of local newspapers, the end of classifieds and the pressures on ad revenues, journalism had no real options but to shrink and consolidate.
The more content we create, the more the market focuses on creating content that could garner attention.
People are going to vote based on the information they have. If they are part of a captive market, then they are going to pick between the choices they are presented or decline to participate.
It’s some sort of irony, that as a society we developed ways to neutralize free speech and expression by flooding the zone with more content, not by controlling content.
I think partly it’s also that democracies aren’t great at longer term planning.
Like in my country there is a big election every 4 years and you have state elections in between. So any government needs to constantly appease the people to stay in power and do anything. It’s basically impossible for them to make and more importantly realise any plans that go beyond that 4/5 year timeframe.
And to solve something like climate change we would need to think in decades or centuries.