The Governance Loop [Meta Politics Idea Summary]
The Governance Loop [Meta Politics Idea Summary]
The Founding Fathers Missed a Few Spots
The founding fathers wrote a constitution that addresses three malincentives that cause government collapse.
Tyranny - the inability for the people to control the government
Anarchy - the inability for the government to protect the citizenry
Censorship - the inability for people to report on government actions
You might notice that there are four points of the cycle and three failures. The missing failure is information overload - specifically, the inability of the public to properly judge credibility. This failure mode was recently introduced through mass media and social media - truth no longer needed to die by censorship, but instead could be drowned out by a deluge of disinformation, partisanship and distraction.
This isn’t to come out on team “democracy dies in darkness”. Print and cable media have played into the same self-destructive tactics in the United States, albeit suboptimally relative to social media.
A new constitutional credibility-distributing method that avoids the fuzzy, relativistic behaviour of an overloaded information system is necessary to maintain this cycle of governance.
The erosion of the other branches is evident. Rising partisanship, government incompetence and unaccountability have correlated with the dominance of national cable, radio and now social media.
I have to disagree somewhat. I agree that the current information overload scenario was likely never foreseen, however, the general premise was foreseen. This is the reason for our republican form of government and the emphasis on localism. This is also why the general population was never supposed to elect the head of the federal executive branch, or even the senators for their state. While the Founding Fathers did not see the current deluge of information, they did understand that most people (90%+) would never have the ability (faculties, information, insight, understanding, etc.) to see or make decisions at that level. On the flip side, the parts of government so detached from the average citizen was supposed to be as equally removed in the impact that it had on these people's lives. Our current problem is not just a result of an overload of information from new avenues of information distribution, but also a result of the accumulation of power at the federal level (so that what happens there becomes deeply important to most citizens), as well as an increase in the participation of the average citizen on the federal level. We now have enough information 'available' to potentially allow every citizen this participation and to allow the government to have that far reaching of an impact in order to form a more perfect society, but we are proving that even though we have a never before seen amount of information, we still cannot handle it.
And I am not saying this just to arbitrarily defend the Founding Fathers, even they new that this government was imperfect and could only be as perfect as the moral character of the people. However, I do believe that the rise of social media is causing some never before seen problem, and I do believe that this problem of information overload was well handled by localism and republicanism.