While leafing through its pages last night an article titled Virtual Washington by Kevin Phillips caught my attention. The subhead reads: "The way is open for the total of overhaul of US politics." (Emphasis theirs.)
The first sentence seemed so prescient that I had to keep reading. How did they know there would be a pandemic?
Rain or shine, few Americans will go to the polls on election day in November 2020.
No, they weren't predicting a pandemic. They were presuming that in 25 years the Internet will have changed the way we vote. The paragraph continues.
Most will vote by modem, telephone or mail--and overall participation will be much greater than just today. So will citizen interest, partly because four or five reasonably serious presidential candidates will be on the ballot, along with at least official at least one official referendum and perhaps half a dozen national advisory referendums. Enthusiasm for the democratic process will have reached a point where even Washington should be more popular.
Two hopeful? Perhaps. But it’s no pipe dream. Technology, whose image has suffered under a century's worth of dictators, Orwell and novels in a long Cold War, is becoming a key to the revitalization of US politics. The 1990s are witnessing technology's reemergence in the healthier role foreseen by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as an enabler and propagator of democracy.
Let's unbundle these opening sentences. The author admits in the latter paragraph the possibility of being too hopeful. In the former he suggests that the two-party monopoly will be unbundled to include other players, other parties. He chose the number five because it represents a range of perspectives.
The history of the current two party system is such that countless elections are between the lesser of two evils. Hence the lack of enthusiasm for politics, especially Washington politics. If there were more parties, he reasons, more people would become engaged because at least one candidate might represent their views.
When he enthusiastically mentions Thomas Jefferson, little does he know that 25 years later statues of the author of the Declaration of Independence will have been toppled and that Phillips' own good name may be cancelled for advancing this faux pas.
Frankly, however, having been writing about the World Wide Web since its birthday, I have repeatedly stated that whatever you find in the "real world" will be found in that digital universe as well. Politics, populism and porn don't disappear when we beam up to cyberspace. Everything else from A to Z is here as well.
Phillips hilariously goes on to say that eight second soundbytes will become a thing of the past because technology will be more informative. I say hilariously because what is Twitter other than a infinitely multiplying universe of 8 second soundbytes? 6000 Tweets per second, which corresponds to 350,000 per minute and 500 million a day. (Just how determined are you to stay current up-to-the-minute on what's happening in the world?)
The author believed people would be more informed in the future, and there's a sense in which the possibilities of being informed exist, but Google and Facebook algorithms are designed to feed us what we already like to read, thereby concealing viewpoints that differ from our own and might enlighten us if we were aware of them.
His optimism that our two party system would expand as a result of the Internet may never come to fruition. A great fear is that the two-party system may one day become one party alone, courtesy of Big Brother. As the Democrats celebrate their conquest of D.C. with the Executive and Legislative branches now under their control, their last target will no doubt be the Judicial branch. Let's watch and see what happens. Place your bets.
Alas, yes it would be nice to see a more equitable distribution of power, but there are few moments in history where those who have it have turned around and generously yielded it up.
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