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How to Undermine a Democracy
A handbook for how to sow division in a technologically advanced society
I thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this piece as I don’t want to arm people with tools to do harm. Then I looked at the state my country (and others) currently in and realised that the bad guys are already running this playbook. One of the reasons they’re finding it so easy is that there’s a general lack of awareness of just how vulnerable we are. Back in 200, I sat in a room with a friend of mine and we debated various ideas for startups. One of my ideas was a system to control public opinion piggybacking on the Internet. The ideas we discussed then are relevant today in the way our democracies have become so sharply polarised. Where civil discourse is no longer possible, and abuse is a daily fact of life.
How did we get here? And how easy would it be for someone to have given us a push in this direction?
In the olden days, the way to influence a democracy was via it’s media. The printed, televisual and radio media had a near monopoly on the attention and opinions of the voting public. If you wanted control over public opinion then buying a newspaper was a good strategy. You might argue that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post to advance his political agenda. You might also argue that he bought it to…
