How democracy can evolve and flourish in the digital era

As virtual communities erase national borders and information barriers dissolve, democracy needs to move away from its industrial-age roots if it is to flourish in this new age of social media and Big Tech

Liu Jun

Published: 1:15am, 10 Feb 2021

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What has happened to democracy, or at least the democracy that Western countries advocated and fought so hard for? After the recent political chaos that swept Washington, law and order has returned but the conviction for democracy appears to have faltered.

Theoretically, much like music and other art forms, democracy is bound to progress with social advancement. Long before Donald Trump became US president in 2016, society was undergoing a paradigm shift driven by technology and innovation. Online business and the internet in general spurred a big leap forward into the second millennium.

Digitalisation brought about by big data, the internet of things and artificial intelligence has been an even bigger leap. Human behaviour and society are constantly being reshaped by tech-driven productivity improvements, and so is democracy, a central construct of many political regimes.

During the first Industrial Revolution, people were tied to physical premises such as farms, factories, houses and offices. Information did not flow freely and was often limited for ordinary people, making it difficult for them to make important decisions. The realistic choice then was for a well-informed elite to represent the masses and make those decisions on their behalf.

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Electoral democracy became a natural choice and consequently, when a government was needed and came to be formed, it relied heavily on this elite minority to function, represent and serve the people.

With representation built from the bottom up, the electoral system rightfully reflected the social and political hierarchy in general. The higher up the pyramid, the more resourceful people were.

Although the inherent principal-agent problem (the conflict in priorities between a group and the representative who acts on their behalf) hinders information symmetry and the quality of representation, the system by and large worked to give voice to ordinary people by allowing them to elect their representatives.

The basic assumption of this classical form of democracy was that ordinary people cannot afford the costs of information gathering and decision making, so their scope for expression of opinion is reduced, along with their direct political involvement.

This democratic architecture was fair at that stage, taking into account the barriers to information and lack of connectivity among people and the issues they care about. Accordingly, the formation of government has been based on geography and physical aspects, and governance beyond national borders has been largely unachievable.

If democracy can be reincarnated as a result of profound introspection and prudent practice, it can become dramatically non-linear with a multidimensional path of execution

But the digital age has transformed society and removed these bottlenecks. With the explosion of social media, anybody can easily set up a personal channel or platform and broadcast to an audience, not just CNN or the BBC.

Information now travels at the speed of light and can be integrated and manufactured efficiently and systematically. Citizens are netizens too; virtual social groups are replacing physical ones and statehood is mirrored in the virtual world – although the virtual world is better at breaking down the walls of nationality and ethnicity.

The rise of “virtual supremacies” such as Facebook, Twitter and Amazon has created virtual states that might to a certain extent be more powerful than nation states. In the virtual world, society has been re-engineered into a large variety of groups which align with various interests and preferences. The effects of the information cocoon or data silo are reinforced by algorithms – and the people behind them.

This atomised society is regrouped along lines labelled as values or principles, and assembled back on the platforms designed by Big Tech. Opinion leaders, rather than politicians or officials, are the ones who come out strongly to represent the people within the groups, and this representation is borderless and deemed democratic by their own members.

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Once politicians lose touch with their virtual communities, their power of representation is gone for certain. Nowadays, the scariest thing for an elected political leader is not being thrown out of the official circle but, rather, being banned from social media, which is what has been happening in Washington in real time.

The obstructions to free speech erected by these virtual states, and the standards applied by those behind them, may hamper the careers of some politicians, but within these own virtual republics, it is deemed to be democratic representation per se.

If we are now in a new digital era, then it is time for democracy to change; to march towards a digital democracy and leave behind the industrial-era democracy. It is necessary to keep the time-tested principles, but also elevate them by embracing transparent and just rules that are adaptable to the new era. In this way, the spirit of democracy can live on.

The traditional idea of democracy is that it is linear in nature with a top-down execution path. But if democracy can be reincarnated as a result of profound introspection and prudent practice, it can become dramatically non-linear with a multidimensional path of execution. With new technologies at hand, humankind can undoubtedly handle this new system properly and wisely, leading once again to a great renaissance.

Liu Jun is a member of the China Finance 40 Forum