Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
I think you overestimate the threats to democracy (and furthermore, make them somehow uniquely a threat to democracy and not to other styles of government) and underestimate the resilience of democracy as a robust system of government.
I single out democracy because it enables and is enabled by personal freedom and its personal freedom that I am arguing will have to be limitied in order to ensure humanity's long term survival.

The same truth works in reverse. I would argue that militant Islam succeeds in gaining adherent because of insufficient globalization, not too much. Oh, sure, they might get some reflexive conservative following as a reaction to Western culture and permissiveness, but that is because said culture doesn't come with its attendant freedoms or equalization. It's easy to convince an ignorant goatherd to go blow up a checkpoint somewhere - to convince a worldly, internet using middle class professional is quite another deal entirely. Globalization doesn't eliminate nutjobs, but it helps isolate them. Cultures in contact frequently clash, but I do not think that a necessary result of that clash is violence or enmity.
A few things:

#1. The idea of suicide attacker as ignorant goatherd is a myth. It has been demonstrated time and again that many islamic extremists, including suicide bombers, come from educated and privledged classes. I'm not sure that is actually relevant to the argument, though.

#2. What the recent cultural friction has done is introduce new memes that free cultures have never had to deal with before. Whether or not that friction goes away for whatever reason doesn't matter, the memes will remain. And there will always be extremists ready and willing to behave accordingly for whatever cause they champion. That genie can't be put back in the bottle so as more dangerous technology becomes available, someone will be willing to use it destructively. The only way to deal with that will be draconian, by today's standards, social control.

Any technology has its drawbacks, but I would argue that the benefits of sharing information and developing technologies invariably outweigh the downsides of its misuse. Misuse of technology is a symptom of the problem, but not the problem itself, and does not by itself provide a significant threat to democracy. Quite the contrary; we've seen the internet used to subvert dictatorial and totalitarian governments, to organize peaceful political protest, etc. Imagine how the internet could have hastened the fall of the Soviet Union - instead of painstakingly copying out samizdat publications, dissidents and democracy activists could have spread their messages to millions, and the KGB would have been powerless to stop them.
A few more things:

#1. Again I'm not sure the benefits of the internet are relevant to the argument, but the real world example of China's ability to censor the internet and maintain draconian social control is ample argument against your Soviet Union speculation.

#2. Symptom or not, the fact remains that technology continues to become more and more potent over time. It will not be long before catastrophic capabilities are readily avavailable in a commercial laboratory. Such abilities probably already are. The will to use such technologies to harm the general public coupled with good old human ingenuity and a free society spell grave potential for disaster. The issue isn't whether such technologies will appear and whether someone will use them, but how they can be stopped within the framework of personal freedom we all enjoy.


I think you have a too-fond memory of the pre-internet press. It was limited to a handful of sources who could be intimidated into suppressing stories, even in democracies (for examples, it was an act of great personal courage when Edward Murrow took McCarthy on in the 50s). Now, rarely can anything stay secret for long (see: Wikileaks, etc.), and 'establishment' sources, whether major news networks or government statements, are regularly challenged by third parties.
This part, again, doesn't seem relevant to the hypothesis. If anything, the inability to keep secrets may support it, though only periferally. It doesn't have an affect at all on the subversion/ polarization/ paralasys of government portion.
It's a chaotic system with plenty of bullshit, but a consensus of the truth rapidly emerges from the mess, along with a host of different analyses. People are always going to believe what they want to believe, of course, but that's not a function of the internet, but of human nature.
I'm not sure reality bears out the rosy picture of the concensus of the truth emerging, rapidly or otherwise. There may be a concensus, but truthful? All you have to do is look at the recent attempt at health care reform to know otherwise. What the destruction of traditional news sources and the fractured new order have achieved is the ability to replace for millions of Americans all news with political editorial, without them even realizing it. That's the source of the extreme political polarization we see today.

You overestimate AQ's power. They are in reality a very loosely affiliated network of local terrorist organizations with generally poor funding and organization, and little coordination. They are neither 'super wealthy' or 'super powerful', and they have yet to provide a credible threat to any society. They are nasty, sure, and a nuisance, but not an existential threat.
AQ is just an example. Consider instead the post 9/11 anthrax mailings. If whoever did that had access to something more potent, there would have been catastrophe. And more and more people have wider access to increasingly potent technologies. With loose personal freedom and no political means to crack down on it, its just a matter of time.