by keybored | 2025-05-04 20:33:14+00:00
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.

I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.

> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.

That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.

> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.

Pretty much true.

> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.

Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]

People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.

> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.

This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.

And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.

> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.

Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]

[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda

[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part

[3] Tongue in cheek!

[4] Referring to socialism