The fundamental problem is this: we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise…Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking.

I think there is a lot of validity to this way of looking at things. We need new types of institutions to deal with the 21st century information world. When it comes to politics and information, much of our ideas and models for organizing and thinking about things come from the 18th and 19th century.

The problem is that we’ve essentially invited the entire global population to participate in discussions regarding how our societies should function. For all you know you’re arguing with a meth head from LA about the nuance of English Law, or some old dude from Iraq with a 9yo wife discussing marriage reform, or a literal CCP agent deliberately attempting to undermine your government. I’m finding it really hard to believe that was not deliberate sabotage.

We have a tendency to have a reactionary definition of free speech, mostly associated with a historical context that is simply inapplicable to our modern context.

When you criticize the relationship between social media and censorship, you often get brigaded by one of two groups, sometimes both. The first group are those who often accuse social media groups of censorship, often more associated with rightwing ideologies. Generally it’s because they have some abhorrent view they think they should be able to spread widely but can’t because of basic moderation. The alternative group are often those making the argument that “companies are not governments and have no requirement to respect free speech”, which is fine, but what is the meaning of free speech if we can’t use it? We put down language in the first amendment regarding government suppression of speech because it was governments which had the power to control and limit speech. If a corporation has the power to limit what perspectives or speech is allowed, how different is it really than a government? If a corporation has this degree, should it not also have limits placed on it’s ability to regulate speech?

The fact is we’re often talking past each other regarding speech and it’s consequences. We need a revised understanding of what it means to have the rights of free speech and free association, when so much of our daily lives are controlled by corporations and billionaires with levels of influence rivaling and even dwarfing some governments. What does it mean to have free speech? What even is free speech in a modern digital context? What forms of speech do we allow or disallow?