This chaotic world has always been a coliseum for the big powers to brandish and flex their might, with one’s rise orchestrating another’s fall. Each browbeat is more than its opponent; from giving death stares in the Cold War to engaging in various indirect brawls in foreign territories, ending up, sometimes, in the Thucydides trap. The last century witnessed the battle of ideologies, which ended with the so-called “victory of democracy” – and “the end of history” as propounded by Francis Fukuyama. [Fukuyama’s argument was that with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated. Fascism had been killed off in the Second World War, and now Communism was imploding. In states, like China, that called themselves Communist, political and economic reforms were heading in the direction of a liberal order.] Despite all other competitive ideologies, the world in the 20th century was always more democratic than in the past, with newer and newer democracies emerging, older democracies becoming more stable, free and vibrant, and even the autocracies softening and opening up. But that’s not the case anymore; the current century has proved to be a period of democratic regression with the rise of newer powers in the world like China and the resurgence of old powers like Russia, each presenting an alternative model, which is a big fat threat to Western democracy. Technology is somehow seen to be in favour of these competitive ideologies; with cancel culture on the rise, the West is not only receding back to identity politics, tribalism and patrimonialism but also seems to be falling out of love with the very idea that they have nurtured and fought for for many centuries: the sweet democracy.

Selective freedom of speech and the cancel culture
Our understanding of the world is today mediated most of the time by the screens, not only in poor or developing states but also in the First-World states. The three big tech corps – Meta, X (formerly Twitter) and Google – are messing with democracy in unprecedented ways. Last time, it was Facebook and Zuckerberg’s meddling with people’s voting behaviour in the Project Alamo for the Trump presidency and Cambridge Analytical’s venture for Brexit that rattled the political pundits all over the world. Things have changed exponentially since then. Think beyond that: what if a single person, who is the CEO of an online media platform, could determine if a certain candidate will be allowed to use his platform for his campaign or not? Or maybe influence masses using this platform? No need to think further; our wildest dreams are reality now. It’s not Facebook but rather X that has raised hackles in the political community this time. While Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist,” he turned out to be a selective absolutist, only for those who share his ideology. After Trump’s election as the new president, X complied with 83% of requests made by the governments for censoring or surveilling the accounts of the critics. The same platform underwent a deal with Turkish president Erdogan, who demanded X for censoring or blocking his political opponents, and the platform complied. Similarly, the Indian government’s requests for removing the controversial documentary on Narendra Modi was also accepted, and all the accounts of the critics were blocked. All these are blunt attacks on freedom of speech, strangling the political debate that is always essential for nurturing mature political culture. The democracy’s promise of giving a level playing field to everyone in the electoral process is doubtful today. Even in the US, the First Amendment put restrictions on the government that it can't suppress or put any restriction on the freedom of speech so that none of the individuals or the corporations that have so much power and influence over the political behaviour is capable of determining the outcome of the elections. The disinformation is like the dust of elections; you put something on social media, it goes dandelion; you put something on social media, it goes places and countries you didn’t even hear of. And there’s virtually no way of determining its authenticity; no one goes through the hard task of filtering, and no one goes through the hard task of filtering. Moreover, these media giants decide themselves what is “hate speech,” and every now and then a person becomes a victim of this cancel culture, and when this particular person decides to speak against all that, he gets blocked by X or Facebook.

From men of deeds to men of clicks
From men of deeds that has emerged due to social media is political impassivity, democracy is now a spectator’s sport but rather requires the active participation of each and every individual. What these social media platforms have done is that they have taken away the avenue of any concrete action from the people and replaced it with a fake, self-defined sense of achievement and satisfaction associated with posting status, tweets on X or liking a particular post, e.g., you go to your social media account and post something against racism, like a tweet against extremism. You have stoked your ego and feel self-conceited that you have already performed your part of the duty by liking that tweet on X, which says, “Every human, irrespective of race, colour or religion, should be respected.” The real political participation involving the arduous task of mobilizing people for a cause, pressurizing [authorities], going to the legislature for lawmaking, going to the courts, and getting a law passed to bring about a social change is actually a hard thing, and Gen-Z settles for something easier and within their comfort zone. They pick a screen, log in and post something to their accounts about it, liking all the relevant posts, retweeting those, and that’s all. These online platforms have transformed, if not killed, the concept of participatory democracy, where the only participation left is limited to a few clicks and taps on screens.

The unfamiliar market of ideas
The classic liberal concept of a free market of ideas is also failing democracy due to the rise of technology and social media. The notion that good ideas always outcompete the bad ones in democracy has proved to be farcical; rather, studies show that these social media platforms have become a cesspool of lies, disinformation, and propaganda. And these not only fare well in this online market of ideas but also outperform the true information all the time. It’s not that these platforms like Meta, X, or Google are inherently evil, but rather it’s their business model that is architected in this way; the more activity, engagement and debate there, the more they get monetized. The physician and author, Hans Rosling, in his book Factfulness, talks about a shrewd play of evolution that controls this, known as the fear instinct and the negativity instinct, which implies that normal and good is bland for human beings and always overtaken by something that is negative, sensational or anything that manipulates or plays with our fears and arouses emotions. The liberal notion of a free market of ideas is incompatible with human psychology; we are operated, not compatible with human psychology; we are operated, controlled and manipulated by our fears and emotions controlled and manipulated by our fears and emotions...
...these take over our rational decision-making.**

We are experiencing a revolutionary change; the notion of democracy, which has been evolving from the times of the Greeks, is indeed witnessing yet another big change in the age of technological disruptions. What happens in the future is to be determined by us, whether the governments take these private individuals and corporations under their control, taking down their personalized, selective regulation of free speech and letting the classical liberal idea of a free market of ideas prevail, or letting these tech giants control and decide what things can be said and who is “appropriate” to exercise this freedom. In the later case, the future of the world will be in the hands of a dozen people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs, who will decide and influence our voting behaviours. It will be a major downgrade from democracy being all about people to democracy by the Mark, for the Musk, and of the Steve.