Dave Shaw

“The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them; the dullness, by contrast, of the bureaucracy and the courts; all of this”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“EU or NATO find it extremely hard to make fast decisions or big changes. Unsurprisingly, people are afraid of the changes technology will bring, and also afraid—with good reason—that their political leaders won’t be able to cope with them.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The anarchical potential of AI is particularly alarming, because it is not only new human groups that it allows to join the public debate. For the first time ever, democracy must contend with a cacophony of nonhuman voices, too. On many social media platforms, bots constitute a sizable minority of participants. One analysis estimated that out of a sample of 20 million tweets generated during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, 3.8 million (almost 20 percent) were generated by bots.[48] By the early 2020s, things got worse. A 2020 study assessed that bots were producing 43.2 percent of tweets.[49] A more comprehensive 2022 study by the digital intelligence agency Similarweb found that 5 percent of Twitter users were probably bots, but they generated “between 20.8% and 29.2% of the content posted to Twitter.”[50] When humans try to debate a crucial question like whom to elect as U.S. president, what happens if many of the voices they hear are produced by computers?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The medium of the debate has also changed the nature of the debate. Advertisements for hair dryers, news about pop stars, stories about the bond market, notes from our friends, and far-right memes arrive in a constant stream on our telephones or computers, each one apparently carrying the same weight and importance. If, in the past, most political conversations took place in a legislative chamber, the columns of a newspaper, a television studio, or a bar, now they often take place online, in a virtual reality where readers and writers feel distant from one another and from the issues they describe, where everyone can be anonymous and no one needs to take responsibility for what they say.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism