Democracy in Question in the Digital Era

Keywords: democracy, facism, digital, inequality, polarization
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Shocks to democracy such as voter suppression and manipulation of electoral processes, the reversal of Roe v Wade, and the January 6th insurrection have characterized US politics since the 2016 presidential election. Although Trump and the republican party clearly have been central actors in the erosion of democratic culture, I suggest more generally that digitalized processes since the second decade of the new millennium have underscored if not enabled undemocratic if not fascist-oriented events and have been chipping away democracy; the trajectory, just in the infancy of the digital era, is spiraling. Beyond the use of the internet to organize collective action on the far right as well as the left, digital filter bubbles segregate and diminish inter-group communication, construct impermeable walls around groups, and produce the grounds for the development of ‘alternative facts’ without substantiation. The colonization of all people’s personal data by firms, government, even educational institutions, strips citizens of their privacy while the data collected without consent can be weaponized. Data collected from racialized populations commonly are used in predictive profiling followed by automated judicial processes, signifying first, a shift from the understanding of citizens as innocent until proven guilty, a hallmark of democratic processes, to guilty with no chance for proving innocence, and second, the scaling of racist material practices as well as pernicious representations of marginalized groups. The ways in which the digital infrastructure has been used in the context of deepening inequality and societal polarization have fueled evolving trends towards fascism.