Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Logic of Democracy

Democracy is logically problematic. Its success depends upon the acceptance of a number of rather awkward propositions by the entire electorate. Key among these propositions is that everything is negotiable. If any political issue is perceived as ‘make or break’ by any faction, democracy is threatened and will likely deteriorate into tyrannical dictatorship or fragment into civil war.

There is a corollary to the requirement for universal negotiability: in a democracy no one is ever satisfied.* Democratic politics is always in flux as factions seek advantage to improve their position. Negotiated compromises are always temporary. And as new ‘interests’ are discovered (or manufactured), all existing positions are vulnerable.

Inevitably, these interests must include the rules of the democratic procedure itself. Who is entitled to vote, how this is determined, what constitutes fraud, and even the precise criteria for ‘winning’ are all fundamental issues which are self-referentially resolved by the very process which is to be controlled. Nothing in democracy can guarantee these issues are resolved ‘fairly’ since fairness is defined by the democratic process itself.

Infomocracy is a fictional account of what happens when the process of democracy becomes a non-negotiable single issue. The book follows several campaign agents as they organise rallies, disrupt counter-rallies and participate in gathering and using intelligence on the political opposition. Their field of action is a complex global democracy composed of popular and corporate ‘centenals’ (electoral units of exactly 100,000 people) in which factions compete for local dominance and the possibility of a wider Supermajority.

Because immigration restrictions have been eliminated in Older’s world, people have tended to migrate to regions whose populations hold similar views to their own. So constituencies have become economically, religiously, and ideologically homogenous. Centenal political allegiances are therefore international. The centenals are themselves simultaneously governments and political parties. It is through coalitions among the centenals that a Supermajority world government is formed. One might call the structure and the process DemocracyMax. Ingenious invention.

But by outlining such an extreme form of democracy, Older is able to demonstrate clearly the fatal flaw in all democracies: the more homogenous any electorate becomes, the more likely it is to construct non-negotiable demands - single issue stands on which a faction stakes its existence. And the more non-negotiable demands, the less likely that democratic politics will produce its best outcome: a situation which no one wants but which everyone can accept. And when democracy cannot approximate this situation, it is dead.

The problem with Older’s book is that its crucial insight gets hidden beneath a mass of sci-fi hype about fake news, voter manipulation and electoral dirty tricks. Of course these are the things in today’s news. But while significant, they are so as a perennial and probably necessary part of democratic politics. They are elements of the process whether we like it or not; and they always have been. Publicising them merely distracts from the much more fundamental issues and trends which can undermine the entire democratic enterprise. As Winston Churchill quipped, democracy is indeed a terrible form of government. But if it isn’t recognised for what it is, it could become a lot worse.

* This is an inherent and incorrigible aspect of democratic politics, in fact of any group decision-making from planning the family vacation to national elections. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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