Democracy Doesn’t Need Better Analysis—It Needs Better Dancers
A Response to Dan Williams
Williams is half right, which makes him dangerously wrong.
He’s correct that social media didn’t simply manufacture right-wing populism through algorithmic sorcery. The naive liberal story—that better content moderation and tweaked algorithms could restore democratic normalcy—does indeed miss something crucial. But Williams mistakes the effect of cognitive infrastructure collapse for the revelation of pre-existing popular stupidity. He’s treating symptoms as causes, and in doing so, he’s trapped in exactly the analytical frame that helped create the crisis he’s diagnosing.
The Forest Williams Misses
Consider the Bad Bunny affair from last week. When Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski declared that ICE would target the Super Bowl because Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny was performing, MAGA influencers revealed they didn’t know Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They weren’t performing strategic deception—they were genuinely surprised to learn Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
Williams would interpret this as social media revealing pre-existing ignorance that elite gatekeeping previously suppressed. But that’s not what happened. These aren’t ordinary citizens expressing long-held beliefs. They’re influential figures with millions of followers who shaped their entire understanding of American identity, immigration, and citizenship in information environments that never required them to learn basic civics.
The problem isn’t that social media revealed their ignorance—it’s that social media’s attention dynamics made their ignorance possible in the first place.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, algorithmic addiction doesn’t just amplify pre-existing beliefs—it fragments the cognitive infrastructure required to form coherent beliefs at all. Unlike drug addiction, which destroys individual lives while leaving social structures intact, algorithmic addiction affects the shared capacity for sustained attention, complex reasoning, and authentic relationship that democracy requires to function.
This is McLuhan’s insight applied to epistemic collapse: the medium is the message. A platform that rewards immediate emotional reactions, tribal signaling, and attention-grabbing provocations doesn’t just amplify existing stupidity—it systematically produces confident incompetence by destroying the conditions under which competence could develop.
The Analytical Frame Eats Itself
But there’s a deeper problem with Williams’ analysis: he’s using the very framework that helped create the conditions he’s diagnosing.
As I explored in “The Technocratic Liberal Establishment,” the analytical frame treats complex democratic systems as complicated technical problems requiring expert management. This approach systematically removed citizen agency from governance, creating what some political scientists politely call “democratic dissatisfaction”—what citizens actually experience as the evacuation of meaningful connection to democratic life.
When people feel that every major decision affecting their lives is made by someone with credentials they don’t have, using criteria they didn’t choose, optimizing for outcomes they never voted for, they don’t just feel “dissatisfied.” They experience the systematic replacement of democratic navigation with expert choreography. “This is complicated—trust us to manage it” became the inverse of democratic engagement, which should sound like “this is complicated—let’s figure it out together.”
Williams’ analysis continues this pattern. He’s studying popular beliefs as an analytical problem, treating democratic breakdown as a puzzle to be understood through careful observation and sophisticated modeling. But the analytical frame is itself part of what broke democracy’s capacity for collective sense-making.
The Optimization Mindset
Consider Marc Andreessen’s 2014 advice to “run media businesses like businesses.” On its face, this sounds like reasonable counsel about sustainability and efficiency. But embedded in that directive is the entire analytical frame: treat discourse as product, treat audiences as markets, treat truth as whatever optimizes for engagement and revenue.
This is how we got social media platforms designed not to inform but to extract—attention, data, revenue—at scale. When you run media “like businesses,” you don’t ask “what does democracy require?” You ask “what metrics do we optimize for?” The answer, inevitably, becomes engagement, growth, retention. And engagement-optimized systems systematically destroy the cognitive infrastructure required for coherent discourse.
Andreessen represents the collision of technocratic thinking and venture capital incentives. The people who brought us “move fast and break things” now act surprised that they broke democratic sense-making. They treated complex social systems as complicated technical problems, optimized for measurable outcomes, and produced exactly what the analytical frame produces: systems that work brilliantly according to their metrics while catastrophically failing at their ostensible purpose.
This is why Williams’ democratic pessimism misses the mark. He’s analyzing “revealed popular beliefs” without recognizing that those beliefs developed in environments designed by people who took Andreessen’s advice—who built systems that treat human attention as resource to be mined rather than capacity to be cultivated.
The Collision, Not the Revelation
What we’re witnessing isn’t social media revealing pre-existing popular beliefs. It’s the collision of two destructive forces:
First, decades of technocratic governance that treated citizens as problems to be managed rather than participants in collective reasoning, creating a democratic deficit that left people hungry for agency.
Second, attention extraction systems that filled that vacuum with engagement mechanics designed to maximize scrolling at the cost of coherence, systematically destroying the cognitive capacity required for sustained reasoning.
The result isn’t revealed preference—it’s produced incapacity. The MAGA influencers who don’t know Puerto Rico is part of America aren’t expressing long-suppressed popular wisdom. They’re demonstrating what happens when frameworks for understanding develop in environments optimized for engagement rather than accuracy, where confident assertions keep people scrolling and empirical verification is friction to be eliminated.
Williams treats this as democracy revealing itself. I see it as democracy being systematically disabled by forces that profit from fragmentation.
Navigation, Not Choreography
Williams’ democratic pessimism—”maybe democracy can’t survive too much democracy”—accepts a false choice: either we need elite gatekeeping to suppress popular stupidity, or we accept that democratization means epistemic collapse.
But this assumes the only alternatives are expert management or algorithmic chaos. It ignores the possibility of democratic navigation—citizens developing collective capacity for sense-making that doesn’t require either technocratic control or attention extraction.
Democracy was never supposed to be a perfectly choreographed performance executed by expert directors. It was always supposed to be a dance where we improvise together, responding to music as it changes, learning steps through the dancing itself. The technocrats forgot how to dance—they spent so long studying composition that they lost the rhythm. And now Williams is analyzing why the dancers fell, while missing that someone removed the floor.
The Path Forward
The solution isn’t returning to elite gatekeeping (which created the conditions for backlash) or accepting epistemic collapse as revealed democratic nature (which mistakes effects for causes). It’s rebuilding cognitive infrastructure while restoring democratic agency.
This means teaching people to think coherently—not what to think, but how. Building frameworks that resist manipulation because they’re accountable to both empirical reality and genuine values. Practicing abductive reasoning that evaluates patterns rather than just individual claims. Integrating reason and emotion rather than privileging one over the other.
But it also means transforming the systems that profit from fragmentation. Regulatory frameworks that hold platforms accountable for engagement mechanics that destroy reasoning capacity. Economic interventions that change incentive structures making manipulation profitable. Democratic reforms that return agency to citizens rather than treating them as problems requiring expert management.
Williams is right that we can’t solve this just by tweaking algorithms. But he’s wrong that the problem is democracy revealing itself. The problem is that we conducted democratic discourse through systems designed to destroy the cognitive capacity democracy requires, after spending decades replacing democratic navigation with technocratic choreography.
We don’t need better analysis of why democracy is failing. We need to stop analyzing and start dancing—together, consciously, with the discipline to maintain rhythm even when the music grows strange.
Being Down to Earth is necessary to help others understand important concepts, key issues, and often what is considered factual or true information. We need to communicate with each other in an understandable way.
When I was an intern at LA County-USC Medical Center, working with my intern partner into the wee hours of the morning, I experienced those "in your face" moments that stay with you forever. One is relevant about the need to be clear in how we communicate. Peter W. was my intern partner, and we were attempting to care for an overload of patients during the flu epidemic of 1968 or 69. Patients were in gurneys lining the hallways. I was writing up my assessment of a patient when I heard Peter taking a medical history from an elderly woman.
"Do you have paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea?" he asked. His question took me some time to process in my fatigued state, but when I realized what he had queried, I became hysterical with laughter, pounding my desk in disbelief. Peter heard my commotion, and as he walked towards me, his appearance of frustration made me laugh harder. "Do you know what you just asked?" I said. We both had a good laugh.
So when Mike says, "As I’ve argued elsewhere, algorithmic addiction doesn’t just amplify pre-existing beliefs—it fragments the cognitive infrastructure required to form coherent beliefs at all." all I can respond with is WTF is algorithmic addiction and how many people reading this will know what this means.
But I can say, plain and simple, for a Democracy to exist, it must be in a setting of a citizenry that values Democracy and knows what its loss means, as well as what it is likely to be replaced with. When our public education system ailed, we did not fix it. When immigrants entered this country, we did not require a level of their understanding that led to understanding America and valuing democratic principles.
What we have in many millions of voting citizens is characterized by the acronym AIL.
Apathy. A desire to spend more time watching football then picking up a book, reading a magazine, going online and searching about anything. Not bothering to vote or discuss issues.
Ignorance. Americans have become a nation of ill-informed and mis-informed people. There appears to be an epidemic of stupidity in the US. I wonder how anyone could watch MSNBC for 30 minutes and then do the same and watch Fox News and not see the difference between more factual reporting and mis-representation of current events. I have seen this too with patients that are attracted to charlatans (despite their MD) and who clearly cannot discern the difference between real medicine and hucksterism. This ignorance is related to apathy and a disappearance or lack of curiosity, but it is also related to the "L" in AIL- to Laziness.
Laziness. Our country has become the modern day version of the fall of the Roman Empire. It's hard to find those with a work ethic that was once characteristic of Americans. In my neighborhood in Oregon, most homeowners have gardeners, and of those gardeners, 99% are Hispanic. It's great that the US is becoming more and more a melting pot of different cultures, but it seems to me that much of the population have become "infected" with lassitude, and that lassitude eventuates in outright laziness.
For any system to work, its constituency must be involved, must work, take part, and be part of the proverbial "hive." I have not seen a bee hive of late where the bees just hang around, drinking nectar and watching flowers. Bees work. They are committed to the welfare of the hive.
It is certainly true what Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, and as Mike noted:
"... McLuhan’s insight applied to epistemic collapse." Epistemology, the validation of information, is a stepping stone or perhaps a Rosetta Stone in reaching closer to the truth. To make valid, to invalidate, to ensure the truth of, is so crucial "to know" and acquire knowing or knowledge. Yes, one of the factors that has brought us into this mess is social media, but that is one manifestation of what has happened to this country over many decades. Think about our fast-food mentality. It applies not solely to McDonald's and the many similar eating "establishments" but to all of our society, and it was happening well before X, Facebook, etc.
My field is no longer "medicine" but McMedicine. Fifteen fucking minutes to evaluate a dynamic, intricate biologic system. Would you bring in our car to be diagnosed and expect a well-trained mechanic to always diagnose what's wrong in 15 minutes or less?
Social media is a late stage expression of McReading. Sex without foreplay is McSex. Much of what we see on TV that is supposed to be News is McReporting. You do not get the gist of something valuable or important when 5 minutes is spent discussing it. That's what candidates are given in debates. Now all the major news stations are 5 minutes of reporting followed by commercial after commercial.
McLuhan is right in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. "You know nothing of my work." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
So why not have a real dialogue on CNN or BBC or MSNBC about social media and its danger. Why not bring up the points made by Mike a la McLuhan:
A platform that rewards immediate emotional reactions, tribal signaling, and attention-grabbing provocations doesn’t just amplify existing stupidity—it systematically produces confident incompetence by destroying the conditions under which competence could develop.
I do not know about others, but I often cannot handle the entire load of dirty laundry that Mike puts into one washing machine load. It is too much for my less evolved brain. It is too painful and creates overwhelming despair.
My father spent little time with me, but he did relate some pearls along the way.
"Son, if you fix one thing here, another there, before you know it you have fixed the entire "car." Bernie to Stephen
Maybe the messy beautiful dance of democracy isn't really tiring at all. If we step out there and meet people where they are, we may discover that coherence resides in that dance. Well done, Mike!