Democracy Doesn’t Need Better Analysis—It Needs Better Dancers

A Response to Dan Williams

Photo by Ardian Lumi on Unsplash

Dan Williams

has written a provocative piece arguing that social media’s primary political effect isn’t algorithmic manipulation but democratization—that by removing elite gatekeepers, platforms revealed genuinely popular beliefs that liberals find uncomfortable. His conclusion flirts with democratic pessimism: maybe democracy can’t survive too much democracy.

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.