#electronic democracy

[electronic-elle]

hiii i'm elle and i'm in your computer! if you are coming from my other blog that shall not be specified and know me by another name, please shhh ♡!

✰ angel software running on creature hardware constructed over 20 years ago out of sopping wet scraps someone found lying around in a cardboard box. i'll use whichever pronouns survive my many dastardly traps and machinations. i make them compete for fun. i don't even care

✰ i post about whatever media currently makes me happiest (or fills me with the most gut wrenching despair) and frankly who the hell knows what that'll be at any given moment <3 right now though it's invincible, gundam (witch from mercury and unicorn), and arcane! don't get comfortable, this will change :)

✰ sometimes i draw! maybe if i say that here i'll actually do it ^^

✰ asks/dms are open! maybe if i say that here i'll actually answer them ^^

✰ if you read this part go drink some water and please tell me to drink some too thanks <3

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Who needs democracy when you have data?

Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen.

Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?