2347) In a democratic society, it's dangerous for elected officials to ignore the body politic. But what if it has been driven mad by television? What if the duties of the citizenry have been abandoned by most of those that are still sane? Thomas Jefferson never imagined the conduct of democracy in the thrall of a mass medium.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2348) That subset of Americans who still exercise their [voting] franchise -The Market, if you will - tend to be much older, whiter, and more socially conservative than the population in general. The live mostly in suburbs, shop in malls, work for large organizations, and go to church on Sunday. Creatures of a mass society, living in a culture created by mass media. Genericans. Not a bad lot, really. Decent people, most of them, with good judgment - if that judgment were well informed.

And that's the problem. For most of The Market, reality is, as I say, almost entirely based on The World According to Television. This has been the case since the Kennedy-Nixon debates and will continue to be the case for some time. The World According to Television is not a reality that arises from direct experience with events or phenomena. It is a processed world, both eviscerated of context and artifically fortified toward no greater purpose than entrancing the audience.

[... Television has] learned that fear, violence,and sex all fertilize attention marvelously, so it continually churns up virtual demons and scandals that not only jolt the audience into paying attention, but completely transform the political debate. Voters are now more concerned with imaginary threats than with real ones, and so they elect representatives who will address these "problems" without regard to their existence.

It's become a hung loop. Consider the process behind the following familiar example. Looking to raise share and beat back the future, the media raise an imaginary problem, say, a cyber-tsunami of online kiddie-porn. Out in Televisionland, parents who have already been driven into a state of omniphobia by TV depictions of kidnappers, child molesters, and Calvin Klein commercials, freak out and call their congressperson.

Of course, the congressperson doesn't actually know whether or not there's a flood of kiddie porn online. He (or she) has never been online and isn't about to go there. But he does know that his constituents have seized upon An Issue that they are truly passionate about. Under such circumstances, it takes a brave man to do nothing. So he gets together with his colleagues and passes a law that effectively addresses a problem almost no one has ever experienced, while issue forth a whole new set of real ones.

The is democracy in the Television Age, working with hideous efficiency. It is [...] Government by Hallucinating Mob. A push-me, pull-you that is self-contained and almost completely detached from anything that I would call "real." The US government has broken, the victim of television and of connection crash in general.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2349) Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has studied "complexity catastrophe," in which an organism or natural system is forced by its context to process more information than it can. A frequent symptom of this kind of connection crash is fibrillation - a purposeless, resource-expensive quivering that usually culminates in system collapse. It could easily be said that Congress, indeed the entire government of the United States of America, has already reached this state. But however useless and wasteful I think it has become, there are enough Americans who believe in the comforting myth that their government still works, that its continued institutional existence probably contributes to a calm, however delusionary, among the People.

John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)