Very much worth reading: Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy: "Democracies draw upon the disagreements within their population to solve problems.... In a well-functioning democracy, each such group vies for political influence by persuading voters that its way of understanding problems and associated solutions is the best one. This is to the democracy’s benefit. It provides a mechanism through which a polity can harness the diversity of perspectives within it, the better to solve complex problems. This requires contestation over who the rulers should be, and what broad social goals they will seek to implement. Political parties and other collective actors hope that they (or their allies) will be in control for a given period, and each vies against others to win public support to that end.... Autocracies adopt a very different approach to common and contested knowledge...
...They require common political knowledge about who is in charge, and what their social goals are, as a basic condition of stability. There may be internal contestation between different factions within the elite, but such contestation is often clandestine, and is carefully insulated from the public realm, so as not to destabilize the shared expectations that anchor regime stability. This explains the great lengths that autocracies often go to manipulate shared expectations, and to support useful public beliefs.... Rather than allowing common political knowl- edge regarding the preferences of the population and the variety of political actors to be shared among actors in a decentralized order, such regimes will try to maintain monopolistic control. This forestalls new collective interests from organizing, and makes it harder for existing interests to coalesce into a challenging coalition....
Authoritarian regimes are potentially vulnerable to information attacks that challenge their monopoly on common political knowledge, either by undermining preference falsification or by disseminating knowledge in ways that allow other collective actors to organize and form coalitions to challenge the regime.... Democratic regimes, in contrast, are vulnerable to information attacks that... turn contested knowledge over who will rule and to what ends, into common political knowledge that permanently advantages a specific faction and associated set of social goals... to attacks on the common political knowledge shared by groups, factions, and parties about their re- spective goals, levels of political support, and potential coalitions, as well as to attacks on shared expectations about the fairness of the political system. Because this knowledge is decentralized, it is easier to destabilize through certain kinds of attacks....
US libertarians claim that the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, Putin’s government discovered that the best antidote to more speech was even more bad speech. Thus, authoritarian governments such as China, and semi-authoritarian regimes such as Russia moved quickly to mitigate vulnerabilities in their information systems, through disrupting the ability of both domestic and inter- national actors to turn regime-favoring contested political knowledge into regime-undermining common political knowledge about the genuine state of public beliefs.... Such attacks disrupt democracy by degrading citizens’ and groups’ shared political knowledge about allied and adversarial groups within so- ciety, fomenting confusion about the goals of those groups, and the level and kind of support that they enjoy. By increasing the levels of noise, flooding attacks degrade the decentralized com- mon political knowledge that provides people with a rough overall map of politics, and make it more difficult to organize around collective inter- ests or to build coalitions...
#shouldread
