Add that the proponents of high-tech democracy are curiously math challenged. They overlook that even if everyone could speak freely, there's a limit to the number of speakers anyone can listen to.
There are, for example, almost 300 million active Twitter users today. Even if each of them only tweets once a week and the rest of us spend a full 30 hours a week reading 100 tweets an hour, we would only be only be able to follow the tweets of one in 100,000 of those tweeting. This leaves a lot of people tweeting nobody is listening to.
But even if we could listen, the tweeted opinions are limited to 140 characters (about 20 words). If this is democracy, it's hardly deliberative democracy. It's closer to a battle of the sound bytes.
To their credit, those who champion the internet and related technologies as the saviors of democracy are constantly countering governments' attempts to censor or even investigate the speech of the users of the technologies.
Although this opposition to governments' intrusions is laudable, it's also just good business. By protecting their users, the technology companies are better able to attract and retain them, which in turn boost their profits.
Meanwhile, the companies' opposition to government intrusions is conveniently unmatched by a corresponding opposition to the distortion of information and censorship of speech by the legions of private businesses that parasitically attach themselves to the technologies, even as it ignores the realities that contemporary technologies don't help anyone listen to or deliberate about the information and speech they are exposed to.
Of course, there's still much good to be said for the internet and related technologies, but augmenting democracy doesn't rank very high among these goods. To believe that it does is to confuse technological progress with political progress. Not only do these two forms of progress often poorly correspond to one another, they can also operate at cross purposes.
President Trump, after all, now has over 20 million people following his every grunt and chortle on Twitter. Is this an augmentation of democratic free speech or a technology put into the service of populist domination?
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