Very Serious Populists
Ben Shahn Voting Booths (1950)The point of online voting systems is not to highlight the best content but to build and maintain hegemony
There is this strange notion, mainly in the United States, that votes are the atomic unit of democracy, giving it structure and tangibility. The civic work of picking candidates to vote for, registering people to vote, talking about whose votes matter the most and are hardest to get is supposed to culminate in an exuberant climax of polls and balloon drops. Voting is so deeply embedded in the collective conceptualization of democratic governance that one could mistake the mere opportunity to vote as sufficient proof that democracy is happening. But to reduce democracy to dutiful voting is to pull energy away from direct action and defer responsibility to civil servants invested in the status quo that protects their job. Voting, and not clicking, is the original slacktivism.
