Libertarians often hold these mechanisms for acquired and refuse to consider where they come from. For example, you have electricity and drinking water in your home. When you go to the bathroom and rinse the water, wastewater enter a huge sewer system. This system is created and maintained by the state. But in the libertarian state of mind, it is easy to hold for granted that you simply use the toilet and rinse the water and that no one needs to maintain it. But of course, someone needs it.
There is really no perfect free market. In addition to competition, there must always be a kind of confidence system. Some things can be successfully created by competition in a free market, however, certain services and necessities cannot be supported by the market on the market alone. Justice is an example.
Imagine a perfect free market. Suppose that I conclude a commercial contract with you and that I break this contract. We are therefore going to court and ask the judge to make a decision. But what happens if I had united the judge? Suddenly, you cannot trust the free market. You would not tolerate the judge taking the side of the person who paid the most bribes. If justice was to be exchanged on a completely free market, justice itself would collapse and people no longer trusted themselves. The trust to honor contracts and promises would disappear, and there would be no system to apply them.
Consequently, any competition still requires a certain structure of confidence. In my book, I use the example of the Football World Cup. You have teams from different countries in competition against each other, but for competition to take place, there must first be an agreement on a common set of rules. If Japan had its own rules and Germany had another set of rules, there would be no competition. In other words, even competition requires a foundation of trust and common agreement. Otherwise, the order itself will collapse.
Photography: Shintaro Yoshimatsu
In LinkYou note that mass media have made mass democracy possible – in other words, that information technologies and the development of democratic institutions are correlated. If yes, in addition to the negative possibilities of populism and totalitarianism, what opportunities for positive change in democracies are possible?
In social media, for example, false news, disinformation and conspiracy theories are deliberately distributed to destroy confidence among people. But algorithms are not necessarily the distributors of false news and conspiracy theories. Many have done it simply because they were designed to do so.
The purpose of Facebook algorithms, YouTube and Tiktok is to maximize user engagement. The easiest way to do so, it was discovered after many tests and errors was to spread information that fueled the anger, hatred and desire of people. Indeed, when people are angry, they are more inclined to continue information and disseminate it to others, leading to an increase in engagement.
But what happens if we gave the algorithm a different goal? For example, if you give it an objective such as increasing confidence between people or the increase in veracity, the algorithm will never diffuse false news. On the contrary, this will help build a better society, better democratic society.
