- [I've just read this halfway through on my phone, but it's a lot more voluminous and interesting than I thought it would be, so I'll read it more carefully when I get back home.
- [The World and Japan 100 Years from Now: How the Internet Will Change the World (PDF)](https://www.murc.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/201304_33.pdf)
- [[The World and Japan after 100 years]] [[How will the Internet change the world?]]
- [[Quarterly Journal of Policy and Management Studies]] [[Hiroki Azuma]] 2013 vol.4
Here is a summary of the main points of Hiroki Azuma’s speech and the Q&A session
- What the Internet has made visible is not people’s rational opinions, but “the general will,” their collective unconscious and desires.
- Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” can be interpreted as similar to the collective knowledge on the Internet today.
- In politics, the “general will” should not simply be realized, but treated as a constraint on it.
- In large societies, full direct democracy does not work. Some degree of elitist political system is necessary.
- The development of the Internet has made it necessary for the government to constantly monitor and, if necessary, suppress the “general will” of the people.
- In the future, the need for labor may diminish, necessitating a basic income-like system.
- The role of politicians shifts from simply representing the will of the people to controlling populist desires.
- While technological advances make it technically possible to visualize the general will, whether or not to incorporate it into politics is a matter of “hearts and minds.”
The lecture discusses the philosophical considerations and practical challenges of democracy and politics in the Internet age.
deliberation democracy
- Kan Suzuki, then a member of the House of Councillors
- From Muttering to Deliberation.”
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I think that tweets like Twitter are the immature will of the people, which must be properly enhanced through deliberation. Basically, I think that is what people usually think. In other words, many people think that tweets circulating on the Internet are immature compared to the political will of the people, and that raising them to a mature will through deliberation is the way to improve the quality of democracy.
As for ideological obstacles, it is usually decided in the humanities to overcome them by re-reading the classics. The most powerful way is to say, “This is what the ancients said. In the humanities, we are not allowed to invent new concepts. - People who don’t look at the moon through a telescope. or [Those who insist that the heaviest things fall first.
Nerd Political Thought. Rousseau was a thoroughgoing individualist … In his book “The Theory of Learning and Art,” Rousseau wrote: “Basically, civilization has made us worse. He argued that man was happiest when he was a discrete individual, when he had only a small family like hunter-gatherers, and when he had no contact with others at all. So is the theory of unequal human origins… Humans are unequal because they have come to exchange. Self-sufficiency is the best. It doesn’t matter what society says. Rousseau had several conflicts with the Parisian salon space, resulting in his choice to retreat to the countryside. In fact, Rousseau’s livelihood depended on this love story… The Social Contract is the political philosophy of this type of recluse. The concept of “general will” is a question of “if a group of reclusive otaku were to get together and create a society, what do they think would be the best way to do so? I think this is very important when considering the coming age of the Internet. In other words, Rousseau was thinking of “a politics that does not involve human beings as much as possible. In other words, Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” is how to conduct politics successfully with little or no communication with each other. In other words, “politics without deliberation. General will is politics without deliberation.
In the era before Rousseau, there were thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke who were famous for their “social contract theory. Both Hobbes and Locke developed a very intelligent “social contract theory,” which states that “if we live alone, our own bodies and property rights are threatened, so as a rational choice, we all create our own society. Rousseau, however, is different. Rousseau thinks that society should not create human beings from a rational standpoint, but when asked “Then, why did you create it?
The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have different characteristics. - Hobbes., in “Leviathan,” considers the state of nature to be “A state of war of all against all” and states that a battle for self-preservation arises. So people make a contract to transfer the right of self-preservation to the state and form a government with strong powers. This government is said to be absolutely powerful and incapable of rebellion. - Locke saw the state of nature as rational and equal, but disparities in wealth cause a state of war. Locke’s social contract theory states that governments are formed to protect property rights, but when governments violate human rights, the people have the right to resist.
- In his Theory of the Social Contract, Rousseau believed that people live in isolation in the state of nature. Because of possible conflicts and plunder with others, people form communities by contract and protect their individual rights by assigning their rights to the community. As this developed, a state based on the “general will” would be formed, which would pursue the interests of the community as a whole rather than those of the individual.
In the Social Contract, this is referred to as “compassion”… Rational human choice, or economic rationality to use a term that appeared in later times, depends, in Rousseau’s view, not on such rationality, but on something more fundamental, something like bodily emotion.
- As civilized society developed and private property was created, “compassion” was lost, resulting in inequality and strife among people.
It was this view of mankind that made Rousseau the basis for the overwhelming influence of Romantic literature in the nineteenth century. And it was a little more sophisticated theorization of Rousseau’s view of the human being that would be developed a hundred years later by Freud … The Unconscious … Human beings are not basically driven by reason, but by emotion.
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… The theme of sex and desire was actually very new at the end of the 18th century. That is why Romanticism emerged in the 19th century. In other words, Romanticism made it a theme of literature to depict people who were driven by desire, rather than subjects who acted rationally and rationally.
2chan is very close to the “general will”.
In the book “General Will 2.0,” the conclusion is that our world should be a kind of two-pronged system: deliberation and general will.
I think the creation of things like 2channel and Nico Nico Douga in Japan is probably very important. These Japanese media are not “connected media” at all, but “solitary media”. It is a media that is solitary and desire-driven.
Rousseau’s argument that popular will equals enthusiasm, and that unmediated, unconsidered political decision-making, and the very possibility of it, has given rise to populism in the first half of the 20th century, and cannot be adopted today as such.
So you are not saying that democratic decision-making should be subject to the “general will”? Rather, you are saying that we should be wary of such a situation. Yes, I do not mean that democratic decision-making should be subject to the “general will. I say that the “general will” is a constraint for our society. So we should accept it as a constraint, rather than follow it… For example, there are some policies that are absolutely right but cannot be implemented without money. In the same way, even if a policy is absolutely right, it cannot be implemented if people’s feelings do not support it.
I think we should build a political system based on the premise that the world will not improve even if the will of the people is realized as it is. My book “General Will 2.0” was written as a first step in thinking about this.
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Representative democracy is a low-pass filter for the will of the people
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No good politician can be elected in a mass society with the internet.
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Capitalism as a deliberative elite system and the general will
The “general will” is very effective in overthrowing dictatorships, as was the case with the French Revolution in the first place. In this sense, the Arab Spring and the French Revolution have exactly the same structure. In such revolutions, the “general will” can be used to destroy a system by saying, “I don’t like this system. However, it is very difficult to use “general will” for creative activity What made open source work… It’s the criteria for whether a program works or not, or is faster or not faster, more or less convenient, etc. It is not “everyone” that determines these criteria, but the machine. So the fact that the criteria are outside makes open source possible.
- I’m fine up to “it works or it doesn’t, faster or it doesn’t,” but the machine hasn’t decided “more convenient or less convenient.”
- Therefore, the number of functions is constantly increasing without verification of “it would be more convenient if this function were added” versus “it would be better if this function were not added because it would be simpler”. - Remote control full of buttons
Open projects are not possible in principle when it comes to humanistic and social projects, where we have to create our own standards of value. This is very important. It is not a technical problem, but a logical impossibility, because we have to set our own values.
Chairman Nakatani… In today’s news, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) has accused the U.S. government of “tapping into the Internet, Twitter searches, and who is doing what, and figuring out everything, and then giving reasonable treatment to those who are really dangerous. He made the accusation that “the government is tapping into the Internet, tweets, and who is doing what.
- [Edward Snowden - Wikipedia https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A8%E3%83%89%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B9%E3%83%8E%E3%83 %BC%E3%83%87%E3%83%B3]
- June 2013 - what a coincidence!
Professor Azuma]… I think the only model is that the state constantly censors the unconscious that is visible on the Internet, and in order to prevent it from going out of control, it guides and suppresses it in certain aspects, while trying to maintain the stability of the state. In other words, it is impossible for a society to be successful if it is left to everyone’s self-regulating order, and that is probably the only way. However, there is a possibility that this could lead to human rights issues or suppression of speech, which is a very sensitive issue. I think Japan will also run into this problem in the near future. For example, the issue of “hate speech” is a very clear example. Hate speech is within the scope of free speech. However, if hate speech is left unchecked, it will become a bigger movement as more and more people agree with it, and it may actually lead to violent incidents. That would be a problem, so the idea is to nip it in the bud in its early stages… From the principle of a democratic state and the principle of human rights, we should not intervene in such a way. However, in the future, it may be better to intervene.
What made the Internet revolutionary was the fact that it was composed of printed text. The Internet was revolutionary because it was made up of printed text. I believe that until the first half of the 20th century, the era in which so-called discourse was centered on texts printed on paper, the essential change had already begun about 50 years ago when television became commonplace. With the advent of the Internet, we have finally been forced to confront this reality.
Coming up with new search terms is the most creative thing you can do right now. Anyone can do a search, and coming up with the right words to search for can actually determine up to 95% of the value of a survey. When I think about where this “coming up with words” comes from, it is, in my opinion, a very deep story, and I think it is close to the primordial problem of human language use. In other words, it is close to the question of what kind of words we use to express what we see. And as long as we are recommending words in a language, saying, “People who use this word will use this word,” or “People who use that word will use that word,” no new words will probably emerge, will they? It is a story as close as possible to such questions as “What does it mean to create a poem?
- Stories similar to “[All language is metaphor.
- METAPHOR
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