|
Back in 1992 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history and predicted the world would embrace Western liberal democracy.
Democracy’s downward trajectory over the following three decades might have been predicted by Murphy’s Law, but it is best summed up by the character in a Hemingway novel who said the process of going bankrupt was “gradual, then sudden”.
In 2024 we have already seen several populist and authoritarian leaders across the world succeed by leaning into conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation.
Sydney University democracy expert John Keane has described the most common populist leadership strategy as a form of “gaslighting”. A once obscure book by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”, has become a widely quoted reference text.
Experts will differ on precisely what is driving the rise of populism in our politics, but one thing is clear, the emergence of digital media and social media has comprised our information ecosystem.
Today it is just too easy to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation. The rise of artificial intelligence is only accelerating this trend.
All this, in turn, has eroded trust and made it easy for bad actors to take advantage of the confusion. How are we to get out of this mess?
No one has a single solution – and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. If we’re to nudge democracy back on track a lot of things will need to go right, and one of the most important will be improving the quality and trustworthiness of the information available to all citizens.
This is where The Conversation has a role to play. We take the work of the world’s best academics and make it widely available, for free, to people who need unbiased explanatory journalism to be better informed.
This is vital for democracy because better information will lead to better decisions, in politics as well as our everyday lives.
We do our work with no political agenda, our only goal is to help people access the information they need. We make all our work free because we think that meaningful participation in democracy shouldn’t depend on wealth.
We also make our articles free to republish to seed our colleagues in the media with better information. We hope that this will lead to better public debate and build social cohesion.
But to keep doing all this we need your help. This week we are launching our annual donations drive. If you value the work that we do please donate whatever you can afford and help us build a democracy that is less confused, more cohesive and better informed.
|
