Alex Krasodomski | This House Believes Modern Technology Will Destroy Liberal Democracy | CUS

Alex Krasodomski speaks as the third proposition on Thursday 7th March 2024.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.". That was Marx's grim assessment of the steaming pace of modernisation and industrialisation, which he thought spelled doomed for liberalism. It did not- but new challenges emerge. How can systems, documents and ideas, formulated in 18th Century salons and coffee houses, hope to stand up to the power of Al, a world where denizens are hunched over cell phones, and a world where tyrants can influence news cycles at the click of a button?
The growing sense of oblivion for liberal democracy is being compounded by the 2024 US Election, which Trump, often using these distinctly modern tactics, seems to be pulling ahead. But are we perhaps being clouded too much by pessimism, and ignoring the accountability and knowledge realised by the internet and our technological lives? Or has technological change doomed liberal democracy to oblivion?
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ALEX KRASODOMSKI
Alex is a senior research associate in the Digital Society Initiative leading efforts on digital public infrastructure, open source sustainability and articulating, measuring and advocating for an internet compatible with democracy. He was until June 2022 interim research director at Demos, and director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, during which time he authored more than a dozen major reports on digital election integrity, content moderation practices, digital regulation and the intersection between tech and politics. He led the Good Web Project and is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
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