The digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere

> As we have written in Noema [1], new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.

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> Just as republics have historically sustained themselves by creating countervailing institutions to check power when too much of it is concentrated in one place, so too such checks are needed in the digital age when power is so distributed that the public sphere itself is disempowered.

I'm unsure of Nathan Gardels and the Berggruen Institute's ideological orientation. But I found this article and passages such as the one above, interesting.

[1]: https://www.noemamag.com/participation-at-scale-can-repair-t...

I think we are seeing the usual Freudian slip of "restoring trust as a goal". The same often seen with corrupt leadership in the wake of their latest scandal. It doesn't even occur to the speakers to lie about becoming worthy of the trust, as if transparency and accountability are unfathomable, lovecraftian concepts and that trust just exists to make people into puppets.

Here they complain of a lack of trust and 'disunity' but say nothing about why they are worthy of trust. Indeed they scapegoat information for it, what should be a basis of trust. It comes across as the same ole corrupt "shut up and be good pawns again" attitude.