We’re now confronting the greatest structural challenge to democracy we’ve ever seen: a truly open society. Without gatekeepers, there are no constraints on discourse. Digital technology has changed everything. Consequently, reality is up for grabs in a way it never has been before.

Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy is another deeply instructive study of the illiberal drift of so many democracies across the globe.3 However, like so many others, Applebaum’s view proceeds from a default assumption that democracy is a discrete system. But that assumption prevents us from understanding democracy as a constantly evolving

Technologies changed media that changed communicative styles that changed culture that changed thinking and interaction. How we centered ourselves as individuals and the relationships we had to culture, institutions, and the nation-state all transformed.

democracies are defined by their cultures of communication. If a democracy consists of citizens deciding, collectively, what ought to be done, then the manner through which they persuade one another determines nearly everything else that follows. And that privileges media ecology as the master political science.

There is no democracy without an open process of deliberation, and there is no democracy whose processes of deliberation escape the hazards of persuasive rhetoric.

For several decades, the American mainstream press endeavored to satisfy the political demand of neutrality, sacrificing even objectivity itself to avoid labels of bias.

with so much noise on social media and so many news outlets disseminating contradictory information, citizens are justifiably confused and cynical. Many find it easier to retreat into echo chambers and share misinformation than discern what’s real amid the chaos of the public sphere.

As John Dewey once observed, communication is not simply the pipe through which water flows. It locates humans squarely in the realm of meanings, and that struggle over meaning is always where democracy can be found.

The wager of democracy is precisely this: that a free society must allow for isegoria no matter how unseemly the results.