Hot Type: TechnoFeudalism’s Warm Embrace
Two new studies suggest liberal democracy is gradually being replaced with technofeudalism, reports Political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda
“First comes Pushkin, then come the tanks” – Ukrainian idiom
I wept when reading the new Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute. Not because it detailed the ‘autocratization of the USA’. That I had expected. The collapse of American democracy is something we can all see. But tears welled up when I read on page 4: “Among the new autocratizers are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the UK.”
Seeing the UK listed as an autocratizing country was devastating. Perhaps naïvely, I am still holding out hope that UK citizens will wake up in time to stop the worst from happening. All they have to do is look at the devastation in the US – that should be enough to jolt the British into preventing further erosion of their democracy.
But that is not how this invisible war we are all in works – the poison slips in country by country, through its unprotected internet borders, with fine-tuned and work-shopped messaging designed specifically for each nation, to turn citizens against their own freedoms.
The V-Dem Institute, part of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, measures global democracy and in the time that I’ve been reading their reports, we have seen democratic nations trending in the wrong direction — from about half of the world a decade ago, now, 74% of the world population live in autocracies, with only 7% of the world population living in liberal democracies. Like the monarch butterfly and polar bears, liberal democracies are now an endangered species.
