Johannes Himmelreich

In The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics (Oxford University Press), pp. 655–684, 2023

Abstract

This chapter reviews and evaluates different ways in which digital technologies may affect democracy. Specifically, the chapter develops a framework to evaluate democratic practices that is rooted in the tradition of deliberative democracy. The chapter then applies this framework to evaluate proposals of how technology may improve democracy. The chapter distinguishes three families of proposals depending on the depth of the change that they affect. Mere changes, such as automatic fact checking on social media, augment existing practices. Moderate reforms, such as apps that enable and reward participation in local government, facilitate new practices. Radical revisions, such as using artificial intelligence to replace parliaments, are constitutive of new practices often replacing existing ones. This chapter then concentrates on three radical revisions—Wiki democracy, avatar democracy, and data democracy—and identifies meaningful benefits in the first and deep problems in the latter two proposals.