Democracy and the Algorithm
Plato’s Philosopher Kings vs. Tech Oligarchs “Who guards the guardians?” This old chestnut, attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal and famously repackaged by Plato in The Republic, feels eerily relevant in our era of techno-utopian manifestos, algorithmic governance, and click-happy demagogues with machine-optimized memes. Somewhere between Socrates sipping hemlock and Mark Zuckerberg sipping yerba mate, we lost the thread of democratic oversight. Or perhaps we traded it for a shiny new algorithm that promises us efficiency, fairness, and personalized news, with just a pinch of invisible bias and a side of existential risk. The Promise of the Philosopher King Let’s rewind to Plato. In The Republic, he argues that democracy, beloved though it may be by the hoi polloi, is a dangerously chaotic system where power lands in the hands of the persuasive, not the wise. His solution? Philosopher Kings. These are not your garden-variety pontificators on Twitter. They are individuals trained ...