democracy in a solidified world

Democracy works best when information is passed around locally. When correlation length isn't too long.

That is, when you're in a liquid, not a solid.
Solids have the behavior that, it's very easy to determine the global direction by bribing one or a few people
And once that direction has been chosen, it's exceedingly difficult to change it
It's the same mechanism by which error correcting codes can be decoded: natural dynamics will "correct" you back to the agreed upon belief
- That is, even when you place an external field on the system representing changing external incentives, you'll still find it very hard to leave this stable state.
Examples:
- It feels like polling does not fluctuate anymore
  - Even after Biden's disastrous debate and Trump's assassination attempt (which each should have imposed heavy external fields
Another issue is that social media platforms are only making the issue worse.
- By recommending content based on user clicks, they're aggravating confirmation bias
Solutions:
- Inject more randomness: there should be some minimum entropy in content recommendations
- Or maybe... this just isn't a problem: maybe truth isn't as important as agreement.
Studies to conduct:
- [?] Can we measure how semantically diverse the content people consume is? Is it more or less diverse than before?