this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley' (www.tilburguniversity.edu)
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[โ€“] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.

The EU puts the interests of its elites and bureaucracies above all others. Because the EU is its elites and bureaucracies, that's how it's built.

OK, I don't even live in an EU country (OK, suppose in like 50 years by some miracle Armenia joins it, and suppose I get Armenian citizenship before that ...).

But - it's not EU's particular problem.

EU is sort of a system built entirely of "liberal democracy best practices" as they were seen in year 1999. And all its faults are highly average and general for liberal democracies.

It's the crisis of liberal democracies as a thing, because modern technologies allow representatives to guide their populations like a Victoria II player does. Like in a global strategy. And it works. It's not even only modern technologies, it's also "political technologies" like what was normal for USA for many years, but to the rest of the world has spread only in the 90s and 00s. In USA those were, until some point around Reagan, balanced by functional journalism and protest culture.

Except the fact that it works in the sense of having necessary feedbacks and controls and computing power is only one side of the coin, the other side of which is that direct democracy can work too. This removes direct democracy's disadvantage of impracticality, and removes representative democracy's advantage of stability (the opposite of what politicians call stability, stability of democracy is the direct opposite of stability of elites, culture, morality, economics, laws and policies).

And the fact that it works in the sense of political technologies means that representative democracy gains a significant disadvantage of not being really democracy anymore. Those unfortunately work. Those can still work when voting for decisions, not people, but it's harder to make a populace support two inconsistent (from the point of propaganda) actions than it is to make them support a politician who'll support both and then make them doubt the inconsistency.

So to adapt for changes liberal democracies must become direct liberal democracies or turn into Russias. I have spoken.