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This past year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is the fight for the soul of our information civilization.

Welcome to the third decade.

The public tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates over federal privacy legislation to a mania for total information awareness, turning Silicon Valleys innovative surveillance practices into objects of intense interest. As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed, the intelligence community would have to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it, in order to reach beyond constitutional, legal, or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today. By 2013, the CIAs chief technology officer outlined the agencys mission to collect everything and hang on to it forever, acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible. The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data.

Young entrepreneurs without any democratic mandate landed a windfall of infinite information and unaccountable power. Googles founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, exercised absolute control over the production, organization and presentation of the worlds information. Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg has had absolute control over what would become a primary means of global communication and news consumption, along with all the information concealed in its networks. The groups membership grew, and a swelling population of global users proceeded unaware of what just happened.

The license to steal came with a price, binding the executives to the continued patronage of elected officials and regulators as well as the sustained ignorance, or at least learned resignation, of users. The doctrine was, after all, a political doctrine, and its defense would require a future of political maneuvering, appeasement, engagement and investment.

Google led the way with what would become one of the worlds richest lobbying machines.In 2018 nearly half the Senate received contributions from Facebook, Google and Amazon, and the companies continue to set spending records.

Most significant, surveillance exceptionalism has meant that the United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding principle of social order. With this forfeit, democratic governments crippled their ability to sustain the trust of their people, intensifying the rationale for surveillance.

To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, its important to know that surveillance capitalisms operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.

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Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times

Local winners have been announced in the 2020 VFW Voice of Democracy Contest sponsored by Westby Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8021. The theme of this years competition was Is this the country our Founding Fathers envisioned? The contest was open to all students in grades 9 through 12 including home-schooled students.

This is a national contest, where the national winner receives a $30,000 college scholarship. There is a total of $153,000 in college scholarships awarded annually to state and national winners. Over 190 Westby High School students entered the contest.

Eighth place was won by Jaylin Holte, a 12th-grader and daughter of Kathy Pieper and Justin Holte of Westby. Jaylin won $15.

Is this the country our Founding Fathers envisioned?

Is the country the Founders envisioned? The answer to that question is very divided, but ultimately, no, it isnt what they envisioned. The country has changed so much over time, and even though almost everything is different, the way people are treated and how America is run could use improvement. The Founding Fathers had a much different vision of America than it is today because our country isnt equal, we involve ourselves into other countries problems when we dont need to, and the wealthy control the government today.

The Founding Fathers wanted America to be a country of freedom and a place where people were treated equally, but at that time America was anything but that. We had slavery and women were treated as inferiors. Some may argue that over the last few centuries we have created a country they envisioned because we abolished slavery and we gave women equal rights, but at the same time we arent equal. Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested. Once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted, they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences, note the activists at Dosomething.org. We say that everyone is treated equally, but we still have police brutality and we still have people who live in poverty who dont receive the same opportunities as those who live in wealthy cities. In 2018, 40 million Americans were dependent on food stamps. The intended American Dream is out of reach for so many today. The number of US citizens suffering would horrify the Founding Fathers.

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Voice of Democracy: Is this the country our Founding Fathers envisioned? by Jaylin Holte - The Westby Times

A living democracy depends on truth

Do you remember Richard Nixon, another former U.S. president who thought that the law didnt apply to him? Nixon authorized underhanded attacks on his rivals, including the famous Watergate break-in, even though he was far ahead in the polls. But, as you may also recall, Nixon was the only president to resign from the office.

The Republican senators and Congress members at that time were no more anxious to lose their partys president than the current members. But most of them were World War II veterans and they knew first-hand how unchecked dictatorial ambitions could destroy the world and they knew right from wrong. They were patriots the Greatest Generation and put their country above their party. They advised Richard Nixon to resign or be impeached.

Contrast that action with the dangerous way that the Republicans in the current Congress are acting lying about a fair election, lying about the seriousness of the pandemic and, in general, sowing hatred and discord in an attempt to keep one unqualified person in power. This is not patriotism. These people never saw war and if they have read our Constitution they certainly dont understand it.

A living democracy depends on truth and trust and a constant dedication to keeping it alive. Our rule by the people cannot stand on lies and division and guesses presented as facts. Please work to keep our way of life and our way of self-government strong and reject lying, hatred and division.

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Letter to the editor: A living democracy depends on truth - The Winchester Star

President Joe Biden speaks during the 59th Presidential Inauguration on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

By Eric Genrich | mayor of Green Bay

This was a conversation I had with my son, Henry, before Joe Bidens victory last November:

Dad, if Joe Bidens elected, Im going to write him a letter and tell him that he should make America a democracy.

Thats a good idea, buddy.

Democracy is a good idea, and its worth fighting for, especially in the wake of the violent insurrection that recently besieged our nations Capitol building. This is my response to Henry, and it is my note of encouragement to him and to all who believe in the fight to make our country the democracy we are destined to achieve.

Democracy is something Im pretty familiar with as the mayor of Green Bay. Its a project to be engaged in at all levels of government, and its embrace everywhere is what my citizens are due. Without it we will be incapable of accomplishing what is necessary to improve the lives of our people in the fundamental ways that are so strikingly obvious to those of us on the ground floor of government.

My 10-year-old sons comments about democracy were related to his recent discovery of how the Electoral College elects our president. What he learned was upsetting to him, and for good reason. The anti-democratic elements of our government should be upsetting to everyone who believes in the principle of representative government, and the anti-democratic and violent actions of Donald Trumps supporters should embolden us to strengthen our democracy further.

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Eric Genrich: My son believes in democracy, and we should too here's how we can achieve it - Madison.com

Americas Founding Fathers were among the wealthiest people in the Colonies when they drafted and signed the Constitution, and thats pretty much who they expected to continue to guide the young nation.

It was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy,where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all issues, says Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. The vote itself,they thought,ought to be reserved for people of wealth and education, but they certainly didn't want to restrict all those other kinds of political participation.

Thefounders expected the common people, the poor and uneducated, to participate indirectly,through their local government, at town halls and meetings and through protest actions like boycotts.

Some of thefounders were particularly concerned about populism and mob rule.

These were the kinds[of people]that thought that democracy was a dirty word. Even John Adams said stuff like that. He didn't want poor people to vote, he didn't want women to vote, Wehrman says.

BruceKuklick, a professor of American history emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, says the framers of the Constitution had a very different idea of democracy than Americans do today.

Thefounders didn't want this sort of democracy at all. The Constitution is written so that citizenship rights are very, very limited, he says. They worried about democracy... It was a bad form of government because once you let everybody participate, then you're likely to elect a demagogue. You're likely to have people come to power who appeal to the frenzy of the masses. That idea is long gone.

Wehrman points out that the framers of the Constitution saw to it that only one part of one branch of the federal government, the House of Representatives, is popularly elected by the people. The Electoral College chooses the president, the commander in chief selects the Supreme Court justices and, originally, senators were selected by state legislatures.

It's another attempt to kind of whittle away at the direct participation of a large group of people in the political process, Kuklick says. Sothere are all these other constraints that they write into theConstitution to shore up what they think might be a leaky vessel,where too many ignorant,poor people get the right to vote.

It was only after the 1913 ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution that U.S. senators were elected by direct popular vote.

Clearly, the Constitution was written and enacted to pull back some of the actions that were taken by state legislatures. People like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought that the state legislatures and voters in most states had gone too far, that too many people were participating in politics, too many people were voting, says Wehrman.

For example, New Jersey gave the right to vote to residents who could reach a certain property ownership threshold. This included women and African Americans,who were able to vote from 1776 until 1807, when the state restricted voting rights to white men.

They (thefounders) thought that there were too many voices in the state legislatures, that states were becoming too radical, that they were beholden to the interests of the common man,when they needed to be more reserved and more accommodating to wealthy, educated business-interest types, Wehrman says.

Sowhat would people like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the other framers of the Constitution think about America today?

I think they would all be sort of delighted that the general framework that they created is still in action, Wehrman says.

And they might even be open to change. After all, they did write in a process for changing or amending the Constitution. They even availed themselves of that process with the ratificationin 1804of the 12thAmendment,which established separate Electoral College votes for president and vice president. The tweakkeptpolitical adversaries from opposing parties from serving in the same administration as president and vice president.

Even so,Kuklicksays,the Founding Fathers would be considered reactionaries by todays standards.

[They]didn't want what came to be,Kuklicksays.And one of the amazing transformations of the United States in the 19th century is that we go from having this very, very limited view of participation by the people in the government, to the one that people just now completely accept as being the democratic way.

Although democracy in action today might not be exactly what thefounders envisioned, money and power do continue to play a vital role in U.S. politics. And, given thatthe vast majority ofAmerican presidents have been independently wealthy, thefounders aim of reserving a prominent place in government for the rich has essentially been realized.

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Todays Democracy Isnt Exactly What Wealthy US Founding Fathers Envisioned - Voice of America