Issue 5. The Future

The future of democracy in our digital and chaotic age may be one of deepening unease – a future shaped not only by technologies and geopolitical clashes, but by a fundamental emotional condition: solitude. The 19th-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, who analyzed modern democracy, wrote about the solitude of the heart. Nowadays, the future may not only be about how artificial intelligence or social media transform our information space, but how they impact the emotional architecture of democracy itself. This essay runs through such ideas, and offers a positive way forward: by rebuilding spaces of genuine encounter between people, we can alleviate the general restlessness. The future of democracy may depend less on what we invent, and more on how we choose to reconnect.

In Franz Kafka's short story Fellowship, we read about five people who resist the inclusion of a sixth person.

“We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed at us and said: Those five just came out of that house. Since then we have been living together, it would be a peaceful life if it weren't for a sixth one continually trying to interfere. He doesn't do us any harm, but he annoys us, and that is harm enough; why does he intrude when he is not wanted? We don't know him and don't want him to join us. ... Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not to explain and not to accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.”

This is one of Kafka’s piercing parables – those brief, allegorical insights that illuminate the character of mature modernity. It begins with a seemingly comprehensible dilemma: not all communities are obliged to admit new members, especially if those members are perceived as burdensome. And yet, in this case, the “sixth” is not a burden, nor is there any particular bond that unites the original five. What unfolds is a metaphor for modern society, where individuals find themselves alongside one another largely by accident—sharing little, bound neither by common cause nor conviction, but held together instead by inertia or indifference. This is no vision of a welcoming collective. Kafka’s notion of “fellowship” (Gemeinschaft in original) is closer to that of six solitary figures standing in proximity, rather than any coherent social group.

The theme of solitude, so characteristic of mature modernity, occupies a long line of contemporary thinkers, filmmakers, and artists after Kafka. Just to pick a few newest examples: Spike Jonze's Her is a story of a lonely man who falls in love with an operating system – a strikingly relevant plot in the times of ChatGPT. Severance is an American science-fiction series where individuals suffering from solitude, under the auspices of a mysterious corporation, undergo a procedure that separates their work memories from their personal ones. Death Stranding is a Hideo Kojima's computer game about a world defined by both literal and emotional isolation. It is solitude that defines our time – the time of “social media”, populism, and “fake news”.

But we have been here before.

In the somewhat more distant history of ideas, there was a thinker who most comprehensively addressed this issue, a defining ailment of the modern form of democracy. Never did it better come to light in its immediate and simple urgency as when it was first formulated, when, to use the words of Jacob Burckhardt, this thinker – Alexis de Tocqueville – struck a “fundamental cord”.

In 1840, the second volume of Democracy in America by Tocqueville was published. Five years had passed since the appearance of the first volume – years during which Tocqueville undertook further travels, including to England, Ireland, and various European countries, in an effort to compare political and social systems firsthand. Yet the distinction between the two volumes lies not merely in the time of their publication.

Arguably the most enduring concept introduced in the first volume of the book is that of habits of the heart. In Tocqueville's thought, the habit of the heart is neither mere passion or mere custom – it is both. It signifies a passion so deeply ingrained through repetition that it becomes nearly unconscious, a reflex shaped by the civic education one has undergone through lived democratic practice. Tocqueville writes of the habitual exercise of liberty – of associations, of newspapers – that embed democratic mobility so thoroughly into the lives of citizens that they eventually develop a visceral resistance to any authoritarian inclinations on the part of politicians.

It is, to be sure, a beautiful vision of democracy. Indeed, viewed in this light, one could almost believe in the idealistic promise Tocqueville sketches when he writes: “Men will be perfectly free, because they will be entirely equal; and they will be perfectly equal, because they will be entirely free.” This is perhaps why the concept of habits of the heart has inspired so many volumes. Contemporary scholars of American democracy have devoted numerous books to this notion, weaving it into hopeful projections of what democracy is, or more ambitiously, what it might become. Among them are Habits of the Heart by Robert N. Bellah and Parker J. Palmer's Healing the Heart of Democracy. There is a probability, however, that in doing so, they have perhaps contributed – unwittingly – to a distortion not only of Tocqueville's thought, but also of the modern imagination surrounding democracy’s true nature and its potential limits.

The difficulty lies in the fact that habits of the heart represent only one face of democracy. Or rather, more precisely: they form part of a remedial project – a therapeutic program for a political system whose deepest feature is not community at all. As Tocqueville explains, “democratic equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie.” It is a vision strikingly reminiscent of Kafka's parable: individuals living in proximity, yet fundamentally unbound.

Thus, the true starting point of democracy is not to be found in the habits of the heart, but in a phenomenon that has received considerably less attention from Tocqueville's interpreters – solitude of the heart. This subject is tackled at length in the second volume of Democracy in America, a work that is, in many respects, a different book altogether from the first: darker, sombre, and more pessimistic in its diagnosis.

It is here that we learn that in democracy it is individualism, and not passionate love of equality, which dominates, with its initially gentle and hardly perceptible nature. It is not, like egoism, a passionate and exaggerated love of self, but rather “a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends... he willingly leaves society at large to itself.” Individualism is rooted in envy and fear and is closely linked to that desire for equality which seeks to pull others down rather than to raise all upwards. Understood in this way, individualism inevitably leads to isolation and solitude, ultimately degenerating into egotism. The sense of weakness which, in the case of well-conceived, civic-minded individualism, serves as a catalyst for cooperation, here manifests as helplessness, inclined to look towards an increasingly dominant state or any force that seizes the initiative in such circumstances. Equality of opportunity—the great social achievement—then gives way to equality in mutual resentment and grievance.

Tocqueville's fascination with political sentiments might seem alien, particularly to those who understand politics primarily in terms of party structures, policymaking, and legislative frameworks. In an age marked by populist, and post-populist episodes around the world, the philosophy of solitude may strike many as painfully impractical – ill-suited to the pressing demands of accountability, legal reform, and the ever-growing expectations citizens place upon the state.

Yet, individualism – or more precisely, in Tocqueville's words, solitude – remains the central, unresolved tension of modern democracy, across time and geography, and must be confronted anew by each generation. Our argument is that solitude, left unaddressed, recurrently pushes democracy toward a different kind of regime – one also founded upon equality, yet fundamentally distinct: despotism. It is not that people necessarily love despots – people like Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or Jarosław Kaczyński. Quite the contrary: they may, in fact, dislike or despise them. But this is, ultimately, beside the point. What matters more is that the people no longer harbour any warmth toward one another. What follows is a social unravelling. The barriers between individuals begin to rise. Eventually, to use Tocqueville's words, “despotism raises barriers to keep [people] asunder” and “makes general indifference a sort of public virtue”.

We can identify three distinct eras of such democratic solitude. The first belongs to the nineteenth century. The second to the twentieth. The third—one we have only just begun to experience – belongs to the twenty-first. Each era of democratic solitude is marked by the emergence of a new form of communication technology. These technologies play a multifaceted role in relation to solitude. On the one hand, they are instruments that connect people. As such, they are merely tools—which means their consequences can vary dramatically. They may serve to bring people together in the pursuit of shared solutions, fostering inclusive communities grounded in diversity. But they may also be used to unite people against others—against politically defined enemies or minority groups. In both cases, individuals may believe they are building a form of solidarity. Yet this is a solidarity founded either on inclusion or on exclusion – much like in the fragment from Kafka.

But they may also serve as conduits for egalitarian and inclusive ideas, as television did during the revolutionary period of 1968 in the United States. Much in these scenarios depends on the moral and intellectual quality of the political and social leadership in place. In this sense, much remains in the hands of individuals. And yet, in every case, democracy is shaped by the communication technologies that happen to be dominant at a given time.

The first era of modern democratic solitude – Tocqueville’s era, the nineteenth century – was marked by the early development of a politically engaged press rather than a fully mass press. It is important to recall that new communication technologies, such as the press, arrive in the absence of social preparation and widespread competencies needed to use them consciously. Thus, they are invariably revolutionary in nature. This has been true at least since the time of Gutenberg: the invention of print contributed to the dissemination of knowledge that eventually helped enable the Scientific Revolution, but also to the Counter-Reformation, the religious wars, and the proliferation of tensions that came to define the seventeenth century as an age of upheaval. While newspapers played a role, pamphlets and political clubs were even more central in the ideological dynamics of the French Revolution—and to a certain extent, one must also consider their part in bringing about the Reign of Terror.

With time, however, social competencies may grow. And thus, for Tocqueville, writing Democracy in America in the mid-nineteenth century, the press was no longer a revolutionary force. By then, it had become something else: a remedy for the solitude of the heart. There are two remedies, according to Tocqueville: the first lies in the proliferation of intermediary institutions – structures of association capable of uniting individuals who might otherwise remain isolated, cultivating a sense of shared agency, and mediating the relationship between citizen and state. Democracy in America devotes particular attention to associations, being a kind of an active citizenship school. The fourth estate, which in his time meant the press, plays an equally important role. Newspapers, Tocqueville believed, possessed the unique capacity to draw solitary individuals into common space.

This landscape would be profoundly transformed over the decades that followed. By the 1930s, a new communication technology came to dominate: radio. The emergence of the broadcast wave brought revolutionary consequences. It is difficult to imagine the consolidation and mass mobilization of fascist and Nazi regimes without radio; while communism, especially in its later Soviet form, also harnessed broadcast media for ideological dissemination. Yet the power of radio was not monopolized by authoritarian movements. Charismatic democratic leaders also mastered the medium – most notably Winston Churchill, whose wartime broadcasts helped sustain British morale and unity during the darkest moments of World War II. Radio made it possible to speak directly and intimately to millions of citizens, bypassing traditional mediating institutions and reinforcing cults of personality.

This development was compellingly analyzed by the French political theorist Bernard Manin, who argued that radio – and later, television – ultimately gave rise to a new form of democracy, which he termed audience democracy. From the 1960s onward, radio and television enabled candidates in democracies to appear directly before the public, bypassing the mediating role of political parties.

Like print media democracy, audience democracy had its own way of addressing the problem of solitude. This occurs on several levels. First, the cleavages presented by political actors give rise to new forms of association – organizations that adopt and advance the moral and equality-based agenda characteristic of this type of democracy. These include advocacy groups defending women’s rights, the right to legal abortion, and the rights of minority communities such as gay and lesbian citizens, among others. The remedy for solitude in audience democracy thus takes the form of a burgeoning third sector, composed of a wide array of niche non-governmental organizations – NGOs.

Second, audience democracy offered a different kind of response to solitude: the figure of the media expert – the commentator who interprets why a particular issue has been amplified, why it polarizes, how and with what possible consequences it maps onto ideological conflict. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that identity politics and minority rights have come to occupy a central place in this model of democracy. Among the wide array of issues explored in opinion surveys, these subjects consistently provoked the strongest collective emotions. As such, they were best suited to be presented to the public as the core axis of political division.

Third, local politics assumed a distinctive role. This is a form of political life in which neither media experts nor poll-driven strategies dominate. Instead, the source of necessary political division lies in specific, tangible solutions— those more or less desirable or convenient for residents of particular neighborhoods. In the face of growing polarization, local politics in audience democracy comes to serve as a kind of pressure valve – a place where the need to alleviate solitude finds expression through acts of collective, yet limited in scale, organization: tending to shared gardens, resisting the encroachment of unscrupulous developers, or collaboratively designing the revitalization of communal infrastructure.

As I write these words, we are already several steps into a new revolution – one that is reshaping communication technologies, and with them, our democracies. This is a revolution driven by social media and the broad accessibility of artificial intelligence.

It is not the case that new technologies and techniques for measuring attention have entirely displaced older forms of communication and the model of audience democracy. Rather, what we witness is a palimpsestic form of democracy, in which various logics and modalities coexist – layered upon one another rather than sequentially replaced.

Yet, as the German scholar of digital democracy Ralph Schroeder observes, populists have found particular success in democratic systems. This is due to their ability to bypass traditional media; instead of relying on television, radio, or mainstream newspapers, they moved directly to the internet – where there were no gatekeepers and where, by the early 2010s, they began to achieve significant gains.

This “ecumenical” media environment has transformed the nature of effective political leadership. In the era of press democracy, political leadership emerged from clearly delineated class divisions. Party leaders were tasked with articulating and reinforcing these divisions and advocating for the rights of the social classes they represented. In audience democracy, the leader’s role was to identify latent lines of division in society, ones with which electorates might come to identify – or not. Public opinion polling served as the principal tool for this task.

In digital democracy, however, the equation is different. Here, party leaders must reckon with the digital swarm, which forms the energetic base of their political formation. Digital swarms generate multiple, often highly radical, lines of political cleavage. In many countries, for example, anti-vaccination movements have demanded the abolition of childhood immunization programs, falsely claiming links to autism. In digital democracy, the leader no longer has a monopoly on defining the line of division. On the contrary, they must often align themselves with lines proposed by the swarm, or risk losing the swarm’s support entirely.

The new media have also reshaped the character of political parties. While parties remain the main vehicles for attaining power in democracies, they have been profoundly transformed by leaders fluent in social media dynamics. At first, digital parties existed as anti-systemic platforms, structured like the social networks they mirrored. Yet this proved unnecessary. Why build an alternative platform of the disaffected, when one can simply “hack” an existing, large catch-all party? Why institutionalize like the Pirate Parties or Italy’s Five Star Movement, when one can draw on the uninstitutionalized energy of a digital swarm – say, anti-vaccine groups or online conspiracy networks? This is precisely what occurred with the Republican Party under Donald Trump, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) after 2010, or Brazil’s Liberal Party under Jair Bolsonaro. While the party still wins power and forms governments, in the new media landscape, power accrues to those best able to weave together a network spanning television, radio, the press, and the digital sphere. Victory goes to those who can construct the broadest, most complex digital swarm—composed of the most eccentric and hyperactive nodes in online political communication.

In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal remarked that he had finally understood the reason for all of humanity’s problems: they stemmed from man’s inability to sit still. While we are beginning to grasp the profound impact of social media on politics, we are not yet fully aware that we have already taken several steps into a new revolution – that of artificial intelligence. Under its influence, digital democracy will soon give way to a new form: a hyper-digital, or simply, restless democracy.

Liberals find it hard to fully accept these conclusions. What remains, then, is the search for encounter – a new response to loneliness. Yet calling to stop using social media or regulating them is not enough. What is needed, then, is a threefold response.

First, the building of spaces for encounter. These spaces already exist – senior centers, local deliberation forums, parent associations, neighborhood councils. Each of these settings, however imperfect, creates opportunities for touch and negotiation, for practicing compromise and rediscovering a sense of civic agency. Particular attention should be paid to sites of reconciliation and deliberative dialogue: though often initiated by experts rather than emerging organically, these spaces can, when designed with care, foster real transformation.

Second, the work of media literacy. Social media have no single face. They can serve democratic or authoritarian ends alike. They can rally attention around women’s rights – or around lipstick shades. Still, there is hope that with greater awareness of the risks and rewards of these platforms, people might sometimes choose more wisely. This knowledge must be seeded early – in schools – because children encounter these technologies long before they are equipped to understand them. Until that changes, education must meet them where they are.

Third, there lies dormant potential in what we might call the fifth estate. As of now, it does not truly exist – social media remain private businesses. But one can imagine a democratic transformation: decisive regulation, citizen control over algorithms, nationalization of core platforms, or the imposition of sovereign public constraints. Such measures, of course, do not guarantee salvation. As the American example shows, states can themselves fall into the hands of anti-democratic actors who co-opt these platforms for their own ends.

In such moments, it is the first and second responses – real-life encounter and media education – that can become lifelines. They form the emergency architecture of a democracy under pressure – a democracy searching, once again, for ways to resist the solitude of the heart.

Illustration: Jenya Polosina