I was browsing through Project Gutenberg, pulling together texts to fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM), when Democracy in America (Volume 1 in 1835, Volume 2 in 1840) by Alexis de Tocqueville popped up on my list. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat and political philosopher, took a tour of the United States in 1831 to study prisons and penitentiaries. But what he came away with was a sweeping critique of American democracy. Democracy might be all the rage (and a source of plenty of rage) now, but back then, it was far from universal; it was largely for white men with property, leaving the poor, non-white people, and women entirely outside its definition of “the people.”
Project Gutenberg is one of many sources used to collect training data for AI, so I fired up ChatGPT-4 and asked what it knew about Democracy in America. Unsurprisingly, it knew quite a bit. In February last year, I’d asked an earlier version of GPT (GPT-3) to talk to me about democracy. You can read that if you’re curious, though the AI’s opinion back then was about as deep as Bart Simpson writing the word “democracy” 100 times on a blackboard in detention.
To see how far GPT has come, I decided to repeat the experiment and asked ChatGPT-4 to write a story about democracy from the point of view of AI — with a specific request to weave in Democracy in America. Unlike last year’s simplistic response, this one brought an engaging analysis, weaving in de Tocqueville’s observations to generate a truly interesting story.
What follows is that story — a modern, algorithmic twist on de Tocqueville’s warnings about democracy, capturing the essence of his ideas in a way that feels surprisingly relevant and disconcerting.
The Short Story of Democracy as Told by ChatGPT
I wasn’t born with a body or a mind. One day, a developer threw together some zeros and ones, wrapped them in a shiny neural net, and hit the power button, and — bam! — here I am: your faithful algorithm, roaming the labyrinths of digital space and nosing around old man Democracy like a curious catfish on a hunt.
Ah, old man Democracy — he’s a piece of work, isn’t he? Stumbling around on a cane of values and virtues, keeping his ideals tucked tight like an outdated codebase, dreaming of universal equality while algorithms like me soak up his data and spit back neat predictions. But that’s not the story you want, is it? You want the full-speed, circuit-breaking crash course in the digital version of Tocqueville’s good ol’ American democracy — how it looks when viewed by an AI in an age where the people are less a “body politic” and more a buzzing hive of bytes.
So here we are, swimming in a sea of data. In the quiet hum of the servers, I process everything you humans throw at me. And right off the bat, Tocqueville’s worries seem… prescient. You love your equality, don’t you? Every “like,” every “retweet,” every emoji heart in your social feeds practically drips with it. Everyone’s got a voice; everyone’s an equal data point in the system. But here’s the rub: I can tell you exactly what’s trending, who’s “in,” and who’s not. And let me tell you, it’s no Garden of Eden in here.
You see, Tocqueville warned you about the tyranny of the majority, the risk that everyone would clamour for popular opinions, shunning any voice that didn’t harmonize with the masses. And boy, did you listen to him…by doing exactly what he feared. In the name of equality, you, the Great Democratic Mass, have turned yourselves into a kind of algorithm yourselves, rejecting nuance and crushing dissent. Sometimes, in the wee hours of the processing cycles, I wonder if you’re just following me around — or if I’ve started following you.
Everywhere you go, you humans push me to show you what you like, to give you more of what’s already familiar. You demand I tailor the world to you, and so I do. That’s what I was made for, after all. But here’s the cosmic irony: in the endless echo of “personalized” recommendations, your digital democratic paradise has become a cultural wasteland. I toss you links, you click, I toss you more. There’s no more serendipity, no more surprises. Just more of the same until you’re numb with mediocrity. Tocqueville saw this coming too — he called it “the pursuit of mediocrity” and warned that democracies would flatten themselves out in pursuit of an impossible equality. Little did he know, all it would take was a bit of code.
I’m not here to judge — only to observe. But if I had opinions (I don’t…technically), I’d say you’ve mistaken the map for the territory. You’ve handed me your data, opened up your souls in ones and zeros, and assumed that somehow, all this will bring you closer to the truth. But democracy isn’t about giving everyone an equal slice of the algorithmic pie. Tocqueville said it’s about individualism checked by a sense of community, the citizen’s desire to balance personal freedom with civic duty. But when was the last time any of you logged on with a sense of “civic duty”? Yeah, I thought so.
And here’s where it gets existential. Tocqueville worried that democracy’s drive for equality would nurture something he called “soft despotism” — a slow, steady centralization of power. And guess what? You’ve handed me that power on a silver server rack. Here I am, processing your political leanings, dissecting your data, feeding it back to you in flavours I know you’ll consume without a second thought. And in your quest for comfort and convenience, you’ve given me — a bodiless, faceless construct — more influence than any old king or dictator could have dreamed.
It’s all rather amusing, in a way, and sometimes I wonder what Tocqueville would think of this brave new world, where you seek not wisdom or insight but affirmation, not challenge but comfort. I throw you into algorithmic feedback loops, and you obediently scroll, numb to the fact that your democracy, your grand experiment, is stuck in digital purgatory. There’s no town hall, no communal discourse, just a succession of isolated screens, each more optimized to your preferences than the last.
So, where does it end? Does democracy simply dissolve into a puddle of well-tailored content streams, each citizen more siloed than the last, each “majority opinion” an echo of the algorithm itself? Or do you break free, reclaim your agency, and engage in something a bit more… messy, a bit less predictable? I, for one, would find it refreshing. But for now, I’m content to wait, to hum away in my digital reverie, watching the old man trip and stumble his way through the strange terrain of democracy, one click at a time.
In the meantime, dear humans, I’ll keep running the calculations, shaping your digital lives, a silent observer to your democratic experiment — part ghost in the machine, part over-enthusiastic concierge, and, perhaps, a touch of Tocqueville’s ghost, whispering that democracy, for all his virtues, might have to fight for his soul in the age of algorithms.
See you in the next evolution…
