To decide the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, there is a voting system that combines the opinions of a supposedly "professional" (?) jury with the virtual vote of the public in each participating country. In the semifinals, only the public votes are taken into account, while in the final, each country awards two types of points: one from the "professional" jury and one from the people voting at home. The song that obtains the highest total number of points is declared the winner of the contest, and in the event of a tie, the one with the most public votes wins. Every year, for one reason or another, this system generates controversy. Generally, they are more than justified. In itself, the Eurovision Song Contest is not a political issue, but it is obvious that it ends up becoming politicized. Right now, it is also part of the culture wars, to the extent that it has become, albeit unofficially, an openly gay event. How does all this affect our perception of politics?
Traditionally, the prestige of politics had been based on the ability to harmoniously articulate relationships between the different members and collectives of the polis. If these relationships were fluid and fruitful, not based on coercion or deception, and, furthermore, helped to resolve tensions between conflicting interests, politics enjoyed its highest level of prestige. It was perceived as necessary—improvable, obviously, but necessary. The internet, and everything connected to this technology, such as the more than dubious Eurovision televoting system, can erode that perception. This isn't exactly a negative feeling of discredit, but rather a neutral view of uselessness: what purpose do we have in politics if the basis of our most important social relations doesn't rest on the polis as we've understood it until now? The question already makes sense today, and it could become even more so in a few years. The Internet posits a completely reticular structure of relationships, based on complex forms of reciprocity, not on the unidirectional linearity of a hierarchy. The idea of community or nation, of the polis, no longer makes much sense within this new structure: almost all relationships can become decentralized and, in a different sense than today, private. The mediation of politics would become increasingly tenuous because, in fact, the very notion of the polis would become increasingly unreal. The polis now resides in the cloud, and the cloud is an algorithmic abstraction managed by AI.
The main criticism of representative democracy is usually... its unrepresentative nature. Politicians are elected for a term of four or five years; over this time, the real will of the citizens and the decisions of politicians become increasingly distant. Until now, attempts were made to correct this inevitable asymmetry through opinion polls, but public opinion gauging has never managed to improve the system's shortcomings. Social media has created a pseudo-democratic and pseudo-participatory culture that is beginning to have a significant generational effect. Sooner or later, the generation that has grown up within this new reality will end up asking itself, I don't know whether legitimately or not, what the role of Parliament and parliamentarians is, given that political decisions could be made directly by all citizens at very low economic cost. Why do we need representatives if we can represent ourselves? some will say. And why do we need the mummified forum of Parliament if we have TikTok or X? others will add. Why should we vote every four years when we can do it several times a day? And so on. The Trump/Musk tandem captured this diffuse mood perfectly, channeling it toward their interests.
With or without televoting, an issue like Israel's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, for example, would have generated a fierce controversy under the current circumstances. Here we are raising a much more delicate issue: that of societies that might consider granting political legitimacy to the algorithmic coding of pseudo-votes cast on a mobile phone at any time and without any real oversight. This is the great fantasy of the primitive populism that controls social media, but also that of the left. woke that makes programmatic use of cancel culture. In the heart of the world kitsch and provocatively banal Eurovision, there are signs that it is worth taking into account in the long term.
