Number of podcasts worldwide

It turns out that as humanity has grown increasingly eager to record itself talking about increasingly niche subjects—microtonality, the thermal properties of Victorian doorknobs, whether pigeons dream—the world has simultaneously become less democratic, which seems like either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that the universe has a sense of irony that makes Douglas Adams look like an optimist. We are, in essence, becoming freer to speak while becoming less free, which is the kind of arrangement that sounds like it was designed by a committee that has never met but communicates entirely through passive-aggressive memos.

The Democracy Index fell in 2020 partly because covid emergency powers suspended parliaments, jailed journalists, and postponed elections in dozens of countries — while the same lockdowns sent the podcast creator economy into overdrive as millions rediscovered their microphones. One line is the cost of improvised rule-by-decree; the other is what bored creatives do when they can't leave the house.

So we have arrived at a world where more people are speaking than ever before, mostly because fewer people are being heard where it actually matters. The podcasts and the democracy decline are not cause and effect, but rather symptoms of the same underlying condition: a slowly fracturing consensus about who gets to decide anything. What a peculiar time to have invented infinite broadcast channels.