RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117190464771300967

This¹ is exactly the reason why in Ancient Greece representative systems (what we call "democracy", "representative democracy", or "liberal democracy") were considered a form of aristocracy, not of democracy (sortion² and what we call "direct democracy" being considered actual rule of the people²). Only the bourgeois revolutions starting with the American and French Revolution slowly changed the meaning of the word "democracy" to satiates the public's hunger for democracy without actually giving it to them.

(¹ In case you can't read the quoted post: It quotes Philipp Amthor (a prominent politician of the far right-wing party currently forming the majority of the government in Germany) saying (translation mine) "The basic idea of representative democracy has to be that the smartest, most hardworking, and most resilient shape politics.".)
(² I'm using the term "rule of the people" here instead of "democracy" for reasons you can ask me to infodump about, but that aren't relevant to this discussion.)