  Although ICT have created hope for a shared pluralistic world, democratic
principles are far from being respected in the public digital environment, and
require a detailed knowledge of the laws by which they are governed. Von
Foerster's conjecture is one of the early theoretical results that could help
to understand these laws. Although neglected since a long time, the advent of
the overlying layer of recommendation and ranking mechanisms which is
progressively occupying the Web has given empirical evidences of this
conjecture, which predicts the consequences of increasing inter-individual
influences on social dynamics and the susceptibility of these latter to
manipulation. With both von Foerster's conjecture and the Snowden revelations
in the background, we analyse the impact of ICT on human societies and their
governance, in view of the fact that they have a massive impact on the way in
which people influence each other in their tastes and actions.
