Category: Politics

America is a Creative Expression

Image by miflippo

This past July 4th, NPR posted the Declaration of Independence in a series of 113 consecutive tweets; and in response, a number of supposed Trump supporters took issue with the news organization, having no idea what they were reading, assuming for instance that statements denouncing the tyranny of George III were directed at the president.  And while the taste of such irony-rich schadenfreude may indeed be sweet, it would be fatally naive to think for a moment that only the most eager acolytes of Team Trump are so ignorant about the contents of the nation’s founding document.  After all, Trump’s presidency is merely a variation on a much broader theme of anti-establishment sentiment where we also find an ample supply of citizens splashing about in the kiddie pools of “liberalism,” equally uninformed and equally committed to views that are corrosive to democratic principles.

In fact, according to data collected by the World Values Survey, only about 30% of Americans born after 1980 believe that living in a country that is democratically governed is of paramount importance.  Although an unsettling statistic, it isn’t necessarily a surprising one given that its anecdotal accompaniment can be heard reverberating throughout Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. This anti-democratic trend is one that defies traditional political affiliation; it cannot be ascribed to either liberal or conservative groups; and it is manifest in democratic nations other than the United States. In a paper for The Journal of Democracy, one filled with startling revelations, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, write …

“As party identification has weakened and party membership has declined, citizens have become less willing to stick with establishment parties. Instead, voters increasingly endorse single-issue movements, vote for populist candidates, or support “antisystem” parties that define themselves in opposition to the status quo. Even in some of the richest and most politically stable regions of the world, it seems as though democracy is in a state of serious disrepair.”

Naturally, I blame Twitter.

Medium is message, right?  So, the one antagonist in this NPR Declaration story who interests me—a man highlighted in the coverage by The Washington Post—is the guy who realized his mistake and apologized.  He wrote, “I tweeted a VERY dumb comment. But ask yourselves; if read to the average American, would they know that you were reading the DOI? I do now.”  It is hard to argue with his assumption, especially when the Declaration is being fragmented into 113 pieces at 140 characters each, and then posted on a schitzy social media platform. I mean let’s face it:  if The Federalist had been distributed in a series of tweets, the American Republic would never have come into existence.

The real irony, of course, is lost on this man who apologized, as it probably would be on those eager to mock him.  The same medium, which obliterates context and practically demands mindless reaction, is the exact tool that a guy like Trump uses to manipulate citizens into reactionary behavior all the time.  But in this regard, Trump has merely capitalized on a trend that has been bollixing up our politics for years—and certainly not exclusively among his supporters. The president’s tweets are just the most prominent example of the information age having the opposite effect we were promised 20 years ago.

Given the manner in which social media atomizes and de-contextualizes information, should we be surprised that our politics have become so demonstrably tribal—and so utterly disconnected from the historical record?  Isn’t this what happens when we share common terms (like freedom!) but then destroy a common framework for interpreting those terms through digital remix?  Without meaning to do so, NPR remixed the Declaration, changed its context, and inspired some citizens to interpret individual phrases through their own arrogant, narrow, and absurdly contemporary lenses.  Isn’t that what social media inspires all day long on a thousand and one different subjects?

This seems particularly dangerous in America because ours is a uniquely fragile form of democracy. Fragile because the entire history of the nation begins with nothing but words on paper written a relatively short time ago; and stability depends on a degree of common context for what those words actually mean. Unlike our European forebears, the citizenry of the United States is not linked by any kind of common culture but is instead supposedly bound by a relatively common ideology.

In an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson notes that the Declaration of Independence did not articulate original principles but “…was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”

Jefferson’s explanation reminds me of the principle in copyright law known as the idea/expression dichotomy.  We recognize a difference between an idea (e.g. liberty) and an original expression (e.g. the Declaration) and grant temporary ownership to the latter but not to the former. Ideas are part of the commons and must be built upon and/or expressed in new ways; but original expressions of ideas are distinctive enough to be considered the property of their authors. Not all expressions are particularly compelling, but some are the most valuable of all human achievements.

I don’t mean to imply that the Declaration of Independence is a copyrighted work, but rather to note the significance that the American version of certain universal principles is unique to the country’s story and character. And this uniqueness matters. All creative expression is, of course, subject to interpretation—even to the extent that, at this nation’s founding, one man’s liberty was allowed to include the right to deprive another man of his liberty.  It took almost another century and then a war just to abandon the depraved hypocrisy of slavery—and another century after that just to begin to make policy out of basic compassion and humanity.

America is a creative work.  And like any creative work, it can be interpreted without context; but context makes a considerable difference in both understanding and valuing a work. Reinterpretation is also inevitable and essential. Although the elements of democracy had traveled through centuries, as Jefferson describes, to be present in the minds of the Framers, the precise expressions themselves were highly original at the time. “I confess that in America,” wrote de Tocqueville in 1835, “I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”

Still, it has taken nearly all of our 2.4 centuries as a nation just to reinterpret the meaning of those first expressions in order to “secure the blessings of liberty” for a plurality of citizens. So, it is certainly disheartening to think that the next generation—the first to inherit the progress of all that struggle—is now supposedly poised to give up on democracy itself.  If this is truly the case, then the reasons are no doubt various; but one possible catalyst is that creative works like the Declaration are not meant to be interpreted through the scattered keyhole views of social media.

Out of the Fire and Into the Matrix

Photo source by orlaimagine

One of the first articles I ever published (for a magazine that no longer exists) was about cogeneration.  This is the process whereby the waste heat produced by a power plant is captured and used to heat the same structures to which it supplies electricity.  That was in 1997, just as President Clinton was about to sign the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol to the consternation of most of the GOP. In fact, the Senate refused to ratify the treaty on the usual grounds that emissions restrictions would harm the American economy.  This was also nearly a decade before An Inconvenient Truth helped bring the subject of climate change into mainstream consciousness for many Americans.

Based on what I had learned about the efficiencies of cogenerating power plants and other technological solutions to reduce carbon output, I speculated in that article that emissions caps like those called for in Kyoto, while they serve an important purpose, may be surpassed by industry. As soon as enough companies realized that using less energy saves money and that investments in new energy innovation could be profitable in itself, the private sector should, in theory, do better than the regulatory mandates of a negotiated treaty. And to an extent, this is what happened.

Many American corporations have realized the benefits of low-carbon-emission investments, and they’re not going to reverse course just because the current president doesn’t believe in science.  Reporting on this very topic has been among the silver-lining responses to Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would naively pull out of the Paris Agreement; but even if the domestic private sector continues to develop energy alternatives in spite of federal policy, one major problem with not having government as a partner in innovation is that the people then have little say about where technology leads or how it’s used.  In the energy sector, this may not be a major concern, but when it comes to the effects of our data-driven society overall, that’s another story.

Among the fears that keep me up at night—and there are many of late—is that the current administration will create such a gaping policy vacuum, leaving so many Americans wanting, that we will then react by turning to the technologists to save us.  And many of these folks are indeed brilliant in their own ways, but they don’t necessarily get democracy either. Perhaps the murmurings about Mark Zuckerberg running for president are just murmurings.  Perhaps the exaggerated proposal in 2014 to anoint Eric Schmidt as “CEO of America” was meant as a provocative joke. But I find it more than plausible to imagine how we might slingshot around the gravity of this black hole administration to accelerate an already-latent desire to breed a technocracy.

After all, as much as I bash Silicon Valley for various reasons (especially how the internet giants have treated creative workers), there are certainly investors and geniuses out there solving tangible problems whether the nation’s political leaders think they should or not.  They’re investing in renewable energy solutions and medical research and advancing real innovations beyond the side-show marketing platforms we generically call the internet. It is hard to ignore the Ayn Rand-like contrast between the valley of brilliant minds and the regressive whimsy of Covfefe, which I propose become the official name for the Trump doctrine.

The problem, as we know from the world of science fiction, occurs when the wizards, in the spirit of Rand, assume that we cannot live without them. And then they turn out to be right! When oligarchs own the machine of the world and we destroy the intermediary force of representative government, we get feudalism, albeit in technological form this time.

One of the biggest challenges we currently face is how we are going to address the progress of automation and the probability of a workless future for perhaps as much as 40% of the population within a decade or two.  And while we are understandably distracted, either by supporting or denouncing efforts to rekindle “the greatness” of the United States of 1955, the AI challenges—economic, social, and moral—are “not even on our radar screen,” says Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, as reported in this article by Jamie Bartlett for The Guardian.

Theorizing that the current dominance by right-wing populism through data-manipulation  (i.e. propaganda) is merely the story of the moment, Bartlett writes, “Digital technology has helped the populist right for now, but it will soon swallow them up, along with many other political movements unable or unwilling to see how the world is changing.”  What he’s referring to is crypto-anarchy, an ideology based on the premise that networked technology will obviate the need for governments or states; and this view is only slightly divergent from the brand of libertarianism espoused by many of Silicon Valley’s leading executives.  This theme can also be heard in the political views of more than few progressives who seem to feel that government itself is an obsolete construct. Bartlett writes …

“It’s not a direct path, but digital technology tends to empower the individual at the expense of the state. Police forces complain they can’t keep up with new forms of online crime, partly because of the spread of freely available encryption tools. Information of all types – secrets, copyright, creative content, illegal images – is becoming increasingly difficult to contain and control. The rash of ransomware is certainly going to get worse, exposing the fragility of our always connected systems. (It’s easily available to buy on the dark net, a network of hidden websites that are difficult to censor and accessed with an anonymous web browser.) Who knows where this might end.”

That may sound like good news to the anarchic idealist, but there is not a single lesson in history where we find the collapse of government resulting in good times for most people.  In fact, the benign anarchists would probably be among the first slaughtered in a world of marauding survivalists reacting to the breakdown of basic systems. Perhaps it wouldn’t go that way, but the proposal that technology alone can sustain billions of people, leaving us all at our leisure to write poetry and share selfies, seems to overlook one or two qualities of human nature and the post-Enlightenment rationale for constructing democratic states.

To me, a crypto-anarchist is a guy who insists on paying for a RedBull with Bitcoin because he has no idea how the RedBull got to the vendor in the first place. No question technology is a major part of that supply chain, but we forget the human element at our peril. As Barlett notes in that article, the efficiencies gained by “Uberizing” multiple sectors of the economy come at the cost of labor rights due to the lack of accountability for the virtual “employer.”  And when it comes down to brass tacks, civil rights are profoundly intertwined with labor rights.

One of the dangers of the presently divisive climate, driven by so much false information, is that Americans in particular will forget how fragile the Republic actually is.  It’s just words on paper that we try to live up to, and that effort has produced some incredible results—particularly in the arts and sciences.  The inherent brittleness of the American contract has historically been mitigated by the sustainability and economic security of a large middle-class.   So, if enough things break and our “nation turns its lonely eyes” to Google, what follows is hard to say, but I don’t think it will be democracy.

Big Data in politics. Maybe we should break the internet.

Photo by LisaD

If it feels just a little bit like the world is careening toward the edge of a cliff with a madman at the wheel, maybe it’s because that’s what’s happening. Except the madman isn’t just some garden-variety berserker.  It’s not President Trump with his incoherent tweets and unabashed lies. In fact, according to this in-depth story by Carole Cadwalldr, writing for The Guardian, those antics are calculated theater being fed to the press as just one component of a much larger, more insidious process by which money and computing power are undermining democracy itself.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the madman at the wheel is us.  All of us. Voluntarily feeding the database via social media, teaching the system exactly how to tell us what to think. “There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together,” Cadwalldr writes.

Focusing primarily on billionaire/computer-scientist Robert Mercer, his relationship to Stephen Bannon and the development of the Breitbart network, Cadwalldr details the process by which wealthy, mostly right-wing, individuals are using computing power not to understand the electorate (that would be old-school) but to manipulate the electorate into reshaping the world as these individuals believe it ought to be shaped. Cadwalldr’s is one of several articles to appear in recent weeks about the role of Big Data in global politics, and just one to mention the company Cambridge Analytica. She writes…

“On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a ‘propaganda machine’.”

Cadwalldr cites several scientists who voice deep concern about the capacity of the AI to learn about us through interactions as apparently innocuous as Facebook Likes.  With the input of 300 Likes, Cambridge Analytica claims that the computer can understand us “better than we understand ourselves.”  And because the computer never stops learning, never stops adapting, this provides the opportunity for political operatives to steer the electorate toward targeted conclusions about issues or candidates.

The irony, of course, is that this is all based on the illusion that digital technology provides us with more choices to get “better” information, which is why discrediting the “mainstream media” is a key component of the strategy. But lest we believe press-bashing is exclusively a Trumpian phenomenon of the moment, we should not forget that the “mainstream” has previously been dismissed by the left and libertarian-leaning, techno-utopians of Silicon Valley as well—all singing from the hymnal that the internet is the greatest tool for democracy ever invented.

Regular readers know that I am more than a little cynical about this generalization and that this is one reason I remain critical of “digital rights” groups fearful of any form of regulation in cyberspace—particularly regulation meant to protect or restore the rights of individuals. It’s not that I find fault with the premise that the goals of openness and free speech should be protected online so much as I balk at the assumption that an absolutist approach (i.e. law has no place on the internet) can only have salubrious results for democratic values.  I believe this sensibility is a holdover from Silicon Valley’s more hippie-like early days but is a vibe that no longer has any relationship to the advertising and data-mining systems the major companies have built.

But now that we’ve mostly “left the internet alone,” allowing these companies to collect and sell information about us without any kind of rules—allowing these same companies to monetize works of authorship and social interactions without restraint—all in the name of “freedom,” we are apparently teaching the machine to effectively democratize democracy out of existence. Cadwalldr quotes Jonathan Rust of the Cambridge University Psychometric Centre thus:

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.”

The manipulation skews right. For now.

Take a subject like immigration policy and the fact that many of us who live or work in diversely populated urban centers (traditionally liberal) can’t understand why Americans who live in more homogenous, rural communities (traditionally conservative) are so concerned that Muslim refugees pose a substantial threat to security despite a lack of evidence to support this fear.

It’s not because citizens are uninformed, it’s because they are purposely misinformed by a very sophisticated network of well-crafted, smartly-written articles that contain elements of truth glued together by rhetorical paranoia.  This is in fact the structure of the average Breitbart article on immigration; and these articles become the foundation of a million ways to automate the spread and repetition of an anti-immigrant message until it morphs in the minds of readers from emotional xenophobia to what is perceived as rational security policy. This is why labeling support for an EO immigration ban as “racist” sounds absurd to many and why their response will be, “It’s not racist. It’s just common sense. Look at the mountain of evidence! The mountain of evidence the MSM isn’t reporting!”  (Never mind that the mountain is a hologram.)

This phenomenon is hardly restricted to the political right, though Cadwalldr observes that the money and institutions behind this level of big-data manipulation is largely a right-leaning agenda at the moment. My own concern has always been that these manipulation tools, neatly disguised as “democratized” information, can be wielded by any entity with the resources.  If the pendulum were to swing from Breitbart to Google or to some left-leaning billionaire’s project, that still wouldn’t be democracy.

The ability to create the appearance of consensus through rapid replication, a network of “alternative news” sites, and bot-swarms, all emanating from a single source is exactly the concern that launched this blog in 2012. The illusion that hundreds of articles or millions of people all “agree” on a given topic can be conjured by a relatively small and nimble group of people with the money and computing power to do the job.  I alluded to this concern in this post in 2012, suggesting that Citizens United was child’s play compared to the capacity for manipulation of the political process on a one-to-one basis via social media.

In 2011/12, this sophisticated kind of disinformation was what I believed was happening with a bill like SOPA.  Now, it’s the same scenario on a much larger scale, influencing the governments of the world. The implication is the destruction of democracy by means of the very tools that were supposed to improve democracy. And the irony is that it’s all voluntary.  Every day, we get up and feed the beast. We teach the machine how to manipulate us.  So, is the only solution to abandon Facebook et al — to stop feeding ourselves as data to the machine?  Can we even afford to unplug given that these platforms are now almost indispensable for access to information and to substantive interaction with people?  A Columbia Journalism Review study on the effects of the Breitbart media ecosystem, offers these words of wisdom and hope:

“Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.” 

So, maybe we don’t have to break the internet so much as break a lot of really bad habits the internet keeps trying to teach us.

Also read:  The Rise of Weaponized AI here.