Tag: democracy

Too Much Democracy Can Kill Democracy: Social Media as a WMD

democracy

It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death of democracy.

When I started writing this blog in 2012, the 5th of November was celebrated by internet defenders who seemed to think that Guy Fawkes of the English Powder Plot of 1605 was a rebel and a hero. This fallacy was based on conflating history with the graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta, whose tyranny-fighting protagonist wears a “Guy Fawkes” mask, which became the symbol of hackers calling themselves Anonymous. Then, by extension, the mask became a symbol of advocating John Perry Barlow’s idealistic notion of the morally superior, purely democratic internet against the anachronistic laws of “weary” republics.

Of course, the real Guido Fawkes had more in common with the January 6th insurrectionists than any champions of democracy. The intent of the Powder Plot, led by Robert Catesby, was to restore the authority of the Catholic Church, which would have killed the nascent progress of republicanism in England. In this light, the plot was one of many forebears to American Christian nationalists, eager to have Trump blow up the secular administrative state the same way Fawkes & Friends were supposed to blow up Parliament and the Protestant monarch in one move.

As often happens in history, the catastrophe of the Powder Plot was averted by individuals listening to their own better angels. Uncomfortable with killing any Catholic members of Parliament, the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, who dutifully reported the plan. Thus, Fawkes was found in the cellar waiting for the signal to light the 36 barrels of gunpowder, which would have indeed blasted all of Parliament, King James I, and the king’s family into the River Thames. How this conflagration might have altered the course of American history—and, therefore, democracy in general, is impossible to know, but it is doubtful that the Puritan adventure beginning in 1620 would have transpired in the same way, if it happened at all.[1]

In contrast to gunpowder, social media is an insidious weapon that erodes the foundations of republicanism from the virtual cellar occupied by our lesser angels—steadily degrading not just truth, but the value of truth.[2] This was not every platform founder’s intent, of course. Jack Dorsey appears to have had a late-stage realization of the damage Twitter could cause, but it is not at all surprising that under the control of Elon Musk, the rebranded X does not even pretend to “beg forgiveness” for its manipulations of reality.

The architects of the American Constitution and leaders of the Federalist cause understood that direct democracy was synonymous with chaos. When they used the word democracy, it was almost pejorative, referring to a heedless mob that might swallow the pursuit of “ordered justice.” In short (and with the possible exception of Jefferson), they recognized that too much democracy would be fatal to sustainable democracy, but this is exactly what social media has fostered—a form of direct democracy undermining a collaborative understanding of the American experiment.

Even if Trump loses, the project of restoring the cultural foundations of the American Republic will be far from over. As author and journalist Sebastian Junger said at a conference I recently attended, the project is generational—one that must begin now to benefit our grandchildren. Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College, Junger was one of several speakers who offered a critique of the Left from within the Left—exemplifying the kind of discussion I believe is essential, but which social media makes nearly impossible. In fact, Junger specifically blasted “the phones,” focusing primarily on their addictive qualities, but clearly in regard to platforms creating and exacerbating political divisions.

That discussion on the Left will only happen if Trump loses. If he wins, chaos will ensue followed by reactions to that chaos, and it will be hard not to shrug at, or even endorse, extreme reactions. After all, Trump promises violence and fascism, which will spark violent responses that are both natural and justified. But if that nightmare is not our fate, then the project of saving democracy from latent authoritarianism will require the work of Liberals and Conservatives, who must confront the fact that social media has been the indispensable catalyst in reshaping a concept of America that would tolerate, let alone almost elect, a manifestly dangerous individual to be President.

Sustaining any republic requires policy that fosters reasoned compromise behind the theater of politics, but thanks to the free soapboxes in every citizen’s hand, all policy is now political, and all politics are now performative. Social media softened the ground to create the ideal landscape for a populist charlatan to rise to power despite (or even because of) his open hostility for the Constitutional order. But Trump’s supporters are not alone in abandoning that faith.

Even before the revelations of 2016 that data gathered from modest online activity could be weaponized to engineer political outcomes around the world, it was clear that the narcissism inherent to using social platforms provoked acute, often poorly articulated, outrage—including responses to rumor and conspiracy with no foundation in fact. That folly is not unique to any ideology or political party because it is a psychological relationship to the medium itself that we are far from resolving.

Then, with the addition of powerful actors who control the data and algorithms, a significant, albeit hard to measure, number of world-shaping events have been triggered by what amounts to online pranks. Even the most ambitious and most powerful democracy ever invented has been punked to the edge of extinction by the dark arts of internet trolls. All those tech boosters who claimed there was a wall of separation between adolescent cyberspace and adult real life were simply wrong.

Social Media Platforms Are Narcissism Machines

By coincidence, I recently met one of the student fellows at HAC, who is visiting Bard from Ukraine and studying human rights. Noting that there will not be another election in her country unless and until they win the war with Russia, she referred to a frustration with her contemporaries, who as young Americans, do not intend to vote this week. I asked if those students offered reasons for their reluctance, and she told me the two main explanations that came to mind were 1) that the outcome didn’t really matter; or 2) that if the candidate they vote for “let’s them down,” they will feel guilty about having cast the vote.

The first sentiment that voting doesn’t matter is a familiar cynicism of youth. But what the second sentiment implies is a heightened degree of narcissism that I believe is fair to associate with the digital-native generations. The notion that any President could be perfect in the administration of that unfathomable office suggests first, a childlike innocence about human beings and the complexly dangerous world we occupy; and second, an arrogance that one’s own idea of “perfection” is well founded. This is an astoundingly naive way to evaluate the mere mortals we might elect to be President of the United States, though it is consistent with the kind of “purity-test” mentality that shapes the rhetoric of the digital-native generations.

The phenomenon is observable in real-time because social platforms are venues where political allies become irreconcilable antagonists the moment a member of the tribe dares to criticize the tribe’s thinking or conduct. The critic becomes the apostate, earning herself at least a virtual, if not a literal, stoning. Examples abound, but in this moment, I am thinking specifically of progressive activist Brianna Wu, who has the integrity to criticize the extremism, antisemitism, and ahistorical narratives animating many anti-Israel protestors and, consequently, is bombarded by personal attacks and death threats from people who consider themselves liberal or “progressive.”

Those responses, like many of the protests themselves, are narcissistic and performative. The American Liberal repeating the mantra “settler colonialism” is barely distinguishable from the Conservative who claims that Christianity is under attack in the U.S. There is no intellectual, let alone moral, difference between the Right’s generic attacks on DEI and the Left’s attacks on Jews in academia and in their private lives. But again, the common denominator is social media, designed and managed to stoke, promote, and reward righteous outrage, not discourse.

Unfortunately, social media draws everyone into its gutter. While I believe that a figure like Trump could never have obtained political power without the insane environment of these platforms, even rational opposition cannot afford to cede the alligator pit as a battlefield. Although Harris, other candidates, and brave Conservative apostates do not engage in the outlandish, incoherent, and fascistic messaging exhibited by Trump, merely fighting fire with fire on social platforms demands a juvenile and sad derivative of the discourse that wrote the nation into existence. It is a meager dividend from our investment in the “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.”

Waiting to find out whether Trump will be reelected is like waiting to learn whether the nation has Stage IV cancer. Everything is on hold while millions of Americans ask the same question, albeit from different perspectives:  are we at the brink of civil war? In this regard, there are not two sides. Specific policies notwithstanding, Harris means a continuation of the American experiment and the possibility that we can at least try to have difficult conversations on both the Left and Right. Trump means chaos and who the hell knows what comes next? If we manage to dodge the bullet, maybe, just maybe, we can admit that social media was the gun that fired it.

[1] Civil unrest would likely have ensued, but if Rome were indeed reinstated, it’s entirely possible that anti-Catholics like John Winthrop would have been executed rather than allowed to establish New England.

[2] It is not only Trumpians who are immune to counterfactuals in their world view, and although social media does not cause this human frailty, it does exacerbate it.

Image: N. Currier. (1846) Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor. , 1846. [New York: N. Currier] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/.

Climate Disaster: A Rough Decade

This month is the tenth anniversary of The Illusion of More. Specifically, I believe the site launched on August 12, but I did not know what, if anything, I wanted to say to mark the occasion other than to thank readers for following and supporting the blog for a decade. And I am very grateful for that. But in light of the editorial focus of this blog and the state of the world, ouch. It’s been a rough ten years.

I asked in the intro to the first podcast in 2012 (an interview with journalist Christopher Dickey) whether digital technology was making things “suck faster,” whether the illusion of more access, engagement, and information would simply make otherwise reasonable people more rapidly and more virulently misinformed. For one contemporary answer to that question, read Francesca Tripodi’s recent article in Wired describing how Google’s changes to its “neutral” search engine can prioritize false information and reinforce a psychological vulnerability she calls the “IKEA effect,” (i.e., taking pride in something one has assembled). Tripodi writes:

Conspiracy theorists and propagandists are drawing on the same strategy, providing a tangible, do-it-yourself quality to the information they provide. Independently conducting a search on a given topic makes audiences feel like they are engaging in an act of self-discovery when they are actually participating in a scavenger-hunt engineered by those spreading the lies.

Or for a lighthearted version of the same principle, Craig Ferguson says in his Netflix special, “Tweet it, retweet it, retweet it again—fuckin’ true.”

As explained and reiterated in many posts on this blog, what began as a response to the lies and flood-the-zone tactics deployed in the anti-SOPA campaign of 2011/12 quickly encompassed a much broader concern about the major internet platforms (Big Tech) as a dangerous force that just might swallow democracy itself. This was not a popular view in 2012. Both official policy and public sentiment were predicated on a blind faith that more speech without restraint (i.e., direct democracy) had to be a good thing. That fallacy was central to rejecting the anti-piracy legislation just over a decade ago, and it persists today in, for instance, the Internet Archive’s rationales for its brand of book piracy.

Big Tech and its network of mostly left-leaning organizations said that harmful speech—from personal harassment to raving conspiracy—would be mitigated and safely marginalized by a fresh, invigorated dialogue enlightened by open access to information. Standing in the way of that utopian vision, they insisted, was “the government” in cahoots with corporate “gatekeepers” like the press, publishers, and Hollywood—all wielding the cudgel of copyright law to control what we are allowed to learn or experience. Meanwhile, the words of the prophets were written on the social media walls.

To suggest that, we seemed to be entering an age when information would be indistinguishable from bullshit, was to earn the title “luddite.” Even now, despite the overwhelming and terrifying events that have occurred in last ten years—all of it based on free access to deep wells of bullshit—the tech-utopians still believe in the illusion of more as surely as climate-change deniers refuse to see the science in the global havoc unfolding daily.

But lest anyone think that conspiratorial delusions are exclusively the opiate of the Trump cult, I would ask readers to remember the climate changes in our politics that were taking place before the Tiki Torch parade began. When the Ed Snowden story broke, and my friends on the left went nuts about those revelations, I wrote a post recommending calm, in which I opined, “While oversight is an essential, and believe it or not still extant, component of the American system, a universal and unwavering distrust in ‘the government’ is tantamount to distrust in one another, and this is the cancer that grows into a malignant threat to civil liberty.”

And here we are, witnessing real threats to the constitutional order of the United States, as the Former Republican Party (FRP) is consumed by a cult of personality, surfing waves of bullshit about the most basic mechanisms of government and law enforcement. On the other side, we share memes lampooning the “law and order” party for shrugging off credible threats to attack the FBI, the Attorney General, and a federal judge, but perhaps we choose to forget that this same conspiratorial rhetoric, comparing the American justice system to the KGB et al., was more universal before the election of 2016.

Like watching glaciers melt and rivers evaporate, it is easy to think that the erosion of trust in core institutions is beyond repair–that it is really just a question of who is doing the distrusting. And to believe that social platforms are not an underlying cause of this harm is as willfully ignorant as believing that easy access to firearms is not the key ingredient in mass shootings.

Social media offers some nice features, but on balance, it has made everything suck faster. It is a hallucinogen that produces twin chimeras named Information and Engagement, who gnaw on Common Sense and Humility until Narcissism and Arrogance prevail. Take for instance, this little collage made from responses to photographer Jeff Sedlik’s copyright lawsuit against tattoo artist Kat Von D:

I draw your attention to both the ignorance and the style in this hatecloud—not because it is rare, but because it is common to the point of predictable. This is how we talk now about almost everything. Those comments were made by ordinary individuals, probably decent people most of the time, but who would be unlikely to admit that they know less than nothing about the law or about Sedlik and his motives. And all that rancor directed at one individual, empowered by the technology designed to “connect people,” is just a response to a little copyright case. So, can we really be surprised that, by means of the same tech exploiting the same psychological frailties, tens of millions of people are easily duped into believing that an election was stolen, or that the U.S. Justice Department is indistinguishable from the Stasi?

In 2012, in that same intro to the first podcast, I quoted Mark Twain who said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” A keen observer of human nature, Twain foretold the Big Tech Lie that is still flooding the zone with millions of other lies, which, like too much carbon in the atmosphere, may yet make the world uninhabitable.

Photo by: ole999

Copyright Advocacy in Turbulent Times

copyright war

It is admittedly difficult, maybe even a bit ridiculous, to think about a policy matter as arcane as copyright law when the headline story of the moment is an attempted coup d’etat—let alone one fomented by the President of the United States and endorsed by some Members of Congress. But against the backdrop of existential threat from within, I am also reminded why I believe a subject like copyright is so important:  first, because it exemplifies the hard truth that our democracy is built on fragile principles requiring careful and persistent stewardship; and second, because it expresses the almost quixotic hope among the founders that the nation might eventually be great enough to produce art and culture. In a different post, I cited this quote from a letter written in May of 1780 by John Adams to Abigail:

 I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Although Adams could not possibly envision the modern, technological media that would emerge in the late nineteenth century, his allusion to such delicate arts expresses that aspiration toward an American greatness that could one day be a nation strong enough to indulge in creativity and invention. Yorktown was still a year and half into the war’s uncertain future when Adams wrote those words to his wife. Thirty-four years later, during the war that some historians call the “second American revolution,” an adversary occupied a congressional chamber in the U.S. Capitol, which was still newly under construction. On August 24, 1814, Admiral Cockburn of the Royal Navy sat down in the Speaker’s chair and in a mocking, parliamentary tone asked his troops, “Gentlemen, the question is, Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All in favor of burning it will say Aye!”

This anecdote appears in the Handbook of the New Library of Congress, published in 1897 to commemorate the grand opening of the beautiful Beaux Arts building—today the Jefferson Building—situated just east of the Capitol with its copper dome topped by the flame of liberty. Although the story has a whiff of mythologizing in it, the account of Cockburn’s farcical, legislative theater as a prelude to lighting up the Capitol is at least a metaphorically fair reflection of England’s disdain for the American experiment when they burned down icons that they noted had been so hypocritically built with slave labor.

The reason that story was published in the Handbook of the New Library is that the precursor to the Library of Congress was burned by the British as the library within Congress—a narrow skylit atrium of hardwood and wrought iron, originally located along the west wall we see behind the stage where presidents are inaugurated. The new library, as envisioned by Lincoln’s appointed Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford, was not only meant to be a house for the people, but a repository for the latent genius of the people by collecting copies of works deposited for copyright registration. As cited in the book I published in November:

Immediately following passage of the 1870 Copyright Act, the library received just over 5,700 deposits, or roughly one work for every 6,600 citizens; by the peak year (for the century) of 1893, the library received just over 48,000 deposits, or roughly one work for every 1,360 citizens. So while the population nearly doubled in this same period (from about 38 million to about 75 million), creative output increased roughly fivefold.

To put it mildly, the goons who ransacked the Capitol have no better understanding of what the leaders of the Revolution hoped for America than they were clear about what they might ultimately achieve with their grotesque misadventure on the Mall. By the end of the nation’s first century, Adams’s modest hope that the United States would be strong enough to be creative was beginning to be realized. And one terrible irony of the present is that in so many areas, real American greatness—its capacity to invent, to create, and to reinvent itself—was alive and well the day Donald Trump told the nation that all he could see was “carnage.”   

It is no coincidence that the corporations most responsible for the aggressive assault on creators’ rights are the same companies now finally understood to have played a substantial role in cultivating that alternate reality in which too many citizens now operate. Mischaracterizing copyrights as barriers to access has been a key ingredient in Silicon Valley’s magic elixir they sold to the world as the “free flow of information.” And for years, they simply refused to acknowledge that truly dangerous disinformation flows just as freely and twice as quickly.

I jumped into this debate almost a decade ago because I believe that an empowered population of authors and creators is essential for a thriving democracy. In 2013, I wrote, “To put it whimsically, a great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets.” Having now witnessed a closer brush with tyranny than many would have thought possible in the United States, I am more committed than ever to that particular kind of whimsy.