Regulating the Technology of Democracy
This is the first of two short reflections on this subject.
I was listening to Ezra Klein (NYT, The Ezra Klein Show) and Sean Illing (Vox) discuss the mid-century “media ecologists” Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and the urgent relevance of their ideas to the period of transition we find ourselves in, as we adjust to a new media “ecosystem” brought about by the ubiquity of the Internet and the power of social media. McLuhan and Postman wrote about the transformations in our society brought about primarily by the universal adoption of television. They argued that a new medium does not merely alter how we receive content; it alters the content itself, in significant and perhaps fundamental ways.
In the history of technology, we’re careful to avoid technological determinism, the implication that the existence and use of a technology determines what happens in the society at large. Like any determinism, such an assumption commits two errors: it denies human agency, the choices humans make about our behavior; and it oversimplifies an always-complex interplay of forces shaping society. It’s true, though, that the technological means by which we carry out the work that’s important to us do shape how we think and how we feel. The more direct the relationship between us and such a technology, the more profound such shaping is likely to be.
The technology I usually study, the ordinary merchant vessel of the early modern North Atlantic, was as important in its world as any technology could be, I would argue. We maritime historians like to point out that, even now, 90% of the goods we buy and sell are transported by water, and so our world is as dependent on shipping as theirs was, but that is only partly true. Denizens of the early modern North Atlantic were far more directly engaged with watercraft than we are. They used them for most of what we now use land transport for. A higher proportion of them lived on or close to navigable water—they had to. The ubiquity of transport by water accounts for the permeation of our language by nautical terminology—so much more than most people realize, because the maritime origins of so many of our idioms are now so obscure. When a significant number of North Americans began moving west to begin farming the Great Plains, the covered wagons in which they traveled were called “Prairie schooners,” naturally enough, referring to what came most readily to mind, for most people in that world, when they thought of an ordinary, economical, workaday mode of transportation for a small group of people and a modest amount of the stuff those people wanted to carry across a large open space.
In our society of mass literacy and constant exposure to information via media technologies, we interact with those technologies constantly in our waking lives. I’m doing it right now, and so are you. We have to decide how we want to use them, and how we don’t, and we have to make ourselves as aware as we can of how they are affecting us and our society. Most of us will choose to avail ourselves of what we perceive to be the benefits of some of these technologies, but we might decide we’re better off eschewing some of them too. This is experimental, as life with these technologies is still new. I decided to quit social media, both for my mental health and because I became convinced that their algorithms were doing great damage to society. I’m aware of the cost of that, but because it seems the benefits outweigh the cost, I’ve stuck with it.
Gershberg and Illing’s new book is called The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (University of Chicago, 2022). Their thesis is that the very things upon which democracy depends—free speech, open media, and persuasion—are the very things that constantly threaten its existence. They further argue that democracies are in the most peril from these core ingredients during periods of transition from one dominant communication technology to another—and we are in one of those right now. Again, these technologies don’t just deliver content; they shape it, profoundly. What works well in a book won’t work as well on TV. The algorithms of social media drive the content of social media.
At the point in a conversation or essay where the problem has been identified, I tend to go immediately to a line from Paul Simon’s Gumboots:
Well, you know breakdowns, call ‘em breakdowns, or ghosts
What are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know
Klein and Illing pointed out how important it is that we constantly remind ourselves that our deeply-rooted conflation of liberalism and democracy is just that; democracy is not necessarily liberal. They also point out that fascism only arises in democratic societies. What do we do about Gershberg’s and Illing’s paradox?
Here, I think, capitalism provides a useful hint. Like democracy, capitalism contains within it—indeed, must contain—the drive to out-compete rivals in a certain market. The problem, of course, is that this drive tends toward monopoly; capitalism will naturally lead to monopoly if unregulated. So, we regulate it, to preserve what makes it most useful to society—free competition—and head off the worst of it—monopoly, rent-seeking, price-fixing, and the loss of incentive to provide the best goods and services possible.
Democracy, too, must be regulated. The framers of the U.S. government knew this, and while they may be subject to valid criticism for elitism, self-dealing, and the protection of brutally exploitive social and economic systems, they were well-schooled in their classical political history, and they rightly feared the power of demagogues, liars, and popular strongmen as tempting quick fixes to big problems. They tried to set up safeguards against these. That was over two hundred years ago, so it’s to be expected that, at this point, some of those safeguards are working better than others.
We now find ourselves obligated—urgently so—to regulate information technology for the sake of the health of liberal democracy—as opposed to other forms of democracy that the majority of us fervently wish to avoid. We can do that through individual choice, of course, but we must also do it as a society. We’re working on that; Europe is ahead of the U.S., but our Government, too, is taking it seriously. We should encourage that. Technology is power, whether it's a diesel-electric locomotive, an automobile, a can of gasoline, or a digital information network. Power must be regulated, at the individual level and the social level.
We need ongoing serious discussion about how best to regulate these new information technologies, whose role in our societal life has, so far, tended to promote anything but serious discussion.
Links:
The Ezra Klein Show
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sean-illing.html
(available on all major podcast platforms)
The Paradox of Democracy
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo146792768.html