Two years later, where are we?
posted by W. Rhett Davis on Fri, 6 Jan 2023
Today marks two years since the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington, which to me was one of the saddest days in our country's history. The most depressing thing to me is that we cannot even begin to agree on what actually went wrong. It seems that we have spent more time arguing about whether it was an insurrection or tourism gone overboard. I have spent a lot of time in these two years looking for causes on which we might all be able to agree. I keep coming back to these two:
- They don’t represent us — In his book with this title, Lawrence Lessig proposes that there was a time when our government represented the will of the people (roughly from the 1930s to the 1990s), but no longer. Back then, it was the convergence of three technologies that enabled the government to represent us: radio, which allowed the public to be informed about what the government was doing, accurate polling, which allowed the government to know the will of large numbers of people, and the telephone, which allowed pollsters to call everyone in the country. But today, we are so awash with entertainment options that most people choose not to be informed, and spam calling is so common that few people answer their phones. The result is that our representatives really can’t represent us, even if they wanted to.
Another very compelling statistic that Lessig brings up is the fact that 85% of Congressional districts are considered "safe". Thanks to very effective gerrymandering by both the right and the left, no one who runs for office in these districts is concerned about an attack from the center. Rather, they are concerned about an attack from further right or further left. That is 6 out of every 7 representatives who have a very strong incentive to move away from the will of the people, even if they knew what it was. We see this playing out this week as the House of Representatives hosts a dramatic battle over who will become Speaker. The GOP front-runner Kevin McCarthy is facing fierce opposition from 20 representatives who are more extreme than he is.
But wait, you say! Technology allowed the government to represent us before! Can technology not save us again? Perhaps, but that brings me to the second cause.
- Godlike information technology with twisted incentives — It was a dream from my childhood to be able to put a device in my pocket that connects me instantly to everyone that I ever knew and anything I ever wanted to know. It seemed like it would be an amazing unifying force for the world. Now we have that technology, but it has been enabled by some twisted economic incentives. When you can know everything all of the time, you need some way to sort it, and the free market has decided that the best way to sort is to choose the content that keeps us glued to the device longer. This means that, even if we wanted to be informed, we get the content that is the most distracting, the most enraging, the most frightening. Inevitably it seems that we find ourselves pushed to an extreme. The internet seems more like a global gladiator arena, rather than the unifying force that I had envisioned.
I do not want to be all doom and gloom. There are many reasons to hope that things will get better. Today however, I am simply taking stock of the problem. I am also proposing that one part of the solution is to create networks of trust: sources of information that are unifying, rather than divisive. I hope that this feed can be a small part of that. By design, this feed is completely free of advertising. It costs me only $15 per year, so I do not need to distract, enrage, or frighten you to keep it going. My only incentive for doing it is the fact that I feel some responsibility. In the spirit of Bertrand Russel and Albert Einstein’s Pugwash conferences, in which they assessed the dangers of nuclear weapons, I feel the need to assess the dangers of the information technology to which I have dedicated my career.
This is where we are today. How do we make things better?