One of the more readable contemporary writers on information technology and the ways in which it impacts on human behavior, Jamie Bartlett, has used his latest book, “The People vs. Tech” to illustrate what he sees as the deeper motives behind the info tech’s relentless appetite for data collection and the use of that data for what he sees as the manipulation of human behaviour. His perspective on the phenomenon has led him to the conclusion that hi tech ‘juggernauts’ like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are among the insidious horsemen of an apocalypse that have emerged to pose a threat to democracy itself.
In this issue, The Guyana Review publishes a highly revealing (edited) excerpt from the introduction to Mr. Bartlett’s book. The People vs. Tech.
In the coming few years either technology will destroy democracy and the social order as we know it, or politics will stamp its authority over the digital world. It is becoming increasingly clear that technology is winning this battle, crushing a diminished and enfeebled opponent.
I am not referring to the lathe, the power-loom, the motor car, the MRI scanner or the F16 fighter jet. I mean specially the digital technologies associated with Silicon Valley – social media platforms, big data, mobile technology and artificial intelligence – that are increasingly dominating economic, political and social life. It’s clear that these technologies have, on balance, made us more informed, wealthier and, in some ways, happier.
After all, technology tends to expand human capabilities, produce new opportunities, and increase productivity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good for democracy. In exchange for the undeniable benefits of technological progress and greater personal freedom, we have allowed too many other fundamental components of a functioning political system to be undermined: control, parliamentary sovereignty, economic equality, civic society and an informed citizenry. And the tech revolution has only just got going. As I will show, the coming years will see further dramatic improvements in digital technology. On the current trajectory, within a generation or two, the contradictions between democracy and technology will exhaust themselves.
Strangely for an idea that nearly everyone claims to value, no one can agree on precisely what democracy means. The political theorist Bernard Crick once said its true meaning is “stored up somewhere in heaven.” Broadly speaking, it is both a principle of how to govern ourselves, and a set of institutions which allow for sovereignty to be derived from the people. Exactly how this works changes from place to place and over time, but easily the workable and popular version is modern liberal representative democracy. This form of democracy typically means that representatives of the people are elected to make decisions on their behalf, and that there is set of interlocking institutions making the whole thing work. This includes periodic elections, a healthy civil society, certain individual rights, well organised political parties, an effective bureaucracy and a free and vigilant media. Democracies also need committed citizens who believe in the wider democratic ideals of distributed power, rights, compromise and informed debate. Every stable modern democracy shares nearly all of these features.
This is not another book-length whinge about rapacious capitalists who masquerade as cool tech guys, nor a morality tale about grasping multi-nationals. Democracy has seen off plenty of them over the years. While there are certainly contradictions in minimising tax while claiming to empower people, doing so doesn’t necessarily betray insincerity. And, on first glance, technology is a boom to democracy. It certainly improves and extends the sphere of human freedom and offers access to new information and ideas. It gives previously unheard groups in society a platform and creates new ways to pool knowledge and coordinate action. These are aspects of a healthy democratic society too.
However, at a deep level, these two grand systems – technology and democracy – are locked in a bitter conflict. They are products of completely different eras and run according to different rules and principles. The machinery of democracy was built during a time of nation-states, hierarchies, deference and industrialised economies. The fundamental features of digital tech are at odds with this mode: non-geographical, decentralised, data-driven, subject to network effects and exponential growth. Put simply: democracy wasn’t designed for this. That’s not really anyone’s fault.
Many early digital pioneers saw how what they called ‘cyberspace’ was mismatched with the physical world, too. John Perry Barlow’s oft-quoted 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace sums up this tension rather well: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world…Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” This is an exhilarating statement of the freedom offered by the internet that still holds digital aficionados in thrall.
But democracy is based on matter, in addition to the legal concepts of property, expression, identity and movement. If you scratch beneath Silicon Valley’s corporate pieties about connectivity, networks and global communities, you will find that an anti-democratic impulse continues to exist…
But we shouldn’t start smashing the machines just yet. For one thing, there is currently a tech arms race between democratic societies and their Russian and Chinese counterparts, and it is important for the democracies to win this race. And if subjected to democratic control, the tech revolution could transform our societies in myriad positive ways. However, both tech and democracy need to change dramatically…
The great tech pioneers… are firm believers in a sunny techno-utopia and in their ability to take us there. I have been fortunate enough to interview some of them, and have spent a lot of time either in Silicon Valley itself or with people who inhabit that world. In my experience they were rarely evil and most have faith in the emancipatory power of digital technology. Many of the technologies they build are wonderful. But that makes them potentially more dangerous. Just like the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries, who believed they could construct a world based on abstract principles like equality, these later day utopians are busily dreaming up a society dictated by connectivity, networks, platforms and data. Democracy and indeed the world, does not run like this. It is slow, deliberative and grounded in the physical. Democracy is analogue rather than digital. And any vision of the future that runs contrary to the reality of people’s lives and wishes can only end in disaster.
The New Panopticon – What the Power of Data is doing to Our Free Will
We live in a giant advertising panopticon which keeps us addicted to devices; this system of data collection and prediction is merely the most recent iteration in a long history of efforts to control us; it is getting more advanced by the day, which has serious ramifications for potential manipulation, endless distraction and the slow diminishing of free choice and autonomy.
Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have long ceased to be simply tech firms. They are also advertising companies. Around 90 per cent of Facebook and Google’s revenue comes from selling adverts. The basis of practically the entire business of social media is the provision of free services in exchange for data, which the companies can then use to target us with adverts.
This suggests a very different, and far less glamorous, lineage: a decades-long struggle by suited ad men and psychologists to uncover the mysteries of human decision-making and locate the ‘buy!’ button that lurks somewhere in our frontal lobe. A more cogent founding story is the early years of American psychology, which emerged as a serious academic discipline a century ago alongside the beginnings of mass consumer culture. Psychology had been developing in Europe – and especially Germany – for some years, and was imported to the US before the First World War. But the American variety diverged from the European fascination with philosophical whimsies like ‘free will’ and ‘the mind’. Driven by pioneers such as James Cattell and Harlow Gale, it looked instead at how to turn the question of human decision-making into hard science that could be used by business.
In 1915 John Watson became president of the American Psychological Association. He argued that all human behaviour was essentially the product of measureable external stimuli, and could therefore be understood and controlled through study and experiment. This approach became known as behaviourism, and was later popularised further by the work of B.F Skinner. The promise of malleable humans was catnip to companies hoping to sell products, and behaviourism spread throughout the corporate world like a virus. For some years, businesses – encouraged by Watson and others – believed they had godlike powers over desires, hopes, fears, and, of course, shopping. Behaviourism was knocked out of fashion somewhat in the 1920s with the arrival of statistical market research (which, unlike behaviourism, actually required asking people questions). But together, behaviourism and market research signalled a more scientific approach to advertising that has been with us ever since.
In the bowels of every inspirationally branded tech firm some of the world’s smartest minds are paid small fortunes to work out why you click on things, and to get you to click on more things. Although the secret of Facebook’s success is ultimately the human psyche (humans are creatures that like to copy and watch each other and Facebook is the greatest system ever invented to allow us to see and be seen) this is supplemented by every imaginable tactic to keep you hooked. Nothing is left to chance, since even the smallest improvement can be worth a fortune. Tech companies run thousands of tests with millions of users-tweaking backgrounds, colours, images, tones, fonts and clicks. Facebook’s homepage is carefully designed to be full of visible numbers – likes, friends, posts, interactions and new messages and always in red! (Urgent!). Auto play, endless scroll and reverse chronological timelines are all sculpted to keep your attention.
It’s certainly working. Hordes of us are now members of a zombie army that walks while looking down at our phones and chats to distant disembodied avatars rather than whoever is sitting next to us.
Data
The Holy Grail for the social media giants, just as it always has been for all ad men, is to understand you better than you understand yourself. To predict what you will do, say and even think. Facebook doesn’t collect data about you for fun; it does it to get inside your head. What the company knows about you, based solely on the untold hours you’ve spent there, is enough to fill several binders – interests, age, friends, job, activity and more. And that’s not all. Facebook has partnerships with quietly powerful ‘data brokers’ like Acxiom, which has information on over 500 million active consumers worldwide, with thousands of data points per person; things like age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, health worries and holidays, often scooped up for others shops and records. Armed with all this information, cross-referenced and analysed, companies can target you with ever more refined advertising.
Amazingly, this data collection frenzy is just getting started. By 2020 there will be around 50 billion internet-enabled devices – four times what there are now – and each one hovering up data.
The data windfall is far beyond human analysis these days, which is why algorithms have become so central to the modern economy. An algorithm is a simple mathematical technique, a set of instructions that a computer follows in order to execute a command. These are the magic keys to the kingdom, which filter, predict, correlate, target and learn. Your life is already guided by algorithms that determine everything from Amazon recommendations and your Facebook news feed to the things that pop up on your Google search. Your dating matches. Your route to work. Your music. News aggregators. Your clothes.
The scary thing about modern big data algorithms is how they can figure things out about us that we barely know ourselves. Human are often quite predictable, and with enough data – even trivial or meaningless scraps such as what songs you play – algorithms can learn very important things about what sort of person you are.
The logical end goal of dataism is for each of us to be reduced to a unique, predictable and targetable data point. Anyone who’s tried to talk to a chatbot or seen an ad for something they just bought knows that these technologies are far from perfect. But the direction of travel is clear, and it is easy to imagine the ways in which every choice you take might one day be subject to a series of algorithmically informed nudges, all carefully and perfectly calibrated around you.
