Public Interest Algorithms: An idea whose time has come, and will quickly be shelved by free-market ideology
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed a technical measure to defend against the trend of social media to divide us: Public Interest Algorithms. See this in the Brookings Institution website: Wheeler on Public Interest Algorithms
Tom Wheeler is a very smart guy, so why has he poisoned his concept by branding it as a public interest initiative? In an era when free-market ideologues hold sway over the intransigent core of Republicans in Congress, and Silicon Valley is jam-packed with libertarians, anything that smacks of public interest is derided as an instrument of the Nanny State. If you can’t legislate restaurants to stop providing super-sized soft drinks to their customers (a clear public health hazard), how are you going to keep at bay the Sultans of Social Media who will fight tooth and nail against public interest algorithms tampering with their business models?
A current Senate hearing on Russian meddling with U.S. elections via social media finds Facebook and Twitter PR spinners making conciliatory noises while at the same time holding fast to their narrative of social media as the best outlets for the freest flow of information ever conceived of by the human race. The problem with this narrative is the unbounded nature of the “flow.” It’s not like a stream that gathers the contributions of multiple tributaries and flows in a direction (toward the truth or at least a wide consensus). It’s not even like a river that has overleapt its banks in a flood, since a flood, too, still has a recognizable shape and direction. It is a deluge pounding down anywhere and everywhere, a Hurricane Harvey hovering over continents. The “public interest” is a drowning victim.
Politics ignores existence of Earth Two
On MSNBC the other night, Joy Reid invoked the metaphor of Earth One and Earth Two as shorthand to sort out the differences between the dying world and the rising one. Earth One is the world inhabited by those who agree that facts are facts, a disagreeable fact is as valid as an agreeable one, and outlandish claims need strong factual evidence even to deserve consideration—followed by independent scrutiny. Earth Two is the world where “alternative facts” can be as true as actual facts, facts you don’t like can be rejected on account of suspicion of the sources, and outlandish claims deserve consideration on the basis that someone—anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account—made them. Earth One is moribund; Earth Two, with a rich soil receptive to any seed of misinformation, is thriving as a jungle where the most bizarre life-forms flourish.
If it were not for the Russian component to the dilemma of social media, there would be just about zero interest among legislators in regulating the industry in our current political atmosphere—it would be un-American, an assault on free enterprise, and worst of all, a plot to smother voices decrying the Deep State.
Ergo, the Senate hearings are focused on foreign governments rather than on the overall terrain and climate of Earth Two (the terrain and climate may be too vast, sprawling, and volatile to focus on—what’s the answer?).
California senator Diane Feinstein scolded the representatives of Twiter and Facebook with the charge that “I don’t think you get it.” She invoked the specter of “cataclysmic” cyber-warfare with foreign nations.
Unfortunately, Senator Feinstein, the leaders of social media do get it—they just don’t take it seriously. In their view, it’s the fuddy-duddy Feinstein, with her outmoded paradigm of nation-states acting in their citizens’ interest, who doesn’t get it. Just as free-market ideologues hold to the blanket idea that unfettered markets lead to the greatest economic good, via the action of “the Invisible Hand,” Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey hold that the Invisible Hand of information will ultimately sort the good from the bad in a global conversation. What they don’t get—and blind themselves to, because it would be devastating to their business—is that the “conversation” has become a cacophony where truth itself is just another small voice.
The result of the Senate hearing, if it goes anywhere, will most probably be legislation aimed at the narrow target of paid advertising, mainly that paid for by foreign governments or foreign government agents. That leaves undiminished the froth of pseudo-information spewed at the online public by conspiracy theorists, know-nothings, mischief-makers who sow divisive rumors just for the hell of it, and outright liars. Complete fabrications have been unleashed by social media to travel instantaneously worldwide in an alternative universe where the boundaries between truth and fiction have become arbitrary, and everyone’s opinions are equal until shouted down.
Deeper Issues: Narrowcasting and The Attention Economy
What the Senate hearing has not probed is the deeper question of the cumulative effect of social media splitting the public into tribes—of which some are wandering in miasmas of confusion, and others are either at war or simmering in suspicions of The Other.
Charles Seife took up this question in one chapter of his book Virtual Unreality, entitled “The Loneliness of the Interconnected.” For the epigraph of this chapter Seife chose a quote from Cass Sunstein: “I think it’s a firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you’ll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.” Seife speaks of “the fragmentation of the media,” and when you include the internet, the fragmentation goes well beyond what you get from Fox News or MSNBC. As Seife puts it, “The more thinly spread the audience, the more it makes sense to drop the pretense of trying to appeal to everybody. . . . Narrowcasting is beating out broadcasting. . . .” Seife adds, “the internet allows narrowcasting on a scale never before dreamed of.”
This is what enables spittle-emitting, hate-mongering, conspiracy theorist, right wing nutjob Alex Jones, broadcasting from Earth Two, to solidify his base (native Earth-Twoers) and draw converts from Earth One, including even the president of the United States. Earth Two has generous immigration policies: all that’s required for entry is belief in just about anything that gets your juices flowing.
Narrowcasting and online “echo chambers” don’t just splinter society into cultural, class, and political groups, but also contribute to tribalism where it had gone underground: witness the recent energizing of the white supremacist movement in the U.S. and Europe, and the Catalan secession in Spain. (The latter almost succeeded.)
Less dangerous but still misguided groups gather online to share their biases: vaccines cause autism, Intelligent Design explains biological diversity, human cloning is happening, eating certain vegetables prevents cancer, etc.
Charles Seife addressed the way Narrowcasting is tearing at the social fabric. But the fabric itself is being transformed . . .
There’s another pervasive and dangerous effect of the internet, and social media in particular, that I took up in another post. See: The Other Addiction.
There, tech savant James Williams warns that the way the internet distracts and distorts our attention may be as great a danger as internet content. Williams, an ex-Google strategist, speaks of the “attention economy”: “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” The attention economy “privileges our impulses over our intentions.” This goes part of the way to explain, as he puts it, what drives “internet outrage over issues that ignite fury.”
I’m not sure I go all the way with Williams’s analysis, nor the dire impact on free will that he posits. But I am frightened by the effects that are sweeping us along in a direction towards we Know Not What. I recently read in The Atlantic* about the steep rise in teen suicides accompanying the steep rise in cell phone use and other screen time. These teens may have fallen prey to “the loneliness of the interconnected,” and it may be what killed them.
So. The need is great and becoming more urgent for leaders in politics, religion, and the media to come to grips, not just with internet content, but with its impacts on perception, attention, mood, emotion, and modes of thought. We are being propelled into a Brave New World by technology that no one, and no group, thoroughly understands. We are all subjects in a global experiment that might as well be being conducted by aliens for all the control we have over it.
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*The Atlantic, September 2017, “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?” by psychologist Jean Twenge. She has a website at Jean Twenge