We need to have a global discussion about the influence of technology on democracy...
The pace of technological progress has long far outstripped the progress of our political institutions. Most of us are aware of this fact. The law for example is years behind when it comes to our digital rights and freedoms even though our offline activities are usually relatively well addressed. Simply going online to do the exact same things you might feel comfortable doing in person posses risks that we often too frequently ignore.
But the risks now are spreading to more than just our personal privacy. We need to have a serious discussion before we find that we have no idea how our democracies and cultures are even run anymore.
There is a good argument to be made that we are already there. We all know the decades long battle we have been fighting, and losing, in keeping private money out of politics. Most of politics these days is funded by business.
But what we are seeing now is more fundamental, and potentially much more dangerous. Before the digital age, your sources of news were relatively few. Television, newspapers, and word of mouth. Yes these were businesses as well. But they were at least somewhat transparent in their motives and operation. Now we get our news through a million and one digital sources and increasingly through social media. Aggregations of aggregations. The danger is, we don't know what we are not seeing.
For example just take Facebook as an example. All of us know that Facebook doesn't show us all of our friends posts. They have an algorithm that picks and chooses what we get to see. These algorithms are closely held secrets and are at the heart of EVERYTHING we interact with on the web. They are of course first and foremost designed to maximize the profit of the corporations that run the social media platforms. Beyond that we don't know. It's all a black box.
Of course they ARE necessary. Without them we would drown in a sea of information.
We already know that social media echo chambers play an increasing role in deciding elections. And increasingly they play a role in the very knowledge that we have access to. Every time you do a search, every time you open a social media platform what is presented to you is filtered through totally opaque algorithms that are designed as much to maximize profits as they are to be efficient and show the results you want.
Also. Remember those last two words are important, what "you want". These algorithms are designed to confirm our biases, because doing so makes us happier, and happier people are easier to market to. But when you filter out the stuff you don't want to necessarily see you end up not knowing what you don't know.
The danger is not only that algorithms end up choosing presidents, but that they also end up choosing everything else as well.
What defined the 60s and 70s? The hippie movement, disco, bell bottom jeans among other things. What defined any decade? Sure advertising played a role in all of this. But it was also quite an organic and messy emergent phenomenon. What we see now is that what could come to define a decade now in terms of pop culture, trends, fads, and tastes could be chosen by algorithms for us that we don't understand.
We need to have a public discussion about the dangers of having so much power concentrated in the "hands" or "processors" of so few organizations. And so much of it being black boxes.
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