Democracy in the Digital Age
Introduction
The internet, social media, and the increasing power of technology have made it so that it’s requiring less and less effort to make a huge impact on society. For better or for worse.
A case can easily be made that the power of persuasive technology has warped and fragmented citizens' shared understanding of the world. By atrophying our ability to cooperate at scale, democracies become increasingly dysfunctional and less competitive compared to more centrally-planned techno-authoritarian nations. And the harder it is to find democratic consensus the more tempting it becomes to accept authoritarian measures that suppress disagreement.
In this post, I will be breaking down how technology has led us to this state, and what technologists can do to protect and strengthen democracy.
The Value of Technology
Is technology fundamentally good, bad, or neutral?
Neutral - It seems like it’s common to believe that technology, in all forms, is “values-agnostic,” and that it’s humans who imprint their good or bad values onto our technology.
Good - There is also the view that all technology is fundamentally good, but humans just sometimes misuse and abuse that technology to a negative effect.
Bad - The opposing view is that technology is fundamentally bad, since tech is essentially just power, and it drives increased power inequality and resource extraction.
But all these viewpoints are fundamentally untrue, or at least insufficient.
It’s my view that technology is “values-affecting.” Technology affects human values because it affects human behavior, which in turn affects our values. And it affects behavior in different ways that may be positive or negative. It’s actually hard to imagine technology not doing this.
When we understand this, the question isn’t just, “How are we developing our values culturally so that people use tech properly?” It’s also, “How are we coding our values into our technology so that it feeds back into human behavior and values positively?”
For technologists, designers, product managers, engineers and citizens, this is an unbelievably important perspective. Especially in the context of a properly functioning democracy.
How Tech Affects Democracy
For a democracy to be effective in any serious capacity, citizens must first be:
Sufficiently educated about the function of the government and current issues
Capable of proper sensemaking, critical thinking and empathy
Able to communicate with the government in an open and effective manner
Trusting of the government’s ability to receive and internalize feedback
And technology that imposes on any of these capacities directly diminishes the effectiveness of a democracy.
It feels almost like a cliché to say at this point, but social media is one of the most worrying and potentially destructive technologies to democracy.
The end goal of social media is not to make you a happy and well-adjusted person, it’s to keep you on the site and exposed to as many ads as possible (given that the service runs on an ads-based business model). The content algorithms will therefore use any means necessary to keep you on site. Which usually means providing you with content that:
Affirms your current thoughts and feelings
Paints opposing views in ways that invoke outrage
Is highly engaging and addictive in a way specific to your personality
Is prone to misleading or incorrect information
The Center for Humane Technology covers this extensively. For instance, they define 8 ways that social media distorts users’ perceptions of reality:
The Extreme Emotion Distortion
The Information Flooding Distortion
The Micro-Targeting Distortion
The Moral Outrage Distortion
The Engaging Content Distortion
The Anti-Journalism Distortion
The Disloyalty Distortion
The Othering Distortion
Let’s consider the consequences of kids growing up with powerful, Facebook-like optimization algorithms: One side-effect is that they grow up thinking that the world conforms to their preferences, which encourages narcissism at scale. Other consequences may be addiction, shortened attention spans, mood disorders, etc.
Democracy requires people to have long enough attention spans, good enough working memory, and enough empathy to hear multiple peoples opinions on things and to analyze & synthesize those ideas.
The point being - These social media distortions don’t just affect individuals. Over time these distortions warp society’s perception of reality, breaking down our ability to find shared understanding.
So what can be done?
Taiwan’s Digital Democracy
Taiwan seems to have a government that has done exceptionally well at leveraging information technology and citizen participation to form a successful “digital democracy.”
For example, Taiwan has implemented a suite of new technologies to improve its democracy. One such technology intends to reveal consensus between political groups: A software called Pol.is which includes an algorithm to identify areas of unlikely agreement between clusters of users who previously “liked” different kinds of content. This helps identify and reveal overwhelming consensus in the population which lawmakers can use to create effective policy.
Taiwan has also implemented a highly effective user interface for many different digital government services: Accessing personal information, interacting with government officials, and accessing resources for a variety of life events. I talk about these service in much more depth here: US vs Taiwan Digital Services.
In short, it comes down to the Taiwanese government’s open-mindedness to cooperating with it’s citizens and incorporating new technology into existing institutions and governance.
China’s Techno-Authoritarianism
To see how a country can use technology to control, rather than empower its citizens, we have to look no further than Taiwan’s next door neighbor:
The Chinese government leverages public services to manipulate the behavior of “dangerous” people. Authorities used a COVID tracking app to restrict the movement of people who were upset because local banks had frozen their deposits.
The CCP collects and process vast amounts of data about its citizens' behavior, both online and offline, to create a national database of individual Social Credit scores. These scores are used to assess citizens' trustworthiness and compliance with laws and regulations, with the aim of rewarding "good behavior" and punishing "bad behavior."
It’s easy to see that some of these strategies of controlling people with technology are tempting for those who are in power or who want to control a narrative. But we cannot allow that to happen.
Democratic Digital Solutions
To conclude, if we want to support democratic governance in the same way that authoritarian states are using 21st century technology to upgrade their systems of social control, open societies need to be at least as capable as authoritarian societies at integrating digital technology into their governance. And as I mentioned at the start, implementations of technology that negatively impact behavior has a cascading effect on social values, and creates a culture that is more susceptible to authoritarian control.
I, of course, don’t have the silver bullet answer to resolving these issues, and I don’t think there is one. But it is clear that solutions need to happen in many different areas that support the functioning of democracy. This means digital solutions that can:
Educate people about the function of the government and current issues
Educate people about critical thinking, misinformation, rhetoric, good-faith argumentation, biases, logical fallacies, etc.
Demonstrate or capitalize on consensus, rather than differences
Remove sources of misinformation or media manipulation like Twitter bots
Disincentivize predatory and manipulative social media algorithms
Enhance the communication and feedback between citizens and government officials
