We won’t witness a repeat of the 1930s, everyone’s favourite analogy. Rather, I believe that democracy will fail in new and unexpected ways. The looming dystopia to fear is a shell democracy run by smart machines and a new elite of ‘progressive’ but authoritarian technocrats. And the worst part is that lots of people will prefer this, since it will probably offer them more prosperity and security than what we have now.
Being always under surveillance and knowing that the things you say are collected and shared creates a soft but constant self-censorship. It might not feel like that when people are screaming abuse on Twitter – but for every angry troll there are hundreds of quiet users, lurkers who watch but don’t post, for fear of the angry Twitter mob, the data collectors, a nosy employer or the hordes of professional offence-takers who shark around the net waiting to be upset.
Developing the faculties to think for oneself requires that people say controversial things, make mistakes and learn from them. But social media creates a strange form of performative politics, where we all act out certain roles and acceptable public responses (this idea is bad! This person is good!), which limits the room for genuine personal growth.
Numbers are intoxicating, because they hold out the promise of a pure, exact, judgement-free answer. Algorithms are doubly so, since they appear to be logical and objective calculating machines which draw on millions of examples.
Nearly five million Brits have already used the voting app ‘iSideWith’ in multiple elections. The fact that five million people asked an app that they barely understood how to fulfil their most important duty as a citizen bothered exactly no one.
McLuhan, the great prophet, was far too smart not to hedge his bets. He also said that conflict and disharmony was possible in a world where everyone was connected to everyone else, because information-at-all-times would be so discombobulating that it would spark a mass identity crisis. ‘The day of political democracy as we know it today is finished,’ McLuhan told Playboy Magazine in a 1969 interview. ‘As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence.’2 CEOs, high-profile endorsers, hangers-on, early technologists and politicians all tended to ignore this bit, because these sorts of people much prefer optimism to tremendous violence.
At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.
Kahneman’s main point was that there are two basic systems that govern human behaviour. ‘System one’ thinking is fast, instinctive and emotional. It’s the reptilian brain, running on instinct. By contrast, ‘system two’ thinking is slow, deliberative and more logical.7 It sometimes, but not always, acts as a check on those wilder rages. Modern democracies aspire to run on ‘system two’ logic, and its ideal citizens are McLuhan’s literate man. Its institutions are arranged to arrive at logical, thought-out, fact-driven decisions. The internet, by contrast, more closely resembles ‘system one’: everyone and everything is immediate, instinctive and emotional.
In 2001, cyber-psychologist John Suler explained why this was, listing several factors that allow users of the internet to ignore the social rules and norms at play while offline. Suler argues that because we don’t know or see the people we are speaking to (and they don’t know or see us), because communication is instant, seemingly without rules or accountability, and because it all takes place in what feels like an alternative reality, we do things we wouldn’t in real life. Suler calls this ‘toxic disinhibition’. This is what all the articles about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ miss. The internet doesn’t only create small tribes: it also gives easy access to enemy tribes. I see opposing views to mine online all the time; they rarely change my mind, and more often simply confirm my belief that I am the only sane person in a sea of internet idiots.
Over the last 200 years, individual liberty and wealth have grown hand-in-hand, because freedom was good for the economy, and that economy produced more well-off people who valued freedom. What if that self-reinforcing cycle was weakened? What if economic growth in the future no longer depended on individual freedom and entrepreneurial spirit, but on capital and the ownership of smart machines that can drive research and entrepreneurship? What need would the rich then have for the poor they neither knew nor liked? In this scenario, ‘universal basic income’ wouldn’t be a dreamy utopia of satisfied and empowered citizens, but instead a very neat way for the millionaires to keep the poorest in society from rebelling.
The iPhone and web browsers we now all use have carried the Californian Ideology around the world, infecting us all with the alluring idea that disruption is liberation, total individualism is empowerment and gadgets equal progress.
That’s the final realisation of the crypto-anarchist fantasy. A world of lonely one-per-centers, freed from all constraints and social commitment – anonymous ghosts in the machine.
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