POLITICS

What A Biden Win Would Mean For The Information Economy

Thinking through problems in information the past few years and changes likely under a President Biden

It is never easy to unseat an incumbent president. An incumbent president who deliberately builds cults around himself, lies constantly about everything, and works directly with a powerful “entertainment” news network that holds sway over the way a huge percentage of heartland Americans think about politics and vote… well, let’s just say that Joe Biden seems to have pulled off something that should have been impossible.

George Packer, of The Atlantic, writes that “we are two countries,” but I wonder if he has underestimated.

The nation is four or five different cultures which increasingly do not get along and are forced to make alliances to get anything done. California and the west coast have powerful economies and seek strong social benefits for their citizens, who tend to be somewhat better educated and more informed than heartlanders to whom agriculture and industry is more important and who have less experience with technology. Among them all you have mountain people, forest people, desert people, and beach people of a variety of colors and backgrounds all living together in a way that isn’t completely antagonistic, but which could certainly be better for all involved.

The weirdness of US politics comes from the interplay between these extraordinarily different groups of people. In bygone years, more of America was white and there was more agreement about political realities, which in turn were actually less known in general because there was less media coverage of everything because we didn’t have the internet. There was no journalistic uncovering of the US sales of guns and oil to the Nazis during WWII, for example. And we survived that as a nation somehow.

In the past, what I want to call the “information economy” was more limited in scope than it is today. People didn’t know as much about the world as we do today. Can you imagine being illiterate? I have a niece who performed her first Google search at age 2, and I’m sure other children have done so even earlier.

The information economy is a term I’m borrowing from economics and using rather loosely to refer to the availability of information at any given point in time for any given individual. Rather than an economy based on information, what I want to convey by the term is the broad marketplace from which we Americans receive our information. A healthy information economy would be one in which new ideas were able to spread but bad ideas didn’t make it very far. If you needed a fact, you would be able to get it quickly in a healthy information economy. And our information economy generally does very well, but it has had some absolutely catastrophic failures.

The thing we seem to be up to, as a society, is dialing in the way we communicate with one another. One of the most pivotal developments just getting started on this front is the rise of blockchain technology which allows for trustless information processing. The biggest problem, bar none, in news media, is trust. Can the audience believe what it reads?

In this article, I want to look at the issue of trust in media through the lens of competition in markets and try to take a somewhat apolitical, historical view of the situation. The goal here is simple: we just want to understand the problem we’re facing.

Fox News: Founded 1997

The old majority, mainly white and centered in the heartland, spun up Fox News to try to resist the demographic trend that was predicted to lead to a majority minority status US; that is, more non-white people than white people. Back in 1997, when the network was founded, no one could have known the pivotal role it would play in consolidating the then-center political power still held by the nation’s declining majority and spinning it right.

The next few years, Fox whinged and blathered and ultimately influenced the election in the favor of George W. Bush in Florida by prematurely calling the state in his favor. This was a pivotal moment that would foreshadow the next two decades of conservative politics, and which, oddly enough, may have repeated this year with an early Fox call in Arizona for Biden. An alliance had formed between rightwing politicians and their new media outlet.

Fast forward twenty years. We’ve watched Alex Jones utterly disavow the notion in court that his show contained anything like factual information, and we’ve seen Fox apply the same legal defense to their own questionable conduct successfully.

The news is a serious industry at heart. We like to be free, and we like to live our lives the best way we can, but when people who perhaps do a decent job of reporting facts on a regular basis deliberately mislead us to cause us to vote a particular way, we have a real problem on our hands. And if these little errors are written off because a network bills its programming as “entertainment,” there is little or no direct accountability.

Nobody is perfect, but accountability for misdeeds is something that is sorely lacking in the United States’ media coverage of political matters. The market dictates that, if there’s a benefit to be gained by misbehaving, there needs to be a consequence that outweighs that benefit to keep people from gaming the system or bad actors will spring up and spin the hell out of everything the way that Fox News does every day.

However, the growth of Fox cannot be infinite and it is a profoundly unpalatable news source for a lot of urban America. The division that delivered Germany to Adolf Hitler was a division between urban and rural Germans, but it appears that the internet has changed the game a bit. The speed with which information moves these days may help to keep Americans just alert enough to prevent another Holocaust.

If Fox decides that it can grow more by reducing the polarizing nature of its content, the American media marketplace will in all likelihood halt its rightward march down the political spectrum. After all, the market doesn’t require a Christian/rightwing stance. This was a successful capitalist play, but nothing about past success indicates that the future will allow similar returns on similar plays.

And the demographic that made Fox number one in viewership is steadily declining. At some point, the political gamesmanship by the American right wing will come to an end just as the Trump presidency did. When that happens, America will probably begin to think more clearly.

But clear thought has never been a given, and as the world’s population increases it will be more and more important to discover ways that we can work with each other to solve problems. Tribalism and nationalism may still be hot today, but these mindsets are short-lived fads under most circumstances. What would we notice, if the divisive rhetoric found itself severely limited by a new president who was white, male, and not socialist?

Facebook and Google

Where Fox is a content producer, Google and Facebook are platforms instead. Both work by using computers to figure out what people do, and then experimenting with strategies in advertising and content delivery until they find something that they can make money on. It’s been an incredibly successful business model thus far, but both of these companies are about the same age as Fox News and both really began pushing the limits in terms of acceptable content and advertising strategy in the years leading up to 2016.

Many Americans get news and entertainment from Facebook and Google every day, but the problem here is that there is no one in charge of content production. Google just indexes the internet and lets people put videos onto YouTube so it can sell ads, whereas Facebook provides networking tools to help people stay in touch but also sells ads and does all sorts of ethically-dubious algorithmic manipulation to make money.

Antitrust litigation would ostensibly serve to split Google and Facebook up into smaller chunks according to a handful of different strategies still being debated. The major issue here is that we don’t really know exactly what needs to happen to make it less possible for a bad actor to come in and manipulate millions of people into doing something terrible. After all, even if Facebook were to be regionally divided, Cambridge Analytica could still come in and simply pay each region to produce targeted ads and effectively brainwash people.

Worse, with respect to social media, the content itself isn’t really the issue at all. It’s more about the way in which access to users is sold to bidders. And there really isn’t much of a standard for that quite yet. Where should the limits be, in terms of the stream of personalized content directed at us?

Google has done some wonderful things, like supporting the open source community and finding ways to offer services such as the now-ubiquitous Maps to its users for free, but the problem of trust in content is one that even the cypherpunks who gave us blockchain algorithms such as decentralized byzantine fault tolerance have failed to solve convincingly. It’s no surprise that Google hasn’t figured out how to stop the spread of misinformation on its network.

It is possible that the threat of destructive antitrust legislation will lead to a better online atmosphere, but it seems unlikely. The users are the ones who spread misinformation and lies to one another or choose low-quality sources to back up dubious claims about hydroxychloroquine, or whatever the case may be. Google is simply a means to that end which creates, in the case of YouTube, a series of recommendations based upon what other users have viewed next. The “rabbit hole” effect is an emergent phenomenon managed by Google but only really problematic in a few very particular situations.

When viewed this way, the network technologies themselves are seen to be faced with a very hard problem indeed: how to keep the corrupt nodes from corrupting other nodes on their networks. In other words, how can Google keep your uncle Ted from slowly going off the deep end by watching Plandemic and then picking up QAnon and just generally losing his mind? Is there a censorship algorithm that can block these sorts of things from happening?

I don’t think it can be done. The fact is, if conspiracy content is universally banned, we have a censorship problem that is preventing new information from entering the network to some problematically high degree and we know it because conspiracy content isn’t particularly unique. Sure, many times it’s harmful, but there is a very real sense in which it’s important to be able to get the information we need to make an adequate judgment on the matter.

Biased or overly persuasive content creators can be problematic and difficult to weed out too. But there’s another accountability point here: the creators of these conspiracies aren’t really being investigated or called into question either.

Perhaps it’s best for our free speech if we don’t take these sorts of things seriously and just allow information to flow freely. However, the problem is not gone just because Biden won the presidency and it is entirely likely that, again, assuming Trump doesn’t somehow end up getting handed another term by an obviously corrupt Supreme Court, the current state of the informational network we call the internet will stay about how it has been. That means more conspiracies, more bullshit, more lies. If YouTube came up with an algorithm that matched point to counterpoint with respect to political videos, the user could simply skip non-toxic content in favor of Ben Shapiro or whoever.

Still, there’s something to be said for exposure to a toxin. I have been scammed a few times in my twenty-five or so years on the internet, and my general reaction to it is something like immunity. I don’t tend to fall for the same one twice and my overall strategy is to minimize my losses whenever I perceive risk… so who’s to say that the Trumpists and Q believers won’t figure out at some point that they’ve been had and become resistant to further scamming? Religion in general doesn’t give us a track record that provides for just a ton of hope here, but perhaps the benefit we receive by leaving things more open is larger than the benefit we will ultimately end up with by closing it down.

And conspiracy theories are all about trying to make connections to the environment people share. Right now, the narratives the various toxic conspiracies contain seem somewhat borne out by the world. A Biden presidency will effectively reduce the validity of the Q line as well as the Trump one by getting rid of their subject, President Trump, who will likely be a civilian and then a convicted felon within the next few years. The level of faith it takes someone to continue believing a conspiracy for that long is high enough that four years of someone else as President will sorely test it and at worst see it mutate into something else. The calculus of viability for cults, conspiracies, political parties, and religions is one of group fitness and individual fitness relative to others — and when the jig is up, the idea disappears.

Google and Facebook are just technology companies with problems. The internet is just a form of technology that connects people. Our issue that we need to deal with here is that political interests allow people to do all sorts of horrible things with that connection, including the people building the technology. Still, accountability here is extremely tough, just as most everything is about these social media giants. I won’t go the way of Jaron Lanier and argue that you should stop using social media right now, but it does seem increasingly likely to me that we will need to come up with entirely new laws to regulate the things that happen on the internet. Antitrust law may be where the conversation starts, and the parties doing the investigating may be doing so with their own axes to grind, but these days I don’t expect simple resolutions to problems this big.

What’s Next?

We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and our nation, and I’m proud that the descent into authoritarianism didn’t quite happen here. Or at least it hasn’t quite yet. The pandemic and impending/ongoing recession are still capable of posing a threat, but it is likely that a President Biden will be able to make progress with respect to the massive task of getting us back to something like what we were up to before. I’ll be happy to see that, but the past four years have taught me that change is essential. The very possibility of the cult of Trump we’ve endured together is strong evidence that what we’ve been doing has some fundamental problems with it.

Google and Facebook represent an acceleration and a subtle form of manipulation with respect to the information economy, whereas Fox News is more old school skullduggery, but all three of these companies are competing in a media market that rewards appeals to emotion and lacks rules of engagement regarding decency due to its inherent novelty.

The sort of change we need is well thought-out and meaningful progress on the hard problems of how to adapt our government to suit the needs of its people. Technological development has outstripped the pace of innovation in legislation to the point where even congressional representatives don’t really have the information they need to make a decent judgment call here. At the end of the day, the question is one of how to rapidly develop and deploy new technologies with minimum collateral damage.

The people’s needs can change, and they frequently do. Bad actors like Fox rarely change for the better, but they can when the market or a new regulation forces their hand. Google and Facebook and the rest of the technology world can change, too, under similar circumstances, but they supply actual needs and thus must be managed carefully. If the American government gets back to functioning status again, it’s possible that things could get better fairly rapidly with respect to the pandemic and the civil unrest that have characterized 2020. It’s also highly possible that big money interests will continue to exploit a Republican majority in the Senate to prevent legislation from reigning any of the malicious content producers in, and it seems likely the issue will remain unresolved for some time yet to come. In any case, this election seems to have shown that the battle for the future of our information supply isn’t over yet and that gives me hope that perhaps, little by little, individual people will just figure this out on their own.

The issue we face is that the internet works 90% of the time flawlessly. The connections are there, the real-time news is off without a hitch except when the networks spread bullshit, most people are able to be more aware of facts than was previously the case, and almost everything is improving rapidly in terms of the development and deployment of these technologies.

We do still have a few bugs to work out, though. The open internet isn’t as full of pirates as it once was, but it still allows a lot of unconscionable activity. The collective sigh of relief being heaved by Biden voters everywhere is evidence that our social frameworks are more robust than they have seemed for the past four years, but issue politics still indicate that there is a major gap to fill.

People in the United States don’t share many common principles, and that’s making this a very tough problem to solve for everyone involved. Whether you’re the Koch brothers or Donald Trump or Greta Thunberg or the Pope, you’re having to make plans on the basis of uncertain information and you’re getting unpredictable results. Technology is changing rapidly and it’s changing us rapidly.

What we need is accountability for content creators in technological spaces, but there’s too much content and there are too many places to put it. Like so many other problems today, we just don’t have a solution here quite yet. So we have to recognize that we cannot trust certain things we encounter online, and we are forced to make judgment calls about which things. Fox News is a problem because so many people are willing to subscribe to such dark reads of ongoings (remember the made up Jade Helm hoax they all fell for?) and Google and Facebook are issues because people are so intent upon creating such low quality content.

What would the world look like if we all just cut the crap out and focused upon real problems? I want a flying car, and instead I get PizzaGate? The long game here is human character: eventually, all the PizzaGate morons will figure out that it wasn’t good for them to believe that bullshit and move on, hopefully less likely to believe conspiracies in the future. How long will it take? How much will the rest of us have to suffer before they figure it out? Only time will tell.