I am not a technochondriac, Nick Bilton's wonderful word for the naysayers and worrywarts who think that our texting-obsessed kids will never read another book and that online social networking is destroying the bonds that hold real communities together. I love our brave new gadget-filled hyper-connected world.
And I loved reading Bilton's romp through the fear-filled fields of the past, when some worried that trains would asphyxiate passengers if they went more than 20 mph, and the august New York Times rumbled (back in 1876) that "the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every home, will empty the concert halls and the churches." Every politician now making headlines by attacking Craigslist or video games for supposedly corrupting society should find the time to read Bilton’s new book, “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works."
But there’s still something that irks me about the balmy charm of his book's title and overarching thesis. I'm sorry, but I think the technology-driven future that Bilton lives in is already here, and unless we recognize what we're doing to ourselves as a society, and make some deliberate adjustments, the effects of all this new technology cannot be simply described as benign.
**Shouldn’t a book about a bright future explore whether we need to take affirmative steps to insure that everyone is connected to that future?**My beef is not, by the way, with Bilton's fascinating discussion of how our brains are adapting to multimedia and multitasking. We’ll adjust to a world filled with smartphones in much the same way our grandparents adjusted to a world filled with phones.
Nor is my complaint with how he weighs and dismisses the fears of today's media executives, who desperately want to force people to pay for old content models. Journalism — the act of reporting and making sense of the news — has a long and healthy future ahead of it, I am convinced, and Bilton outlines many smart ways that journalists will get paid for their work, drawn from his experience working in The New York Times R&D labs.
Technological development is also social development
I have two concerns with Bilton's overall argument, which I offer in a spirit of constructive criticism. First, while he uses history to poke gentle holes in the fearful arguments now expressed at the forward rush of today's technology, he could do more to remind his readers that at every step in our technological development we also needed to take ameliorative action as a society to address each new technology's unexpected consequences.
Trains didn't literally asphyxiate people, but the railroad barons did threaten to choke commerce and corrupt politics to protect their privileged position, at least until progressive reformers pushed through anti-trust laws. The telephone didn’t cut off concert halls or churches, but soon we recognized that the lack of a dial tone might cut off the most poor and rural members of society, and legislated the Universal Service Act of 1936 to ensure that everyone would at least have this basic connection to their home.
If, as William Gibson memorably wrote and Bilton rightly quotes, “The future is already here — it just is unevenly distributed," shouldn’t a book about that bright future explore whether we need to take affirmative steps to insure that everyone is connected to that future?
I searched in vain for terms like "network neutrality" or “generativity" or references to writers like Yochai Benkler or Jonathan Zittrain in “I Live in the Future… " and while it may be unfair to expect Bilton to tackle communications policy issues in depth, the future he celebrates is contingent on how we resolve those questions.
What about the immune system of democracy?
My second concern is larger. Bilton is arguing that our “world, work, and brain are being creatively disrupted,” all for the better. But his book doesn’t really address what being hyperconnected may be doing to our world, as opposed to our work or our brains, and in particular to the institutions that we use collectively to manage our way forward in the world, known as “government.” And to be honest, we don’t really know.
My friend Craig Newmark has a point when he argues that we have to take serious steps to shore up 'the immune system of democracy' now that our political conversations run on internet-powered steroidsI’ve long argued that the rise of open source politics, in all its ramifications — less reliance on big money, a larger role for small donors and independent organizers, more ability to call bullshit on politicians and pundits, and so on — was helping shift America towards a political process that is genuinely more open, participatory and accountable. I still believe we’re seeing those effects, though they too are unevenly distributed.
But the new political-media system that has evolved in just the last two or three years is giving me some second thoughts. When the blogosphere was young (in say, 2002-03), the issue for political bloggers across the spectrum was to challenge the old media gatekeepers and do real bullshit detection. And many bloggers still do that. But now, thanks to the rise of hyper competitive ideological cable TV shows and their tendency to magnify almost any story that bubbles up from the bottom of the blogosphere, we find ourselves whipsawed from fake scandal to fake scandal almost nonstop. Slander and rumor-mongering isn’t new of course, but I do think my friend Craig Newmark has a point when he argues that we have to take serious steps to shore up “the immune system of democracy” now that our political conversations run on internet-powered steroids.
In addition, now that almost anyone indeed can own their own "printing press," we are experiencing a nearly exponential increase in the amount of chatter that enters the public discourse, without a concurrent improvement in our filtering tools and habits. Bilton addresses this problem creatively, with a useful chapter countering critics like the New Yorker’s George Packer, who are responding to the new media firehose by refusing to even engage online. Bilton sees the answer in what he calls “trusted anchoring communities” — the friends, colleagues and domain experts you follow and trust to sift through the daily infostorm and point you to what’s important.
“I’m convinced,” Bilton writes, “that being guided online by communities that I trust won’t create an information hell that leaves you gasping for air. Instead, trusted anchoring communities will help you filter and navigate a bigger world in an eye-opening way that has never been possible before. You just have to get your brain around the possibilities.”
Well, yes, but what if those possibilities aren’t quite so rosy? Here’s a thought experiment that’s been rattling around in my head: What if mass participation politics by especially motivated minorities causes people who are less passionate about the issues to avoid engagement, simply because the public square has gotten too crowded and noisy to effectively participate in?
What if, at the same time, all these new tools for connection and collaboration are just more effectively arming organized minorities for political battle, which they will generally win against the larger unorganized majority that yearns for effective government and cares little for narrow causes and labels? The internet seems especially good at abetting all the blocking energies that our Constitution already has in place, such that almost no big problems can be addressed in any meaningful way other than “stop!” In the digital arms race to amass more email address and more followers, and bombard Congress with mass online campaigns, no one really wins.
Go further with me down this path. What happens to ordinary, not hyper-political voters, when they see government gridlocked more and more by narrow interests, individual favor-seeking representatives, and the like? Rather than rebel, many just turn off, and it becomes harder to convince them that voting or participating matters.
The result: we’re living in low turnout times (the Presidential ballot being the sole exception), where well-organized ideological minorities can hijack public attention (see Andrew Breitbart and crew) and can pick up seats that otherwise might never tilt so hard to either side of the spectrum. That, in my humble opinion, is what is currently going on right now in American politics — not only are Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul and Christine O’Donnell doing surprisingly well in party primaries, so are progressive challengers like Eric Schneiderman in NY (backed by the leftwing Working Families Party) and Ann McLane Kuster in NH (backed by the leftwing Democracy for America).
Is it good for American democracy if being hyperconnected and hypernetworked means organized minorities multiply and just manage to yell louder at each other and generally block efforts at effective governmental innovation? Obviously, that’s one possible future, and it certainly seems like a realistic description of our present.
The answer, I suspect, is in some new synthesis only dimly visible on the horizon. At Personal Democracy Forum, we are calling it “We-government,” the co-creating of new forms of collaboration and service that use technology, public data and the social web to address vital issues and solve public problems, that does more with less. It’s neither Right nor Left, not small government or big government, but effective do-it-ourselves-government. That I suspect is where we will find a future that actually “works.” Until then, Bilton has given us a very useful guide to the near-present, but we all still have more work to do to get our brains around the possibilities of a better future than the one we have now.
Micah Sifry (@Mlsif) is co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of its blog, techPresident.com.
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