Book launch: Digital Technology and Democratic Theory

hello and welcome to the launch of digital technology and democratic theory published by the university of chicago press my name is octavia reeve and i'm delighted to welcome you on behalf of the ada lovelace institute a london-based research institute with a mission to make data and ai work for people in society the stanford center on philanthropy and civil society and the london school of economics department of media and communications in a few minutes you'll be hearing from five of the authors of the book moderated by dr sita pena gangaradan associate professor in media and communications at the lse and author of the chapter digital exclusion or politics of refusal while people are joining i'll take you through a few points of housekeeping we were delighted to welcome you here this evening as usual in these virtual events you in the audience won't be audible or visible during the event but you can make comments using the chat and please do ask questions using the q a function at the bottom of your screen which sita will pick up and build into the discussion there's a transcriber doing live subtitling of the event and you can access those by clicking on the closed caption button at the bottom of your screen if you want to tweet along please do so during using ada lovelace inst and your favorite hashtags and finally we are recording this session and it will be made available on our website i can see most people have now joined so i just want to say how absolutely delighted i am to welcome these five eminent authors on the subject of digital technology and democratic theory to share their insights about how technology is changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments to tell you that the university of chicago press has generously provided a discount code which will be posted in the chat for those wishing to buy a copy of the book the book and to hand over to dr sita pena gangaradan to introduce you to the panel tonight so sita over to you thank you so much octavia and thank you to the ada lovelace institute for hosting this event together with stanford pax and the department of media and communications at the lse i'm delighted to be moderating today's event with my fellow contributors to the edited volume digital technology and democratic theory our format will involve a brief introduction to the book by lucy bernholtz followed by arkhan fung and then landmark and brian ford and then we will move promptly to the discussion portion of the event and with that i will begin with introductions and then kick it off to lucy lucy bernholtz is a senior research scholar at stanford university's center on philanthropy and civil society and director of the digital civil society lab the digital civil society lab hosts an online community and resources called digital impact that supports people and organizations using digital tools and data safely ethically and effectively to achieve social missions bernholtz is the author of numerous articles and books about civil society philanthropy and technology she's studied history and has a ba from yale university where she played field hockey and captained the lacrosse team and an m.a and phd from stanford university our second speaker is arkhan fung who is the winthrop laflin mccormick professor of citizenship and self-government at the harvard kennedy school his research explores policies practices and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance he focuses on public participation deliberation and transparency he co-directs the transparency policy project and leads democratic governance programs at of the ash center for democratic governance and innovation at the kennedy school he has authored five books four edited collections and over 50 articles appearing in professional journals he received two sb's in philosophy and physics and his phd in political science from mit and then landmark is associate professor of political science at yale university with tenure her research and teaching interests include democratic theory political epistemology theories of justice the philosophy of social sciences particularly economics constitutional processes and theories and workplace democracy her research has been featured in the new york times the boston review the washington post the new yorker and recently the ezra klein show professor brian ford leads the decentralized distributed systems lab at the swiss federal institute of technology and lausanne epfl he focuses broadly on building secure decentralized systems including privacy and anonymous communication systems security and blockchain technology since earning his phd at mit ford has held faculty positions at yale university and epfl and with that i want to kick it off to lucy to share some background on the volume and our process thanks lucy thank you sita and hello everyone i'm lucy bernholtz i'm calling in from the unseated land of the romaitus oloni people and i wish to pay my respects to the traditional stewards and their elders past present and future i also want to thank the ada lovelace institute and lsc for pulling this event together it's great to be here with all of my colleagues again my task is to talk a little bit about the aspiration of the volume writ large it is truly an edited volume with chapters that speak to one another and this was accomplished by actually working together in three workshops over the course of two years we learned each other's methods and languages we argued over the meanings of democracy and technology and we worked to find ways to write together across discipline and distance the book is as such not a comprehensive look at either theory or technology we chose instead to focus on inviting a deliberate mix of methods and disciplines and allowing the authors to focus on the pieces that were of greatest interest to them this was done deliberately it was done with an aspiration of expanding both democracy theory and who is seen as contributing to these theories and all of it results in trying to put forth an agenda for future research so it's a real delight to be back together with colleagues with whom we spent quite a bit of time several years ago to hear their uh reflections on their chapters and their current thinking um sita back to you thanks lucy so with with that we will turn now to our speakers beginning with arkhan and arkhan um you and co-author joshua cohen take on the role of the public the digital public sphere or the public square in democracies can you give us a sense of the specific aspects of digital technology that matter to the public square and the broader bigger questions you address yeah great thank you very much ceta and um to the ada lovelace institute and to stanford pax for bringing us together i'm really looking forward to this conversation um so the contribution to the book uh that i participated in is a chapter by josh cohen and myself and we try to answer the question of what would a good public sphere look like one that is supportive for democracy and a lot of the discussion right now i think in the uh in the press and in in some academic circles is about like what we need to get rid of in the public sphere like hate speech or misinformation or or donald trump or not donald trump if you read the facebook oversight board decision ours is not really about arguing for a negative but arguing for the positive like what should a good public sphere do and um i'll just share just a couple of slides that are schematic that lay out the kind of outline for uh what we say and so the main effort of the chapter is to kind of construct a normative yardstick about what the features of a good public sphere and then what we do in the chapter after kind of constructing that yardstick is measure up two very different public spheres the current digital social media public sphere that's one and the other one is the 20th century late 20th century mass media public sphere according to this normative yardstick and so our yardstick has two different pieces to it first there's uh what we say what we call a set of rights and opportunities and you can think of this as the affordances of the public sphere is there free speech can people participate on it how hard or easy is it to get information and good information out of it right those are rights and opportunities and then the second kind of category of the normative yardstick is the norms and dispositions it's how we as citizens as speakers utilize the public sphere and um many of us including i think probably some a lot of the contributors to the book in the early days of the internet we were pretty optimistic about how good the public's fear would be for democracy and uh i think everybody's had a sobering kind of set of lessons in the past few years on that and one of the mistakes we made i think uh generally speaking is we really underestimated how awful we are as people as speakers on the public sphere and so this set of norms and dispositions is meant to lay out some guidance about how we can be better people on social media when we participate in the public sphere right so that's that's kind of the structure of uh the yardstick and so uh here here they are i'll just kind of tick them off the different elements but first focusing on the rights and opportunities the first one is the basic first a u.s first amendment value the right to free expression people should uh have a right to express themselves freely in the public sphere that one is really familiar the others might be a little more uh strange and kind of unusual or distinctive right the second is people should have good and equal chances for expression right so uh you know compared to the 20th century i think the digital public sphere offers us a lot more offers many many more people good and equal chances to get their ideas out there right so if you think about the the network era in which it was the bbc one two whatever that dominated in in britain or in the us the networks um you have pretty much had to be a public official or a journalist trying to get your perspective out in the public sphere and now lots and lots of different people can get their views out it's a lot easier for uh me too or the tea party or the movement for black lives to get its perspectives out in the public sphere than it would have been in that 20th century mass media world the third criterion is access to good and reliable information and here it's a little bit of a mixed bag in that uh i think if you want to look there's much more uh good information available on the internet than in any time prior time in human history you could find tons of information about covid or whatever interests you the trouble is there's a lot more noise too and so sometimes it's hard to get to that reliable information so it's a little bit of a mixed bag the fourth is diversity it's important in a healthy public sphere to hear a wide range of views and perspectives and then finally our fifth one is uh communicative power and this one is the idea that uh in the public sphere we exchange ideas and beliefs and values with each other and in a good public sphere uh one of the qualities of a good public sphere is that we can get together and act on those ideas and we see that in some social movements that for whom social media is a prime um medium on which they communicate and coordinate and project out their ideas um and then the second main category for us is the uh is the norms and dispositions is how people should behave on the public sphere and this part is is really hard i mean we are our aspiration is that you know everybody in the audience you know everybody on the panel when you engage in social media and the public sphere you don't just do what's comfortable or what makes you feel good you regulate your behavior according to norms just like um you know in a bar or in a park you may like have impulses to do all sorts of things that aren't necessarily polite or constructive or uh or helpful to other people but you should regulate those impulses and behave like a decent uh person similarly on the public's in the public sphere and so uh our three norms here about uh user behavior first is regard for the truth right even we kind of retweet things we amplify things we say things largely many of us because they make us feel good or because they're funny or whatever we think an important regulatory norm is that we should uh post things and amplify things with some regard to whether or not they're true not just whether or not they make us feel good and then um the second one is a common good orientation we should amplify and say things that are helpful to other people and try to bring uh society to a better place and third is a norm of civility and here we don't mean politeness but we mean kind of a respect like if you say something in the public square or in the public sphere whether it's in mass media or social media you should explain yourself you shouldn't just put it out there you should explain yourself in terms that other people can kind of understand and get and then it's also part of the norm of stability is it's incumbent upon you to listen to other people and to really try to get where they're coming from and these days there's a i think this is um kind of a controversial position because it some people argue that it puts the burden on people to listen to very hurtful views and not just uncomfortable but damaging views and so i think that's something we should talk about but we think that there is a norm of civility that that um requires us to at least try to understand other people and address them in um in terms that uh we hope will persuade them even though uh they may have very very different views and very very different perspectives than we do and so um that's basically our structure and then we can i talked a little bit about how we think the uh social media public sphere the mass media public sphere stack up on those terms and we can dive into that a little bit more later on in the q a if people want all right why don't i hand it hand it back over to you zita thanks so much yes a lot to dig in there and thanks for setting the ground for our discussion and then you delve into the connections between technological opportunities and democratic renewal and i'm hoping um that you'll speak about the promise or can you speak about the promise of open democracy and more specifically these networked open mini publics that you talk about in your chapter thank you zita so i am as a creditor i also wanted to just add a word of thanks to the to the authors and uh and express my appreciation for their work and i i i second uh lucy in saying that this was a really rewarding experience sometimes there were frictions and and misunderstandings and and but at the end i think it made the volume a lot stronger and so i i learned a lot from the experience and i'm very grateful for for the opportunity um so i indeed uh in my chapter i um everywhere the optimist so uh i i try to take a positive uh uh outlook on on the potential of digital technologies to help us reinvent what i see as a new form of democracy and i suppose i didn't want us to simply envision democracy as we know it but online or democracy as we know it but augmented by digital technologies but i really wanted to consider um what's possible like if we reinvented democracy from scratch in the 21st century um because as we know democracy as we know it representative democracy was born in the 18th century and are very different technological and epistemological conditions um i think that the main change that has happened between then and now to me is that we have the epistemology and technology for what is called collective intelligence meaning we understand that in order to have smart groups and in particular smart lawmakers it's not enough to put the best and brightest in there it turns out that's actually counterproductive to some degree so and it turns out that even though before you know in the age of the uh of prince basically it was really hard to collect feedback and and gather you know input from all corners of of the nation state in particular now we can do that uh a lot more costlessly um not completely but it's it's a little a lot less daunting so so if you think of of wikipedia as a sort of endeavor and and um uh accomplishment uh that was absolutely impossible before the advent of digital technologies i think in the same way what i call open democracy wasn't really possible um until we had uh you know new epistemologies and new technologies and so that's where i i'm trying to envision something different and the main difference i would say so now i'll say a few words about the the open democracy padding the way i see it uh perhaps arrogantly is as a paradigm shift if you want a copyright revolution instead of rotating around elected elites my system is meant to rotate around the ordinary citizen uh in fact the organized citizens because it's not just you know it's a group it's really authentically supposed to be a clinical mass so to express the vision i guess i could give you the list of principles uh you know participation rights um uh deliberation majority in principle democratic representation transparency and then ultimately if we expand beyond the political and expand beyond the boundaries of the nation state there are two additional principles which are dynamic inclusiveness and substantive equality but i think i'd prefer in a few minutes i have to give you a sort of a vignette that i put at the beginning of my of my chapter which is this vision of a of a greek woman on angelique papadopoulos who is a bed and breakfast uh manager and she goes uh it's the year 2038 and she's um logging into her citizen book account which is this global platform where communities can organize themselves online it's a non-profit company that was formerly called facebook and she's able to communicate with all kinds of people uh in our community so for example she's about to cast an online vote about some issue about which has some doubts so she can log in and in you know in a deliberative room that where she's going to encounter a random sample of people from our community to discuss some issues so that she's not locked in in a filter bubble she can actually really have a a complex 360 vision of a given issue with very different perspectives and then go back and cast her vote and if she's not sure she can delegate her vote to her uncle who's a marine biologist so if it's a matter of environmental issues or justice or something so that's a model called liquid democracy which is also something that's singularly um possible online and via the the tools of digital technologies um and and and then she she uh um receives an email from the um house of the people in europe where uh she's a citizen that invites her to join the so-called house of the people uh 499 randomly selected citizens who are in charge of setting the agenda for the european parliament so actually i'm not that bold in the chapter i i don't envision a system in which elected uh assemblies like appalling like parliaments including the european parliament have disappeared and i don't ask uh in this model the angelique to go and become an actual lawmaker i've i'm i'm getting there actually because of things that have happened since i wrote that chapter and and the experience with the french students convention for climate where citizens were in fact um asked to become quasi-law makers so it's really surprising to me that actually practice is going you know it's catching up with syria at such an incredible pace that even my little science fiction science fictional vignette is becoming obsolete quite fast but um so that's the idea to look at the ways digital technologies can really empower the citizen and help him and her or her or them uh you know access the center of power which is ultimately um the agenda-setting power the legislative and the legislative power um so that's that's so that's that's the idea and the open mini public that zita kindly mentioned it's a this vision of a large randomly selected body of uh citizens that's connected to the larger public it's not a closed-off institution through crowdsourcing platforms through networks of other um local mini publics that manage to sort of like bring all the bring all the decentralized information to the center of the system uh not quite on the wikipedia model which is which is quite distinct and specific but inspired by the principles of openness and the idea that just as any one of us can go on wikipedia and make an edit write an article contribute to an article etc we should be as citizens be able to just pop in and help fix you know a flawed law and or initiate a new one and i'm out of time so i'll leave you that there thank you and that thank you so much and um for giving us that optimism we'll move to brian um who i think has a balanced view both optimistic and somewhat critical or at least willing to point out challenges um of digital technologies and so brian in your chapter you unpack the hard and technical problems of digital democracies and describe a layered relationship between these problems what do you hope people will take away from your analysis yeah so um yeah thank you i i'm uh so of course uh you know i'm coming i came to the book to this project as a computer scientist and in particular as a system builder uh that's you know really what my expertise is um and so i can't you know i i can't you know even start looking at these problems without at least trying to solve them and so and so that's that's kind of what uh you know you know my uh uh my chapter tries to tries to at least start doing sketch sketching out you know uh uh what would an architecture look like for the kind of uh for the kind of digital system uh that could actually you know solve some of the you know serious problems with current systems and make possible uh the kind of uh interactions uh that that uh elena and arkhan for example have uh have been uh uh sketching out right um how how could uh how could we build uh you know digital systems that truly serve uh or truly serve people uh at uh yeah at mass scale right um and um and uh my a lot of my work focus on focuses on security and privacy and so from that uh from that perspective i see a number of really basic questions uh issues in our current technology that have to be solved in in order to make you know these kinds of visions of true online uh digital digitally enabled democracy possible uh we have to uh solve well one of the basic questions we have to answer and ultimately solve is can we have true freedom of speech online without that enabling rampant disinformation and and handing a megaphone to miscreants profiteers or would-be dictators for example right um and and uh and um in in my view this isn't so much a matter of balancing say freedom versus accountability so much in that we really need both on the other hand uh a significant part of the problem is what we call an amplification problem that that that that you know misbehavior is not uh you know can be amplified to uh you know to seem like it's coming from thousands of people or uh rather than just one uh one abuser right so um so that's one of the basic pro issues uh another some of the other questions uh can we um can we create can we make exciting decentralized innovations like we've been seeing in cryptocurrencies for example that but uh but ones that serve everyone equally and bring uh you know benefits like financial inclusion to all without descending into a free for all of financial scams and ponzi schemes and uh that you know only benefit the technorati or or uh you know wealthy or like lucky investors right um but ultimately you know maybe most importantly um can we create online forums that that support genuine democratic deliberation uh of the forums that are really open and scalable uh forms of the kind that helen was sketched out in her vignette for example um that allow anyone to participate and even uh even delegate in uh like as a liquid democracy or using other tools like that but also be uh uh without being vulnerable to large-scale manipulation and abuse and that's that's you know to me as a not a technical person surrounding that you know the issue of security vulnerability to manipulation abuse you know we're never going to get to this uh you know point where we need to be at unless we can can solve those problems now i believe all these problems can be solved um and of course you know trying to trying to uh um explore you know what solutions to those might look like is is part of the chapter and it and it's uh you know somewhat partly a little bit uh you know half way straddling uh you know technical and uh and um and social naturally um and uh you know i i'm not going to uh try to um try to um uh you know relate the uh uh what what the chapter says in general but but maybe just to just to start to give a flavor of the starting point um i feel that any solution to the larger issues or the disconnect between technology and people will have to start by solving the challenge that our that our entire technology ecosystem doesn't actually know what a person is at least not in a secure and reliable let alone privacy respecting way right so our our technology ecosystem doesn't know how to distinguish a real person from one of thousands of fake online accounts or millions of bots in a big botnet right um and that is where the amplification vulnerabilities and attacks come from which which is what's uh you know in our current environment uh what you know i feel that the biggest problem actually comes from not the not the lone abusers or lone liars or or dissemblers but uh but it's the amplification factor of the people who figure out how to how to unfairly and un uh uh um uh uh and unrepresentatively and unaccountably amplify uh their voice uh um and and that and this is a this is a very hard uh problem uh i it is well known as the sybil attack in uh called the civil attack in uh uh technology circles um it's it's well known to be a very hard problem partly because i believe it just doesn't have an all technical solution technologists like myself tend to like to look for you know clever cryptographic algorithms or you know all technology you know a magic algorithm or a magic device that will just solve this and i don't think there is one because it's uh it's a problem that can only be solved by general genuinely connecting to people and societies and creating a design creating systems that are co-designed between people between you know the designers of the technology and the people intended to use them and and so actually uh you know solving these kinds of problems and uh um uh um you know and and coming up with the right solutions is is in a way another um another venture that's going to require the kind of uh broad-based uh you know communication discussion co-design and collaboration of the kind that that de len is talking about not just uh by you know a few geeks in a uh in a dark in a dark room right um and so again i believe we we can come up with solutions to these and and you know my chapter tries to tries to sketch this it also goes into you know the question well once we have this foundation once we can securely recognize a person how can we build the upper level the the upper layers of this technology stack uh the applications to support uh to support things like communication uh creation propagation and vetting of news uh um or a large-scale online deliberation uh and and self-governance uh uh on on these foundations so uh and again yeah i i won't get into into the details but i believe we have the basic techno uh technological tools to solve these problems um what we what i think we're still really missing uh are basically three you know three things that i see to make to make this actually work we need no more technical people willing to learn study and understand how their digital technologies affect people and societies or or should or shouldn't do it we need more understanding among the general public and policy makers on what technical tools exist you know what works well what doesn't work at all um and how how you know how we can make these tools work uh in support of people in democracy uh and finally you know we need to work on developing the political will awareness and culture of placing society and democracy first in our uh technical designs and architectures and so you know i'm i in my chapter i'm i'm trying to illustrate how we can at least make a few steps toward toward doing that um and uh and hopefully convincing at least a few people that it should be possible and uh i i will leave it there so thank you so much and uh thanks for astounding the clarion call for other computer scientists who get engaged in these issues um so we've just we've just i mean not everyone is coming out of the pandemic at the same pace as is happening in the united kingdom or the united states but we've now had more than a year of most things going online and of a form of digital democracy unfolding because of necessity right and so the question that i want to pose to all of you lucy included um is in light of this what if anything and i think actually brian and then you sort of started us on that path what if anything might you adapt in the models that you've developed or in the analysis that use you know your affirmative framework that you've put together for this volume brian yeah sure sure i'll uh i'll take it um yeah well i i mean i'm glad you glad you brought this up i mean i think the the way the pandemic has forced so much of our you know work and and discussions and deliberations our whole lives online uh in in some respects has been a you know a great thing for you know anyone with the program of of you know trying to figure out how we can bring democracy online you know it has really underlined the necessity of doing this right you know we can't we can't even even considering uh things like just you know are just voting in conventional elections let alone uh you know new deliberative forms but um you know so it's it's become really clear that we need electronic voting remote voting you know uh we can't live without it right at least you know not safely uh you know to our to our health and uh you know well-being in the context of a pandemic right on the other hand uh it's uh in some sense it's a terrible very risky development in that we we know that our current methods of doing things like e-voting democracy are absolutely not secure enough right at least not for uh um not for uh the high-stakes kinds of discussions and uh deliberations and debates that we really need to use them for right um and uh and um you know again i i feel like the uh the solution the potential solutions are are there uh and and achievable and we are seeing uh uh you know in in some some quarters you know kind of great greater interest and urgency and and uh will from both the technical and and uh and policy sides to try to figure out ways to ways to solve some of these problems and make uh you know make online voting and and uh related technologies uh more secure um and more and more powerful um but you know unfortunately what we're stuck with right at the moment is basically being forced to you know use a bunch of band-aid hacks that could totally fall apart at any time and or or be you know kind of seriously misused at any time um and you know so it's a it's a really big uh outstanding risk and and threat and potential threat while also having the beneficial effect of in some sense forcing you know forcing us to move forward so it's it's hard to balance the the risks from the benefits there great thank you and then arkhan lucy and well i'll just interject really quickly to say um if you have a question uh participants at this stage please go ahead and start posing them in the q a function so i so if anything is pandemic and the fact that we are all online now and you know teaching online having faculty meeting online my kids having their piano lessons online now it's it's just makes me in a way more optimistic that uh something like an open democracy is doable including at scale because uh yes it has its limitations and will never be able to fully replace face-to-face meetings but the you know cost-saving aspects of this the time-saving aspects of this the convenience aspects of this are amazing so i i personally hope we never go back to the world of before i hope we we stay in a sort of hybrid system where we can partly do stuff online partly do them uh face to face and so that so when i think of angelique right so my heroine who um i made move in the story i once she's invited she started selling her stuff on her sofa and she's i thought she would have to move to brussels for four years and i'm thinking well actually no she probably would just have to rent a small place and be there a few weeks a month and um and maybe not always and come back and in fact that's exactly what happened with the french citizens convention for climate uh for those of you who haven't heard of it it's um an experiment where um 150 randomly selected citizens were brought together to make quesadilla quasi-law proposals on how to cut green gas greenhouse gas emissions in a strait of social justice and initially everything was supposed to take place physically um at great costs in a yena palace in paris they brought people from all over france um uh we also have a representatives of the ultramarine territory so extremely costly to bring people and because of the pandemic halfway through it it had to switch to online meetings it wasn't ideal some of the meetings were not as good and but anyway there was so much work to be done that they had to include zoom seminars in the inter sessions anyway so so basically nobody believed that it was possible but it turned out that they had to do it and worked so i think uh that that makes me more optimistic about the feasibility that said i i bracket completely the security issues mentioned by brian i just trust that he will fix them someday and and that we can indeed vote and exchange and deliberate you know in a safe and secure way um but i'm most optimistic that this means we could have global deliberation one day because you know like for for issues of climate change for example there are activists and academics who are trying to convene a global climate assembly and for years funders were not interested in funding something that was online they wanted face to face very costly very complicated uh with the the pandemic they are willing to fund uh an online virtual you know um pilot which is going to take place in this this coming fall in the margin of the glasgow cup 26 so it has changed the game completely i think great lucy you have a some thoughts to share i'm laughing because i think the audience will now see um some of the differences of opinions that shape the writing of the book no one has ever accused me or complimented me by saying i'm an optimist um so uh i'll just jump in here uh i have a very very different feeling about what we've learned over the last 13 months and um let me compare it kind of oddly but just to a paper i just read yesterday which actually really um it was like an escher drawing and i feel like the last year has been an issue drawing so the paper is by dan bauck and dana boyd and it's called democracies data infrastructure and um it's about the u.s census and it's a remarkable the paper does many things remarkably well but what it really does well is point out how for centuries in the u.s this critical part of our democracy which is required for both allocation of funding and allocation of representatives is a terribly flawed process and documents biased and discriminatory from the get-go through two and a half centuries of different stuff by constantly focusing on this statistical technical challenges of reporting on the under count in the census we've successfully distracted everybody from the fact that the larger project doesn't really do what it's supposed to do and that in an age of of um of uh pervasive uh very small amount uh very granular amounts of data on everybody this has become a real real problem because of privacy and aggregate concerns the point being i think pre pandemic um the the nice to have nature of our dependence on these digital systems was um was uh more in my the front of my mind and the ability to create these possible hybrids more in my mind and what i've experienced over the last 13 months here in california globally is that all of that nice to have stuff we shouldn't take another step forward to it until we can guarantee things like regulatory structures that make sense access in a way that allows people to participate and that means everybody not some people it's not okay to have some people left out just sort of the entire infrastructure and the way in which the pandemic has made so painfully visible the way we've been papering over these discrepancies i i find it unconscionable to think about continuing to focus on the nice to haves when the the digital systems are both already um uh so uh critical to our ability to do anything not just communicate but anything and they're just not designed that way they're literally not thought of as infrastructure they're not regulators in friction they're not available to people they're not um so the the chasm is just enormous and i think for me personally that um my chapter in the book is about associational life and new kinds of organizing ways and i just think the degree to which we've um been uh focused on an assumptive of access and agency and security and safety just it's just not we can't build from here until we address those core infrastructural recognitions and also go much beyond the idea of the internet as a communication space it is fundamental infrastructure for every social and civic function in modern life and it has to therefore be designed and thought of in that way before we go to the nice to haves good i've i just have a couple of thoughts um just to add on to this rich discussion one is i i think you know in three or four years communication people maybe some politics people the the pandemic digital communication on the pandemic will be like transformed in terms of what we consider interesting questions right because like when people are looking at social media they're thinking oh it's the business model or it's the algorithm or it's the news feed but in zoom i mean there is a business model but that's not doing the communication work and it's certainly not advertising that's doing the communication work it's a whole different social graph than facebook or twitter right but it is different from face to face and so what is that what is that doing to communication right and it just like like the zoom space is a little bit more like the whatsapp space which people weren't that attentive to which is really really different from the facebook and twitter space right and so it just shows like the contingency of what we count as important on structuring our digital communication is totally different on zoom and i think we we just now i don't think anybody's really begun to ask really uh deeply what difference that makes but you know just like a couple of differences i don't know about you but the talks i'm in and the talks i go to now compared to the pre-pandemic world have about 20 times as big audience because like you know you don't have to be on campus to go to a university talk you can be having lunch somewhere in brazil and you know it's a topic that interests you and so that's a transformation that changes the accessibility of information and the accessibility of some relationships and communication i don't know what it means and i don't know how much of it there is but you know just that certainly has occurred in the academic world and certainly in the politics world as uh people are doing more of their relational work and organizing in this pandemic year necessarily on digital media i think it's made a big difference but i can't characterize for you what the nature of that difference is so that's kind of one point and people will look and it'll be super interesting what they find whatever it is um and then the second thing is um i think that the the jon stewart mill proposition on social media right that the marketplace of ideas will generate you know some something better something more will uh can tend toward the truth i have a fair amount of optimism about that i know it i you know fully recognize that it's a mixed bag but like looking at the pandemic in the united states early on in the pandemic one thing that was absolutely true is that the statistics just about how many people had kovid and how many people were in the hospital were just not being gathered in any systematic way and it was a crowdsourced project called the covet tracking project that went to each individual site and cranked those numbers every night and then we got to begin to get a national picture of it and the fact that we could get a national picture put a lot of pressure on health authorities and state governments to be more transparent about the reality of kovid and then the new york times and the atlantic and other people picked up that source and then professionalized it and so it's that social media interaction that in the early stages made possible social knowledge about how bad the pandemic was in the united states that's exhibit one exhibit two is the initial mass guidance from who and cdc we know was like a horrible tragic mistake and it was social media conversation some famous people like zaineb tufetchi but many others challenging those official positions of authorized scientist experts that forced i believe well anyway was coincident later on with a course correction later on and that's you know pretty significant and we see several things like that um epidemiologists especially on the west coast early on in the pandemic saying hey look i've done some gene sequencing and putting on twitter i think it's already reached a level of community transmission when everybody else from andrew cuomo to the cdc to gavin newsom was saying hey you know we got this under control we got it let's keep it out of the country in china when it was already here and it's social media that created avenues for those dissonant voices and positions to articulate themselves and challenge the official position which happened to be quite wrong at each of those instances now that goes along with the anti-facts and the misinformation and you know the the dark side of it and i don't you know it's hard to weigh up how those two compare but i don't want people to lose sight of the ways in which the information sphere did generate dissenting opinions and a quite cons perspectives and facts in a quite constructive way over the course of the pandemic thanks i'll just add very quickly because i feel like we i mean it is worth sort of highlighting the the range of perspectives that are in this edited volume and just to say really quickly as somebody who writes on technological refusal and thinks about how members of marginalized communities are are really you know both concerned and constrained and interested in challenging socio-technical systems um in terms of the last year plus uh i think it only amplifies for me the the ways in which yes we do need some of these affirmative both the theories and and the models right to to help us understand how to um invigorate democracy and make democracy accessible to more people um but also how we have to think about undesigning undoing technical systems um you know not settling for coercive technologies which seems to have been um a pace in the last year and a quarter so i'll just stop there because we have a question um from robert ford who says isn't the basic problem one of cultural values human behavioral norms and socio social political control systems where unhealthy norms can't be or are not able to be controlled easily without basic agreement on basic ethics focused on quote-unquote openness rather than quote-unquote power and control which is the norm in political systems today i don't know i mean that's such a huge question i think there's a lot of norms that work in different political systems and i i think it's a moment of flux it's early days for these digital technology for the pervasiveness of these digital technologies and structuring communication and we're creating norms all the time right um uh there was there was a story in one of these podcasts somebody was um kind of hounding jack dorsey about um some speech thing the the the ceo of twitter the creator of twitter and uh and finally jack dorsey responded he said okay i'll have coffee with you i'll listen and the guy said well what did you get out of your coffee with jack dorsey and um he said well you know what i walked away with was he just does not want to be the arbor of what's sayable and not sayable on the internet he set out to create an app to connect bike messengers to one another so they can talk more easily and now he's in charge of the global public sphere that's not something he wants to do and clearly mark zuckerberg in creating the facebook oversight board right he wanted to outsource he doesn't want to hold that responsibility so that's like an example of in which these people find themselves having a huge amount of power it's not like they don't like power i mean who doesn't like power but they uh but they've been burned so many times by the exercising that power in ways that cause a lot of backlash because they're bad decisions and at some point it's better not to make those decisions to have somebody else make those decisions and that's an opportunity to inject some norms and some structures about how they could be made in a more fair and democratic way and so i do think these these norms are uh very quickly evolving as well as the practices in the institutions lucy brian and then we have just uh a couple two minutes or so um and if you want to just chime in with either response to this question or some concluding thoughts that'd be great yeah and then um i i i think the question is saying something that i agree with which is that it comes down to also politics and and power and who gets to define the norms and who gets to [Music] shape the rules and and um and so it's not really just a question of technology only we we as a society as a community get to choose what norms we encode in our algorithms and what preference get you know ranked in what way and so i i think that's absolutely true and and we that's why we wrote that book to put in in a conversation you know democratic theory and the technology instead of just focusing on one or the other as if they're not constantly shaping each other um i just also wanted to react to something um arkhan said about the way uh technologies have sort of really changed the way descent can be expressed and all that i also think going back to teaching i think uh you know cheating on zoom all day actually has changed also the dynamic in the classroom not not in bad ways necessarily because when you lecture in a in a you know large lecture hall you only you only see the front row and they only the front really raises their hands and it's certain kind of people who dare to speak in a large group and and i find that there's an equalizing sort of dynamic to this little square that we're all sort of framed in now and and i noticed um gender dynamics shifting subtly and racial dynamics is shifting sadly in in rather positive ways so i i am i'm with you with it i i was completely convinced by your you know general um observations about silences and exclusions and and the infrastructure in itself is exclusive exclusionary as of now and i and i'm with you lucy i i agree that technically we should move on and go further until we fix the problems but so one thing i think we we people will move forward anyway i just don't see being stopped unfortunately so um there's a there's a almost a sense in which we have to make the best of what's going on and and and try to catch up basically uh and then i think again because i i'm i can't help it i just see the positive in this and i i actually saw a lot of positive things in in the ways we've used technologies this past year despite the utter misery of everything else great um i just want to i think that ending on a positive note is a a great idea um i want to thank all of the speakers the panelists and to thank ada lovelace institute for hosting again and a reminder that the discount code i've put it in the chat for the book it is dta mddt at the university of chicago press website and i do hope you take the opportunity to engage um it's been really wonderful with all of you um joining us today to talk about digital technology and democratic theory thanks so much thank you very much you

2021-05-16 18:20

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