Clash of the Utopians
Clash of the Utopians
At the close of this hell year, the normal impulse to take stock and imagine a better future feels especially pressing. My own stock-taking leaves me grateful to all of you for helping this newsletter grow and for continuing to read it, share it, and send tips. I’m excited to keep this project going in 2021, I have a vision for its next phase, and if writing each week about the collision points of technology and democracy has taught me anything, it’s that visions definitely matter.
An October conversation I had with University of Washington History Professor Margaret O’Mara (for what turned out to be one of this year’s most popular newsletters), left me with the dawning awareness that this entire undertaking is just one of many downstream consequences generated by a few radical visions hatched in the 1960s and 70s.
Those visions all appeared around the same time on America’s west coast and sprang from similar populist and liberationist impulses, but they took very different paths toward realization and ultimately wound up in direct conflict with one another.
I’ve written in a different format about Jolene Unsoeld, the trailblazing visionary from Washington state who helped push a landmark 1972 voters’ initiative that laid the foundation for a new era of open government. She rose to prominence amid the 20th Century corruptions of closed-door governance, which reached their apogee in Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and she devoted herself to prying open the locked doors of government meeting rooms and ripping away the veil of secrecy cloaking the money trails behind political campaigns.
To do this, Unsoeld and a group of like-minded advocates backed a lengthy, citizen-drafted measure that could be accurately condensed into a simple slogan: “The people have a right to know.” It passed with 72 percent of the vote in 1972, and from that victory emerged the Washington State Public Disclosure commission as well as a set of forward-thinking transparency laws that reverberate to this day. One indicator of the strength of those reverberations is that Facebook, the largest social media company in the world, now finds itself in Washington state court decrying what it calls the “exceedingly burdensome” legacy of Unsoeld’s initiative when it comes to transparency requirements for online political ads. The company’s arguments are set to be tested at a trial next year.
As one might guess about a woman who spent the mid-1970s using an Underwood typewriter to assemble her popular Washington state publication, Who Gave? Who Got? How Much?, Unsoeld believed that “there is no substitute for an informed, participatory public.”
This is a familiar and fundamentally utopian vision: give people the information necessary to make better-informed choices and they’ll naturally do exactly that, in the process tearing down old, corrupt systems that need to be reimagined.
You may roll your eyes and call this vision naive, given that we now find ourselves, nearly half a century later, overwhelmed by the omnipresence of digital information, yet enmeshed in a falsehood-fueled political discourse that’s fed in part by a president whose corruptions eclipse Nixon’s.
But ironically, the same utopian vision that motivated Unsoeld—greater access to information leads inexorably to positive social transformation—was the north star of the dreamers who laid technological tracks that today carry Facebook and other digital giants. Even more ironic, the ongoing lack of transparency from these massive digital platforms has, in recent years, caused them to run afoul of principles championed by early open-government visionaries like Unsoeld.
As O’Mara chronicles in her fantastic book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, the birth story for the modern internet runs directly through California’s Bay Area in the 1960s and early 1970s. Some of the visionaries in that radical period were women, but given the time and the field, more of them were “Sputnik-generation boys with science-fair ribbons who’d collided head-on with the cultural liberation of the Vietnam era.”
One of those boys, Ted Nelson, is described by O’Mara as the Tom Paine of the computer revolution. Paine was a philosopher and Revolutionary War pamphleteer, while Nelson is a philosopher who in 1974 self-published the breakthrough book Computer Lib. “Flip the volume over,” O’Mara writes, “and there was a second book, Dream Machines, which talked about computers as media platforms.”
O’Mara quotes Nelson lamenting how “knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded,” and she explains how he believed widespread use of computers could transform society and loosen the grip of a “priesthood” that, at the time, was controlling computer technology. Loosening that priesthood’s grip and making computers for the masses would, Nelson believed, lead to average people enjoying “the freedoms of information we deserve as a free people.”
Nelson’s book, O’Mara writes, was “released into the world as Richard Nixon was helicoptering away from the White House in disgrace.” That same year, 1974, was also the moment when Jolene Unsoeld released into the world her first self-published edition of Who Gave? Who Got? How Much?
Now, nearly five decades later, here we are, at the end of a painful year that has dampened faith in the core ideal promoted by Unsoeld, Nelson, and countless others: that increased access to information is an inherently—even revolutionarily—good thing.
Against that loss of faith, one could argue that since a burst of nationwide activity in the post-Nixon reform era, further Unsoeld-style transparency measures haven’t dared, or been allowed, to go far enough in giving people more honest views into how their government really operates. There’s still a lot that elected officials, candidates for office, and political action committees are able to hide from the public that would probably be illuminating.
When it comes to loss of faith in the techno-utopian vision, though, it would be hard to make a parallel argument. Even in Silicon Valley, few are suggesting that our present predicament stems from techno-utopians having too little room to run. What they wanted was frictionless online communication for all and, sadly, in achieving that vision they helped speed us into a nightmare of confusion, polarization, and disinformation.
As former President Barack Obama recently told The Atlantic:
I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible, because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it…
If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.
This will be the work of the year ahead, and likely many years after that.
In Congress, at the tech companies themselves, and among people following these issues closely, it’s become obvious that allowing everyone in the world to read and broadcast new information instantly and incessantly is not, by itself, an inherent good.
Judgment has to enter into the equation.
But whose judgment?
An algorithm’s? The government’s? The judgment of an overstretched Facebook content moderator? The judgment of Jack Dorsey or Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg? The judgment of some new crusading utopian visionary in the model of Unsoeld or Nelson? The judgment of a Ted Cruz or an Amy Klobuchar? The judgment of each individual online speaker, unfiltered by anyone else’s notions of what’s right and wrong?
And when it comes to manipulative speech that monied interests can pay to have amplified online, who will be held responsible for judging when such paid speech is, and is not, a political ad? Who gets to then decide what should, and should not, be disclosed about each political ad bought in the still-growing, and largely unregulated world of targeted online advertising that aims to sway local and national elections?
These last questions are part of the particular terrain that will be covered by the case of Washington State vs. Facebook when it goes to trial in Seattle next year, set amid the broader, even more treacherous terrain of the ongoing global information revolution. I’ll be taking a year-end break from it all over the next two weeks but look forward to coming back to your in-box on January 11 and picking up the thread anew.
Until then, I hope you have a good New Year. As always, here are some of the stories I’ve been reading this week:
• Verified content only — After an expose by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, Pornhub is changing its business model. Kristof sees this as a potential reason for hope. Pornhub points out that by deciding to host verified content only, it has now put in place a policy that “Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitter have yet to institute.”
• Demanding data — The Federal Trade Commission wants nine major technology companies to reveal information on how they track their users.
• The new year will bring more attempts to change Section 230 — You already knew that if you’ve been reading this newsletter. The New York Times has a good overview of the big ideas and the pre-positioning moves of tech giants.
• “How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever” — They used bulletin board systems, “the precursor to the modern internet,” to help each other. In doing so, they demonstrated a novel and helpful way of using online communication technology.
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