Blinkist: The People VS Tech

What’s in it for me? Learn how digital technology is

undermining democracy and what we can do about it​.

In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of books, movies and television

shows set in dystopian futures. If you’ve ever read or watched one of them,
you may have wondered, “How likely is it that the future will be so bleak?”
Well, after reading these blinks, you’ll come away with a rather unsettling
answer. That is, very likely – unless we do something about it.

In these blinks, we’ll be looking at some of the ways in which digital

technology affects politics and economics. By digital technology, we refer to
innovations like social media platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) and big
data – the collection and analysis of large sets of data. For convenience,
we’ll often refer to these innovations as simply “technology,” even though
that term usually has a broader meaning.

Technology, in this sense, has brought many undeniable benefits to the

world. However, as we’ll see in the following blinks, it also poses equally
undeniable dangers to the very underpinnings of democracy – threats that
could destroy it unless we acknowledge and address them in time.

In these blinks, you will learn

● how encryption and cryptocurrencies pose threats to
democratic governments;
● how AI may destroy the middle class; and
● how governments and citizens can take steps to head off
these and many other dangers facing democracy.
Democracy requires active, amicable, equal
and free participation from its citizens.

What would happen if a democracy held a national election and no one

bothered to debate the issues, inform themselves about policy proposals or
even vote on the candidates? It would be as if you threw a party and no one
showed up: hardly a party – or, in this case, a democracy – at all.

Like a party, democracy requires people’s active participation – and the

more active the participation, the more robust the result. With democracy,
active participation entails sifting through claims, weighing facts and
making decisions on who or what is the best candidate or course of action.
Active citizenship is the first of the six pillars on which democracy rests.

Now, let’s say people show up to your party and are actively participating.
So far, so good – but what happens if they start getting rowdy? Well,
eventually, the party might turn into a riot.

The same goes for democracy. For it to work, citizens must not only actively
participate, but actively participate in certain ways – two of which are to
engage in rational debate and compromise, which allow them to amicably
work through their differences and move forward together. This shared
democratic culture is the second pillar.

Now, let’s say you throw a party and a couple of loudmouthed attendees
dominate all of the conversations, undermining other people’s abilities to
participate in the process. That won’t work either – everyone needs to be
able to participate more or less equally and freely. The same goes for
democracy. For it to work, citizens must stand on more or less equal
footing, talk to each other and vote on issues and candidates without
interference. These are the third, fourth, and fifth pillars: equality, free
association and free elections.

Finally, returning to the party analogy one last time, who’s going to look
after the gathering to steer people in the right direction – encouraging them
to participate actively, amicably, equally and freely? Well, you – the host.
Similarly, the government’s job is to ensure that citizens participate in
democracy. And to do this job, the government needs power. That’s the
sixth pillar: governmental authority.

Unfortunately, modern technology poses a threat to all six of these pillars of

democracy. In the following blinks, we’ll see how it’s doing that. Then, we’ll
look at what might happen if they collapse and how this can be avoided.
The rise of social media, big data and artificial
intelligence makes citizens less active.

What are the foundations of active citizenship? An easy way of answering

this question is by asking why all democracies have a minimum voting age.
Well, the answer is simple: children aren’t mature, independent or wise
enough to make political decisions – or so the thinking goes.

At the same time, active citizenship depends on citizens being politically

mature, independent-minded and capable of making their own judgments.
Unfortunately, technology weakens all three attributes of active citizenship.

One way it does this is by exposing people to constant public scrutiny on

social media. This encourages self-censorship, which discourages political
development. For example, on Twitter, many people are afraid to speak
their minds because they fear facing angry mobs of respondents, data
collection or employer scrutiny – especially since a single stupid thing they
say today could come back to haunt them years from now.

The safer option? Keep quiet or never say anything controversial – just
parrot the acceptable public responses on any given issue. In other words,
don’t put yourself in a position to make mistakes in your opinions, be
corrected on them, learn from them, change your mind and thereby develop
your political thinking.
Meanwhile, the increasingly sophisticated data collection techniques and
processing algorithms of big data are leading to an increasingly
manipulated citizenry. This happens through the development of
personalized ad delivery systems, which can target people’s precise
interests and even moods. In the near future, for instance, someone could
tweet about a bad encounter with a foreigner and get targeted by an
anti-immigration ad from a nativist politician. Or she could tweet about
recycling and get targeted by an ad from Greenpeace.

Fast forward further into the future, and we can also see a more existential
threat to active citizenship – artificial intelligence (AI). As it becomes more
powerful, AI will be able to make decisions that are increasingly better,
wiser and shrewder than ours. As a result, we’ll increasingly doubt our
abilities to make our own decisions and defer to AI to make them for us.

We already see glimpses of this future to come with apps like iSideWith,
which tells you who to vote for based on your preferences. Millions of Brits
used the app in the last few elections, effectively outsourcing their
judgment to an algorithm.

"The Holy Grail for the social media giants … is to understand

you better than you understand yourself."
Information overload and social media
connectivity encourage tribalism,
divisiveness and demagoguery.

In politics, as in life in general, human beings have a natural tendency to

congregate into groups of like-minded individuals. What turns a group into
a political tribe is a shared sense of grievances and struggle.

There have always been such tribes, but technology significantly facilitates
their creation. By making it easier for people to find and create associations
with each other, the internet makes it easier for them to cluster into smaller
groups with specific grievances, fragmenting the population into more and
more tribes. As a result, no matter your background or grievance, you’re
likely to find your specific tribe online. If you’re on the far left, you can join
Antifa. If you’re of the opposite persuasion, you can link up with the
alt-right. And if your tribe doesn’t already exist, you can simply create it.

After facilitating the creation of tribes, technology then reinforces them by

encouraging their members to consume a diet of information that fans the
flames of their shared sense of grievances and struggle. The reason for this
boils down to the sheer amount of content available online, which allows
people to easily find like-minded sources of information that fuel their
sense of oppression.
Algorithmic curation then amplifies people’s gravitation to like-minded
sources. For example, YouTube provides myriad more options than mass
television of the past. Once you start opening videos, the site’s algorithms
begin analyzing your preferences, predicting what you’re most likely to
watch next and offering suggestions that reflect and reinforce those
preferences.

As a result, people become increasingly agitated and entrenched in their

beliefs, which makes it increasingly difficult for them to communicate and
cooperate, leading to political deadlock. Even worse, as tribal divisions
deepen and people feel increasingly under attack from other tribes, they
also come to view those tribes as enemies, and seek a leader who can
protect them and fight their foes.

For example, from 1992 to 2014, the number of Americans with very
negative views of supporters of the opposing political party more than
doubled. Then, in 2016, many Trump supporters flocked to him because
they saw him as a leader who would save them from enemy tribes:
Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and the mainstream media
Technology undermines free and fair
elections by enabling political parties to
influence voting behavior.

Imagine a science fiction scenario in which an evil genius gains mind

control over all of the citizens of a democracy. Election day arrives, and –
surprise – the evil genius wins in a landslide!

Would this election be free and fair? Of course not – and the reason is
simple. To participate in free and fair elections, voters must be able to make
up their own minds without undue influence. Unfortunately, technology is
making this increasingly difficult. While mind control may still be the stuff
of science fiction, political parties are gaining an unprecedented ability to
influence voters’ decision-making processes by leveraging big data.

Using sophisticated techniques to collect and analyze large sets of data from
people’s shopping data, web browsing histories and voting records, political
parties have been able to gain increasingly perceptive understandings of
their potential voters. This, in turn, allows them to target and communicate
with sympathetic voters more and more precisely.

For example, in 2016, while teaming with the Trump campaign, the
political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica determined that a preference
for US-made automobiles strongly indicated a potential Trump voter. Thus,
if someone had recently bought a Ford but hadn’t voted in years, the
campaign could tell that he was a promising target. In this manner,
Cambridge Analytica was able to help the campaign identify 13.5 million
persuadable voters in 16 battleground states – thereby creating a roadmap
of where to have rallies, knock on doors and advertise on television. Given
the decisiveness of these voters and these states, Cambridge Analytica
played a major role in electing Trump.

If that seems like a worrisome precedent, well, buckle your seat belt,
because the influence of big data is only going to grow in the years ahead.
Going forward, each party will need to keep up with their rivals and outdo
them in leveraging big data. This sets the stage for an ever-escalating
technological arms race.

Meanwhile, the parties’ consulting firms will be able to collect data from a
host of new sources, such as networked refrigerators, monitoring your
eating habits. As big data becomes gargantuan data, the sort of correlations
that Cambridge Analytica was able to draw in 2016 may come to seem like
child’s play.
Tech companies are uniquely well positioned
to become monopolies with unprecedented
degrees of power.

To turn an old saying upside down, as the poor get poorer, the rich get
richer. The flipside of AI-powered technology taking over large swaths of
the economy, eliminating many jobs, eviscerating the middle class and
increasing inequality is that the companies pushing that technology are also
going to become increasingly rich and powerful. Indeed, tech companies
have an inherent tendency to become all-powerful monopolies. The very
nature of their economic activity paves the way for them to achieve
exponential growth that crowds out their competitors.

There are two factors behind this. The first involves a phenomenon called
the network effect. Essentially, if you’re a company providing a service that
connects people into a network, your service becomes more desirable each
time you connect another person to it. This entices more people to join it,
which makes it even more desirable, which leads to even more people
joining it, etc. For example, the more passengers that join Uber, the more
drivers it attracts, so that Uber can provide better service – which leads to
even more passengers joining Uber, and so on.

The second factor involves the low-cost and high-speed at which tech
companies can scale up their networks. For instance, it takes barely any
time or money for Airbnb to add a new host to its network of lodgings,
whereas it takes a lot of time and money for a hotel company to construct a
new building.

Now, the factors leading to the creation of tech monopolies may be novel,
but monopolies themselves are nothing new. Like monopolies of the past,
tech companies are using their power to buy influence with politicians.
However, compared to monopolies of the past, tech companies can
command an unprecedented amount of influence, for two reasons.

First, political parties are uniquely dependent on tech companies, given

how much they need digital platforms to reach potential voters. Second,
owning those platforms gives tech companies unprecedented power to
influence public debate and opinion. Indeed, they’re already starting to flex
their muscles. For example, in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act in
2012, Google added a link to a petition on its front page, which led to
millions of signatures and helped kill the bill.
Encryption and anonymity allow private actors
to evade and thereby undermine
governmental authority.

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear the term
“democracy?” For many people, it would probably be “freedom.” After all,
individual liberty is an undeniably vital component of democracy.

However, an equally vital component is the opposite of freedom: state

coercion. To enforce laws that express the will of the people, the
government must have a system of coercion in place to be able to do things
like make people pay taxes. And to justify and organize this system, the
state needs to control information like taxation records.

However, the rise of a movement called crypto-anarchy is threatening the

government’s ability to control information and thus its authority to coerce
its citizens. What is crypto-anarchy? The short answer is that it’s a
movement that seeks to undermine the authority of the state through
encryption, which allows people to communicate, store and retrieve
information beyond the reach of the government.

A salient example is Bitcoin – an encrypted digital currency, or

cryptocurrency, that enables people to make secure, quasi-anonymous
transactions without a central government backing or controlling the
currency's value or supply. Such a currency poses a threat to governments
because it challenges their abilities to exercise state monopolies on money,
monitor transactions and therefore collect taxes and pay themselves.

Bitcoin, in turn, is just one example of blockchain technology, which stores

information in an immense, disbursed and tamper-proof database. In the
case of Bitcoin, independent records of each transaction are kept by
thousands of computers linked together into a decentralized network. You
can’t delete or edit one record without deleting or editing them all, which is
virtually impossible.

Further applications of this technology are already proliferating and will

continue to spread, resulting in blockchain-based marketplaces and social
media platforms that are impervious to government surveillance and
interference. These marketplaces will allow the free flow of illegal products
like drugs, personal data and child pornography.

Meanwhile, social media platforms enable users to spread hate speech,

illegal images and terrorist propaganda. Thus, the government would be
powerless to remove from the blockchain network or even trace, let alone
prosecute the users behind them.

The result? The government’s laws – and by extension, the government

itself – will become increasingly toothless, as malefactors become able to
break them with impunity.
If the challenges of technology are left
unchecked, democracy could descend into
dystopia or techno-authoritarianism.

What if humanity doesn’t correct its course from the path it’s currently on,
which leads to growing citizen-disengagement, tribalism, electoral
manipulation, inequality, monopoly power and crypto-anarchy? Well, there
are two possibilities: a grim future – and an even grimmer future.

Let’s start with the worst-case scenario. This would be an age of dystopian
chaos in which governments lose their ability to function. Meanwhile,
inequality increases until a tiny group of people ends up with all of the
technology, wealth and power, while everyone else is forced to eke out a
livelihood by serving the elite. As disorder grows and society eventually
collapses, the rich retreat to heavily defended compounds, which are
already being built by some of today’s tech elites, like Peter Thiel, the
cofounder of PayPal, who recently purchased a 477-acre safe house in New
Zealand.

Now let’s look at the more likely, slightly less worse, alternative. This would
be a form of techno-authoritarianism, which could unfold as follows. First,
growing inequality leads to growing social problems, like depression,
alcoholism and crime. This, in turn, leads to an increasing demand for big
government services like police, healthcare, prisons and social service.
However, because of its falling tax base due to inequality, the destruction of
the middle class and the use of cryptocurrencies, the government is unable
to meet the demand for these services. This leads to citizens being more
distrustful of the government, which in turn leads them to withhold their
compliance and resources from it. This further undermines its ability to
meet their demands, and so forth and so on, leading to a downward spiral.

Meanwhile, because of growing inequality, society becomes increasingly

fractured, especially between the tech-haves and have-nots. The elites enjoy
lives of technological luxury, while the burgeoning underclass struggles to
make a living through jobs that are increasingly precarious and poorly paid.

At some point, people will naturally conclude that democracy can no longer
solve their social problems. Where will they turn? Here’s one sobering
possibility: a techno-authoritarian riding a wave of enthusiasm for
technological solutions to problems like crime, climate change and hunger.

The tech-elite could easily slide into this role as well, buoyed by a belief that
they and the technology they wield are better able to run society than "the
rabble."
With the right changes, democracy can be
updated to withstand and benefit from the
advancement of technology.

Once upon a time, ancient Greeks living in small cities were able to practice
democracy on a face-to-face level. As society became too large and complex
for that to work, representative democracy emerged to carry on the torch,
which was then kept aloft by the mass party and taxation systems that
materialized when industrialism and mass suffrage arrived.

For some reason, however, democracy stopped evolving at that point. As a

result, democracy is no longer in sync with social reality, and it’s unable to
keep up with the massive, rapid, technology-driven changes taking place.

To survive, democracy needs updates to combat the tendencies that are

undermining it. Some of these updates involve governments reasserting
their authority over the tech industry. For example, to limit the influence of
big data, governments can exercise more oversight on the use of algorithms
and data collection.

To break up monopolies, they can enact antitrust legislation. To regulate

cryptocurrencies, they can issue their own. And to ensure they and their
citizens benefit from the gains of technology, rather than just tech
companies, governments can develop publicly owned and operated versions
of services and infrastructure projects like Uber and driverless car
networks.

Other updates involve governments protecting and supporting their

citizens. For example, to help citizens become less susceptible to
manipulation, the education system can be redesigned to better teach the
critical thinking and digital literacy skills that they need to understand how
to verify sources, how psychological biases work and how the main
components of the digital world, such as targeting algorithms, function.

To provide them with enough time and space to exercise those sharpened
critical thinking skills, which they could use to sift through politicians'
claims and promises, governments could also make election day a public
holiday, replete with hustings, debates and meet-up groups.

To combat inequality, the government can enforce minimum wage laws on

employers who take advantage of the precarious freelance and
short-term-contract labor that characterizes the so-called gig economy,
make it easier for workers to unionize, invest in job creation in emerging
industries such as climate change adaptation and biotech, and pay for
training programs to help workers retool for the changing economy.

Finally, to fund these new programs, the government will need to find new
sources of tax revenue, since corporate and income tax revenues are likely
to decrease. One way to do this would be to levy taxes on the robots that
replace human workers. By implementing reforms like these, democracies
can reassert their power over technology, which will help ensure it
empowers, liberates and enriches us, rather than the opposite.
Final summary

The key message in these blinks:

Digital technology has brought undeniable benefits to

humanity, but it also poses equally undeniable
challenges to democracy. These challenges stem from
certain tendencies of technologically driven social
changes that are unfolding before our eyes –
tendencies that are already eroding the essential
pillars of democracy. If left unchecked, these pillars
may eventually crumble, leaving a dystopian or
totalitarian state in the rubble. Fortunately, there are
steps that governments can take to sync up with the
internet era and thereby withstand the winds of
change. There are also steps that individuals can take
to aid these renovation efforts in their personal lives.

Actionable advice:

Take control of your internet usage.

By taking control of how you use the internet, you can also take back some control of
your life from the encroachments of digital technologies and the tech companies
pushing them. For example, you can prevent advertisers from manipulating you by
downloading ad blockers. You can escape the echo chambers that encourage tribalism
by seeking out alternative sources of information and listening to opposing voices with
an open mind. And you can escape the clutches of monopolies by seeking out smaller,
more ethical companies that provide search engines, social media platforms and taxi
services.

Got feedback?

We’d sure love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to
remember@blinkist.com with the title of this book as the subject line and share your
thoughts!

What to read next: The Net Delusion by Evgeny

Morozow

If Bartlett delivers some bad news about the techno-authoritarian future that might lie

ahead of us, ​The Net Delusion​ paints an even bleaker picture: that future is
already here. Digging through recent history, Morozow uncovers disturbing ways in
which authoritarian regimes have used the internet to undermine the freedom of their
citizens.

Morozow’s evidence and arguments throw cold water on the utopian dreams that many
people have pinned on the internet. Yes, the internet can foster liberty – but it can also
promote tyranny and passivity in democratic and authoritarian societies alike. Morozow
asks us not to despair, but to open our eyes to the dangers we face. To see them for

yourself, we highly recommend the blinks to ​The Net Delusion​.