How Artificial Is the Artificial State?

 

In this week's New Yorker, Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore writes about something she calls "the artificial state," and takes a pretty dark view of it.  In light of last week's election, it's worthwhile to consider her criticisms, and ask how seriously democracy has been compromised by the automation of politics and elections.

 

Several paragraphs in, she gets around to defining the artificial state:  ". . . a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse."  Before you can say something is wrong, you have to have a standard by which to judge rightness.  It's not entirely clear to me what Lepore has in mind as the ideal of democracy unencumbered by digital meddling.  Perhaps the closest she comes to posing an ideal or legitimate use is when she wishes these technologies could be reinvented as "well-regulated, public-interested digital utilities."  So one of the things that bothers her the most about the way politicians use digital technology these days is that it is largely unregulated, and instead of being directed to the public interest, it is controlled by private corporations or entities.

 

Another positive development she would like to see is the recognition of what one philosopher calls "epistemic rights."  Epistemology is the science of knowing, so epistemic rights are the right to be either known or unknown—another way of expressing the right to privacy, perhaps.  She also cites a British author and member of the Labour Party Josh Simons, who has written a book advocating the A. I. Equality Act, which would "assert political equality as a guiding principle in the design and deployment of predictive tools."

 

Turning to problems, she points out that after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter (now X) in 2022, the number of accounts on Twitter that are bots (i. e. not real people but digital simulacra commanded by a central authority) is between 11% (according to X) and 66% (according to an independent study).  That's not a real solid statistic to base a criticism on, but most people will agree that there is some measure of chicanery going on in the social-media world, where the origin of any given click-bait comment is essentially impossible to determine, and being skeptical about whether it came from a person or a machine is just common prudence.

 

There is no doubt in my mind that a good part of the blame for today's hyper-polarized politics is assignable to the drive to extremes that Lepore cites, a drive that is based not on high-minded aspirations for the good of democracy, but on profits.  That being said, profits are necessary for private companies to function.  The opposite alternative is for the government to own and run and regulate everything, which would certainly take care of the well-regulated part of Lepore's ideal digital democracy. 

 

But whether a government-run cyberspace would be public-interested is not clear.  Left to themselves, government-run organizations tend to become government-interested rather than public-minded.  One recent example is the way that the U. S. Department of Education did a face-plant with its attempt to follow Congress's instructions to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and system.  The resulting dumpster-fire disaster had universities all over the country pushing back their application deadlines and losing millions of dollars of student financial aid, a mess which I understand is ongoing to this day.  With the election of Donald Trump, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is packing his desk and checking his retirement plans.  If Cardona's work is an example of how government can operate digital systems in the public interest, good luck with getting it to run politically-oriented social media.

 

If the Department of Education depended for its operating revenue on having a smoothly-working website, with a real downside consequence if it wasn't, either we'd have a smoothly-working website or in a short while we wouldn't have a Department of Education at all.  And the latter outcome would be just fine with certain parties shortly to occupy the executive branch of government. 

 

Despite all the bots, the Musks running X and Bezoses running Facebook, and every other problem Lepore cites, and despite the fears of armed attacks on polling sites, the election we just experienced last week took place peacefully and issued in an outcome that was not desired by the majority of experts and would-be regulators that Lepore would put in charge of our digital political system.  And I'm sure that she would say, "See what happened?  Democracy failed!  All these young black and Hispanic men are voting against their self-interest because they've been bamboozled by the system."

 

Now some people are easily bamboozled, but a principle of democracy that Lepore didn't mention in her article is that if a person meets the minimal legal requirements to vote (age and citizenship, primarily), he or she is free to vote any durn way they please.  That principle assigns any responsibility for avoiding bamboozlement to the individual, not to any government agency in charge of preventing voter bamboozling. 

 

I almost hate to say it, but Lepore shows that many people in the higher reaches of academia are more parochial (isolated in a small group of like-minded individuals) than most of the average Joes and Jills they criticize.  The problem of regulating political speech was stated well by the Roman poet Juvenal when he asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" meaning "Who watches the watchmen?"  Any such regulation inevitably introduces bias, and while there are certain incendiary types of speech that common sense says should be prohibited, the distortions of the present "artificial state," as Lepore puts it, are something that the average voter probably takes into account before voting.

 

I do agree with Lepore that digital technology has severely altered the way the democratic process works in this country.  But I think the answer is not less democracy and more autocratic control, but more democracy in the sense of grass-roots movements towards things like local bans on smartphones for people under 16 or so, and some kind of back-to-reality movement whose outlines are not clear at this time.  In the meantime, we can rejoice that most of the dire predictions about last week's elections didn't come true.  But of course, dire is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

Sources:  Jill Lepore's "The Artificial State" appeared on pp.69-71 of the Nov. 11, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.  I referred to the Wikipedia article "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"