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?"

Can Democracy in America Survive Big Tech?

 

Two articles I came across recently raise the question in the headline of today's column.  One is by a journalist named Allum Bokhari, who gave a speech last November at Hillsdale College, one of the very small number of U. S. colleges that does not accept Federal grants, loans, or other funding.  The other is by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitics specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  Both gentlemen are deeply concerned that social media, as it now works, constitute an existential threat to American small-d democratic government.

 

Kaplan is concerned that social media may create conditions in which the "fragile, perhaps even ephemeral" experiment called American democracy cannot survive.  His studies of nation-states range widely over time and geography.  The old USSR, he points out, was not defeated from without by nuclear or conventional warfare.  Rather, it was destroyed by internal weaknesses and a crisis of purpose that led to its disintegration.  Regarding the present rivalry between the U. S. and China, he sees social media playing radically different roles in the two countries.

 

In China, the authoritarian government ensures that everything on social media reinforces the "blood-and-soil nationalism" of the dominant Han cultural matrix.  Traces of dissent are ruthlessly stamped out, and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs are suppressed and even locked up in concentration camps.  There is basically one political story available in China, and social media reinforce it.

 

In the U. S., on the other hand, Big Tech effectively control social media, and recent events emphasize the subtle but increasingly effective control they exert.  The dominant vision embraced by those who inhabit the upper reaches of corporate and cultural America is a transnational one which, when it looks at American history at all, sees a story of exploitation and shame, exemplified by the New York Times's "1619 Project" that attempted to show that the founders based America on slavery, not on anything noble.  Even worse, the economics of social media have come to embrace the divide-and-conquer principle that feeding different kinds of people what they most want to hear means cutting up the citizenry into "racial, gender, political, or sexual" identity groups that are often pitted against each other, to the great loss of the basic unity that any nation needs to survive.

 

Allum Bokhari brings his experience with Breitbart News to the table.  While I am no fan of Breitbart News, the old principle of free speech (much abused lately) says that every voice deserves to be heard, if not believed.  And he brings some indisputable facts to the table that are worth considering.

 

Unlike the early days of the Internet when no single social-media platform was dominant and everybody had more or less equal access to everybody else's website, today's Internet is a creature of the Google-Facebook-Amazon complex of corporate control.  And control is the right word.  The velvet glove of free apps and fun-looking websites conceals an iron hand of manipulation that is so subtle and complex, powered by advanced AI software, that the vast majority of users have little or no idea that they are being manipulated.  But they are.  

 

Cadres of software engineers spend countless hours devising complex algorithms to change behavior, not only to the benefit of advertisers on Big Tech's media, but for other reasons as well.  One quote that Bokhari reports from a source he interviewed at Facebook says it all:  “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.”  If this isn't manipulation, I don't know what is.

 

In recent months, the manipulation and control has come above ground for everyone to see.  Bokhari cites the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech firms in de-platforming President Trump, and of Amazon and Apple in kicking the upstart social-media platform Parler off their equipment (or in the case of Apple, off the privately owned phones of millions of users).  One can argue about the motivations for such actions.  But the bare fact of the actions remain:  privately owned companies, largely unhindered and in fact protected by government regulation from lawsuits that private individuals can be subject to (that is what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does), unilaterally censored an entire social-media network regardless of who or what was on it, and also censored the sitting President of the United States. 

 

For those who can remember the old days of only three television networks, the only analogous action I can imagine would be if the President decided to make a speech one day, and in the middle of his words spoken to the "pool" camera that all three networks were taking their video feed from, executives decided to pull the switch and return to their regular programming of the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever.  Nothing like that ever happened, but if it had, the roars of outrage from common citizens of every political viewpoint would have been deafening. 

 

Today, roars—or anything else—can't be heard unless Big Tech approves of the roar.  The dominant progressive political views of the transnational cultural elite who are in charge are squeezing out the wide spectrum of views that, no matter how annoying some of the extremes are, turn out to be vital to the survival of democracy.  To those who deplore disagreement and debate, I would say this:  disagreement and debate are features of democracy, not bugs.  Cut them off and you are left with a softer form of what China has:  a homogenized, uniform, expert-driven technocracy that maintains the form of democracy, perhaps, but denies its power.  If this nation, which has endured for 245 years, is to preserve government "of the people, by the people, for the people," the malignant effects of social media and corporate control must be dealt with.  And soon, before it is too late.

 

Sources:  Allum Bokhari's post, based on a modified version of his Nov. 8, 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, is available at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/control-need-rein-big-tech/.  Robert D. Kaplan's article "How We Lose Against China" appeared in the Feb. 8, 2021 issue of National Review on pp. 27-29.

Facebook's Role in a Democracy

Over the last several weeks, the social media giant Facebook has been on the hotseat for its dealings with a consulting firm called Cambridge Analytics.  Evidently, Facebook shared the data of more than 80 million of its users with the firm, which was working for the Trump election campaign at the time.  The details are rather murky and one's view of this particular breach depends on one's political affiliation.  So rather than get down into the mudpit to sling more mud about this specific incident, I would rather take this opportunity to examine a more basic and far-reaching question.  What is the proper role of a huge social media company such as Facebook in a democracy?

To answer that question, we need to have some notion of how a well-functioning democracy works.  Political scientists generally regard a democracy as consisting of a government run by elected representatives.  The people (or some chosen subset thereof) get to vote for these representatives, and in turn the representatives construct and operate a government which observes certain rights of the people and subjects them to the rule of law. 

Speaking from an engineering point of view, a democracy can be considered to be a kind of control system.   Things needing the government's attention affect the votes and opinions of the masses, who elect representatives to do something about these things.  The representatives enact laws that ideally decrease the gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be.  That gap is never wholly closed this side of Paradise, but the narrower it gets, the better the democracy works.

Notice that in the description I just gave, the phrase "the way things ought to be" is really a statement of morality or justice.  In a country of over 300 million people, you are never going to get perfect agreement on anything, let alone matters of morality and justice.  But the beauty of democracy is that if most of the people broadly agree on something that the government can or should do, the democratic system has a way to deliver it.  And sometimes it even does.

Control systems have feedback loops, and in the most general view of such things, what is fed back is information.  And the same is true, broadly speaking, of democracies.  The people inform their representatives of their opinions about various matters by voting, as well as contacting them directly.  The representatives vote and pass bills using this information, and the information solidifies into laws, which are sort of like operating instructions for both the government and the people.  Anything that short-circuits or distorts this process is a potential threat to the proper functioning of a democracy.  In particular, any influence that can sway voters unduly or by fraudulent means must be carefully observed, and if necessary, dealt with somehow to restrain it from distorting the flow of information.

Newspapers have been around longer than the U. S. Constitution, and in the very early days of the country, some steps were taken to repress the freedom of the press.  But wiser heads quickly realized that to let the government say what could and could not be published was a gross distortion of the democratic process.  And so the First Amendment was passed to guarantee freedom of speech.  In doing so, the founders regarded the people as being wise enough to judge what opinions and alleged facts they should pay attention to in casting their ballots.  But the proper functioning of the system relies on that judgment, and ever since then there has been a tension between two extreme positions that the media can take in political activities.

One extreme is to attempt complete objectivity:  to report everything of significance in as unbiased a way as possible, and to let the voters make up their own minds.  This extreme was never approached very well, but in the glory days of the major city newspapers of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Associated Press came close, motivated as it was by its desire to sell its stories to newspapers of as wide a range of political persuasions as possible.  And when mass media required huge investments and consequently had only a few outlets (such as the three major TV networks that prevailed for the first thirty years or so of network TV), viewers usually got basically the same news from everywhere.  Maybe it was slanted somewhat, but at least everyone was working from the same page. 

But Facebook is as different from that as you can get, and comes closer in some individual instances to the other media extreme of total partisanship at the expense of reason and even truth.  Add to that the fact that huge parts of Facebook are a mystery to everyone outside it.  The old brick wall between the editorial and the advertisement sides of print journalism has vaporized, and the opinion writers are the readers are the advertisers.  Instead of a clean, easy-to-analyze feedback loop from the media to the voters to the government, we now have a messy tangle of voters who are the media, and who are also maybe Russians with secret axes to grind, and political operatives using data from millions to target certain groups without letting them know what is going on.  And it is all being done for profit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  But unlike the old simple lines of profit from print advertisers, whose ads could usually be clearly distinguished from editorial matter, the motives of Facebook and its paying customers are confused, obscure, and sometimes even contradictory.

Can a democracy function when such a confusing mess plays a significant role in elections?  Our democracy is still functioning, in the sense that we still have a Senate and House of Representatives, a President, and a government.  But whether the flow of information back and forth has been hijacked by an influential few, or whether the voters' collective wisdom will rise above even this level of confusion to lead us to a better place, are open questions that only time will answer.  I just hope the answer is something we can live with.

Sources:  An article by Stephanie Bodoni carried in the Apr. 7, 2018 edition of the Austin American-Statesman entitled "Facebook to engage Europe on data scandal" was the motivation for this piece.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the U. S. Constitution and the First Amendment. 

Can Democracy Survive Social Media?

That's the question that Wired reporter Issie Lapowsky raises in a Nov. 12 piece entitled "Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did."  Like many in the media, Lapowsky wasn't expecting Trump to win.  But she got a hint of what might happen when she spoke in October with a 75-year-old Trump supporter in Ohio who told her a string of crazy stories about the various depravities of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  The source of all these patently false but juicy tales?  Facebook. 

It wasn't just negative rumors that helped Trump win, says Lapowsky, but the way Trump conveyed his anger and outrage through tweets that were picked up by the media so that even non-tweeters like yours truly read about them.  It turns out that certain emotions play better over social media than others, and anger is near the top of the list. 

Once a surprising and unexpected thing happens, it's not hard to find reasons why it happened.  Whatever your political sympathies may be, the outcome of last Tuesday's presidential race shows us that social media are playing an increasing role in the way politics works in democracies such as the U. S.  And the social and ethical implications of that shift are just now beginning to be understood.

Probably the single most important difference between the way social media convey political messages today and the way the old mass media used to do it, is the fact that people now can choose media that agree with their politics.  This includes friends on Facebook, twitter feeds, websites, and even cable TV channels.  Liberals tend to listen to and read other liberals, and ditto for conservatives.  The ability to self-select one's news sources leads most people to shield themselves in comfortable bubbles or echo chambers in which people hear only the kinds of talk they want to hear.

There's nothing new about this, of course.  But for a period of about sixty years—from around 1920 to 1980—most U. S. citizens received their news from sources that were designed to appeal to the widest range of readers and listeners—and viewers, when TV came along.  John Durham Peters is a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, and he points out that what he calls the "old mass media" used capital-intensive plant and equipment—printing presses, news organizations such as the Associated Press, and radio and TV networks—and therefore had to make money by appealing to the largest number of people.  They did this by developing so-called "objective journalism" that strenuously avoided partisanship and tried to present an even-handed view of political and social events.  The fact that nearly everyone in the U. S. received their news from only a few news networks, which often sounded alike, imposed a uniformity of viewpoint that was not always good—minority and dissident views were often suppressed—but tended to give everyone the same starting point in political discussions.  It's hard to tell, but we may owe a good deal of the comparative unity and domestic peace within the U. S. for that period to the homogenizing influence of mass media.

The funny thing is that the objective journalism of the twentieth-century mass media was itself something of an anomaly historically.  Before newspapers got big enough to organize and use the Associated Press and similar wire-news organizations for most of their news content, most papers were highly partisan.  Even in small towns, Republicans subscribed to the Republican paper and Democrats to the Democratic paper.  Editors took radical stands and learned to deal with the consequences.  In 1869, Mark Twain penned a humorous but only slightly exaggerated view of life at a nineteenth-century newspaper in a satirical piece called "Journalism in Tennessee."  A substitute editor of a small-town paper starts his first day on the job and gets shot at, bombed, thrown out the window, and subjected to a general riot and insurrection that wrecks the office.  When the chief editor returns from vacation, he hears of these disasters and says nothing more than, "You'll like this place when you get used to it." 

Maybe Facebook and Twitter aren't as physically violent as Tennessee journalism was in 1869, but the verbal equivalent of bullets and bombs fly around social media every day, and the effects are often similar.  In 1960, no responsible newspaper would have knowingly printed false stories that one of the Presidential nominees was getting secret messages in an earpiece from a billionaire during debates and was married to a man who had an illegitimate half-black son.  But that's the kind of thing the Wired reporter heard from the Trump supporter, and the stories came from Facebook. 

Every new communications medium, going all the way back to the electromagnetic telegraph, has been hailed at first as a promising means of unifying people, parties, and nations.  And if people were angels, all these glowing predictions would come true.  But angels don't need to send telegrams or tweets, and the fallible, sinful humans who do use communications media often put them to the worst conceivable purposes. 

This is not a call for censorship or any third-party control of the way people communicate with each other.  We need only to recall how social media have played helpful and positive roles in the overthrow of repressive regimes to realize that authoritarian measures to suppress free speech are harmful to democracy.

But in the wake of last week's election, it wouldn't surprise me to see renewed calls for such restraints, although the political climate will soon change to the point that such calls may fall on deaf ears.  What should concern us more is the bad habit many have of isolating themselves by means of social media to the point that so-called discussions amount to nothing more than a group of like-minded people massaging each others' prejudices.  Politics is the art of compromise, but if you spend all your time talking with people who think just like you, you'll lose the ability to compromise.  And no one else is going to make us get out of our self-created shells.  We have to do that on our own.

Sources:  Issie Lapowsky's article " Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did" appeared in Wired on Nov. 12, 2016 at https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-alone-didnt-create-trump-click-economy/.  John Durham Peters spoke on the old mass media in an interview with Mars Hill Audio's Ken Myers in Vol. 131 of that online audio journal, available at https://marshillaudio.org.  And Mark Twain's satirical piece "Journalism in Tennessee" can be found in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (ed. Charles Neider), published by Bantam in 1971.

Democracy By Sampling

If you had stopped by my house last Saturday, you would have seen me seated on the front porch in a folding chair, watching a presentation on a laptop connected to a notebook computer, which was in turn operated by a woman seated in another folding chair.  The woman works for a contractor to the U. S. Department of Commerce.  The contractor, Abt SRBI, performs high-tech surveys for government agencies.  Instead of pencils and clipboards, the woman brought along the aforementioned technology that she used to show me the options I had for each answer, as well as photographs and other information related to the survey questions.  My subject today is not so much the actual content of the survey (which she requested I keep confidential so as not to bias other potential participants), but the entire process of which the survey was a part, which I'm calling "democracy by sampling."

One vital aspect of engineering ethics is to consider all the stakeholders in a given case, including members of the public liable to be affected by a proposed course of action.  I think it's okay for me to say this much about the survey:  it dealt with a proposed program that the Department of Commerce may implement, and would entail substantial costs to be borne by the U. S. taxpayer.  The program would address an environmental issue which it turns out I have discussed in this space in the past, and it would deal with it in a way that struck me as egregiously boneheaded.  And I told them so.

But unless you, gentle reader, are one of the 1500 or so people nationwide selected to participate in this survey, if you wish to register your opinion on this subject with the government, you are out of luck.  This is unfair, but all too symptomatic of a disheartening trend that has picked up the momentum of an avalanche in recent years.

The ideal of democratic government is that it is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The preposition in question here is "by."  Ultimately, the authority of government is to vest in the people governed.  The means by which this power is exercised in our type of government is through the legislative branch, meaning Congress.  Originally, the only role of the executive branch was to see that the laws were "faithfully executed." 

But beginning in the Progressive era of the early 1900s, a different view of government arose, which can be summarized as government by experts.  The basic idea is that modern life is too complex to leave governance solely to the slow, messy process of legislating laws.  Instead, new powers should devolve upon educated specialists in such fields as finance, technology and its regulation, commerce, and human relations, and we should allow these experts to make such rules as they think best—rules that have the full force of law.  So far, any agency of this type still holds before its face a mask of democracy, in that the agencies exercising such power have to be established by Congress.  But there are so many of them now that Congress can no longer exercise anything like proper oversight anymore.  The result is that executive agencies like the Department of Commerce and its divisions are left to their own devices and desires.

I will grant this to the Department:  in commissioning the survey I participated in, they are genuinely seeking the input of the public, or at least a sample thereof.  They didn't have to do that—as far as I know, they could just haul off and implement the new program they're considering without asking anybody, and we would all just have to live with it.  So they are at least making a gesture toward the idea of democracy.  But it is an ineffectual gesture, in my opinion.

As a part of the survey, I had an opportunity to "vote" for or against the program, and to give reasons for doing so.  But this "vote" is to real voting as hypocrisy is to holiness.  What if we "voted" to elect the President this way?  It would save tons of money and trouble.  Instead of the Electoral College and all that campaign fundraising and advertising and so on, we'd just hand the whole thing over to Abt SRBI, whose experts would come up with a carefully selected sample of 1500 or so voters, and the rest of us would just wait to find out the results, as determined by the experts.  So much more efficient—so much more scientific.

And so much more opposed to the basic notion of rule by law, and not by men.  One of the big reasons that the thirteen British colonies broke away from England was that they were being taxed by those whom they did not elect.  Based on the information I received during the survey, the proposed program would have done exactly that—nothing was mentioned about any enabling legislation.  This sort of thing happens all the time.  The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to categorize carbon dioxide as a pollutant is a shining example of how unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally proclaim costly regulations, and those injured are forced to undertake expensive legal battles as their only recourse. 

The Department of Commerce deserves one small cheer for consulting me about their idea.  But the whole executive branch gets a loud razz for continuing its drive toward government by bureaucracy that has compromised freedom and due process in this country so severely, that some days I wonder if we can ever get them back again.

Technology and Democracy—Too Much Information?

 

Here in the U. S. we are in the last three days of the 2012 election season.  At stake is the Presidency, hundreds of seats in the U. S. Congress, and thousands of state and local races.  Our question for today is this:  have advances in technology made democracy as it is practiced in the U. S. better or worse?

That question immediately leads to another:  by what standard are we to judge improvements in democracy?  Unlike technical concepts such as ideal 100% efficiency, it’s hard to imagine what an ideal democracy would look like.  Just imagining ideal people running it doesn’t do any good.  It was James Madison who pointed out, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  So to my mind, at least, an ideal democracy would allow real fallible people to govern themselves to the best of their abilities.

That being said, we must distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy.  An old-fashioned New England town meeting where the citizens simply represent themselves is a direct democracy, but obviously such a method gets impractical as the size of the political entity becomes larger than a few thousand people.  So what we are discussing is an ideal representative democracy:  one in which people elect representatives periodically to embody their interests and judgments in the operation of government.

In such a situation, we can assess how accurately the elected representatives really mirror the inclinations of their constituents, and how effective this representation is in running the government.  By this standard, technological advances have helped matters in some ways, but have led to big distortions and injustices in other ways.

The good news is that, for example, ballot-counting is a lot faster, and probably more accurate overall, with electronic voting machines and computer networks to handle the math and presentation of election returns.  Electronic news media allows interested parties to learn a great deal of more diverse information than was provided in the old days when there were at most two or three TV networks, as many radio networks, and a couple of daily newspapers in most major media outlets, but no Internet or social media.

What about the negatives?  One serious problem I have seen is the way that computer-intensive calculations have been employed in demographic analyses to gerrymander U. S. House of Representatives districts.  “Gerrymandering” is a term that comes from an odd-shaped Massachusetts congressional district drawn by Governor Elbridge Gerry to benefit his political party in 1812.  The odd shape basically divided his opponents’ constituents and united his own, but one resulting district looked like a salamander and was satirized in a political cartoon that labeled it a “gerrymander.”  The term caught on as a way of criticizing the drawing of voting districts so as to favor one party or another.

Unfortunately, gerrymandering has become a way of life, and it is a routine thing for the party in power in a state to take advantage of every U. S. Census to push the gerrymandering art to new highs.  With computer-intensive analysis of election returns, this process has become one that often guarantees the outcome of an election in a given district.  One adverse consequence is a complete reversal of the original intent of the Founders as to the different purposes of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Senators, with their revolving six-year terms, were intended to be a steady, long-term, stabilizing influence on government, while representatives, all of whom are elected every two years, were meant to reflect rapidly changing constituent opinion.  The gerrymandering of House districts has turned this intention on its head.  With computer-aided gerrymandering, many representatives enjoy fifteen, twenty, and even thirty-year tenures in their House seats.  But because Senators by law are elected from an entire state (and so far, no one has seriously contemplated gerrymandering state borders yet), they are the ones who can be turned out after a single term, and often are.

I haven’t even mentioned such things as targeted campaign ads aimed at specific demographic groups, the overwhelming power of electronic media and its crippling expense that leads to the exclusion of all but the best-funded candidates (which means that no one without rich friends or wealthy corporations on their side can do much of anything nationally), and the handing over of Congressional authority to unelected bureaucrats, which while not directly aided by technological advances, seems to have become more popular as technology has advanced.  And there are now instant polls conducted daily if not more frequently, with dozens of places online to see the poll results almost minute by minute—or instantly in the case of those public-opinion meters displayed on some TV channels during the Presidential debates.  Just about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the formal mechanism of voting and what it means.

The optimist in me says not to worry too much—perhaps the modern voter really takes advantage of the superabundance of information and delivers a more informed decision than those in the past whose media sources were so much more limited.  But the pessimist in me thinks that technologized democracy tends to pander to the worst and the simplest arguments and procedures:  mass-media scare tactics, reducing voters to a single demographic characteristic (e. g. poor, black, Hispanic, working class, etc.) and manipulating voters based on that characteristic, and other techniques that tend to remove power as a practical matter from the average non-politician citizen, and concentrate it into the hands of the few elite who operate the handles of the analysis and publicity machines.

I recently read a book that pointed out many of these flaws and recommended some radical changes that might move the situation back closer to where it was a few decades ago.  Arnold Kling’s Unchecked and Unbalanced is primarily an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, but along the way he shows how un-representative our U. S. government has become.  One main takeaway from the book is the fact that while the current system of constituting the House and Senate was set up back when the population was only a few million, it has not undergone any basic change since that time, and now our population is more than 300 million.  In order to get back to the point that a single congressperson represents about the same number of people that he or she did in 1800, say, we would have to have perhaps 5,350 of them rather than the 535 that we do now.  As things are, there is simply too much power and money concentrated in the hands of too few people, and the great mass of voters go largely unrepresented.

Largely, but not completely.  It still means something to vote, and I hope all of my U. S. readers with that privilege will go out and exercise it on Tuesday.  And we will all have to abide by the outcome, so you better vote wisely.

Sources:  Arnold Kling’s book Unchecked and unbalanced : how the discrepancy between knowledge and power caused the financial crisis and threatens democracy was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2010.  I found the James Madison quote from one of his Federalist Papers at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70829-if-men-were-angels-no-government-would-be-necessary-if, and used the Wikipedia articles describing “U. S. population”, “democracy”, “gerrymander,” and “republic.”