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In 2016 I spent the better part of several months writing an essay in response to the question: ‘Are digital technologies making politics impossible?’ This was the topic posed by the inaugural Nine Dots Prize, which elicited 700-odd entries from around the world. The winner was promised cash and a book deal with Cambridge University Press.
When the winner was announced, I was of course not so honored. But since, for a limited time, the winner's book (a long essay, really) can be downloaded for free, as a PDF (link), and since I invested so much in my initial entry, I decided to download, read and assess it, relative to my own writing.
Saturday morning I read to page 13, then reflected on the author’s thesis: that our own, personal goals are not the same as those who try to attract our attention online; and that this conflict is the central problem of our internet age. Well, I immediately realized that though I'd enjoyed my reading (the story behind Diogenes meeting Alexander the Great is the origin of the book’s title “Stand Out Of Our Light"), my goal was to grasp the gist of the book, rather than be sucked into an all-day affair. So, I skipped the next 85 pages, and read the final few dozen.
My reaction can be summed up succinctly with this question: How are online attention seekers any different than market stall vendors of yore calling out “Sahib, see the special price I have on this jewel!” If there's little difference, then why aren't we applying a simple education-is-the-answer to the problem? After all, once we’ve bought a few “special price” items, we’ll likely realize we’ve been had, be wary of future hucksters, and change our ways as buyers; or, even better, we’ll be warned to be skeptical of any “special price” claim.
To be fair, the winning author, James Williams, casts a wider net, writing: “The technology industry [i]sn’t designing products, it's designing users.” In other words, our digital world's ad-based design is purposefully more addictive and exploitative than is an ancient marketplace. But that doesn’t change the remedy: education/experience.
Williams proposes trying to get the attention-seekers to behave. For example, he describes a code-of-conduct that designers would pledge to follow vis-a-vis their eventual customers:
As someone who shapes the lives of others, I promise to:
Care genuinely about their success;
Understand their intentions, goals, and values as completely as possible;
Align my projects and actions with their intentions, goals, and values;
Respect their dignity, attention, and freedom, and never use their own weaknesses against them;
Measure the full effect of my projects on their lives, and not just those effects that are important to me;
Communicate clearly, honestly, and frequently my intentions and methods; and
Promote their ability to direct their own lives by encouraging reflection on their own values, goals, and intentions.
I have nothing against such an oath. It's akin to the nation-state determining what's permissible advertising—something that political progressives like myself have always championed.
But the author has already zeroed in on what’s needed: “Our mission, then, is… to reengineer our world so that we can give attention to what matters.” And, his proposal isn’t re-engineering so much as incremental improvement. He writes:
“[T]he broad outline of our goal [is] to bring the[se] technologies...onto our side. This means aligning their goals and values with our own.
I don’t claim to have all, or even a representative set, of the answers here. Nor is it clear to me whether an accumulation of incremental improvements will be sufficient to change the system; it may be that some more fundamental reboot of it is necessary."
Unfortunately, things like an oath to 'do good' isn't that far removed from the familiar con that industrial polluters can be trusted to voluntarily clean up their act. It also reminds one of the good intentions behind attempts to help the less fortunate, when what's needed is a fundamental realignment of income distribution that throttles back the excesses of the 1%, and allows the vast majority to return to the upward mobility of yesteryear.
Not that our author doesn’t write well. His essay sparkles with a story-teller's charm; with anecdotes, historical references, and quotes from our civilization's greatest.
My essay, by way of contrast, is an attempt at a more fundamental “reengineer[ing]" of our world: I describe a harnessing of our collective mind, using the internet, that would educate the less informed, marginal voter while enabling direct democracy. So, instead of asking, and expecting, content designers, advertisers, and the like to respect us--all sensible measures, to be sure--the focus is instead on us, adjusting our level of sophistication in resisting the unworthy claim, and seeing through the malicious appeal. And this will only happen by giving people agency (experience) and exposing them to differing viewpoints (education). Thus, an approximate direct democracy, using the internet.
How would this work?
1. Constituents would express opinions to their representatives.
2. Representatives would hire pollsters.
3. Pollsters would generate demographically balanced opinions.
4. Representatives could abide by their constituent opinions, or, possibly, be voted out.
5. Each Rep. would have a website with specific issue, explanatory videos.
6. Each video would end with questions (and a comment/dissent option) to generate opinions.
There's much more to the idea, here.
And Approximate Democracy was just one idea. My book proposal offered nine others, each an “outside-the-box method of approaching and addressing the big issues of the day” (the contest's stated goal) using our nascent internet.
That the judges chose a modern overview of an old problem (the gullible rube), with incremental options for action, is understandable. Submissions were anonymous. Without a panel of experts to deliberate in depth, truly radical outside-the-box thinking was likely too hard to evaluate, and therefore too risky (What if someone’s exciting, new idea was announced as the winner, only to be revealed by experts in the relevant sub-specialty to be an impossible exercise in wishful thinking?) Instead, default mode, I imagine, was to look for hints of a classically trained mind: not only grammar, punctuation, word length, and spelling, but quotes and references that reassured. Williams' book begins, for example, with a quote from Aristotle’s Politics.
Description is always safer than prescription; one is a matter of hinting at a possible truth, the other is narrowing down choices and announcing a true north. In hindsight, those behind the Nine Dots Prize (see youtube video) would likely admit that looking for a new answer to an old problem, without bringing wide-ranging expertise to bear, is, well, wishful thinking.
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