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In The People vs Tech – a timely and pacey read, weighing in at just 224 pages – Bartlett, head of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the London-based think tank Demos, sets out six pillars of democracy, and how the internet and artificial intelligence threatens each of them.
The pillars, and the threats facing them, are:
- Having active, independent citizens – threatened by big data and online ‘nudges’
- A shared culture – threatened by online filter bubbles and echo chambers
- Free elections – threatened by micro-targeting and influence campaigns from ‘bots’
- “Stakeholder equality” (a sizeable middle class) – threatened by automation and AI
- A competitive economy – threatened by burgeoning tech monopolies like Google and Facebook
- Trust in the state itself – threatened by the dark web and the rise of crypto-currencies
It would be all too easy for a book tackling such a wide range of potential threats from new technology to fall into knee-jerk moral panic, or Luddism, given that every new wave of technology spurs such backlashes. Bartlett’s thesis is generally cleverer than that – though not totally immune from it. Noting his own conflicted relationship with the subject he focuses on, he says “I simultaneously rely on, love and detest all the technologies I write about”.
Given its breadth and timeliness, it should not be a surprise that Bartlett’s book is explanatory more than it is revelatory: those who haven’t followed this year’s backlash against technology closely will learn much, while those who have may find much of the book serves as a recap on the status of the technological world as it is.
Nonetheless, the thesis of the internet’s six simultaneous threats to democracy is well-argued, if sometimes exaggerated. Bartlett notes, for example, that Facebook’s initiative to allow its users to flag “I voted” in the 2012 US elections may have increased turnout by around 340,000 (because users who saw their friends’ “I voted” posts were slightly more likely to vote themselves), before arguing that if these were shown selectively to supporters of one party or the other – which he recognises has not happened – this could swing an election.
On Trump’s presidential win, Bartlett argues that given the fact that if 55,000 people across three states had voted differently, Clinton would be president now, the business mogul’s Cambridge Analytica-powered online campaign could have made the decisive leap.
This is certainly arguable, but perhaps a stretch given the huge array of other factors (traditional media, WikiLeaks, Trump’s strategy of convincing Clinton she needed a huge win to have an uncontested election, the left-behind population of the US, and more) – and that Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to help Trump’s opponent Ted Cruz in the primaries proved wildly ineffective.
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