S5E15: Lifeboats: Intro

This is Larry Lessig. We've taken two steps in this series so far. In the first, we considered some of the changes, the totally possible changes that could make this democracy a representative democracy. I won't say again because it's never been representative in the sense we would mean today. But forget the past, focused on the future. We could make these changes and the unrepresentative representative democracy that we now have would change from unrepresentative to representative. The overturned table could be righted, but would that be enough? That was the question we pressed in the second part. The iceberg in our metaphor has not only overturned the tables of representative democracy, it has also ripped a gash in the hull of this ship called America's democracy. In part two, we outlined the elements of that gashed hull. We've just passed from a period when representative democracy seemed possible, when the press supported a common understanding. That was Marcus Prior's work. And that common understanding built democratic understanding. That was Ben Page and Robert Shapiro's work. But we've passed from that period into a period of radically different media, what we call social media. But we should actually better name what's distinctive about this media. What's distinctive, what makes it different from. From the media described by Prior and Page and Shapiro, is not that it's social, it's that it's increasingly unedited, by which I mean edited by humans. The world we're leaving is a world where humans decided what other humans would see. The world we're entering is one where machines will decide what humans will see. I don't mean to suggest that the old world was perfect or even good. There were plenty of humans who chose awful things for people to see. The age of yellow journalism produced effects that are very similar to the effects we are seeing now hold populations or segments of populations misled by lies and the liars who tell them. But these lies were choices made by people who had to sleep at night. They did what they did, but in that doing, they were constrained by their own worldview, by their hope for the world. And thus what got played, at least in the dominant media that defined the second half of the 20th century, was the stuff we needed to see or hear or read about. What got played on the media was played because on some plausible view, it was important for all of us to understand. Okay, but we're quickly leaving that world, and we are quickly entering a world where what gets played gets played for very different reasons. I'm not talking about the op ed page of the Washington Post or The New York Times. Those, of course, remain pure to that older idea. The choices made there are choices driven by a conception of what's needed and what makes sense and to publish. But from that pinnacle we move downward quite quickly from pages protected from commercial influences to pages driven by commercial influence. The point is not binary. The story is a continuum. At the extreme of the op ed pages, there is a tiny commercial influence. Diversity makes the page more interesting. So maybe diversity in views or topics reflects a commercial influence. But I doubt or I hope that any editor on any major paper decides whether to include something solely because it will generate clicks. I'm not saying it's nothing. I'm just saying it's not everything. And at the other extreme, your Facebook news feed or your feed on TikTok, no human is deciding what you will see. An algorithm is, and that algorithm aims to engage you. Its objective is to find a way to get you, to keep you, to make you glued to the feed. And it offers you what it has learned you want, at least those wants that might get you to consume more. Again, it's not binary. There are frameworks at both extremes and nudges at both extremes, and at both extremes serving the news. Those frameworks declare large purposes. The nudges push those declarations. In one way or another. The op ed, or call it the essays page of the Times today has a purpose of enlightening on issues of national import. Maybe there are nudges to commercial interest, but not much. The feat of a TikTok, by contrast, has a purpose of driving engagement of its users, all for commercial interest. Maybe there are purposes of educating that nudge the algorithm one way or the other, but not much. Nothing determines this mix in just this way, as the conversation with Tristan Harris evinced. You could have a TikTok that was aimed at educating kids. That's the TikTok that China has. But in the mix we have as Americans at least, the shift of this age is from humans deciding what we should see to machines deciding what most profitably we should see. For those who own the machines, it is a shift from judgment to algorithms. These algorithms are the relevant part to the AI that governs media today. As I said when I introduced the metaphor of gashed hulls, that AI is just the latest in a line of AIs, some analog, more recently, digital artificial intelligence, living within institutions that have an aim. The challenge for us is that when that aim is inconsistent with our collective aims, what do we do? And the lesson that I draw from these interviews tied with an even broader sense of the threat that AI presents is that in that conflict, the conflict between our collective aims and the aims of these AIs, we won't win. The gashed hull is the reality that these institutions with purpose, corporations as well as digital AI, will defeat us when their aim conflicts with democracy. Not always, but enough. And our urgent need must be to find a way to relocate democracy into a place where it can flourish, or maybe even flourish again. In this part, lifeboats, I want to describe that relocating in three distinct ways. I begin most briefly by thinking about what's actually possible with democracy, what's actually achievable with an effective government. Let's call this lifeboat. You gotta give him hope. And in this lifeboat, we'll talk to two souls who think deeply about how we could make government work better. Brink Lindsey and Jennifer Polka. That's the first, relocating, identifying what an effective government could do. The second, relocating, is to think about what a more healthy political life could be and how we might get there. Here we'll talk to John Green, professor of psychology at Harvard University, who's been thinking carefully about how we might mitigate the polarization that divides us. We'll then talk to one of the most important social innovators in the Internet era, Eli Pariser, who was instrumental in the founding of MoveOn and who is also working now to build more healthy political communities. Then finally, we'll talk to two extraordinary activists rebuilding the nature of real world politics, having been inspired by the great Marshall Ganz of Harvard to think about how to build social movements beyond just simply winning elections. This is Chloe Maxim and Kenyon Woodward. These together fill the health lifeboat with a lifeboat aiming to give us better political health. But it's the third lifeboat that I've come to see as the most important in the story that I want to tell. The way of relocating that this lifeboat describes is the move to protect a democratic process from the competing or conflicting AIs that will stand against it. And here's there's one more metaphor beyond the Titanic that might give you a sense of what I mean. The film A Quiet Place is a post apocalyptic story about how people come to live once the world has been invaded by blind extraterrestrials with an acute sense of hearing. They can't see you, but they can hear extraordinarily well. And if they hear you, they will hunt you down and, well, let's say things don't go well for you. So the survivors have to find a way to live their life silently, and they Find then, that they need to move much of their life underground, at least in the sense that they place their life in contexts that these aliens can't invade. They build bunkers underground and buildings that muffle sounds inside. They have paths outside that are coated with chalk so they can walk about silently. They learn, in other words, to live life in the shadow of this alien threat. I don't want to spoil the plot if you've not seen the two films, but life is not great in this quiet place. So the intuition I want you to draw from this is simple to state once you see the metaphor. We need to account for the threats to democracy that emerge, whether intentionally or not, from these increasingly sophisticated AIs, and then protect democracy from those threats. And by protect, I want you to envision the idea of relocating democracy into a place where those threats are not, in fact, threatening, where we could be insulated as much as possible from the threats that we've identified. A quiet place is an extreme way to frame those threats. We can induce the same intuition with less extreme metaphors. If you're as old as I am, you'll remember a time when most people didn't worry about ultraviolet rays from the sun. When you would go to the beach or the pool without wearing sunscreen. No one would even notice. Few today would do that, or at least let their kids do do that. Sunscreen is the protection from uv. It allows us to live our life despite uv. So then, in this lifeboat, we will consider where or how we could relocate democratic actions to protect them from the AI threats that we identified in the last part. And to begin that story, we will consider the work of profoundly important modern thinker David von Raybrook. Von Raybrook's book Against Elections, is not really against elections, but it is against the idea of thinking about democracy as exhausted by elections, or maybe better. The book is about how democracy has become exhausted with elections, about how we might think about democracy apart from how we think about elections. Because, as he begins the book, we've had thousands of years of democracy in human history, but just a few hundred years of a democracy through elections. This idea, I suggest, open a window into a whole world of activity to understand a collective democratic will without relying upon elections. The first of these that we'll consider is AI technology that could actually help democracy. These are technologies like polis, or the one we'll discuss, crowdsmart, which help a community understand their common ground, to help them then build upon that common ground when that common ground is not easily seen. And then we'll turn to the most exciting democratic innovations that's happening anywhere in the world right now. That is the way that we can assemble what's referred to as citizen assemblies. Van Reybroeck will have already introduced the idea in the conversation we have with him. We'll then turn to the activists doing perhaps the most to spread the idea of citizen assemblies across the world. Claudia Chawalis is the founder of Democracy Next, and with her we'll discuss her work with citizen assemblies and the effort to spread citizen assemblies and everywhere. And then finally, we'll consider three examples of citizen assembly like structures that have done enormous amounts to teach us what's possible. First, with Kata Oldsdotter talking about Iceland, then David Farrell talking about Ireland, and John Stever talking about an extraordinary virtual citizen assembly on climate convened with representatives from across the world virtually in the middle of COVID All this will suggest a democracy that's safer and richer and more resilient than the democracy we have right now. And thus ultimately a democracy more committed to the idea of rule by the people. Not by the elites, not by the aristocracy, not by the academics, not by the authoritarians, committed to the idea of rule by the people. Stay tuned. This has been the 15th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are produced in the abstract sense by Equal Citizens, in a literal sense by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens Us. And there you can give us your thoughts and feedback. We at least I love the feedback, especially the ideas. And there you can help spread this podcast because these ideas need to reach beyond this podcast and they will if more will hear it. We're of course also grateful for your support. Everything I do for Equal Citizens is pro bono, but we have a team that needs to earn a living. So you can donate to help us keep going at Equal Citizens Us. Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode. Sam.