What if here-comes-everybody is the problem?

Democratisation of the means to publish was held out as an unalloyed good, but reality is proving otherwise.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

John Milton - Areopagitica.

“True’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘falsehood.”

“Hell is truth seen too late.”

― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

There’s been lots of handwringing and head-scratching about Trump — and the devoted following he has, which seems impervious to reason. No amount of pussy-grabbing, tax evasion or courtroom defeat of election allegations stick to Teflon Trump. The populist crusade to “drain the swamp” remains intact.

And now we have Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit, a forum that started the pump of GameStock shares, in the face of market fundamentals. Again this is being cast as a revolt against elites. Where in the former, Trump’s populism seems to have sullied our marketplace of ideas, WallStreetBets, is messing with the efficient market hypothesis*.

It is a moment impervious to reason, good taste and sense.

I’ve seen several explanations for it:

1. Social media algorithms, primed to maximise ad revenue, incentivise engagement - that is to say aggressive, sensational, simplistic content, and creates “filter bubbles” of opposing tribes that receive very little contradictory information in their media diet.

2. Related to this, the moderating influence of mainstream media is waning. They are struggling to survive - because social media is eating all their ad revenue.

3. There’s the widely held opinion that the problem is of a society where many people at the bottom have been left behind. The 99%, whose income has stagnated for decades, while the elite has flourished, are craving recognition and dignity. See Dignity - Seeking respect in backrow America.

4. There’s the theory that the problem is partly with the people at the top, namely Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction”: “a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, is a cause for social instability as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their low status.” Think Rudi Guliani.

5. That state actors with bad intent is sullying our public sphere. I even heard the editor of TechCrunch Europe, Mike Butcher, say that state actors might have been involved in the Gamestop bull run.

My own theory is not novel. In 2014 Martin Gurri posited that: “Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media.”

Gurri wonders whether we will figure out new forms of institutions to do what our old ones did in liberal democracies. And so restore the balance of power. But what if our dreams for liberal democracy - and the current reality that new technologies create - are incompatible? When the internet arrived it was explicitly hailed as democratising. That it will bring us closer to ideals of freedom, personal expression, freer information and a freer market - an idealisation of elements of liberal democracy. And this would all be an unqualified good.

There’s a much earlier book by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, which - also makes an appeal to our sense that democratising our media sphere will make our societies better, more progressive, juster. They argue, mainstream media, helped by technological constraints and the economies it created, inhibit complete democratisation of media in favour of elite and commercial interests. I’m referring to the book Manufacturing Consent.

Chomsky and Herman argue, not unlike Gurri later, that mainstream media played a specific - if unspoken - role in that they: “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.”

But what if Chomsky, Herman are right about mainstream media protecting elite interests and the system, but wrong about the beneficial effects of democratisation, also for the downtrodden? What if reaching our democratic dream and giving everybody the possibility to publish has unintended consequences? Consequences like opening the Overton window so wide, that conflict and chaos ensue? What if the good society requires that not everybody has a voice?

Rebecca Mckinnon posited in 2011 that China practises what she calls Networked Authoritarianism. Instead of the Internet threatening the regime, it is used by it, to monitor opinion, something key to successful governing and that it would struggle to do otherwise. It also uses it to shape opinion. They do so through a mixture of surveillance, filtering, censorship, but also through armies of agents participating in and steering the conversation. Counterintuitively it has increased the regime’s legitimacy.

Like mainstream media’s unspoken “system supportive propaganda function” in pre-internet democracies, the Chinese have figured out how to use social media to support the system. Could democracies do that and still call themselves that?

* -“stocks always trade at their fair value on exchanges, making it impossible for investors to purchase undervalued stocks or sell stocks for inflated prices.”