I’m a white guy in tech, and I’ve been interested in police brutality cases ever since I started hearing about the overuse of tasers and the corresponding deaths. And you can’t be interested in this topic without eventually noticing that black people take more punishment than the rest of us. I’m working alone so I can’t comment on “my” workplace, but you seem interested in tech perspectives on this, and I’m happy to weigh in.

I‘m into a lot of things politically: for instance, how copyright law, patent law, the TPP, and so on shift power away from citizens and small companies (and even, in the case of the TPP, the government itself) toward “superstars” and big companies; the neglect by government of poor communities; the failure of congress to meaningfully regulate Wall Street; the privatization of prisons, schools, and so on (on top of the longstanding privatization of the physical wires and airwaves that carry internet and phone services); pork-barrel military projects; and yes, the excessive use of force by police.

For the last one, I would call for better training for police officers, always-on body cams, and better accountability through structural changes to departments. But what does it mean when, despite years of protests, we’re not seeing improvements?

There is something that ties all these topics together: the undue influence of money in politics. Quite simply, politicians are very busy people, and elections are getting more and more expensive:

So they must spend more and more time fundraising (or relying on lobbyists to do fundraising for them). Who are they fundraising from? 99.8% of congressmen (i.e. every single one except Alan Grayson) get the majority of their funding from donations larger than $200. So, rich people. And only a fraction of them donate big. Since quid-pro-quo bribery is illegal, what are these people buying? Mainly time. Access. The privilege of talking with lawmakers, or making friends with them. (Plus, the likelihood of future donations drops when a politician doesn’t say or support the “right” things). Since politicians are so busy, they only have time to talk to people that are somehow “important”. Only about 1.4% of the top 1% are black, and obviously 0% of the top 1% are poor, so the priorities of lawmakers correspond with the priorities of the wealthy.

It’s not necessarily that they don’t care about poor people and minorities. It’s just that the big priorities and battles are over questions like which companies will pay debit card swipe fees. To understand this better, and to see what the solutions are, please watch Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk.

Media

A (seemingly) separate category of problems is related to the media.

First there’s the decrease in funding for investigative journalism. This problem seems to have been caused by the internet, since everyone can now get news (and expects to get news) “for free” (and tech companies still haven’t invented a viable micropayments system so we can pay-per-view with a penny per page or so.) Unfortunately, I have no idea how to solve this problem.

There’s also the rise of anti-intellectualism, disdain for facts and data, right-wing propaganda, and the hateful communities that rise in insular “bubbles” on the internet. This problem seems separate, but related to the first in that most people are not choosing their news stories based on how well-researched they are. Moreover, how could we? Many (if not most) people can’t tell the difference between a professional piece based on extensive, expensive fieldwork, and a piece written off the top of a pundit’s head in a couple of hours based on cherry-picked facts and evidence encountered haphazardly by others. But even when we can tell, most people don’t take a step back and look at the bigger picture. As an example, one might only read about the many ways in which blacks are oppressed, and fail to notice the cases in which white poor people are oppressed similarly.

Since we can’t read even a small fraction of the stories being written, machine learning picks stories to show us based on what we’ve clicked in the past. Liberals see liberal stories, conservatives see conservative stories, BLM activists see BLM stories, and we can easily coast through life unaware that there are massive hateful and apathetic communities out there, and then be caught off guard when men like Trump have a shot at the presidency. The other day I pointed out to a Facebook group called “The Silent Majority debate group” (which is more of a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary group) that Trump’s campaign statements are Politifact’s lie of the year. They told me PolitiFact has a liberal bias — as if there were a right-wing fact-checker out there that could make Trump’s false statements true!

Have you seen Breitbart.com or the comments that are written there? I checked them out when the Dallas shooting happened. You’ll see comments there like “The Imam in Chief, Hussein O will pardon them if found.” (159 upvotes) and “Obummers sons at it again” (474 upvotes) because somehow absolutely everything bad in America is automatically Obama’s fault.

Although technology drove the decentralization and “de-civil-ation” of media, I’m at a loss to suggest how to fix the problem. Facebook bent over backwards to prove they don’t have a liberal bias and is trying to shift all the work of suggesting stories from humans to algorithms, but since even many humans can’t tell the difference between facts and bullshit, or between good journalism and hit pieces, I don’t see how machines could solve the problem we’re having. Machines might detect systematic entire-web-site bias better than humans — but actually publishing bias information would cause a right-wing outcry, since Fox News convinced the right wing that they were in the center.

I would like to suggest that technology companies take a more active role in story selection by emphasizing stories that mention important, large-scale facts (e.g. the massive and rising cost of political campaigns; budget items measured in billions rather than millions; things that affect thousands or millions of people rather than isolated incidents) and in general stories that give people some perspective (e.g. things more likely to kill you than terrorism, graphs that show why nuclear power isn’t scary).

I think a huge source of the polarization in the U.S. is the cherry-picking of facts that support one view, while ignoring much larger facts. Taking nuclear power as an example, most people know that Chernobyl killed thousands of people (about 4,000, mostly years later, from cancer); but most people do not know that the biggest energy disaster was from a renewable energy source (171,000 killed), or that the death toll from the Fukushima meltdown remains at zero (although several workers were killed by the tsunami). Widening your perspective even further, you’d see that ongoing deaths are a far greater problem than one-off events like meltdowns. By giving more “points” to lesser-known large-scale facts (thus making stories about that stuff more likely to appear to readers), tech companies and their algorithms could better inform the public; however, if they attempt to do so they will be accused of bias by the right wing.

Similarly, regarding the bubble effect (where machine learning algorithms tend to show you articles you’ll agree with, because it learns you are more likely to click on those articles), if machines could detect bias they could try showing you stories a bit closer to the center of the political spectrum — but again, since center = left in the right-wing mind, they will be accused of bias. So the tech companies probably aren’t eager to risk using this strategy or the previous one.

What’s else is there? I am starting to feel that we need to fight them where they live: go to a right-wing site, make careful and reasonable comments that aren’t too far left, show your evidence (with links and graphs), avoid saying things that their ideology rejects reflexively, and then spend a little time defending yourself from the attacks they will inevitably throw at you, but don’t get angry. Always take the moral high ground and stress facts, not ideology or opinion. I’ve tried this, and it’s exhausting … but so far I don’t see a technological solution, which leaves us humans to do the dirty work. If you want to give it a try, read this to help you prepare.

Related link: How Technology Hijack’s People’s Minds