Occupy Silicon Valley
A Quest for the lost Cyber Wild West
In the last few centuries, many inventions have been touted to change the world as we know it. The newspaper, telegraph, radio, television and in the last few decades, Internet, has become the latest Utopian democratizing force, annihilator of tyrants, the unifier of the people and ideas, “the new home of mind” and “beyond the border of Governments” as claimed in the A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. The Internet sets itself apart from all communication technology that precedes it, in one crucial way — instead of being a unilateral mode of mass communication like the radio or television where most of the users are reduced only to the role of a viewer in the power dynamic, the Internet provides space for most of its users to actively become a part of its world and shape it. Thus, through platforms like Twitter, Facebook and even TikTok, many communities which have historically been kept away from participating in the public sphere formed through these mass communication technologies, are now increasingly empowered to participate in it. Are we witnessing an unprecedented level of democratization of the public sphere, thanks to the Jio and social media revolution? Is it as democratic as it seems? What does it mean for the future of our political discourse? While it is impossible to ignore the revolution in the public sphere brought in by the Internet, the democratic nature of it is probably not as substantive as it seems. It requires a significant rethinking of how we understand social media to develop more substantial democracy structures within it.
With the ‘democratization’ discussed above, come some disturbing trends. The popular avenues on the Internet are heavily polarized and filled with rage and abuse. Political threads on Twitter, inevitably devolve into abusive name-calling. The most popular political content and trends are seldom bipartisan or detailed commentaries or news, but highly evocative representations capable of accumulating loud demagogic voices around it. Research shows increasing trends of polarization in America, where the number of party affiliates having ‘very unfavourable’ views of the other party grew from 20% in 1994 to 55% in 2016. It is safe to assume by observation that India is following similar trends in recent times. Cass R. Sunstein, the co-author of Nudge Theory, outlined the effect of the Internet, its design and structure, and the resultant ‘ideological echo chambers’ that it creates as:
“The Internet makes it exceedingly easy for people to…read reams of material that support their view… [and] exclude any and all material that argues the other way… A key consequence of this kind of self–sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point.”
Popular psychologist-philosopher Scott Alexander, in his article Toxoplasma of Rage, argues that the most controversial and polarizing content usually is the most popular and engaging. He illustrates this with the examples of reactions gathered around feminist content about rape accusations, and how the use of absolute, aggressive and infalmmatory allegations ensures more engagement with a war of all-caps comments driving up the engagement and popularity, while a more responsible and restrained approach means less polarization but barely any engagement. Social media and its giants were birthed and developed in the dungeons of Silicon Valley, with its contempt for all things old and historic. Therefore, it failed to learn from its predecessors’ historical pitfalls and gave little thought to how instruments of mass media can become dividers rather than unifiers of the world, as hailed by technology utopians. Most of the social media platforms, by design, prefer content with more ‘engagement’ in numbers (of comments and likes), driven mainly by controversy. Additionally, with the ever-increasing heaps of content we come across, the ‘attention economy’ as described by Herbert Simon plays a more significant role now in the kind of content we engage with and how we do so. Graphic, sensationalized, and ready-to-consume opinions and content receive far more uptake than detailed accounts and multi-partisan viewpoints. These bite-sized pieces of ideological viewpoints serve well the lifestyle of low attention and high consumption, and require little critical thought from the consumer.
In addition to polarized and fractured discourse, there is also an illusion of the democratization of power. While the barriers to entry for citizens to participate in the public sphere have unmistakably decreased, the overall control of the popular discussion growingly resides within the hands of a few. The Internet started as this “lawless” frontier, free of government interference, yet its growing influence meant growing investment and interest by the forces of the market and the state to control it actively. Now, most of the political activity on the Internet tends to concentrate around certain nodes of popular personalities, media houses, and social media campaigns, and is fuelled by their social media ‘armies’. Big media corporations, popular leaders of the state, and controversial celebrities and commentators dictate a large chunk of the topics of debate. The echo chambers formed by them and their followers often employ the effective trick of pitting the best version of our and us against the worst of their and them, which form the basis of our misbelief that we have a comprehensive understanding of the debate at hand, and our opinions are well-formed. Thus, while one may believe that one’s online activity is independently conducted, it is usually an illusion.
Therefore, the democratic nature of the online discourse is in looming danger. However, this piece is neither an attempt to criticize the Internet or its place in contemporary politics. It is not implied that the Internet is the sole or even the most direct reason in the rotting of our political discourse. However, it is growingly becoming the facilitator for the forces driving this downfall of democratic discourse. Therefore , this is instead, a call to consider major institutional changes to reclaim its power in enabling global exchange of ideas in a democratic fashion. These changes are neither superficial nor straightforward. For example, a recent study debunked the belief that engaging with content about opposing political viewpoints might lead to decreased polarization. It, in fact, found to have increased it in most demographics. The need, thus, is for more thoughtful changes. Cool-off periods between commenting, quizzing before sharing, limitations on sharing, strong institutional checks and balances against inflammatory content, timeline ‘rest’ and discarding ‘infinite scroll’, are some examples of design-level interventions which might seem too preposterous or disruptive, but they seem so only because of how pervasive the current models of social media platforms have become in our everyday lives.
Patricia Roberts-Miller in her book Democracy and Demagoguery suggests the primary way to tackle demagoguery is reducing the profitability of demagoguery (115). For this context then, it would require a ‘netizens’-led movement to understand this problem and undo the mistakes of the past, by rethinking ‘social media’ and forcing institutional changes on the part of its biggest forces and media houses, through actively boycotting and shaming them. Movements from within the valley have risen up, like the Centre for Humane Technology, however their success remains limited. Movements like such, are important for awareness and adding to the public domain of what we know about the issues and the intent behind them. However, the leaderless nature of an Internet movement, is the precise thing that adds to its power, with unfettered growth, and lack of explicit nodes or targets for the corporate giants to fight against. The next big global political revolution, hence, should not only be conducted on the streets of the Internet, but also about the streets themselves.
Read Mental Health: It’s okay to not be okay by Akhil Bharampuram
Works Cited:
Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 February 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.
Pew Research (2016), Partisanship and political animosity in 2016, Research report, Pew Research Center.
Sunstein, C R (2007), “Sunstein on the internet and political polarization”. University of Chicago Law School, www.law.uchicago.edu/news/sunstein-internet-and-political-polarization.
Alexander, Scott. “The Toxoplasma Of Rage.” Slate Star Codex, 11 Oct. 2018, slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/.
Simon (1971). “DESIGNING ORGANIZATIONS FOR AN INFORMATION-RICH WORLD”. digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu. Retrieved 2018–12–14.
Lepore, Jill. “The Hacking of America.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/sunday-review/politics-disruption-media-technology.html.
Case, Amber. “The Problems with Facebook Are Inherent in Its Design, but That Can Change.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 16 Apr. 2018, www.techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/the-problems-with-facebook-are-inherent-in-its-design-but-that-can-change/
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Demagoguery and Democracy. The Experiment, 2017.
Bail, Christopher A., et al. “Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 37, 2018, pp. 9216–9221., doi:10.1073/pnas.1804840115.
Author’s Bio:
Abhishek Gupta is a part-time procrastinator and a full-time curious being. He loves food, video games, movies and sports. He likes to quiz, cook and dance like nobody’s watching. Above all, he loves a good laugh, especially when he is the one cracking the jokes. He lives to help build an inclusive and peaceful future, and hopes that people would learn to step into others’ shoes. He is currently pursuing his Masters in Sociology and Anthropology from Ashoka University.
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