people “clinging to guns and religion” to donors in San Francisco was reported by the
The downside of this fragmentation, as Obama has learned, is that it is harder to lead. Acting different with different political constituencies isn’t new—in fact, it’s probably about as old as politics itself. But the overlap— content that remains constant between all of those constituencies—is shrinking dramatically. You can stand for lots of different kinds of people or stand for something, but doing both is harder every day.
Personalization is both a cause and an effect of the brand fragmentation process. The filter bubble wouldn’t be so appealing if it didn’t play to our postmaterial desire to maximize self-expression. But once we’re in it, the process of matching who we are to content streams can lead to the erosion of common experience, and it can stretch political leadership to the breaking point.
Discourse and Democracy
The good news about postmaterial politics is that as countries become wealthier, they’ll likely become more tolerant, and their citizens will be more self-expressive. But there’s a dark side to it too. Ted Nordhaus, a student of Inglehart’s who focuses on postmaterialism in the environmental movement, told me that “the shadow that comes with postmaterialism is profound self-involvement…. We lose all perspective on the collective endeavors that have made the extraordinary lives we live possible.” In a postmaterial world where your highest task is to express yourself, the public infrastructure that supports this kind of expression falls out of the picture. But while we can lose sight of our shared problems, they don’t lose sight of us.
A few times a year when I was growing up, the nine-hundred-person hamlet of Lincolnville, Maine, held a town meeting. This was my first impression of democracy: A few hundred residents crammed into the grade school auditorium or basement to discuss school additions, speed limits, zoning regulations, and hunting ordinances. In the aisle between the rows of gray metal folding chairs was a microphone on a stand, where people would line up to say their piece.
It was hardly a perfect system: Some speakers droned on; others were shouted down. But it gave all of us a sense of the kinds of people that made up our community that we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. If the discussion was about encouraging more businesses along the coast, you’d hear from the wealthy summer vacationers who enjoyed their peace and quiet, the back-to-the-land hippies with antidevelopment sentiments, and the families who’d lived in rural poverty for generations and saw the influx as a way up and out. The conversation went back and forth, sometimes closing toward consensus, sometimes fragmenting into debate, but usually resulting in a decision about what to do next.
I always liked how those town meetings worked. But it wasn’t until I read
Born to Hungarian and Lithuanian Jewish furniture store owners in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, David Bohm came from humble roots. But when he arrived at the University of California–Berkeley, he quickly fell in with a small group of theoretical physicists, under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, who were racing to build the atomic bomb. By the time he died at seventy-two in October 1992, many of his colleagues would remember Bohm as one of the great physicists of the twentieth century.
But if quantum math was his vocation, there was another matter that took up much of Bohm’s time. Bohm was preoccupied with the problems created by advanced civilization, especially the possibility of nuclear war. “Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction,” he wrote. “What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought.” For Bohm, the solution became clear: It was dialogue. In 1992, one of his definitive texts on the subject was published.
To communicate, Bohm wrote, literally means to make something common. And while sometimes this process of making common involves simply sharing a piece of data with a group, more often it involves the group’s coming together to create a new, common meaning. “In dialogue,” he writes, “people are participants in a pool of common meaning.”
Bohm wasn’t the first theorist to see the democratic potential of dialogue. Jurgen Habermas, the dean of media theory for much of the twentieth century, had a similar view. For both, dialogue was special because it provided a way for a group of people to democratically create their culture and to calibrate their ideas in the world. In a way, you couldn’t have a functioning democracy without it.
Bohm saw an additional reason why dialogue was useful: It provided people with a way of getting a sense of the whole shape of a complex system, even the parts that they didn’t directly participate in. Our tendency, Bohm says, is to rip apart and fragment ideas and conversations into bits that have no relation to the whole. He used the example of a watch that has been shattered: Unlike the parts that made up the watch previously, the pieces have no relation to the watch as a whole. They’re just little bits of glass and metal.
It’s this quality that made the Lincolnville town meetings something special. Even if the group couldn’t always agree on where to go, the process helped to develop a shared map for the terrain. The parts understood our relationship to the whole. And that, in turn, makes democratic governance possible.
The town meetings had another benefit: They equipped us to deal more handily with the problems that did emerge. In the science of social mapping, the definition of a community is a set of nodes that are densely interconnected—my friends form a community if they all don’t know just me but also have independent relationships with one another. Communication builds stronger community.
Ultimately, democracy works only if we citizens are capable of thinking beyond our narrow self-interest. But to do so, we need a shared view of the world we cohabit. We need to come into contact with other peoples’ lives and needs and desires. The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction—it creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists. And while this is great for getting people to shop online, it’s not great for getting people to make better decisions together.
“The prime difficulty” of democracy, John Dewey wrote, “is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile, and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.” In the early days of the Internet, this was one of the medium’s great hopes—that it would finally offer a medium whereby whole towns—and indeed countries—could co-create their culture through discourse. Personalization has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.
Which begs an important question: Why would the engineers who designed these systems want to build them this way?
6
Hello, World!
SOCRATES: Or again, in a ship, if a man having the power to do what he likes, has no intelligence or skill in navigation [?????? ????????????,
It’s the first fragment of code in the code book, the thing every aspiring programmer learns on day one. In the C++ programming language, it looks like this:
