The New Control Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.

In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.

To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.

What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.

Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.

On conspiracy theories of ignorance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by In “On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance”, Karl Popper identifies a kind of “epistemological optimism”—an optimism about “man’s power to discern truth and to acquire knowledge”—that has played a significant role in the history of philosophy. At the heart of this optimistic view, Popper argues, is the “doctrine that truth is manifest”:

“Truth may perhaps be veiled, and removing the veil may not be easy. But once the naked truth stands revealed before our eyes, we have the power to see it, to distinguish it from falsehood, and to know that it is truth.”

According to Popper, this doctrine inspired the birth of modern science, technology, and liberalism. If the truth is manifest, there is “no need for any man to appeal to authority in matters of truth because each man carried the sources of knowledge in himself”:

“Man can know: thus he can be free. This is the formula which explains the link between epistemological optimism and the ideas of liberalism.”

Although a liberal himself, Popper argues that the doctrine of manifest truth is false. “The simple truth,” he writes, “is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again.” Moreover, he argues that the doctrine is pernicious. If we think the truth is manifest, we create “the need to explain falsehood”:

“Knowledge, the possession of truth, need not be explained. But how can we ever fall into error if truth is manifest? The answer is: through our own sinful refusal to see the manifest truth; or because our minds harbour prejudices inculcated by education and tradition, or other evil influences which have perverted our originally pure and innocent minds.”

In this way, the doctrine of manifest truth inevitably gives rise to “the conspiracy theory of ignorance”…

In previous work, I have criticised how the concept of “misinformation” is applied by researchers and policy-makers. Roughly, I think that narrow applications of the term (e.g., defined in terms of fake news) are legitimate but focus on content that is relatively rare and largely symptomatic of other problems, at least in Western democracies. In contrast, broad definitions inevitably get applied in biased and subjective ways, transforming misinformation research and policy-making into “partisan combat by another name”…(More)”

How the System Works

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Charles C. Mann: “…We, too, do not have the luxury of ignorance. Our systems serve us well for the most part. But they will need to be revamped for and by the next generation — the generation of the young people at the rehearsal dinner — to accommodate our rising population, technological progress, increasing affluence, and climate change.

The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work…(More)”.

Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ethan Singer: “More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down since Friday afternoon, a New York Times analysis has found, as federal agencies rush to heed President Trump’s orders targeting diversity initiatives and “gender ideology.”

The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories. Some government agencies appear to have removed entire sections of their websites, while others are missing only a handful of pages.

Among the pages that have been taken down:

(The links are to archived versions.)

Developing a theory of robust democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Eva Sørensen and Mark E. Warren: “While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. Three current challenges highlight the urgency of adapting and innovating liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. A democratic theory of political robustness emphasises the need to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to changes, just as it helps to frame the necessary adaptations and innovations in times such as the present…(More)”

Un-Plateauing Corruption Research?Perhaps less necessary, but more exciting than one might think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dieter Zinnbauer: “There is a sense in the anti-corruption research community that we may have reached some plateau (or less politely, hit a wall). This article argues – at least partly – against this claim.

We may have reached a plateau with regard to some recurring (staid?) scholarly and policy debates that resurface with eerie regularity, tend to suck all oxygen out of the room, yet remain essentially unsettled and irresolvable. Questions aimed at arriving closure on what constitutes corruption, passing authoritative judgements  on what works and what does not and rather grand pronouncements on whether progress has or has not been all fall into this category.

 At the same time, there is exciting work often in unexpected places outside the inner ward of the anti-corruption castle,  contributing new approaches and fresh-ish insights and there are promising leads for exciting research on the horizon. Such areas include the underappreciated idiosyncrasies of corruption in the form of inaction rather than action, the use of satellites and remote sensing techniques to better understand and measure corruption, the overlooked role of short-sellers in tackling complex forms of corporate corruption and the growing phenomena of integrity capture, the anti-corruption apparatus co-opted for sinister, corrupt purposes.

These are just four examples of the colourful opportunity tapestry for (anti)corruption research moving forward, not in form of a great unified project and overarching new idea  but as little stabs of potentiality here and  there and somewhere else surprisingly unbeknownst…(More)”

Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Observatory on Information and Democracy: “This inaugural meta-analysis provides a critical assessment of the role of information ecosystems in the Global North and Global Majority World, focusing on their relationship with information integrity (the quality of public discourse), the fairness of political processes, the protection of media freedoms, and the resilience of public institutions.

The report addresses three thematic areas with a cross-cutting theme of mis- and disinformation:

  • Media, Politics and Trust;
  • Artificial Intelligence, Information Ecosystems and Democracy;
  • and Data Governance and Democracy.

The analysis is based mainly on academic publications supplemented by reports and other materials from different disciplines and regions (1,664 citations selected among a total corpus of over +2700 resources aggregated). The report showcases what we can learn from landmark research on often intractable challenges posed by rapid changes in information and communication spaces…(More)”.

What’s a Fact, Anyway?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Fergus McIntosh: “…For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise, and transparency—the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organizations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the dispute over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavorable narratives: laws originally aimed at misinformation, many enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, can hinder free expression. The spectre of this phenomenon is fuelling a growing backlash in America and elsewhere.

Although some categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of A.I.-based editing software, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For anyone, this might manifest in scams (your grandmother calls, but it’s not Grandma on the other end), but for a journalist it also puts source calls into question. Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification—a battery of companies, for example, already promise that they can spot A.I.-manipulated imagery—but they’re often locked in an arms race, and they never achieve total accuracy. Though chatbots and A.I.-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him, “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, looks more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now. The resulting problems extend far beyond media: election campaigns, in which subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behavior, feel increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and other manipulations by inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, journalists have only just begun to grapple with the implications.

In such circumstances, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Good journalism offers a way through, but only if readers are willing to follow: trust and naïveté can feel uncomfortably close. Gaining and holding that trust is hard. But failure—the end point of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross—is not inevitable. Fact checking of the sort practiced at The New Yorker is highly specific and resource-intensive, and it’s only one potential solution. But any solution must acknowledge the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It must tell you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it…(More)”.

The Access to Public Information: A Fundamental Right

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Alejandra Soriano Diaz: “Information is not only a human-fundamental right, but it has been shaped as a pillar for the exercise of other human rights around the world. It is the path for bringing to account authorities and other powerful actors before the people, who are, for all purposes, the actual owners of public data.

Providing information about public decisions that have the potential to significantly impact a community is vital to modern democracy. This book explores the forms in which individuals and collectives are able to voice their opinions and participate in public decision-making when long-lasting effects are at stake, on present and future generations. The strong correlation between the right to access public information and the enjoyment of civil and political rights, as well as economic and environmental rights, emphasizes their interdependence.

This study raises a number of important questions to mobilize towards openness and empowerment of people’s right of ownership of their public information…(More)”.