The NY Public Library Manhattan main branch, inside Planet Minecraft

On Monday night, I participated in a class session of Technology, Media & Democracy, a partnership of five academic institutions in New York City, co-taught by

, combining two classes he runs at NYU and Cornell Tech, at The New School, at CUNY Queens College, and Emily Bell at Columbia Journalism. Alongside me as speakers were Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation and Eli Pariser of New_ Public.

Rushkoff sent us some questions in advance, which got me thinking. In essence, he asked us to consider the challenges facing democracy today, to weigh how much tech has contributed to those challenges (as opposed to simply reflecting the complexities and crises already present in society), and to offer thoughts on how to strengthen the public sphere and knowledge-building institutions going forward. In particular, since the students taking this course are all considering careers in civic tech, he asked, “We had 10+ years of designing better ‘public tech’ and public spheres, from Planetary to gobo.social to Diaspora to consider.it. Yet, we have not seen anything break through apart from Wikipedia — is that the case, what might be the key challenge, and are you still optimistic? What promising emerging platforms are you seeing? So much of our discussions are trimming around the edges, but how can we drill down to a core animating issue? Do we have to design for inequality and anti-grift? Do we need to design the internet for the real world, not the techno-utopian vision?”

In other words, can tech help strengthen civil society now? Here’s what I jotted down in response.

For starters, I think we need to recognize what moment in the technological cycle we are living in. In The Master Switch, Tim Wu describes how each major innovation in the technology of communication has first disrupted the previous information empire, and then a new empire has consolidated itself. From the invention of the telegraph, radio, television, and now the internet, there’s a recurrent pattern: A newer, more powerful, and cheaper means of communicating gets invented; the means of communication temporarily spread into many more hands; and then capital consolidates and reconcentrates the system. We’re in the middle of the last part of that triptych now, with giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, Comcast and Verizon dominating and making it quite difficult for any insurgent project to connect at scale.

If Jimmy Wales tried to launch Wikipedia today, it would fail. That isn’t because the “cognitive surplus” that writers like Yochai Benkler and Clay Shirky so eloquently described a decade ago has disappeared. Until the open Internet, the idea of an open online encyclopedia that anyone could edit was an impossibility. In 2010, Shirky estimated that it took about 100 million hours of human attention to build Wikipedia, a mere fraction of the 200 billion hours of TV Americans watched that year. If we shifted just five percent of our attention toward collaborative efforts, we could build 100 more Wikipedia-scale projects, he argued.

We’ve absolutely seen an expansion of people connecting and collaborating with each other since the internet became ubiquitous. But most of that activity has been captured by the monetizing processes of surveillance capitalism. In January 2001, when Wales and his partner Larry Sanger launched the online encyclopedia that anyone could edit, the web was tiny, with fewer than 30 million websites. Today there are around two billion, and that’s not counting the billions of individual pages that users have on the big platforms. No one would notice a public-spirited project like Wikipedia if it were starting now.

What changed between the launch of Wikipedia and today is a handful of empire-builders like Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman and Jeff Bezos figured out how to capture the bulk of that social energy on their platforms (respectively, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Amazon), while a laissez-faire libertarian way of thinking dominated government’s approach to regulating the new digital economy. Don’t forget, it was neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore who privatized the early Internet, and then the neoliberal Barack Obama who lionized the rising tech moguls of Google and Facebook while he was in power. So while there is a cognitive surplus to be channeled towards creating civic goods, most of it currently being farmed on the big tech <strike>plantations</strike> platforms.

But people who want to use tech to strengthen civil society have another problem. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person reports having about five and a half hours of leisure per day. Three-quarters of that time is spent watching TV or on a computer. Americans spend just about nine minutes, averaged across all of us, in civic or volunteer activity. Eitan Hersh surveyed Americans in 2018 and found that most daily news consumers report belonging to zero organizations. In his terrific book, Politics is for Power, he wrote, “Sixty-five percent report that in the last year they have done no work with other people to solve a community problem. Sixty-eight percent say they have attended zero meetings in the last year about a community issue.” Keep in mind that most people tell pollsters they are more active than they actually are.

Worst of all, people think that consuming news and sharing on social media equals being politically active. One-third of all Americans say they spend two hours a day on politics, Hersh found in that 2018 survey. But 80 percent of those people report that time is spent spectating, consuming news and social media, and sharing content with others. Hersh calls those people “political hobbyists” and he damns them, pungently. People who sign petitions online do so as a form of “self-gratification,” he writes. “We click and post and share not to take a civic action … [but] to convey an image to our social networks and ourselves.”

This is all because the winners of the game of platform consolidation solved for what would most quickly allow them to colonize our attention, not what would be best for their users’ health or the health of the larger society. And they did that because under our current system of financialized capitalism, the rewards go to the fastest exploiters. So, to sum up, I don’t think we now need to redesign the Internet, I think we need to change the real world. Which means first, strengthening laws, structures and organizations that aggregate people power and weakening those that aggregate the power of capital.

Can we do that? Sure! Right now there is legislation moving forward in Congress that would begin to rein in the monopolistic powers of Big Tech and start to make room for fresh competition. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992/H.R.3816) would stop dominant Big Tech platforms from anticompetitive discrimination, self-preferencing, and excluding competitors to protect their monopolies and leverage them into other lines of business. And the Open App Markets Act (S.2710/H.R.7030) would prevent the big app stores from using their gatekeeping power to require app developers to use a specific in-app payment system or from unfairly promoting their own apps above those of competing app developers.

These are just a start. We need to open up more choices for consumers to access affordable high-speed broadband. And we also need to restore the conditions that made the open internet such a generative place, by requiring “adversarial interoperability” between big platforms, which would allow users to move from one service to another without losing their data (or their friends). If you can switch phone carriers without losing your ability to call your Mom, why can’t you do that with your social network?

Breaking up the big tech monopolies in these ways would allow for a lot of the social energy now being farmed inside their walled gardens to move more freely, but a generation of bad habits formed around “going viral” and getting endorphin hits from “likes” won’t change overnight. Our civic muscles have been badly deformed by a generation of Big Tech dominance, and right now we are much better at clustering with the people we already agree with and shouting at the people we disagree with than finding consensus. On top of that, I could write a whole other essay about the relationship between “cheap” fossil fuel energy, rare minerals, and the ways we take ubiquitous smartphone connectivity for granted. If we’re going to find our way toward a healthier role for tech in civic life, we’re going to also have to figure out how use it sustainably. Two generations ago, there was a whole movement around the concept of “appropriate technology.” Perhaps it’s time for a fresh look.