Concrete Achievements

Blog

  • Don’t call me stupid!

    Geoff Mulgan proposes sensible solutions to the problem of organised disinformation in his recent blog post, but the “collective stupidity” framing is self-sabotaging.

    Someone else who doesn’t like being called stupid. (Kevin Kline and John Cleese in “A Fish Called Wanda”

    The article, “Collective Stupidity is a Security Threat” recommends taking greater action to build collective defences against “cognitive warfare” – a combination of epistemic risk and disinformation, both on technical and social fronts.

    As well as better regulation of AI and of social media information flows, he proposes a strategy of “cognitive rearmament” including by giving people the skills to recognise fake information and manipulation. Finally, he argues that we need new information and social institutions to support truth, and new laws to preserve it.

    I agree with pretty much every word of this, but I am less convinced, indeed a bit repelled, by the overall framing of “collective stupidity”, which appears also to be the framing of his forthcoming book.

    As a democrat, I don’t think that people are stupid, still less stupider than they were, they are just people, and you need to work with them as they are.

    Geoff proposes various reasons for thinking that people in democracies have become more stupid. I’m not convinced. Declining PISA scores are certainly a concern, though it’s not simple to link them to intelligence, and IQ scores are little better than phrenology as a metric of intelligence.

    Most of all, I know myself. I know how (outside my own specialisms in politics and democracy) I am no better informed than the person in the street.

    Perhaps – perhaps – I have a slightly better-attuned bullshit detector from having worked so long on policy – but then I find myself swallowing a plausible news story that’s debunked hours later. Everyone is susceptible to the temptation of a good story that aligns with our preferences.

    But even if people were more stupid than they used to be, on some measure we could devise, it’s poor strategy to make the argument in these terms.

    The piece argues, rightly, that huge resources are being put into cognitive warfare – making people believe untrue things and act on those beliefs. Those come from motivated actors, whether from political or commercial motives.

    Calling the targets of that activity “stupid” has a sour taste of victim-blaming. If we were in a shooting war, rather than a cognitive war, would anyone other than Donald Trump call the fallen soldiers “weak”?

    Perhaps this seems like a minor point, even hypersensitive, but there are practical consequenes.

    A “collective stupidity” approach reduces the range of possible solutions, by assuming that the people themselves have no stones to bring to the wall.

    The corollary of collective stupidity is technocracy and paternalism – both of which are wide open to corruption by big money and big information.

    Instead, we need to bring people together, to act collectively – not against disinformation in those terms, but in favour of truth, democracy and collective purpose.

    In doing that, government action is important, but it cannot work on its own. The trust of the 1990s has gone, and it’s not going to come back if institutions still work in a top-down Whitehall-knows-best way.

    Only organised people can stand up to organised money. The cognitive war is hard enough to win as it is – let’s not create frames that see the public as our enemies not our allies.

  • Reading: The Nerd Reich

    Finished Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, which is a history of the last twenty years or so in Silicon Valley, and how the PayPal Mafia and other technologists turned against governments and liberalism.

    I am perhaps closer to democratic decay conversations that the average reader, but there wasn’t much in here I didn’t know in one form or another, stitched together into a multi-year story of how Peter Thiel and the people around him reached the positions of wealth and power that they have today.

    The title will tell you this isn’t a fawning biography, Durán – a journalist and political adviser to a number of Democrats – is rightly angry and concerned about what is being done to American democracy.

    However, where the book didn’t land for me is the absence of the rest of the world. Not just in the usual American sense of no other country really being given any attention, but Durán’s hyperfocus on two dozen ultra-rich connected individuals who are driving this movement.

    For a political operative, in particular, it was odd to see nothing – even in the final chapter – that considered why or how these people had built what political following they had; where the fractures might be within the network or – more important – between these billionaires and the wider Trump/MAGA/Techbro movement.

    In particular, the last chapter, looking at the future, seemed to be very light on solutions other than “stop having billionaires”. Where were the mobilisation strategies? What are the political messages that need to be used? How can communities come together?

    A Great Villain theory of history is not so very different from a Great Man theory of history – both over-emphasise the individual, the personal relationships, and the historical destiny of the people involved. Both make contingency and chance seem like divine ordinance.

    If you believe that World Historical Figures exist, perhaps Thiel is one – one for the age of post-democratic technology. What comes across in the book, though, is how far he is from bringing a Fichtian synthesis to contending visions of the world. Rather, he is someone who is driven only by one dark, semi-apocalyptic vision, “made darker still by the lights of a perverted science”, as Churchill said.

    Thiel’s politics and the companies he invested in influence billions of people every day, but those billions of people – at least, those in democratic countries – can push back and cut them down to size. That they have not yet does not mean they cannot, or that they never will.

    Unfortunately the Nerd Reich doesn’t give us many clues on what we need to do to make that happen.

  • Democracy and liberalism are companions not enemies

    Tongdong Bai has an article on the Institute of Art and Ideas Blog arguing that democracy threatens the rule of law and hence liberalism, and that it would be better to have less democracy and more enlighten rule from those who understand policy.

    Liberty Leading the People (painting of the 1830 revolution in France)
    Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by Eugène Delacroix, representing the liberal revolution of 1830 that brought down Charles X and the restored Bourbons in favour of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe.

    The article makes several significant errors.

    The first is to conflate democracy with populism and majoritarianism.

    While at its crudest definition, “rule of the people” could be read as “rule of whatever 50%+1 of the people want”, this is not how most democracies work, nor is it the direction of travel for democratic reformers.

    The majoritarian thinking that Bai criticises in democracy, as well as the decline of liberalism of which he complains are the fault of authoritarians, not democrats.

    Actually existing democracy is liberal – those who are fighting against it are seeking to use the language but not the idea of democracy to overthrow it.

    This is evident by looking at who is using which tools.

    Plebiscites and referendums have been used cynically by the authoritarian right, as in Hungary, and opportunistically by some mainstream politicians, as in Britain. By contrast, there are no significant political movements or parties that call for politics-by-referendum from genuine democratic motives. Where referendums are called for, it is by authoritarians seeking to remove the rights of poor or non-native minorities, not by those supportive of the democratic process.

    The same goes for the idea that populism is overwhelming liberal democracy with ideas of radical democracy. While populism is based on appeals to the true people (as opposed to the corrupt elite), the identity of the so-called élite – students, school teachers, doctors, poor immigrants, human rights campaigners – shows that this is not a movement interested in securing the will of the people, but in disguising their own political motives and self-interest as democracy, scorning and downplaying the majority of the demos.

    Those of us who work and argue for democratic innovation push in a totally different direction. We seek to bring more citizen voice into politics within liberal frameworks, seeing participation, rights and representation as mutually complementary.

    Even the minority who argue to replace elections with deliberative citizen assemblies are not arguing for the untrammeled will of the majority – in fact, they seek to disenfranchise the vast majority of voters in favour of a technocracy guided by deliberative groups.

    The second mistake in the piece is to argue that democracy drives what the author calls “hyper-individualism”. How can democracy be individualist when it creates so many political parties, political movements, campaign groups, trade unions – of the independent sort, unlike those in China?

    Indeed, market liberalism is far more individualist than democracy, in which majorities need to be assembled to achieve anything.

    The failure of campaigners who promise cheques to voters (as Trump is doing now) demonstrate that people’s votes are not cast on pure self-interest, but on a vision of society and a better life that is about their identity as citizens, not the personal self-interest that governs their lives as consumers (hat tip to Jon Alexander here).

    The third, and worst, mistake is to assume that less democracy means better decision making.

    The author writes:

    [Democracy] builds upon an unrealistic premise that voters are rational about their self-interests, a premise that is considered a myth by many economists and political scientists. It is unrealistic because almost all modern states are far too large for non-experts to understand state-level affairs, and the majority of people, who are so busy working, do not have time to understand them. By de facto limiting the voice of the people, the Confucian mixed regime may address this.

    This suggests that the “mixed regime” he proposes, where the state is for the people but not by the people, would produce better social outcomes, because it would have wise leaders who could take long-term decisions in the public interest.

    This is naïve to say the least. The idea that a race of philosopher kings can be found who will rule wisely and without self-interest, without entrenching their power and without oppressing those who stand up to them is disproved by five thousand years of human history, in which not one such state has arisen.

    Moreover, we are fortunate to have before our eyes an example of what a wise, far-sighted regime can produce when it takes long-term decisions without democratic oversight: the one-child policy in China, which was as brutal and cruel in its execution as it has been disastrous in its consequences.

    This was not a deliberately cruel decision. It was undertaken by state officials without democratic oversight or any fear of the people’s displeasure making a terrible decision. Without routes to redress, a few abused women and cracked heads were the price the people would just have to pay for the benefits of their enlightened rule.

    No one would argue that democracies never take bad or short-sighted decisions – the summer we have just gone through in Europe proves that well enough – but democracy is a far better guarantee of liberalism than enlightened bureaucracy could ever be.

  • Reading: Why is AfD strong in eastern Germany?

    This 2020 article in PQ by Manes Weisskircher reviews the research on why the far right is strong in eastern Germany.

    The answer is multi-faceted. There is the reality of economic decline, particularly for those of working age since the welfare state gives people past retirement age an income on which they can live easily -worth noting that in the Saxony-Anhalt results yesterday, the older voter cohorts, past retirement age, were more likely to vote CDU than AfD, despite the CDU’s terrible showing in the region.

    There is also a sense of being looked down upon, particularly by AfD voters – the idea that the western Germans don’t think that they are worth helping.

    Immigration narratives (rather than immigration realities) also play their part, as does the flight of younger people away from areas where they see no prospect of work

    What does it mean for democracy?

    First, that economic well-being matters but so does the sense of being an equal citizen, not a burden on the state. Restarting economic growth in eastern German towns may not be something that can be done with a wave of the hand, but understanding how they need support as the economy continues to transition is part of it. Also, the solidarity between East and West is under pressure in Germany – in a time of fiscal problems for the country as a whole, what can be done to reinforce that as a collective right not a burden on the wessis?

    Second, social and democratic cohesion (or re-integration, in the term the article uses) is essential. That has to start at local level is needed to give voice to local communities and to stand against disinformation-driven radicalisation. Jochen Wegner in Die Zeit calls for this sort of democratic mobilisation, but it can’t come just from Berlin and the media sphere, it has to be built locally.

    Third, the defences at national level against the far-right also need to be stronger. This isn’t just about maintaining the firewall against engaging with the AfD, but also finding means to counter the huge PR boost they acknowledge they are getting from far-right foreign forces, whether Muskite or Putinite.

  • Reading: Does being lonely make people more likely to vote far-right?

    Paper from Anna-Sophie Heinze and Marcel Lewandowsky analysed the last German federal elections.

    Loneliness (self-reported feelings of being left out, isolated or lacking companionship) are not correlated with populist attitudes, or with far-right voting, at least in this study.

    Instead, loneliness correlated with withdrawal from the political process.

    This suggests that initiatives that combat loneliness and bring excluded people back in to social circles may not directly reduce the numbers voting for far right parties far right voting, but instead increase overall turnout (which itself might have a diluting effect, depending on how lonely new-voters break down).

  • AI’s Rawlsian moment

    I posted yesterday about AI and taxation and I’ve been thinking further about AI’s societal impact, as well as reading the scenarios produced by the Windfall Trust.

    That helped me realise that we are at an unusually powerful moment for well-designed citizen participation work to have impact on the future of AI and democracy.

    Looking at Windfall’s scenarios, it is clear that no one knows quite where are going to end up. Unlike climate change – serious, slow, clear direction of travel – the AI transformation is moving quickly but its long-term results are still uncertain.

    Speciflcally, we don’t know for sure who the ultimate winners will be.

    Will OpenAI and Anthropic corner the market in advanced models, or will open weight and open source solutions destroy their business model with good-enough alternatives?

    Will businesses profit massively from firing junior staff and automating coding and documentation processes, or will they need to hire more people to manage the hugely increased flow of AI-generated documentation?

    Will workers find themselves commoditised, sidelined or unemployed, or will the new threat to jobs re-energise trade union and worker movements to ensure labour increases its share of GDP?

    That uncertainty is what makes the moment powerful. The future coalitions have not yet formed, people and organisations have not entrenched their positions – we know that things will change, but we don’t know how they will change.

    So we are in a Rawlsian moment. John Rawls proposed a philosophical approach to justice called “the original position” – what sort of society would you design if you were behind a “veil of ignorance” and didn’t know what position in society you would end up in?

    That’s where we are, and it’s where Sam Altman is, along with every worker or community that might see disruption from AI. So now is the time to create the conversation about what that future might look like, and build the structures of resilience that make it more likely to come about.

    As a democracy guy, I’m interested in how the economic and social changes AI will bring about will flow through into politics and democracy – whether through the loud voices of very rich people, or the collective voices of community.

    Many of us working on democratic innovation are focused on using AI for participation events, or are concerned about bad information spread by AI. Others, including my colleagues at Democratic Society, are working on how to create good governance arrangements for AI use.

    In this Rawlsian moment, though, we have an opportunity to think about what desirable post-AI futures might look like, and what investment we need in democratic and information infrastructures now – before the real social and economic impact hits, and when positions have not yet completely hardened.

    There are lessons to be learned from another equally disruptive but slower-moving process – climate change. In my next post, I’ll think about how citizen participation in just transition thinking can and cannot be a model for shaping a democratic future after the AI transition.

  • No AI UBI without AI taxation

    Stephen Bush has a good piece in today’s FT, pointing out that the state pension is a form of live test of a UBI, a universal basic income. Pensioners don’t just sit around and do nothing, for the most part. Some continue to work, some do local volunteering, some travel.

    It’s an important issue, he points out, because a UBI is one of the solutions for a world where AI and advanced robotics have destroyed an enormous number of jobs, without replacing many of them.

    It’s worth a read, and it makes a convincing case, but the issue that isn’t mentioned, which jumped out at me, is – where does the money come from for paying the “AI state pension”?

    If the companies making the money are – as they probably will be – mostly digital and mostly non-European, how are we going to tax the profits that they are making in ways that will give the State revenue? It’s hard enough as it is, when there are buildings full of office workers in Luxembourg and Cork, all beavering away in an undertaxed paradise.

    I don’t have an answer, but taxing AI-driven profits is one of the social and economic questions that we need to address as AI has an increasing impact on jobs and society. If we don’t, we will end up pressuring smaller businesses that have no choice but to stay local, or imposing regressive taxes on consumption.

    If anyone has seen any interesting research on this, I’d be glad to see it.

  • Reading: Tyranny of the Minority (Levitsky & Zitblatt)

    A US-focused book but seeking to draw lessons from Europe and elsewhere on how to reverse what the authors see as the structural and constitutional bias towards minority government in the US.

    The minoritarian institutions that they discuss are the Senate (equal representation overrepresents small states), the Supreme Court (appointed by often-minoritarian Presidents and confirmed by Senates that are usually not representing majorities), and the House of Representatives (seats being gerrymandered).

    European constitutional flexibility is praised, with examples from Norway to Belgium, but the structures of the EU which risk repeating the mistakes of the US Constitution (particuarly in its inability to undertake constitutional reform) go unmentioned.

    For policy makers:

    • A 15-point plan for anti-minoritarian reform, useful in the US context but not so relevant for Europe.
    • The need to maintain constitutional certainty and flexibility in balance.
    • The need to protect the rule of law.

    For citizens:

    There is reference to movements for democracy alongside the existing civil liberties etc associations, but these are not as focused on constitutional change – the challenge as ever is how do you get the parties who are self-interested to change their prioritisation to handle constitutional reform.

  • Reading: United Cities of Europe

    Reading: Eric Corijn’s “De Verenigde Steden van Europa : ter verdediging van de democratie” (The United Cities of Europe to the rescue of democracy).

    Overall, an argument that I like. Cities are spaces where national stories are quieter and local needs predominate. They are more multicultural than the average of the countries they are situated in. In an era where nationalism and division is rising again, cities can be the foundation of an effort to bring people and cultures together, and create a post-national democracy.

    In Europe, specifically, there is an opportunity to create Europe from the cities, and do that founded on local democracy and democratic innovation, rather than getting stuck at the level of member states and their internal politics.

    Brussels, in particular, is pointed out as the potential archetype, a city that is already hyperdiverse and needs to overcome the history of Belgian communitarianism (also written into its electoral system) to truly establish itself as the capital of Europe. This is something I’ve thought myself in the past, but the connection between Brussels, Belgium and Europe is more complex than that – something that needs more reflection.

    The big missing point in Corijn’s argument is the rural areas. A large share of Europeans live in cities, but many live in rural or periurban areas which are not properly connected into the urban core. Take, for example, the statement of the mayor of Grimbergen, by any measure part of the Brussels economic area but just across the border in Vlaams-Brabant. When the plans for a tram from Grimbergen into central Brussels were cancelled, she celebrated, saying “it’s all very well to be able to get into Brussels easily but what will come out”. That “oil stain” effect of Brussels diversity into the surrounding suburbs and countryside is a significant point of resistance, and of nationalism. We need an approach to saving democracy that does not treat those areas as afterthoughts.

  • Democratic backsliders don’t talk about it

    Reading: How backsliding government parties defend democratic backsliding in the European Parliament, Thomas Winzen (https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165261463883.

    (Note: these are my thoughts and comments, not the paper author’s words)

    Parties in the European Parliament that support backsliding on democracy – those who don’t support democracy, in other words – don’t talk about it. In fact, they rarely refer to their own illiberalism. They point at others, they complain about unfair treatment, and they don’t even mention their own illiberalism.

    There are two risks. The first is that the illiberal parties drive a ‘plague on both your houses’ nihilism, that helps them and discourages citizens from taking action to defend liberal values. The second is that if parties are staying quiet about their own illiberal plans, politics within the EU may not allow for sanctions aimed at supporting the rule of law (as applied to Hungary) – or if they are applied, they will arrive too late or not at all.

    The flip side is that the parties themselves seem to realise that an outright claim of illberalism (as in Orbán’s illiberal democracy) is a bad strategy for them – though the author points out this may be more about maximising their chances

    What can citizens do? Watch for what these parties do not what they say; stay aware of how illiberal actions can be cloaked under accusations

    How should we change the state? A clear and independent protection mechanism for rights and the rule of law is essential – ideally one that can operate more quickly than the ECJ. Something like an OLAF for the Rule of Law, an independent office specifically designed to identify early breaches of rule of law and European values.