I think that Jill Lepore, pictured above, is probably my favorite living historian (she is a lawyer, too). Lepore teaches at Harvard University, and at the Harvard Law School, and if you are not familiar with her work, I hope you will track down her books and get acquainted. Lepore's writings are well-researched, and deeply thought out, but they are not either "legalistic" or "academic" in their tone or presentation. I count that as a positive, myself!
Recently, Lepore published an article as a "Critic At Large" in the November 11, 2024, edition of The New Yorker. Her article was titled, "The Artificial State." Nonsubscribers may or may not be able to access the article by clicking that link. It is an important article, and I hope that those reading this blog posting will be able to read it in its entirety. Suspecting that this might not be possible for many, I have excerpted enough of the article, immediately below, to give you the main idea (emphasis added):
Since the nineteen-sixties, much of American public life has become automated, driven by computers and predictive algorithms that can do the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents, and even crafting policy. In that same stretch of time, the proportion of Americans who say that they trust the U.S. government to do what is right most of the time has fallen from nearly eighty per cent to about twenty per cent. Automated politics, it would seem, makes for very bad government, helping produce an electorate that is alienated, polarized, and mistrustful, and elected officials who are paralyzed by their ability to calculate, in advance, the likely consequences of their actions, down to the last lost primary or donated dollar.
Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign was vastly influenced by the data-driven ad tester Future Forward, the biggest PAC in the United States. Donald Trump, for all his piffle about his indifference to data, is as much a creature of automated politics as anyone. The man doesn’t stay on message, but his campaign does. The 2016 Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, which exploited the data of up to eighty-seven million Facebook users to create targeted messaging. “I pretty much used Facebook to get Trump elected in 2016,” a Trump campaign adviser, Brad Parscale, boasted. This year, the R.N.C. is working with Parscale’s A.I. company, Campaign Nucleus. And although the Trump campaign insists that it “does not engage in or utilize A.I.,” it does use “a set of proprietary algorithmic tools.” ...
These days, Americans are worried not only about this election but about this democracy and its future. In September, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, released “The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America,” billed as the Federalist Papers for the twenty-first century. Most of the essays, chiefly written by tech executives and academics, advance the theory that the automation of politics through artificial intelligence could save American democracy. Critics take a rather different view. In the book “Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life,” the political economist Scott Timcke, using Marxism to look at Muskism, argues that “datafication”—converting “human practices into computational artefacts”—promotes neoliberalism, automates inequality, and decreases freedom.
The artificial state is not a shadow government. It’s not a conspiracy. There’s nothing secret about it. The artificial state is a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement. An entire generation of Americans can no longer imagine any other system and, wisely, have very little faith in this one. (According to a Harvard poll from 2021, more than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe that American democracy either is “in trouble” or has already “failed.”) Within the artificial state, nearly every element of American democratic life—civil society, representative government, a free press, free expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion. In lieu of decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with machines—drones in the place of the demos.
In talking about "The Artificial State," Lepore is really telling us how normal, person-to-person conversations and discussions have been replaced by one-way, algorithmic communications that take place on platforms that are owned by and serve the interests of gigantic, private corporations. Tip O'Neill, long time Speaker of the House of Representatives, was famously known to say, "all politics is local." Not now, says Lepore. Not in the "Artificial State."
My diagram of how government works goes this way:
"Politics > Law > Government."
In other words, we are "a government of laws," but the laws that define and determine what the government does are not like the laws of physics. The laws that establish and implement our "government" are the product of our politics.
If you agree with Lepore's analysis, and if you give credit to that diagram of mine, then it is clear why we all need to get much more personally involved in politics. We absolutely must insist upon our personal and direct participation. We need to practice politics in "real life," through contact with real people, and not by way of TikTok, or "X," or any other online media.
I don't think there is a shortcut. If we want a politics and government that works for us, instead for the giant corporations that own and operate those online platforms; if we want a politics that inspires confidence, rather than the opposite, and a politics that can pull us together effectively to address the incredibly difficult problems we face, then "artificial" substitutes won't work. Instead, we are going to have to get involved in politics ourselves. Of course, that is only a requirement long as we want "self government," not manipulation by hidden forces beyond our individual control.
And... I do want that! I hope you do, too.
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