How the Net destroyed democracy | Lawrence Lessig | TEDxBerlinSalon

[Applause] so I've spent most of my career as an apologist for the Internet and the last 10 years of my career as a critic of governments in particular of the United States government and in the background of that apology and the background of that criticism there has been a glorious group called the people never criticized by me never questioned never questioned that at the core of democracy there was a well-functioning idea called We the People if only we could speak so today I don't want to apologize for the net anymore I want to criticize it and I don't want to talk about the corruption of government I want to ignore it and I don't want to praise we the people I want to show you just how pathetic we have become we're at least how pathetic we are understood because unless we find a way to recover a reason for democracy there is no fight for democracy to be had so I want to start with two things we could call them thing one and thing two thing one I want you to think about common knowledge knowledge held by all of us and thing two I want you to think about common will so common knowledge things known generally within a people everyone knows there was a wall in Berlin everyone knows this is our president everyone knows that most Americans don't like that president these are common knowledge among Americans at least and then there's common will what we want or we believe so Gallup tells us that Americans believe the freedom in their life has contracted over the last decade tells us that the confidence in the economy has grown and just to remind you it tells us that most Americans don't like Donald Trump as our president these are the elements of common will so think one thing to seeing one things we know thing two things we want it's good to get that order right if you want things before you know you get into trouble so we know before we want thing one versus thing two now what I want you to do is to think about thing one and thing two and three different periods over the last 200 years so first the period of the 19th century very cleverly took iconic images from Berlin but I'm not talking about Berlin I want to talk about America but iconic images from the 19th century in Berlin 20th century in Berlin and the 21st century in Berlin these images to trigger recognition of different periods so let's start with the 19th century and question thing one asks how did we know in the 19th century well in the 19th century people knew or those who knew knew through technologies like this printed journals newspapers many many sources which would filter out to produce knowledge in a public fragmented and diverse there's no Broadcasting in the 19th century no real syndication at least in the United States in the 19th century to the extent there is common knowledge common knowledge it is little and thin there are certain facts everyone knows that there was a war called the Civil War who the president is but facts like whether the tariff should go up and down those are not things that ordinary people knew but if you would ask the question what did ordinary people know or what did they want the proper answer in the 19th century was who frac knows because there was no technology to know what people wanted there was no polling there were no surveys people like James Bryce had mystical theories about how politicians came to know what the people wanted but in fact it was more like a Catholic priest or this is a Methodist priest but anyway a priest telling us what God wants never really believing we know what God actually wants just the priests interpretation that's all we have and the consequence was that the will of the people was actually pretty irrelevant to most of what government does if somebody had stood up and very earnestly said what does the public want to a government official the reaction would have been sort of minion like ha ha yes sure as if that could possibly matter policymaking in the 19th century was by policy making elites so we have a 19th century knowledge fragmented what the people cared about basically unknown then the 20th century how do we know in the 20th century well the 20th century has two extraordinary technologies we need to reckon and to think about first a technology of broadcasting for the first time we have the capacity to speak to everybody at the same time and broadcasting dramatically affects news as leaders go to the radio to speak to the people for the first time and it affects culture generally far beyond issues of policy and this troubled many people in the history of culture 1906 this man John Philip Sousa went to the United States Capitol to testify against the evil technology called the talking machines Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines as he testified these talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country when I was a boy in front of every house you would in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day of the old songs today you hear these infernal machines going night and day we will not have a vocal cord left Sousa threatens the vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tale of man when he came from the apes what Sousa feared here was it a certain technology technology of broadcasting or the technology of music in record players would make a certain kind of culture kind of couch potato culture a passive receptive culture that would not engage in creation on its own but consume creation produced elsewhere and that was the fear in politics too but an extraordinary technology that the birth of the 19th 20th century nobody ever thought about radically changed that affect the television and as an extraordinary scholar from Princeton Marcus Pryor has shown us through an incredible empirical analysis of political attitudes as it relates to the technology of broadcasting technology of television changed everything not just because of the concentration one or two channels that broadcast everything and indeed there was an extraordinary concentration sir Agnew writes at least 40 million Americans every night watched the network news in 1969 according to Harris polls in other studies for millions of Americans the networks are the sole source of national and world news even in 1977 news in this sense ninety percent of people got their news from three television networks so there's an extraordinary concentration in the information people are exposed to but more than the concentration is priors demonstrates it's also a certain kind of addiction people can't turn the television off and not just in the 80s of the 90s but in the 1950s the television is turned on and just left on in the United States for those times of the day when the television is running always in the background and there's a regular pattern to the day and if part of the day everybody is watching the news and what that does by putting the news through a channel that was inherently understandable to everybody was that we had a media that conveyed the news so that ordinary as well as elite citizens understood it for the first time this wasn't speaking just to an elite in journals or newspapers that only the highbrow would consume everybody consumed it and what that did was to produce an extraordinarily egalitarian exposure to politics and in America radically changed who voted instead of just polarized extremes voting what Pryor demonstrates is that ordinary Americans who otherwise never were involved in politics turned out and voted and shifted America fundamentally towards what you would not recognize as the left but in America we think of as the left more citizens were engaged and the made in mainstream trusted sources because of course the three news channels shot right down the middle and they created characters like Walter Cronkite who conveyed a sense of trust in the public that the public followed it developed a common understanding common understanding which was thick and great a common set of facts sensible judgments shared by millions of Americans now don't get me wrong I don't mean to idolize what people believed at the time there was an obliviousness about race and obliviousness about poverty and obliviousness about issues nobody even thought about like sexual orientation there was all sorts of ways the system was biased but my point is the architecture at least made it possible for a public to understand a common set of questions and issues which they must themselves address politically it made sense a few sources concentrated everywhere okay that's the first big change in technology the second relates to thing too because then you ask what is the public's will the other thing the 20th century did was to provide a huge change as poor as important as the change of broadcasting and that change was really triggered by this extraordinary man George Gallup now Gallup of course you know is Gallup polls but Gallup began in 1936 as a figure in America because in 1936 there was an election the third time that FDR sorry second time FDR was going to be elected and when FDR ran for this his re-election by this time the elite in America was tired of this socialist I'm sorry Democratic Socialist running the country so the view of the elite was that he was going to be defeated and what literary digest did every election from Calvin Coolidge until FDR was that they would send out millions of ballots to people to ask them who they were gonna vote for and these millions of ballots would be sent back and they tallied them and they would predict who was going to win in every election until 1936 they were spot on within one or two points so they believed they had a system for polling down it just was unfortunately very expensive because you had to send out millions and millions of ballots well George Gallup looked at this he said wait a minute the views of people who owned automobiles or people who owned telephones the perfuse of the people who literary digest was reaching out to don't represent the country because they are rich people and what I think we should do is instead randomly select people from the country and go out and talk to them not millions just a couple thousand and so whereas literary digest predicted Alf Landen would beat FDR 57 percent to 42 percent when Gallup was finished he said actually I think it's going to be FDR winning by fifty four percent over Alf Landen and in fact the results were FDR beat him by 61 percent but with that defeat radical change in the tech nology of polling and George Gallup was a star and in a certain sense he was the Martin Luther of democracy right because he said we don't have to talk to the priests we can talk directly to the people we can reach directly to the people to know in a practical way what the people want and indeed James Bryce who thought that there was a mystical way that we might be able to reach the people in visions in the 19th century a final stage in the evolution of democracy would be reached if the will of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times and that's precisely what George Gallup believed he was doing and he believed he was doing it in the name of supporting democracy for myself I have no hesitation Gallup wrote in living in a country whose everyday citizens feel about major issues as the citizens of our country feel if you say let the people rule you can count me on your side now the technology was expensive so there are relatively few polls early on but through the course of the 20th centuries of rising importance making in a sense a respectable public because the public in part because of what I described as thing one was a public where we all knew we all had a common knowledge upon which to base our judgments about public policy we all judge in common and what that produced was sensible judgments that people like George Gallup could celebrate of a general public that understood and made sense so its 20th century is a century of concentrated information where the public's views known and increasingly respected okay what about the twenty-first century well first how do we know what's how do people come to know things in 21st century it's back to the future because of course broadcasting is finished in the United States the way we know things is through a billion sources not three anymore and the most important of those sources our social media sources increasingly completely uncontrolled by any form of editor Donald Trump did me the favor yesterday of tweeting a relevant tweet he wrote the fake and fraudulent news media is working hard to convince Republicans as I should not use social media but remember I won using social media now mr. Trump you didn't win because of Twitter you won because you got more votes than Europe I'm sorry forget that just forget the whole point but the point is this form of expression is many sources hugely fragmented public a diverse public which of course is a great thing for cultural issues Game of Thrones is something imaginable only in our time not in the time of the 60s or 70s when it would have to appeal to a much more mainstream audience and our friend Sousa would have loved the technology that enables this kind of diversity but though it's great for culture it's terrible for democracy because what this fragmentation means is that there's no common story no common facts radical polarization in what we know and radical polarization in what we should do and there's no better proof of this than this man you probably live in circles like I do where people cannot understand how he's not being called out by the umpires of our democracy just pulled off the field for whatever reason how is it possible the man is still president we wonder doesn't everyone see how ridiculous this is yet a poll last month found that of people who voted for Donald Trump only 2% would not vote for him again and in fact more people who voted for Hillary Clinton would not vote for her again if the election were held a month ago that is because we've separated ourselves and we live in totally different worlds and the reality we know is completely affected by the niche markets of those worlds so you might say okay so we in a sense have gone back to the 19th century fragmented media once again you might say what's so bad about that but it's not quite the 19th century because yes of course we're fragmented again but in the 19th century the will of the people was silenced they didn't even know what it was but for us today because of the 20th century there's a normative will of the people a public that remains and if we think of this question of thing to what is for us the public's will we still know what the public's will is today all the time thousands of poles asking us what do we think and these answers get used they get used against us because they have a presumptively normative role they're relevant but this will that gets identified what we the people believe is not informed by common facts this will is ignorant I don't mean stupid I mean ignorant a white guy my age from America is likely to be able to tell you all sorts of things about this activity I think it's it's football right likely be able to tell you all sorts of things about who's winning what the stats are blah blah blah I don't know any of this stuff I don't know the first thing about that game my dad used to make me watch it I like like to pretend I liked it because I like to be with my dad but I hate the game but that's not because I'm stupid I'm just ignorant I don't know anything I could learn a lot about this game I could learn I think everything there is to know about telling you about this game but I don't because I don't want to I'm ignorant I'm not stupid and so too with us because for us for most of us in a democracy life is not politics there are other things to life and for most of us in liberal democracy what we do is live with our tribe people like us we live with our friends and those two facts mean we don't know a clue about most important issues most of the time and if we do we're likely to be biased because we're doing what our tribe says we don't know but we could know now that's bad enough but it gets even worse because in this business model of media in a fragmented media environment which the United States is the business model makes this problem even worse because the aim of the business is to polarize the aim is to find a way to make people even hate each other more because that drives loyalty to the brand so think of the problem of science Dan kahan from Yale and others have developed where they call cultural cognition theory and what this theory demonstrates massive empirical work is that how people view facts not arguments about what's good and bad not values questions but facts is a function of your tribe who you are the same facts told the different tribes produce radically different understandings now that's depressing yeah what's interesting about that is that's only true with issues that have become polarized issues on the right like climate change where nobody on the right will admit that climate change is caused by humans issues on the left like GMO or no person the left will admit the GMOs could be safe to consume so for example climate change at first everybody agreed with climate change in 2008 both McCain and Obama endorsed radical changes to deal with climate change then this extraordinary movie in community truth came out and tied the issue to a very polarizing figure a hero of mine but still a polarizing figure Al Gore and after that was done people on the right can't hear arguments about climate changes anymore because it's to identify them with Al Gore now what's interesting is not all science is partisan like this this you can't read this but basically what this shows is those graphs where the lines are diagonal are partisan air questions so climate change is the first but those graphs where the black lines are flat are not partisan which means that whether you're on the right of the Left are basically going to believe the same thing for those questions of science here's why this is really terrifying because if the media's business model is to polarize what they're doing is looking at those non partisan scientific questions and finding ways to make them partisan they have an interest in a sense in making us stupid and that interest manifests itself most violently in this highly fragmented media environment this is a problem it is a problem for democracy as we get rendered ignorance the push against a democracy grows around the world it's a great book terrible title but great book technocracy in America which that's what can we learn from these amazing countries Singapore and Switzerland which have highly functional governments and the answer as this author puts it is that we should focus less on democracy and more on governance lesson trying to get democracy writers work on making government work that of course is the precursor to the authoritarianism we see spreading everywhere in the world my view is the answer is not to reject democracy the answer is to find a way for democracy to represent us better to give up the idea that when we talk about we as in we the people we're talking about what we all happen to think now and replace that idea with a conception of we where what may mean is what we think when we are informed and deliberated for any thing about talking to audiences that are not english-speaking audiences natively as you can make up words like The Liberator doesn't completely made up word but you get the sense right the fact the fact of having deliberated okay so the public is deliberated meaning they've had a chance to talk now I've seen such publics I've seen such a week I've met them they are extraordinary people here's a picture of the one I saw most recently so that picture comes from this place that's Mongolia the Mongolian Parliament for mystical reasons passed a law that said whenever there's a change to the Constitution the government has to pick a random selection of 800 Mongolians from across Mongolia c'mon goalie is the size of Western Europe for the population of 3 million so here is 800 randomly selected Mongolians representative who traveled to the capital to sit in the parliament for two ten-hour days to deliberate the proposed changes to the Constitution now I'm a law professor at Harvard I am elitist therefore and I'm a pretty snobby law professor meaning I pretty regularly condemn people when they start talking about constitutional laws people who don't know anything but i sat there through a translator listening to what these ordinary people said and argued about for two days as they deliberated these really important changes the Constitution and I was humbled by recognition that if you give people the information and you give them a sense that they are important and you give them a chance to talk they are actually worth listening to and that the conception of We the People that we get through the stupid press is not a conception that reflects who we can be if we structure who we are in our democratic process properly now what they did is something called a deliberative poll and there have been scores of these done across the world but what a deliberative pole is represents we as representative and informed and deliberated people making judgments that are smart and balanced it is a we we can all be proud of it is a way to represent us the challenge here is how do you scale such a project and the truth is the depressing truth is the reason I don't have a witty happy ending to my story is I have no idea not even sure it's possible what I know is we have to resist a media that works hard to make us seem stupid a media that represents us as stupid yes we don't know everything always why would we that's not embarrassing we live a life we are humans but we can if a democracy learns how to listen to us speak in a way that ought to be respected and we have to find a way to recover that truth about us because the alternative the alternative that imagines us as a people who responds the way democracy engages us today for example again thanks to my friend Donald Trump I have a great example here he tweeted yesterday my use of social media is not presidential it's modern-day presidential make America great again if this is the way our democracy engages with us this is not just not great about America it is hopeless about the future of democracy we have to find a way to elevate the people again because we are an extraordinary resource that makes democracy work thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 776,238

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Global Issues, Democracy

Id: rHTBQCpNm5o

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2017