How to Fix Democracy | Anne Applebaum

[Music] [Music] it's a real honor to interview an always been one of my heroes when I was talking to her earlier she said she does three things she's a historian journalist and she also runs a kind of think-tank in London at the London School of Economics but I always think a historian when someone says their three things and they mention their historian they're always really a historian first and in this I would strongly encourage everyone to read and excellent provocative essay in redefining democracy in the 21st century series of really outstanding essays for this series and then you begin in terms of this fixing democracy by saying as a historian always says well 500 years ago we were in a similar situation so what was going on 500 years ago that's so relevant today so first of all thank you for that opening question opening introduction and thank you for inviting me to this spectacular and very historic room so I began the essay as I sometimes like to begin talks by saying imagine that we are suddenly at a moment when everybody can read and everybody can write and suddenly the people who used to control all the sources of information no longer have access to it and good things are multiplying and and and information is traveling more quickly but so is disinformation and so are and so it's political scandal and things are moving very quickly and they're leading even very quickly to wars and conflict of a kind we couldn't imagine before and no I'm not talking about the present moment I'm not talking about the invention of social media in the internet I'm talking about the invention of the printing press in the 15th century which was a previous moment in history when there was an information revolution that very quickly became a religious a cultural and a political revolution and it similar to the present moment in one sense in that of course the invention of printing and the invention and the which made it possible for millions of people to read and write and have access to information was obviously good it was obviously a positive change in the world why obviously well it it meant that people could you know could have have an expanded exchange of ideas they could have access to things they didn't know it spread information and knowledge scientific knowledge but at the same time it led to the Reformation which was which challenged the the monks and the monasteries and the church which used to control information and that led to the divisions inside society it led to what we now call polarization which eventually led to religious wars all across Europe and Catholics fought Protestants and there was a Reformation and then a Counter Reformation and backlash that that went on really for many hundreds of years and you know when you when you think about the kinds of profound changes at that moment caused you have to you know that's a way of understanding just exactly how profound the current moment is I mean I think we all you know we've become already really blase about very revolutionary technologies I mean the the the iPhone was invented in 2007 so twelve years ago and now almost everybody not just in the developed world but all over the world in Africa and Asia and Latin America now walks around carrying a little mini computer in their pocket which enables them in theory to communicate with every other single person on the planet and this was a kind of unthinkable revolutionary change and of course it's having ramifications that are political as well as sociological and cultural and I think we've made a we've we've we've grown accustomed to it and we've become used to it so quickly that we've we've underestimated exactly how profound it is well before we get to contemporary democracy as a historian do you see the invention of the printing press and the disruption of communications as being the foundation of modern democracy I mean of course it's absolutely the case that modern democracy in the form that we know it could not exist without what was it was created on the basis of printed information of course then later broadcast information you know unless you have a society and this is by the way with this is coming to the the current problem unless you have a society that shares you know that that in which you can have a common debate in other words that people in California and Georgia and Wisconsin can all be having the same conversation or can be discussing some of the same issues then you can't have democracy at all or whether it's people and you know London and Edinboro and Cardiff you need you need some common basis of conversation you need to be able to discuss common issues and if you don't have that in other words if you don't have a public sphere if you don't have if you don't have some kind of mass media then then no democracy is not possible and I think by the way the you know the the the fact that you know if you look back at the founding of the United States and the important role played by pamphleteering and newspapers and so on you can see that the newspaper and that that form of printed information was absolutely key to democracy from the very beginning so Communications is the heart of democracy surely there needs new technologies which as you say allow everyone to become a publisher everyone to carry these supercomputers around in their pockets everyone to perhaps disintermediate companies like Bertelsmann doesn't that intensify democracy isn't that a good thing for democracy it can be and in many ways it will be and we've seen you know we've seen groups of people who were previously left out of the political process taking a role in them we you know we watched you know in a number of countries in authoritarian countries as you know social media has become one of the ways in which you know disempowered people can connect to one another we saw it in Tunisia we saw it in Egypt we saw it in many other places as well so so you know and this is much like the invention of printing press had two sides to it I think there is a there's a there's a clear advantage for democracy in many places of having this new new forms of communication it also though has a the potential for something else which is creating a new kind of polarization in other words when we lose the you know the the the media that held some you know that that that provided a kind of common ground for discussion we also lose the ability to talk to one another all of us come from different societies here but I think probably all of them are now afflicted to some degree with this new form of polarization I mean I live part of the time in Poland I live I have a strong connection here I grew up here and I have a strong I live also part of the time in Great Britain and in all three of those countries I have seen how really profound new levels of polarization in other words people having completely separate conversations about politics have made it very very difficult to have a democratic debate and this is not by the way just a question of some people have one opinion and some people have another opinion this is the kind of polarization that you can now get online where people live in completely separate filter bubbles or echo chambers whatever you want to call them and they no longer share it's not a question of opinion they don't share the same facts with other people so how do you how do you have a debate with your with your fellow citizens if you think one set of things is true because you know that's what your friends on Facebook are telling you and they think a completely different set of things is true you know many of the ways in which we're used to thinking about the press and the free press and what could be the challenges of the free press I think are also very outdated I mean what's the real challenge now to free speech it's not just that some dictatorial government will come shut you know take you over or as in the George Orwell novel somebody will cut up the newspaper and shred the you know the politically incorrect articles and put them down the memory hole no we have the opposite problem now which is that which is that a North or adhering government or indeed a group of people online can flood you with information in other words voices can be drowned out we're all facing this problem there being too much information and possibly that oh that eventually undermining any sense we have of informations value if you know one of the one of the one of the first countries to really understand how this worked was Russia and one of the best examples of how this worked was if you all remember the plane crash over eastern Ukraine when the Malaysian airliner that was coming from the Netherlands crashed in in eastern Ukraine and as as was fairly clear at the time actually and was subsequently proven it was taken down by by a Russian army missile what was the Russian government's reaction to that event it wasn't just to deny it the Russian government's action was to put out literally dozens of explanations so from sensible to crazy to completely insane you know the plane there was a Plane full of dead people that was to take you know that took off from the Netherlands and it was brought down on purpose to embarrass the Russian government or there was a you know there was a Ukrainian plane that hit it and they were trying to shoot down Putin's plane and there were graphics of that on television each one of these explanations was accompanied by all kinds of new information and graphs and drama and and and interviews and so on and this effect of producing dozens and dozens and dozens of explanations was had the successful effect of making people say well we have no idea what what would actually happen and there was a very good series of interviews that were conducted in Moscow ten days after the after the crash and people were asked on the street what do you think happened and people said oh we not only do we not know we will never know it will never be possible to find out what happened because there was so much information and so much of it was contradictory that we'll never know so in other words the one of the other effects of the Internet now is that you can drown people you can you can drown them in trivia you can drown them in falsehood you can you can silence people in much different ways so you're in the kind of Peter pomerance camp that he's my he's my partner at the London School of Economics he sort of presents politics as a real-time reality television show and people like Putin and I guess Trump has the as the Masters of this circus this is a new phenomenon we enter we we went to Holland to interview robbery man who's in the audience he's he's presenting what's happening today as a repeat of the 20s and 30s are you more in the Pomerance camp than the the Raymond camp is this a repeat of fascism or is this something entirely new I know you've got the the the Reformation idea at the back of your mind I mean I I don't believe that history ever repeats itself in exactly the same way so no I I don't think were this is the 1930s and I don't think I can pinpoint exactly which moment we are you know whether it's the on schloss or whether it's whether we're we've got to appeasement yet and so on I do think that each year produces new challenges and it's very important to understand the nature of this new challenge you know it's been it's very interesting even if we just stick to this topic of disinformation it's very interesting to hear I was in a room a very intelligent thoughtful people in London a couple of weeks ago discussing and and another one in Madrid actually also yester a couple of days ago discussing exactly this issue and almost universally everybody in the room has an instinct we need to control the content on the internet we need to ban things we need to transfer our existing legal system we know we need to be able to sue people for libel if they've committed libel on the Internet in the way that we used to be able to sue them in real life and I genuinely think these won't be the answers I mean if there's going to be a regulatory answer it will have much more to do with the nature of it'll be much more to do with the nature of social media they'll be with making things more transparent ending anonymity online you know thinking very hard about algorithms you know do we want Facebook's algorithm which emphasizes you know the goal of which is to keep people on Facebook as long as possible and which emphasizes things like anger and emotion you know things spread on Facebook more easily when they're when they're clicked on do we want that to be the governing algorithm that decides what we all see or do we want there to be you know can we imagine a public-service algorithm in the way that we once dreamed up the BBC you know or the public service broadcasting is this something that there should be that there should be public involvement in our public say and if this if this is going to be if some form of Facebook is going to be how we get our news in the future so getting people to think how we deal with the current situation and how we deal with the the nature of these new information technologies I think is extremely important that's not to say that the you know the analogies from the past are useful because they make us think you know they they remind us of what people are capable of they you know they remind us that ok when somebody says when somebody tarts talk using this elimination asur the language of purity and nation and so on it reminds us of something bad and I think that's that's very useful but it may be that the solutions are gonna require some understanding of what exactly is making is changing things in the present so your focus historically and in cultural terms is Eastern Europe you're a scholar of Russia of a strong family connection with Poland last year there was a cover story in the Atlantic on on democracy by you and you and you suggested that we need to learn from what's happening in Poland and Hungary in terms of understanding the crisis of democracy talked briefly about the shattering of this kind of epistemological consensus in Eastern Europe and how people now can't literally talk to one another yes that article began with a description of a New Year's Eve party that I had in 1999 which sounds pretty amazing right you made all that what did you make the beef stew there was no catering in Poland in 1999 surprise surprise my mother-in-law and I made these vats of stew and anyway and and would I would I tried to evoke in the article as I described the guests there who were some friends of mine from abroad and so on but most of them were poles and most of them were friends of mine and my husband my husband was then a he was a junior minister in a in a Polish kind of center-right government and lots of the people who came to the party were also in politics some of them were journalists and at that time we all would have felt that we were kind of more or less on the same team so you could talk to him even if you didn't agree about it he didn't agree about everything but we were sort of all more or less whatever in favor of democracy and you know markets because that's when we were in favor of D communist a ssin and probably everybody in the room wanted to join the European Union which of course happened a few years later and I had a reflection more recently which is that you know 20 years later which is that about half the people in that room would no longer speak to the other half of the people in the room that there's been such a profound polarization and such a deep parting of the ways this is particularly on the Polish right but I think something similar happened on the right in the United States and in Britain and in other countries too as one group gradually moved away from those ideas minces my interpretation of it and began to see flaws and things missing in democracy and began to long for to be part of some kind of moral community in some ways began to feel threatened by influences from the outside lots of these were the people who often couldn't speak foreign languages some of them could those in and began to and began to look for an alternative social model but but the article was also trying to describe how you know what is the path from democracy to non democracy there are many stages in between and we we tend to have an imagination here there's going to be a coup d'etat or there's gonna be violence actually quite a lot of there are a lot of ways to attack and undermine democracy that don't require any of that and you can do it with the consent of many people you know lots of people really hate the media they didn't like it they don't like people shouting on their television screens every night having it taken over by the government and having it start to sound a little calmer and everybody says more or less the same thing you know a lot of people find that to be really quite a great relief or the court you know we've all we you know we who live in democracies have come to accept the idea that there's a lot of strife and argument in public life and you know I thrive on that I think it's great I don't mind it at all a lot of people find it bothering you know why is there so much just why can't our politicians all agree you know what is this what is this pointless just you know these arguments they have in their in their in their outdated institutions what about the UK the United States Germany how healthy is democracy in your view generally so the UK I've lived there on and off for 20 years and the the real tragedy of brexit and their you know I know Europeans will will feel differently about that has been the disrepute into which it has brought Parliament and and Westminster and for exactly this kind of reason people say because most people don't understand the details of these trade agreements they're arguing about all they can see is that their elected politicians can't come to a solution and they find you know and and and this is you know and they and they know people have lied to them so we've got 10 minutes left how we're gonna fix democracy how we gonna save this stuff how are we gonna how are we going to reignite conversation how are we gonna do away with this sort of epistemological division so that people can begin to agree about facts again where do we start here and I know you said earlier off scurry off stage you said to me it's not an economic issue it's a cultural and a political one so perhaps you might slay economic dragon first so you can slay the economic dragon by looking at Poland actually this is a country of great economic success where incomes have been rising and not just at the top but all the way through inequality has been falling funny enough you can also look at you can also look at France which is a country I've recently written about where it's let me if I can get the statistic right it's the country in Europe where there's the greatest transfer from the wealthy to the non wealthy anywhere in Europe in other words this transfer of income that we think is going to make such a big difference is happening in France and has been happening from France nevertheless in both Poland and France you have major populist movements in France the it's those you guys own and in Poland it's the it's actually the the ruling party and you know the the the point is that economic solutions are imagining that this is all a problem to do with inequality or it's only to do with some people being left behind fails to see that quite a lot of you know quite a lot of Trump voters quite a lot of brexit voters were wealthy quite a lot of the people who who flocked behind populist parties are well-off their problem with democracy is would you say it's not just trying boaters right no and it's it's partly the need to find again and this is why I brought up public broadcasting before a find fora in which we can have conversations again is the solution regulating the big tech platforms so this is part of it this is part part of the solution is but as I said not regulating in the sense of arguing about what to take off the internet and what's legal and what's really but thinking much more deeply about the structure of it how it is that information is being seen what people are reading and why the second solution - how does that work because it's easy to say that I can't imagine how would it work do we have fact checkers on Facebook and Twitter saying this is exactly what I this is what I'm against I mean okay you can have fact checkers and so on but in what you don't want to have happens you don't want Facebook to be deciding what people read and what they don't read what we need to think is but what does me what is the mechanism by which the Facebook newsfeed works in other words what what what determines which articles you see when you open up your laptop and that's determined by an algorithm whose ramifications on so that's a that's one that's one and that's government oh that's citizen assemblies or citizens how does that work don't know yet certainly the government should have a democratically we can't just be Facebook I can't decide what anybody sees so right now there are people at Facebook who make agonizing decisions about what their rules should be and they have to make them in almost total secrecy because if they you know they they can't discuss it with anybody outside of Facebook and I have even had people in tech companies say to me we wish we had a broader you know if there were a broader group of people we could discuss these issues with what else and what else can what what else can help fix democracy apart from the regulation of the platform so my dinner companion and I have just had a long conversation about what's happened to traditional political parties and why people are so disappointed by them and I pointed out that one of the you know what was the what was what was social democracy it was based on a set of real-life institutions trade unions what was Christian democracy it was based on another set of real-life institutions church institutions as those real institutions fall away people are looking for different kinds of communities and more often they find those communities online you can be very involved in a in a political movement now and never leave your house they're very attracted to other kinds of communities I mean there's a reason why the idea of the nation has come back in so many places you know it's a it's something that we can belong to it's got a defined limit it's a it's a so so the question otherwise how do we recreate communities what are the what are going to be the new sources of identity and security in the 21st century technology or is it sort of a way of controlling technology it could be through technology it could be something that companies do there are people right now there are a couple of groups in the United States there's one called better angels which is trying to create a series of almost new institutions kind of discussion clubs that bring together when you political parties right I mean there were new political parties or new political parties I'm Robin his excellent piece for this book talked about Tocqueville and local democracy as being the heart of the American dream that we need to go back to the local to the city so look in America it's pretty clear that local democracy is far healthier than national democracy and lots of people one of the reasons why America looks so much more dysfunctional from abroad than it does when you're actually here is because many people feel that their local government their governor or their member of Congress or their the way their local town is run actually works pretty well or at least they understand the way it works and they they can participate if they want to whereas national politics seems which is which is which seem that seems to be very dysfunctional finally and you know these conversations are always about the other always about populism always about people who are risking against democracy but this is an audience of global elites Germans Americans Europeans we're not perfect we're part of the problem what can we do collectively to help fix democracy think about how you participate in your community and think about what you know what does your company do to create a sense of place and security for the people who work for it what does your institution do how do you how are you contributing to people's sense that they belong to something begin thinking in those terms in everyday life um thank you so much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Bertelsmann Foundation

Views: 11,570

Rating: 4.0999999 out of 5

Keywords: anne applebaum, democracy, information, internet, technology, bertelsmann foundation, andrew keen, how to fix democracy

Id: u-afp8OFMgQ

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019