It’s the year 1993. It’s pre 9/11, pre-Iraq, pre-2008 crash, post the end of the Soviet Union, pre-dot com bubble bursting, pre-Fox News, and now this incredible new technology – have you heard of it, it’s called the internet – is spreading rapidly into homes.

You can look up any fact, instantly. You can communicate, instantly. Anyone can become informed about anything, instantly. Workers, dissidents under dictators, ordinary people, neighbours, can organise, share, discuss simply, quickly, easily.

Book after book, scholar after scholar, and article after article celebrate the techno-utopian potential of this new democratic technology.

Fast forward 25 years and comedian and Youtuber Ethan Klein has started a trending Twitter spat storm by tweeting about podcaster, comedian, MMA person and most likely one of the most influential people on the planet Joe Rogan:

Joe Rogan, who lives on elk meat, egg yolk, and human growth hormone, with lungs full of tar, thinks he’s healthier than everyone. This mfer is such a bitch that when he got covid he threw “the kitchen sink at it” – if youre so healthy just ride it out like you say a man should

Media companies like the Independent, The Washington Examiner, NBC, and commentators like Vaush & Tim Pool all discuss the tweet. Joe Rogan hasn’t even responded. Will he? What will he say? The drama. NBC have already called it a ‘dispute between Rogan and Klein’ but most importantly, between Rogan who has been ‘embraced by conservative figures’, and Klein whose ‘fan base is largely progressive’.

It’s like Vidal vs Buckley, Burke vs Paine, Freud vs Jung all over again.

I wonder if you asked a 90s techno-optimist for an example of what a political discussion might look like on the internet in twenty years time, they’d predict something like this.

Anyway, I want to use this trivial moment to try to answer an important question: why Hasn’t the Internet Fixed Democracy?

Okay, to dive in, we should begin by asking hypothetically and tentatively – what was the case for the internet fixing democracy?

The first thing that’s been pointed to by followers of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas is that the public sphere – where our political discussion, debate, and agenda-setting is happening – would have to be a rational place – a place where we can come to mutual agreement about what the best thing to do is.

Rationality is (ironically) an ambiguous concept, but Habermas pointed to several features of rational decision-making:

He said that:

Discussion is about verifying certain claims
People need to be reflexive about their own beliefs
People need to be able to put themselves in others’ positions so as to be ‘impartial’

People need to be sincere – mean what they say

Each participant should have equal say, and their voices have equal weight
The discussion should be autonomous from state and corporate power

I’ll throw in a few more.

Data needs to be verifiable.

Institutions, organisations, governments, business need to be transparent, information needs to be available.

And those involved in this process should be competent – i.e. be able to understand all of these conditions.

This list isn’t exhaustive but I think it’s a good start. Now let’s look at what Klein is saying about Rogan.

First, he’s saying that Rogan is a hypocrite. He’s also claiming he was more afraid of Covid than he suggested. The wider implication is about Rogan’s claim that no-one is talking about fitness as a preventative measure, which itself is a claim about the focus on and efficacy of vaccines and lockdowns.

There’s also a few other direct implications thrown in – responsibility, fat-shaming, fitness in general. But we could look at some of the wider discussion, too. Like this from Tim Pool and co.

According to this philosopher king, for example, its about socio-sexual hierarchy, gamma, alpha. I mean, just say ‘resentment’ – I guess that’s what you mean? I feel like if you have to say something like this you must think you’re an ‘alpha’ but be deeply insecure about it.

Anyway, this is beside the point I’m trying to make: there are a lot of claims going on in this one very dumb moment.

Let’s look at what they say about the thesis here: why the internet hasn’t saved democracy. We’ll look at the clash of incommensurable values, a bit of Wittgenstein, agenda-setting, Sartre, personality, being triggered, cats, emotion, before finally returning to the question: could the internet save democracy?

First, we have a clear clash of what philosophers call incommensurable values. Two positions that are irreconcilable. Liberty and equality are the frequently used examples – someone might argue that you can’t have them both.

But more importantly, often it’s impossible to rationally calculate which value is more important to pursue because there’s no ‘common measure’, no ‘universal yardstick’ for working out which one is better, which one is more rational.

How do you decide between a career as a lawyer and a career as an artist? Do the pros and cons tally along the same axis? How can you compare preferences for money or creativity, say?

A claim related to Klein’s point might be that ‘getting fit is not a reasonable response to a pandemic’.

And a Rogan claim might look something like: ‘personal responsibility is more important than restricting liberty’.

Now, you can use data to back either of these up, you can argue about the history of liberty as a philosophical concept, or the benefits of a healthy diet for fighting disease, but, ultimately, these claims could be incommensurable, at least for some people.

Now, I could make the argument that while of course being healthy is important to fight Covid, there’s a limit to its efficacy because – 1) it’s difficult, 2) it’s a difficult time to do it 3) there’s not enough time to do it 4) the people dying of Covid often are unhealthy because they’re older, or they’re poorer… etc etc. There are rational points to be made. However, there’s no absolute proof that is going to convince someone that holds ‘absolute libertarian freedom’ as their highest value, no matter what. Again, there is no standard measure, no ruler, we can use to discover which one of these claims trumps the other.

Moral dilemmas are a similar concept.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre used the example about the young man’s choice between going to England during the Second World War to join the Free French Forces or staying in France to take care of his ageing mother.

Which choice is better? Is better even the appropriate term? Whichever the young man chooses he’s lost something.

And most of the time, before we even get to a discussion or choice, we’ve assigned importance to the values and beliefs we hold that weight them differently. That might be diet, lockdowns, vaccines, equality, freedom, whatever – the conceptual ranking we have affects the weight we place on the corresponding data, studies, or arguments we utilise.

But okay, we know this, but I think it points to another phenomenon – the order of things.

If we tried to turn this into a rational, verifiable political discussion – turn it into an academic study say – it might look something like: ‘The efficacy of encouraging improvements to health as public healthy policy during a pandemic’.

But is it just about efficacy? Is it just about the validity of a statement? It’s also about people’s lifestyles – what they’re doing, what they value.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed to this problem in his famous idea of language games.

He argued that language cannot understood scientificality because language is not just descriptive – its not a 1-1 correspondence of the world that’s verifiable: tree means tree.

He used the example of water. We cannot rationally and verifiably decide what ‘water’ means at all times and set it down in a dictionary because the meaning of any thing is inseparable from our daily lived experience.

The word means something different depending on the context – whether it’s describing the ocean, a drink. Whether it’s a label on a bottle or a demand, an order, the answer to what would you like to drink, sir. In answering ‘water!’ the request is not just describing the fluid ‘water’, but is also an order to do something, and might mean something different depending on whether it’s a sick man begging for a drink, a child asking their mother, or a king demanding something of an aide. Later philosophers like J.L. Austin pointed out that some language does things – like ‘I do’ at a wedding, ‘I promise’ to a friend, or ‘I name the ship…’. They perform acts that change the world.

So – and this is clear on Twitter – conversation is not about verifying some fact, it’s about the flow of things – it’s about the conversation itself. And language games create options for responses, rules about what might or could or should happen next, after you’ve said a certain thing.

Imagine two Marxists having a discussion about elections: there’s the outline of a pathway that conversation is likely to go down.

But – and here’s the big but – the development of a conversation depends, of course, on the values of those interlocutors. The different values of each person dictate where the conversation goes next.

The question becomes not what the evidence is, but what the next move in the game is. The more likely move for someone like Rogan might be towards fitness. What’s the more likely move for a scientist working on the vaccine?

The moves we make are wonderfully and beautifully diverse, and a platform like Twitter has thrown them all together, making the direction of conversations unpredictable and often chaotic, in a way that wouldn’t happen in the news room of the Washington Post, say.

Take any disagreement on Twitter. Person A holds a position on a topic. Person B points out that Fact X supporting the position is false. Person A responds that Person B has missed the point. Person C says that it’s about that, not that.

There are an infinity of values backing up values, and claims backing up claims. And each one demands different counterpoints, different deconstructions, different types of evidence. The list goes on.

All of these moves set an agenda which used to be set by elites, newspaper editors, and television studios. In the offices of old media there was much tighter control over the agenda, over how long to discuss an issue, over how important it was, over what the priorities were. This has now been democratised, to an extent, but is much more subject to the whims of all of our different approaches to different issues.

But the moves we make online aren’t quite as free as it may appear. An early techno-utopian, John Perry Barlow, wrote in his ‘declaration of the independence of cyberspace’ in 1996 that, ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’.

But it turns out that cyberspace is not some otherly realm independent of the pre-existing material conditions of the real world. The pre-existing offline power blocs have sovereignty over the places servers are held, over the citizens that log on, over who has contacts with who. The EU and US governments can enforce cookie policy, corporations have massive advertising budgets, special interests still buy politicians expensive lunches. And this all translates over to online behaviour.

And as it turns out, we all like to gather in a handful of places online rather than lots of interconnecting forums or blogs, so the tech giants have power over those places.

Clay Shirky, another early techno-optimist, has said that one thing he underestimated was the ‘social graph’, or how connections on social media maps onto offline friends, friends of friends, or contacts, onto business and organisational networks, onto NGOs and governments and media.

On other words, the structure of the offline world is largely replicated online. Look at how Youtube prioritises videos from the late night chat shows.

Right, here’s a question that I think holds the key to the meaning of life. If we can work this out, we can solve everything, achieve world peace, and build utopia on earth.

Why Cats?

What is it about the internet and cats? Internet cats even have their own Wikipedia page.

You might say, they’re just cute. They’re nice to look at. We have a universal urge to care for something, etc. But then why did we not have cat pages in newspapers before the internet? Why weren’t there cats on page 3 of the Sun instead of topless women? Why wasn’t everyone reading ‘The Weekly Cat’ magazine and carrying around photos of their cat in their wallet to show people?

Of course, we all have emotional triggers – the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza called them affects – but they’re things that we’ve been evolutionarily coded to trigger a brain state change, to say this is important.

And they’re largely out of our control. Cuteness is of course one. We like to care for fragile things. But, as Facebook found in a study, anger is the most evolutionarily powerful. Anger is more likely to grab our attention because we’ve registered something as dangerous – an attack – and we need to ramp up our blood, get more oxygen going, ready to be on the counterattack. We’re more likely to stop scrolling and click on an angry post.

Spinoza’s list included things like desire, wonder, love, aversion, mockery, fear, pity, envy, and lust – they wash over you, change the state you’re in, draw you into thinking in a particular way, seeing the world through a particular lens.

They are trigger points.

And as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown, emotions are a part of how we make rational decisions.

He has argued, based on neuroscientific research, that we don’t feel angry, for example, and then pre-select objectively from our knowledge about what to do in that angry state.

Feeling angry pre-selects relevant information from our memories for us involuntarily and gives it to the conscious part of the brain to do the final part of the decision making.

The classic example is the bear attack.

When you encounter a bear, you’re not scared, then think through all the things you know about surviving a bear attack. Being scared is part of the process that triggers the parts of the brain that are relevant and pre-selects the time you read about not running and the other time you saw a bear attack on Youtube. We don’t flick through our memories like filing cabinets – we’re set off emotionally by encounters.

But the wider point here is that using the internet means more trigger points, more emotional encounters. On the internet we’re thrown together in such a way that we’re constantly exposed to these triggers. We’re like children thrown together in playground and left to our own devices. The internet has, quite clearly, made us more emotionally charged.

Walking down the street twenty years ago there wasn’t much chance of getting triggered over Bernie Sander’s mittens or because someone shouts Let’s Go Brandon at you.

Weight, health, image, hypocrisy – they’re great emotional triggers.

You might be thinking, so what? Isn’t all of this obvious? Of course we have values that clash, of course what we talk about depends on our daily lives, of course the internet has changed how the agenda is set, of course we’re emotional as well as rational.

But the important point is this: what’s become important is not what’s being said, but how, with what emphasis, with whose backing, it’s said. And that has consequences for how we should design our social platforms. The political conversation is not about rational fact selection from an objective body of knowledge. The political conversation is about process: who gets to say what, when, and what and when algorithms amplify or quieten something.

This escaped the early techno-utopians. They forgot that knowledge is not just about static objects and facts, but is about people in motion, it’s about process. Watch this, it fascinates me. The TimCast crew have been moved into a position where it’s reasonable for them to talk about how great Joe Rogan looks as evidence for a particular political view they hold.

Klein was making a comment about Rogan’s character. His trustworthiness. Whether he should be listened to.

Character is important because it determines the language games, the values, the agenda, and emotional resonance that’s going to influence the direction of conversation. But it also means that we get drawn towards, guess what: the drama.

Of course, these platforms are going to reward drama, clickbait, anger, conflict – because that’s what we’ve evolved to focus on. But our institutions, rules, cultures and norms are meant to be designed to help us engineer better societies, better ways of living, help us come together.

Take just one example: the institution of due process or the idea of a trial by jury – these are institutions and norms that are meant to balance the impulse of anger, of retribution and revenge, and they’ve done a good job at that. We have lots of institutional norms that do things like this. Some trivial, like taking your shoes off in a friend’s house, bringing a bottle of wine to dinner, please and thank you – etiquette – and some political or social, like having a certified qualification to prove you’re good at something, libel law to protect against malicious lying, the right-to-reply if you’re criticised in print.

The list here is endless, but the point is, I think we need to approach algorithms in the same way – encouraging that which brings the best out of the process of online political communication, not the worst, so that we’re focusing on the things that matter.

In their book Ethical Algorithms, for example, Aaron Roth and Micheal Kearns talk about some key domains that we should focus on like privacy, fairness, accountability, and morality.

What we want to do is select the trending conversations we’re having based not on drama, but on importance. And I actually think Facebook’s decision to use more reactions than just like is a good step towards this. They realised people were drawn towards the topics that people had responded to angrily and then chose to show those posts more. What if we had an ‘important’ response, or an ‘empathise’, or a way of more accurately gauging what the triggering response means. In short, we need a way of highlighting real issues not drama, of pivoting the process of online political conversation away from triggers and more towards justice.