Socially unsocial

A(nother) good observation in The Handover by David Runcimam. It gets to the point rather well and explains with good reason that issue that we’ve all been probably wondering about in recent times, certainly in the UK, what with the (too fast, or not too fast enough!) conveyor belt of political shenanigans happening in the last decade but certainly a bit more often in recent years... speed and instantaneousness isn’t an answer to the questions many of us have...

In the case of social media platforms, the biggest difference with the state is that their business model depends on their readiness to exacerbate, rather than to correct for, our cognitive biases. Their services are designed to be addictive: they make more money the more time we spend on their platforms, providing them with ever more saleable and re-saleable information about our preferences and habits. To that end, these services reinforce our instincts towards immediacy, short-term pay-offs and dopamine hits. They want us to keep checking, updating, looking for the next thing, and worrying about missing out. Their survival, even in the short term, depends on our readiness to engage with the world in ever-shorter time horizons still.¹⁴

The state was built to produce the opposite effect. Its artificial personality exists to temper our impulsiveness, to steady our restlessness, to damp down our desire to chase the latest thing. States are meant to be slow, or at least slower than we are in rushing to judgement. Their ability to sustain projects over the long term – no matter how wasteful some of their long-term spending is – comes from the fact that they operate to a different rhythm than we do. The checks and balances of any constitution are as much about time management as about power constraints. They are there to ensure that the state’s decisions are neither too personal nor too immediate.¹⁵

When states start to lose their ability to decide for the long term it is invariably because they have succumbed to more human time horizons. A common complaint against democratic states is that they are in thrall to the rhythms of electoral politics and shirk difficult problems that extend from one administration to the next. Democratic politicians find it hard to think beyond their next encounter with the voters, and voters with their politicians. As a result, long-term challenges don’t receive the attention they deserve. If that’s true, it’s partly because the human interests of elected politicians – including their worries about their own employment prospects – get in the way of the impersonal interests of the states they serve. When we humanise states, we can diminish them.

One direct effect of the immediacy of the social-media world has been to fuel our impatience with traditional politics. Though we may complain that states don’t think long-term enough, in the short term we are far more likely to complain that states don’t respond quickly enough to our frustrations. Political communication online thrums with irritation at having to wait for an answer. Reactions to everything from major events to minor controversies can now be instantaneous – and the expectation has grown that they should be. There are few checks and balances regulating this war for our attention. Impatient politics rewards impatient politicians. Donald Trump’s rapid rise from TV personality and online troll to president of the United States reflected the ways in which his political personality – intemperate, invasive, extraordinarily responsive – suited the personality of the age.

The companies that have been responsible for this shift deny responsibility for it. They fall back on the defence that they are platforms not publishers – they simply provide a space in which the key decisions about what content gets consumed are taken by the people who supply it and consume it. This is not true, and became harder than ever to defend once firms like Meta responded to their role in elevating the politics of impatience by blocking its key players from their platforms, including Trump himself (a decision since rescinded, though who knows for how long). They sell their services as choice-enabling, but they are also the ultimate arbiters of those choices.

These businesses are caught by the contradictions in their own corporate personalities. On the one hand, no global corporations do more to promote the idea that they are in it for the long run, with their ambitions to transform human experience in ways we have barely begun to fathom – from here to the Metaverse and beyond. On the other, their corporate interests are remarkably anchored in the moment. This doesn’t only apply to their own future prospects – none of these companies is more than a few decades old, which makes it likely that few if any of them will still be around in a few decades’ time – but is also the way they need to think to survive today. All publicly listed corporations get judged within narrow timeframes: quarterly results drive share-price movements, which drive market sentiment. Tech platforms, though, have to find ways to keep their users interested, and their numbers growing, all the time. By those standards, even a quarterly report can be a lifetime away. Today matters more than tomorrow.

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The state’s artificial personality is different enough from ours to frustrate us endlessly. That’s one way to know it’s doing its job. The personality of the big tech companies feeds off an accelerated, artificial version of some of our own frustrated instincts. That’s one reason to think they can’t do the job of the state.