Ctrl Alt Delete
How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy
Tom Baldwin
Having read it
★★★★☆
A good read, but a bit heavy in places. Nonetheless, the points being made by its author were salient and backed by his professional credentials and years of experience at the coal-face of journalism and politics in the UK and US. As he infers, much of current tech has its uses, but it is allowing many deep-seated, misinformed views to spread given its ease-of-use and prevalence globally. (PS Could have done with a decent copy editor, as even I spotted and read a fair few mistypes and word repetitions!)
A good passage
The consequences of [Boris] Johnson’s five factually-challenged years in Brussels would not be fully realised until a quarter of a century when he led the Leave Campaign in Britain’s EU referendum. Martin Fletcher, a former Foreign Editor at The Times who was also a Brussels correspondent in the 1990s, says: ‘The referendum was not lost in a few weeks in 2016 but in the twenty-five years that preceded it. During that time the British public never heard anything positive about the EU or its achievements and Britain’s role in it. All they got was a cartoon caricature of Brussels which, frankly, Boris largely invented.’15
A second good passage
In the early years of this new age, such polarisation was at least a free choice, like buying the Daily Mail, watching MSNBC or unfriending people who voted Tory. By the second decade of this century, however, the internet was potentially driving people apart in a new and dangerous fashion. Eli Pariser was the former director of the online grassroots organisation, Moveon.org, that had done so much to help get Barack Obama elected in 2008. He began warning that the algorithms of Facebook and Google were learning from the reams of data being generated to keep people on their platforms by giving everyone more and more of what they already like. He said this meant we were not only disappearing deeper into caves to hear the same views but were also locked inside our own ‘filter bubbles’ that invisibly imprison us with ever more amplified versions of our own thoughts.
And often, it is the worst form of us that we heard: intolerant, angry, in search of instant gratification and attention-seeking.
A third good passage
Western democracy must mend, rather than end, its thirty-year abusive relationship with the new information age. The rules by which news is produced and elections are conducted are in desperate need of reform. And tech firms need to understand that the benefits they get from a stable society, as well as the dynamism of free markets, and the creativity that comes with free speech, do not come free-of-charge. We need some of that idealistic spirit from ‘40 perether with greater oversight, higher taxes and a legal duty to do more than make profits.