As we see democracy under pressure from populists and other malign hustlers around the globe, one essential issue has become painfully clear: We do not currently have a healthy public infosphere. Without a place to discuss events, to negotiate how we expect society to function, we lack the basic tools to function as a society.
Note: Since the platforms won’t do this out of their own free will, this is where philanthropy should step in and funnel funds towards initiatives that help break platform dominance and work towards a healthy public infosphere through research, advocacy and alternative models as well as experiments.
The way I think about it, the infosphere is the aggregate of media and social media: The places and channels which help us learn about and make sense of developments and debates, as well as the infrastructures on which they run.
Think print and TV and the journalism that goes into them, and social media platforms and the governance systems that make them run. In other words, the systems that shape and direct our attention.
More concretely, this spans things like:
- Who owns media outlets and platforms, and who can effectively exert control over them.
- Algorithms and content moderation policies, i.e. what speech is allowed and what speech is actively promoted vs held back.
- Who can shape or control the regulatory framework that media outlets and platforms operate under.
- The business models that shape media and platforms.
Currently, we see a new and I daresay weird moment in time where:
- Journalism has largely been stripped out of media through lack of funding. TV and channels still broadcast 24h a day and newspapers (both in print and digital) are filled top to bottom, but an ever-larger chunk of the content is just that: content, not necessarily journalism. Syndicated stuff that shows up in many places rather than local or specific investigations. Places where opinion takes the place of reporting.
- Social media, a communications system we (including myself) once thought would bring more voices into the conversation and strengthen democracy by fostering diversity and citizen journalism, etc., have been consolidated down to a handful of platforms owned by tech billionaires who exert near-total control over their platforms.
- These platforms have captured our collective attention in ways never seen before. This led media into dependence on these platforms for traffic. They are also based on an attention-for-money business model that hinges on behavioral tracking, at which they are infinitely better than traditional media. First, the platforms withheld advertising money from media until media changed their formats and business models; then in a second step platforms also withheld traffic, leaving media toothless and without funding for the journalism we desperately need.
- These same platform owners have aligned themselves with the same forces who undermine state and democracy from within in the US, where the majority of them are based. This turns them into helpers of anti-democratic forces, and by extension into anti-democratic forces themselves.
So we now see our public infosphere largely dysfunctional: We do not have the tools anymore to sense and make sense of the world at scale.
With quasi-oligarchs controlling our attention (Vectoralists, anyone?) and aligned with right wing politicians intent on dismantling the state from within and sowing chaos around the globe for personal gain, we need to find a way forward. This is not as hopeless as it might seem, I think, but we need to get to a healthy infosphere, this is the bit that unlocks the rest.
In order to get there, I believe there are few concrete (but alas, not easy) steps that are necessary:
- De-fang the platforms: Platform power needs to be reigned in seriously across the board. This could be through regulation, or by pulling their business models out from under them. Tough since they are in a jurisdiction that they are actively subservient to.
- Phase out behavioral tracking completely. I don’t see a legitimate reason why users should be allowed to track beyond any individual website or app. This removes the toxic engagement-optimizing attention-based business models that feed off of tracking.
- Restructure recommender and dissemination algorithms to incentivize journalism rather than attention. We need less attention-grabbing for attention-grabbing’s sake and amplify reasonable and well-informed voices more.
Combined, these steps should free up a lot of collective attention and allow us to focus our attention on issues rather than just drama. We need an informed public in order to deliberate, and for that we need to put the infrastructure in place.
