How the Net destroyed democracy | Lawrence Lessig | TEDxBerlinSalon

So I've spent most of my career as an Internet apologist and the last 10 years of my career as a critic of governments, particularly the United States government, and in the background of that apology and that criticism has been a glorious group called the people, I never criticized for myself, I never questioned, I never questioned, that at the center of

democracy

was a well-functioning idea called We the People, if only we could talk, so today I don't want to apologize anymore for network. I want to criticize him and I don't want to talk about government corruption. I want to ignore it and I don't want to praise people.

I want to show you how pathetic we have become. At least we are how pathetic we are understood because unless we find a way to recover a reason for

democracy

there is no fight for democracy, so I want to start with two things that we could call thing one and thing two, thing one, I want you to you think about common knowledge, the knowledge that all of us have and the second thing, I want you to think about the common will, so the common knowledge things that are generally known within a town, everyone knows that there was a wall in Berlin, everyone They know this is our president, everyone knows that most Americans don't.

You don't like that president, this is common knowledge at least among Americans and then there is a common will of what we want or believe, so Gallup tells us that Americans believe that freedom in their lives has been contracted for the last decade and tells us that confidence in the economy has been reduced. grown up and just to remind you, it tells us that the majority of Americans do not like Donald Trump as our president, these are the elements of the common will, so think one thing to see one thing we know, two things we want, It's good to do that order correctly.

If you want things before you know you'll get in trouble, then we'll know before we want thing one versus thing two. Now what I want you to do is think about thing one, thing two and three different periods over the last 200 years, so first period of the 19th century very cleverly took iconic images of Berlin, but I'm not talking about Berlin. I want to talk about the United States, but rather iconic images from the 19th century in Berlin, from the 20th century in Berlin and from the 21st century in Berlin, these images to generate recognition. from different periods, so let's start with the 19th century and ask: how did we know in the 19th century?

Well, in the 19th century people knew or those who knew knew it through technologies like this, printed magazines, newspapers, many sources that would be leaked. produce knowledge in a fragmented and diverse public there is no broadcasting in the 19th century there is no real syndication at least in the United States in the 19th century to the extent that there is common knowledge common knowledge is little and scarce there are certain facts that everyone knows that exist was a war called the Civil War who is the president, but facts like whether tariffs should go up or down are not things that ordinary people knew, but if you were to ask what ordinary people knew or what they wanted, the appropriate answer in the century XIX was who knows tailcoat because there was no technology to know what people wanted there were no surveys there were no surveys people like James Bryce had mystical theories about how politicians came to know what people wanted but in reality he was more of a Catholic priest or this is a Methodist priest, but anyway a priest who tells us what God wants, without ever really believing, we know what God really wants, just the priest's interpretation, that's all we have and the consequence was that The will of the people was actually quite irrelevant to most of what the government does, if someone had stood up and very seriously said what the public wants to a government official, the reaction would have been some kind of subordinate like ha, yeah, sure, like that would matter.

Policy making in the 19th century was through policies. creating elites, so we have a fragmented knowledge of the 19th century, what mattered to people, basically unknown, then the 20th century, how do we know? In the 20th century, well, the 20th century has two extraordinary technologies that we must consider and think about a transmission technology first. For the first time we have the ability to talk to everyone at the same time and broadcasting dramatically affects the news when leaders go on the radio to talk to people for the first time and affects the culture at large far beyond the issues of politics and this worries many people in the history of culture 1906 this man John Philip Sousa went to the United States Capitol to testify against the evil technology called talking machines Sousa was not a fan of talking machines as he testified that these talking machines are to ruin artistic development. of music in this country, when I was a child, in front of every house, on summer afternoons, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day of old songs, today you hear these infernal machines running night and day, we will not . has one vocal cord left Sousa threatens that the vocal cords will be eliminated through a process of evolution as was the history of man when he came from the apes what Sousa feared here was some transmission technology or music technology in record players would make a certain kind of culture, a kind of couch potato culture, a passive, receptive culture that would not engage in creation for its own sake but would consume creation produced elsewhere and that was the fear in politics as well, but an extraordinary technology that the birth of the 19th and 20th centuries Nobody ever thought about the radical changes that affect television and, as an extraordinary Princeton scholar, Marcus Pryor, has shown us through an incredible empirical analysis of political attitudes in Related to television broadcast technology, television technology changed everything, not just because of concentration. or two channels that broadcast everything and, in fact, there was an extraordinary concentration.

Sir Agnew writes that at least 40 million Americans watched network news every night in 1969, according to Harris polls in other studies, for millions of Americans, the networks are the only source of national and global information. news even in 1977 news in this sense ninety percent of people got their news from three television networks, so there is an extraordinary concentration in the information that people are exposed to, but more than the previous concentration it shows that It is also a certain type of addiction that people cannot. turn off the television and not only in the 80s and 90s but in the 1950s, the television is turned on and simply left on in the United States during those times of the day when the television is always running in the background and there is a regular pattern to the day and if part of the day everyone is watching the news and what that meant by putting the news through a channel that was inherently understandable to everyone was that we had a media outlet that transmitted the news in a way that both ordinary and elite citizens understood.

For the first time, it was not just about telling an elite in magazines or newspapers that only intellectuals would consume the entire world and what that did was produce an extraordinarily egalitarian exposure to politics and In the United States it radically changed who voted instead of simply voting from polarized extremes. What Pryor demonstrates is that ordinary Americans who would otherwise never have been involved in politics turned out to vote and fundamentally changed America toward what would not be recognized as the left, but in the America we consider the left, more citizens got involved and made. in traditional reliable sources because, of course, the three news channels fell right in the middle and created characters like Walter Cronkite, who conveyed a sense of trust in the public that the public followed, developed a common understanding, a common understanding that was dense and large.

Set of facts, sound judgments shared by millions of Americans now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to idolize what people believed at that time: there was a forgetfulness about race and a forgetfulness about poverty and a forgetfulness about issues that no one even thought about, like sexual ones. guidance there were all kinds of ways in which the system was biased, but what I mean is that the architecture at least made it possible for the public to understand a common set of questions and issues that they themselves had to address politically it made sense that a few sources would be concentrated everywhere, that's fine, that's how it is. the first big change in technology, the second also relates to something because then you ask what the public will is;

The other thing that the 20th century did was provide a huge change, as poor and important as the change in broadcasting, and that change was really brought about by this extraordinary man, George Gallup, now Gallup, of course, you know, it's the Gallup polls, but Gallup started in 1936 as a figure in America because in 1936 there was an election, the third time FDR was sorry, the second time FDR was going to be elected and when FDR ran for this his re-election at that time the elite in America was tired of this socialist, sorry, democratic socialist ruling the country, so the elite view was that he was going to be defeated and what a literary summary did every Calvin Coolidge pick. until FDR sent millions of ballots to people asking them who they were going to vote for and these millions of ballots were returned and they counted them and predicted who was going to win in each election until 1936.

They got one or two points right, so they believed that They had a system to conduct surveys, unfortunately it was very expensive because millions and millions of ballots had to be sent. Well, George Gallup looked at this and said, wait a minute, people's opinions. who owned cars or people who owned phones, the perfusion of people that the literary summary was looking for do not represent the country because they are rich people and what I think we should do is instead randomly select people from the country and go out and talk to them , not millions, just a couple thousand, and so while the literary roundup predicted that Alf Landen would beat FDR by 57 to 42 percent when Gallup was done, he said I actually think FDR will win by fifty-four. percent over Alf Landen and, in fact, the results were that FDR beat him by 61 percent, but with that defeat there was a radical change in polling technology and George Gallup was a star and in a sense he was the Martin Luther of democracy, because he said that we don't have to talk. to priests we can talk directly to people we can reach people directly to know practically what people want and, in fact, James Bryce, who thought that there was a mystical way to be able to reach people in visions.

In the 19th century a final stage in the evolution of democracy would be reached if the will of the citizens were determinable at all times and that is precisely what George Gallup believed he was doing and he believed he was doing it in the name of supporting democracy for I have no doubt, Gallup wrote, living in a country whose ordinary citizens feel about important issues as the citizens of our country feel, if you say let the people rule, you can count me on your side now that technology was expensive, so there are relatively few polls at first, but throughout the 20th century, of increasing importance, creating in a sense a respectable public because the public, in part because of what I described as the one, was a public in the one that we all knew that we all had common knowledge about what to base our judgments about public policy on, we all judged in common and what that produced were sensible judgments that people like George Gallup were able to celebrate from a general public that understood and made sense, for What your 20th century is a century of concentrated information where the opinions of the known and increasingly respected public are valid, what about the 21st century?

Well, first, how do we know? How do people come to know things in the 21st century? It's back to the future because, of course, broadcasting is over in the United States as we know things. Through a billion sources, no longer three, and the most important of those sources, our social media sources, increasingly completely uncontrolled by any kind of editor, Donald Trump did me the favor yesterday of tweeting a relevant tweet that As he wrote, the fake and fraudulent news media is working hard to convince Republicans that you shouldn't use social media, but remember I won now using social media, sir.

Trump, you didn't win because of Twitter, you won because you got more votes than Europe. Sorry, forget about that, just miss the point, but the point is that this form of expression is many sources, a hugely fragmented audience, a diverse audience which, of course, is a big thing forcultural issues. Game of Thrones is something imaginable only in our times, not in the 60s or 70s, when it would have to attract a much more generalized audience and our friend Sousa would have loved the technology that allows this type. of diversity, but although it is excellent for culture, it is terrible for democracy because what this fragmentation means is that there is no common history, no common facts, radical polarization in what we know and radical polarization in what we should do, and There is no better proof of this than this man.

You probably live in circles like me where people can't understand how he's not being called upon by the arbiters of our democracy, just taken off the field for whatever reason, how is it possible that the man is still president? We wonder, doesn't everyone see the ridiculousness? This is a poll from last month that found that of the people who voted for Donald Trump only 2% would not vote for him again and, in fact, more people who voted for Hillary Clinton would not vote for her again if the election were They celebrated a month ago. It's because we have separated and live in totally different worlds and the reality we know is completely affected by the niche markets of those worlds, so you could say that okay, so in a sense we have returned once again to the media fragmented from the 19th century.

You could say what's wrong with that but it's not exactly the 19th century because of course we are fragmented again but in the 19th century the will of the people was silenced, they didn't even know what it was but for us today in the 20th century there is a will. normative of the people, a public that remains and if we think about this question of what the will of the public is for us, we still know what the will of the public is today, all the time thousands of Poles ask us what we think and these answers are They use, they are used against us because they have a supposedly normative role, they are relevant, but this will that is identified, what we, the people, believe, is not informed by common facts, this will is ignorant, I do not want to say stupid, I mean.

Ignorant, a white boy my age from the United States can probably tell you all kinds of things about this activity. I think it's football. He can probably tell you all kinds of things about who's winning, what the stats are, blah blah blah. I don't know anything about this I don't know anything about that game my dad used to make me watch. I like to pretend that I liked him because I like being with my dad, but I hate the game, but that's it. not because I'm stupid I'm just ignorant I don't know anything I could learn a lot about this game I could learn I think everything there is to know to tell you about this game but I don't know because I don't I don't want to I'm ignorant I'm not stupid and the same goes for us because for us, for most of us in a democracy, life is not political, there are other things in life and for most of us in a liberal democracy what we do is live. with our tribe, like us, we live with our friends and those two facts mean that we don't know a clue about the most important issues most of the time and if we do, we are probably biased because we are doing what our tribe says we don't know, but we might know now, that's bad enough, but it gets even worse because in this media business model in a fragmented media environment where the United States is the business model, the problem is even worse because the goal of business is to polarize, the goal is to find a way to make people hate each other even more because that drives brand loyalty, so think about the problem of science Dan Kahan of Yale and Others have developed what they call cultural cognition theory and what this theory What massive empirical work demonstrates is that the way people see facts, not arguments about what is good and bad, not questions about values, but the facts, it's a function of your tribe, who you are, the same facts, different tribes produce radically different understandings, that's depressing, yeah, the interesting thing about that.

Is that only true with issues that have become polarizing issues on the right, like climate change, where no one on the right will admit that climate change is caused by humans? Issues on the left, like GMOs, or no one on the left will admit that GMOs could be safe to consume, for example climate change at first everyone agreed on climate change in 2008, both McCain and Obama supported changes radicals to address climate change, then this extraordinary film came out about community truth and it tied the issue to a very polarizing figure, a hero of mine, but still a polarizing figure, Al Gore and after that was done, the people of The right can no longer listen to arguments about climate change because it tries to identify them with Al Gore.

Now the interesting thing is that not all science is partisan like that, you can't read this. but basically what this shows is that those graphs where the lines are diagonal are partisan questions, so climate change is the first one, but those graphs where the black lines are flat are nonpartisan, which means that if you are on the right from left are basically I'm going to believe the same for those scientific questions. Here's why this is really scary, because if the media's business model is to polarize, what they're doing is looking at those nonpartisan scientific issues and finding ways to make them partisan, they have an interest. in a sense, it makes us stupid and that interest manifests itself more violently in this highly fragmented media environment.

This is a problem. It is a problem for democracy. As we become ignorant, the anti-democracy momentum grows around the world. It's a great book. A terrible title. but a great book about technocracy in America, which is what we can learn from these incredible countries, Singapore and Switzerland, that have highly functional governments and the answer, as this author says, is that we should focus less on democracy and more in the governance lessons we are trying to achieve. I work to make the government work, which of course is the precursor to the authoritarianism we see spreading around the world.

My view is that the answer is not to reject democracy, the answer is to find a way for democracy to better represent us and give up the idea that when we talk about us as we, the people, we are talking about what we all think. now and replace that idea with a conception of us where what it can mean is what we think when we are informed and deliberate about anything about speaking. for audiences that are not native English-speaking audiences, since you can make up words like The Liberator, it's not a completely made up word, but you get the point of being deliberate, okay, so the audience is deliberate, so which means that they have had an opportunity to speak now I have seen publics like this I have seen a week like this I met them they are extraordinary people here is a photo of the one I saw most recently so that photo comes from this place that is Mongolia, the Mongolian Parliament for Mystical reasons passed a law that says that every time there is a change in the Constitution, the government has to choose a random selection of 800 Mongolians from all over Mongolia.

Come on, the goalkeeper is the size of Western Europe for a population of 3 million, so here are 800 randomly selected. Mongolian representative who traveled to the capital to sit in parliament for two ten-hour days to deliberate on proposed changes to the Constitution. I am now a law professor at Harvard. So, I'm an elitist and I'm a pretty snobbish law professor, which means I quite often condemn people when they start talking about constitutional law, people who know nothing, but I sat there through a translator listening to what these everyday people were saying and arguing for two days as they deliberated on these really important changes to the Constitution and I was I'm honored to recognize that if you give people the information and give them the feeling that they are important and give them If you give them the opportunity to speak, they are actually worth listening to and that the conception of We the People that we receive through the stupid press is not a conception that reflects who we can be if we properly structure who we are in our democratic process.

Now what they did is something called a deliberative survey and dozens of them have been carried out around the world, but what is a deliberative pole represents us as representative, informed and deliberate people who make intelligent and balanced judgments, it is something that that we can all be proud, it is a way of representing ourselves, the challenge here is how do you scale a project of this type and the truth is that the depressing truth is The reason I don't have a happy and witty ending to my story is I have no idea, I'm not even sure it's possible.

What I know is that we have to resist a media that works hard to make us look stupid, a media that represents us as stupid. If we. I don't always know everything why it's not shameful we live a life we ​​are human but we can if a democracy learns to listen to us speak in a way that should be respected and we have to find a way to recover that the truth about us because the alternative the alternative that He imagines us as a people that responds in the way that democracy involves us today, for example again thanks to my friend Donald Trump.

I have a great example here, he tweeted yesterday. My use of social media is not presidential, it is modern. two day presidential elections make America great again if this is the way our democracy relates to us this is not only not good for America but there is no hope for the future of democracy we have to find a way to elevate people again because we are an extraordinary resource that makes democracy work thank you very much