Two writers, from Left and Right, make contrarian,
optimistic arguments about the effect of the internet on public debate:
Both make interesting points, but their optimism is unwarranted.
What is really going on?
Lower costs
The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of
publishing. The market for news and opinion has gone from an
oligopoly to a classical free market, with many sellers and many buyers. What
before required industrial-scale machinery and a nationwide distribution
network can be done by anyone with a Facebook account.
By standard economic theory, that should be good
for consumers, providing more variety at lower cost. Mr Murray and Professor
Milanovic both broadly take this line. But long ago, Joseph Schumpeter argued
that monopoly could be better for innovation than free markets. A monopolist would
expect to reap all the dividends from investing in new techniques; in a free market, other sellers could and would steal your new ideas.
For news production on the internet, this argument applies
in spades. Newspapers always competed for the scoop and knew their rivals would
follow the story up the next day. (In the jargon, news is non-excludable.) The internet has exacerbated this: an article which took weeks of gumshoeing
to produce can be copied in a second – even if not literally copied and pasted,
its ideas can be taken. The traditional press is right to grumble that Google News and
Facebook are killing its business model.
The result is that analysis, which anyone with a brain can
produce, proliferates, but actual reporting, which costs time and money,
withers. And so, instead of scoops, we get front page news about cold weather
snaps. The extreme version of this is the Daily Express in the UK, which has
given up reporting as too costly, and fills its headlines with press releases
about heart disease drugs.
Unfortunately, modern democracies need the information gathered
by reporters much more than they need analyses from social scientists and pundits.
The end of the consensus
The old media firms were not neutral actors. To get
political news, the journalist asked his pals in the government for a juicy
story. In return, they expected favourable coverage. Different organs allied
with different political tribes, but when the elite as a whole agreed
on some view, challenges to that view went unheard.
This was the old-style social construction of reality. It
was certainly problematic. On the other hand, a consensus, even a biased one, provides society with the evidence base it needs to make collective
decisions, and common ground as the basis for constructive debate.
Clickbait
That has all gone. The Sun can no longer swing elections
with its headlines. A paper publishes a fishy story about Jeremy Corbyn meeting
a Czechoslovak spy – his rebuttal, on Youtube, gets a million views in a day.
Those politicians that grasp this new reality – Leftists
like Corbyn, nationalists like Trump, centrists like Macron – win elections.
Those that don’t, don’t.
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| Back in the day |
Is this the democratic ideal realised? Nope: you can also
get a million hits by reporting fake news on Trump’s gorilla channel. News has
another quality: it is an experience good. What we buy are “stories”. We cannot
find out for ourselves which stories are real. The market failure this would normally
cause used to be mitigated by a journalistic outlet’s reputation. Broadsheet
newspapers were biased, but they left the really garbage stories to the
tabloids.
In a market with a million outlets, all copying each other,
this partial solution no longer works. As a result, we are drowning in
clickbait.
What solves public
goods problems?
The actors in this new reality will not be thoughtful
bloggers like Branko Milanovic. They will be states. States can control the
flow of information within their borders. They have the resources to produce fake
news, real news and everything in between. They can step in and solve the
public good problem. And they have the incentive to do so, because states need
to produce consensus supporting their actions.
Professor Milanovic occludes this point by describing
Al-Jazeera, Russia Today etc. as “foreigners” as against the “Anglo-American”
media. But this misses a distinction: Russia Today is directly an organ of the
Russian state. The New York Times is not.
Similarly, the fragmentation of the internet into national
borders is not a reactionary backlash against the new open world. It is part of
the same process. It is the obvious next step.
What is there to celebrate here? Yes, now the West knows
what it feels like. But when Radio Free Europe broadcast into the Soviet Bloc,
it was passing on the truth – at least some truth – from liberal democracies to
dissident citizens in some thoroughly nasty dictatorships. When RT broadcasts to
us, it gives us lies and conspiracy theories.
Western hegemony was often exercised brutally. Many liberals
and progressives, sensing its end, mistakenly infer that the rising powers –
Russia, China and their allies – will agree with their values better. This wishful
thinking will deserve the nasty surprise it gets.
Hobbits and hooligans
Douglas Murray celebrates the availability of new ideas that
challenge the consensus. I agree: I’m glad to read Jonathan Haidt or Nicholas
Christakis or Sam Harris.
We now have a free market in theories. Whereas before we all
had to buy the one theory, we now can pick the one we like best. Will the best
theory win?
The political theorist Jason Brennan describes three kinds
of citizens. There are hobbits, who like comfort and don’t want to be made to think; hooligans,
who gather evidence to support their preconceptions; and vulcans, rational
thinkers like Spock in Star Trek, who make ideal citizens because they inform
themselves impartially. Evidence from public opinion research provides the
kicker: basically, Vulcans don’t exist. There are only hobbits and hooligans. Jason
Brennan is skeptical about democracy.
Jordan Peterson seems like a good guy, and who is to
disagree with rules in his book like “Stand up straight with your shoulders
back”? Whether that is intellectually ground-breaking work, I am less sure. It
sounds an awful lot like Make Your Bed (author Admiral William H McRaven, US Navy,
retd). In general, there is a market right now for sensible, Victorian advice. What
Professor Peterson does seem to have is great charisma as a lecturer.
Intellectual progress requires more than the existence of competing
views. Those views must meet in reasoned debate, and the better argument must
win. The blogosphere, or Intellectual Dark Web or whatever, has not yet proved its
ability to generate this kind of progress. I hope it does. Meanwhile, it is
certainly nice to find intellectual allies, and the internet can provide that
for all of us.
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