Why America Slept
We must renew trust in our institutions!
I spoke a few months ago with Philip Howard, the head of the Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute. In the course of our conversation about the use of bots and fake social media profiles to game Facebook’s algorithms in order to influence the US election, I asked him whether the US intelligence agencies were asleep about the possibilities of the Internet to spread micro-targeted disinformation.
Not all, he replied. They were well aware of the techniques the Russians had used, and even had used them themselves against other countries. They just never imagined, he said, that they would be turned on the US. They were the kind of thing that were used against banana republics, with corrupt institutions and low trust in government. No one would dare use them against the most powerful nation in the world.
His reply immediately brought to mind future US President John F. Kennedy’s Harvard honors thesis from 1940, which was later published under the title Why England Slept. It was a response to While England Slept, a collection of Winston Churchill’s speeches in the years leading up to World War II, in which Churchill had warned repeatedly against Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, which allowed Germany to re-arm and ultimately to initiate hostilities against Europe. I had recently seen both books lying on a table at a friend’s house where I had gone for dinner, and the titles had stuck with me.
“For five years I have talked to the House on these matters — not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet…”
Winston Churchill, While England Slept
Kennedy asked, why did England not see that Germany was re-arming? Why did they think that their past glories kept them safe? Why were they blind to the changing nature of warfare that would render their island moat far less of a protection than they imagined?
We might ask similar questions. Why has America not seen the pervasive lack of trust in government, the media, and other institutions that made a social media attack possible? Why did so many of our political and business elites seek advantage by enabling and encouraging that lack of trust? How did we find ourselves “descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf”? And most importantly, what do we do about it?
A week later, I had another conversation, this time with Bill Eggers of Deloitte, who is doing research on the changing military and intelligence threats of the 21st century. He mentioned that one of the strategic asymmetries that he has identified is that in countries like China, close cooperation between government and the commercial sector gives the government access to vast amounts of data and the latest AI, data science, and social networking technology, while in the US, distrust of government means that companies give their data to government only when compelled to do so. There is a fear among military and intelligence planners that this will put the US at greater and greater disadvantage over time.
I had a somewhat surprising response to this observation. Rather than saying “good for our companies, who are standing up to our government,” I found myself asking instead “why is it that we trust companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook more than we trust our own government? Our government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people!”
There’s been an idea growing in my mind that building institutions we can actually trust, at scale, is one of the great challenges of the 21st century.
The seeds of that idea had been planted by a constant drumbeat of articles about the blockchain and its supposed elimination of the need for trusted institutions. This quote from a 2014 article by CoinDesk, “Bitcoin: A Means for Global Independence,” gives the flavor of so many articles about blockchain: “innovative wallet technologies mean anyone can store vast amounts of value without the need to trust governments or banks.”
This strikes me as exactly the wrong way to frame the problem. It’s the cyber-equivalent to the narrative of Idaho survivalists, stockpiling guns and food for the coming apocalypse, or of billionaires building disaster boltholes in New Zealand. Self-sufficiency for the individual is not what we need! Like it or not, we are all in this together. The opportunity of a technology like blockchain isn’t to free us from trust in our institutions; it should be described as an experiment in building new kinds of collective institutions that we can trust. Projects like New America’s Blockchain Trust Accelerator, which seeks to connect “Blockchain-based pilot concepts with the right technologists, jurisdictions, and funders to achieve better governance outcomes,” seem like a step in the right direction.
Trust is the currency of civilization. Increases in trust, and new mechanisms for people to trust each other at a distance, are what has allowed human society to grow from small warring bands into great nation states, and to form world-spanning commercial institutions. It is now time for us to take the next step towards trust at global scale. And I wonder if, despite their current struggles, internet technology platforms are pointing the way forward.
We’ve all read the stories that begin, “If Facebook were a country…” Here’s the World Economic Forum’s version from 2016:
Since then, Facebook claims to be heading for three billion users; there are two billion Android phone users, one billion iPhone users; and Google owns four or five online properties with at least one billion users.
It seems to me that the question these articles attempt to answer — the relative size of social networks and other internet services relative to today’s nation-states — is rather trivial. I want to ask instead: “if today’s platforms were nation states, how best can they use technology, big data, and their knowledge of their users to improve the lives of those users in the same way that nations must aspire to improve the lives of their citizens?” and “if today’s nation states were internet services, how would they act differently?” I’m going to focus here on the second question. Asking this question also helps us to see things that nation states may be doing, now or in the future, as they catch up to the digital capabilities of consumer internet services.
It’s clear that even despite the current backlash against the great tech platforms, trust in them remains high. Expressions of distrust in the media notwithstanding, we haven’t yet seen any kind of exodus from digital technologies. Billions of people still share on Facebook, perform Google searches, buy from Amazon, transact with banks. Billions of people voluntarily give up their location at every moment to their mobile carrier, to their mobile phone operating system provider, and to location-based application providers. Through our phone calls, our text messages, and our emails, we reveal virtually every personal and business relationship. While there are applications for anonymous communication, few bother to adopt them.
For all their flaws, we trust the great tech platforms more than we trust our own government. Governments have much to learn from their successes, and also from their failures.
As a thought experiment, imagine that the residents of a country are equivalent to the users of a social network or other internet service, and that the nation state is the equivalent of one of these services.
Some of the conclusions I’ve come to are uncontroversial; others might be provocative:
- Just as platforms are always trying to get new users, nations would always be trying to get new residents (that is, they would be pro-immigration), because they know that an economy is the result of people working together, exchanging goods and services, and that more people using their platform and their services is a good thing.
- Nations would think of themselves as platforms, whose goal is to harness the creativity of a their marketplace to create new services for their users, just as platforms like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do. This is what a nation state does for its economy when it creates the rule of law, improves its infrastructure, polices the activities of participants on the service, and invests in basic research, and tries to compensate for failures in their market economies. I have in fact long argued that government is a platform, and needs to get good at it, using the tools of the 21st century.
- As Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin wrote in his book Against the Consensus, governments would innovate by “observing the world as though seeing it for the first time through a newly born baby’s eyes, without preconceived notions.” This is what entrepreneurs do in envisioning radical new opportunities. There are new capabilities being developed every day, new opportunities to rethink the way things have been done in the past. We must seize them!
- They would understand their comparative advantage. Before introducing a new policy, they would (again quoting Justin Yifu Lin) try to “construct a causality model anew…by identifying the agents behind the phenomenon, the goals they wanted to achieve, the constraints they faced, and the options they had.” My friends Dan and Meredith Beam taught me that this is also the essence of a business model: “the way that all of the parts of a business work together to create customer value and marketplace advantage.”
- They would try to get their residents to commit more deeply — they would want their occasional users to become “daily active users” who understand how much value they get from the platform; that is, they would want their residents to become engaged citizens. And they would worry about net outflow of employees or users to competing countries just as platforms worry about losing customers or users to new entrants.
- They would try to draw the best talent. Sure enough, the competition for the best talent between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other internet giants is also being played out by nation states.
- They would constantly develop new services for their residents, and constantly re-invent the old ones, eliminating obstacles to their effectiveness, measuring whether they have actually achieved their intended goals, and replacing them if they did not. This would not be an exercise carried out every few decades, or as the result of an election, but the daily work of government. (Teaching government how to adopt iterative, data-driven, user-centric practices is at the heart of the work of Code for America, on whose board of directors I serve. That work needs to be applied not just to technology development but to policy development.)
- They would be exploring the potential of AI and other algorithmic systems to create more equitable distribution of the fruits of the productivity gains from technology and better business and governance practices. (I am fascinated by the way that internet platforms are pioneering new algorithmic tools for managing marketplaces to create unexpected economic windfalls, and better outcomes for their participants. This is a longer topic than I can address here, and will be the subject of a separate piece. In the meantime, I did talk about it a bit in my keynote at Venturebeat’s Blueprint Conference two weeks ago.)
- They would collect enormous amounts of data on their citizens. If they are unscrupulous, they will use it to manipulate our behavior, and to keep us under the thumb of those in power. But why do we imagine only this dark alternative? It is precisely because of the power that governments have as the institution that sets the rules for society and creates the platform upon which society builds that we must update the institutions that hold them accountable. The creators of the US Constitution designed a unique and powerful set of checks and balances that were intended to make government more trustworthy despite the enormous imbalance of power. We need to embrace this same path in the 21st century.
I’m not holding up China as a model to emulate. Despite their apparent success on the Edelman Trust Barometer and in improving the economic lives of their people, they are using data to manipulate their people and to hold them in check. What I’m saying is that it seems inevitable that the US will emulate China, which is why we need to work hard as a nation to create a government that is worthy of our trust, and that doesn’t use the data it collects against us. I know that may be a utopian dream, but it’s one we need to work towards.
And it is in this regard that the current efforts to hold technology platforms accountable, and the efforts of those platforms to regain trust have so much to teach us. Jessi Hempel wrote a compelling report from the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year on discussions there about technology and trust. Read it.
Platforms are learning that they must be more transparent about what they do with the data they collect; they are learning today that manipulating users to increase sales or the use of their product may give short-term advantage, but that it erodes trust and usage over time.
A platform gains trust to the extent that it uses the data it collects on behalf of its users, not against them, providing benefits that they could not achieve alone. Platforms (and governments) are means for collective action, and they should be for collective benefit, not for extraction of value by the platform owner. This will be no less true in the future.
So too, politicians who who squander their people’s trust for short-term electoral advantage are not true leaders; they are destroying the foundation of their nation’s greatness, which is based on trusted institutions that allow people to work together towards common goals.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said it 2500 years ago:
“A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
‘Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you;’
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’”
And:
“One who knows his lot to be the lot of all other men
Is a safe man to guide them,
One who recognizes all men as members of his own body
Is a sound man to guard them.”
As platforms evolve, basing themselves on new technologies like AI, blockchain, and marvels yet to be invented, they must stay true to this principle!
I write more about lessons from computer platforms for business, government, and the economy in my book WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. For ongoing perspective on technology and the economy, subscribe to the O’Reilly Next:Economy Newsletter, or visit the WTF Economy site on Medium. And to learn about the tools of technology and 21st century business, subscribe to Safari, O’Reilly Media’s online learning platform.
