Ctrl Alt Delete by Baldwin Tom;

Author:Baldwin, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2018-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

In the deep, dark cave

Tom Steinberg had spent most of his working life trying to harness the power of digital technology to make the politics a little bit more accountable, open and democratic. He set up Downing Street’s e-petitions website in 2007 and founded MySociety which included sites like FixMyStreet for people to report potholes and TheyWorkForYou which laid bare the varying rates of productivity among MPs.

On the morning of 24 June 2016, he woke up to discover that Britain had voted to leave the European Union. Like most liberal left types he was devastated by this news. But his immediate reaction was to seek out a better understanding of what had just happened. The trouble was, he did not know people who had voted for Brexit—and nor were they to be found in the one place someone like Steinberg would naturally turn to look: on social media.

Later that morning, he posted a message complaining he could not find ‘anyone who is happy’ on Facebook despite more than half the country voting for Brexit and ‘the fact that I’m *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.’

He added: ‘This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies. … We’re getting countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.’63

The shock felt by so much of the political class after the victories of Brexit and Trump was not merely because they had been unexpected, it was also because those who had voted for such outcomes had simply since disappeared from view.

A subsequent autopsy saw these electorates being sliced and diced across almost every demographic. Well-heeled journalists travelled from Westminster or the prosperous coasts of the US to explore the heart of darkness in ‘the North’ and the so-called ‘fly-over states’. Some concluded the split was about social class and economic opportunity, with poorer, less educated white voters in Britain’s northern towns or the American Rust Belt swinging towards Brexit and Trump. Others saw it as a cultural clash between liberals who have the mobility to be from ‘anywhere’ and those left behind ‘somewhere’.64 Still have shown how it reflected age, pointing out that older voters disproportionately backed the inward-looking offers of Brexit and Trump—while younger voters who grew up in the internet age with open and outward-looking values overwhelmingly preferred Remain and Clinton.65

But, in the bitter aftermath of both these votes, just about everyone could agree that both Britain and America were more divided than at any time in the past fifty years. And it was also clear that social media was not necessarily making the world ‘more open and connected’, as Facebook’s mission had promised, but giving people the means to close their eyes and their minds to any view they did not like.

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