Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and the New Century of Centralization

Translator press:

This article is translated from Harper's article Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism by Fred Turner , chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and author of The Democratic Environment: Multimedia and the United States from World War II to the Psychedelic '60s Liberalism (2013), From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Global Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006), Echoes of War: Trauma, Memory, and the Vietnam War (2006) Echoes of the War: The Vietnam War in American Memory was published in 1996, and the title was updated when it was republished in 2001).

In this article, Fred Turner attempts to backtrack and sort through to understand how social media spawned new forms of centralization. In the first half, the author combed the history of decentralized media from World War II to the present, and described how decentralized media proposed in the context of responding to fascist propaganda. Develop a medium different from mass media to inspire a sense of identity. The committee's collaboration with Norbert Wiener made cybernetics the theoretical basis for coordinating society and sparked the imaginations of members of the countercultural movement that would later develop the Internet. However, under the basic belief that "engineering replaces politics to solve totalitarianism", they cannot get rid of a "technological optimism" and "technological determinism", relying on technology as a way to create an equal and collaborative social order solution.

The second half tells that the "sense of mission" of technology as a political solution has continued into the contemporary era and is reflected in the business culture of Silicon Valley and major technology companies. They attempt to create an "imagined community" while mining and selling user data. Earn a lot of money. The fruits of the American counterculture movement and identity politics of the 1960s have been misappropriated by today’s conservatives, and the once belief that “collective individuality is the foundation of democracy” has become a strategy today. Net reds who are well versed in the way of popularity shape online behavior, hide political attempts in popular cultural symbols, "come out", reveal their warm and witty self, operate pure politics, and democratic "individualism" makes New forms of centralization gained new legitimacy. Fred Turner believes that it is not enough for the public to take ownership of social media. In unwritten cultural norms, social media will also re-emerge sexism and racial segregation. To find the source of the problem from the political vision, social media cannot Complete the democratic work. Nor is it enough to tell the truth, he advocates establishing the truth as we experience it into law.

 Original link: https://bit.ly/2RY4DOd
Date of publication: January 2019 Fred Turner / Wen Ye V / Lu Ruiyang / proofreading

"Totalitarian Goliath will be brought down by Microchip David," Ronald Reagan said in 1989. A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he addressed a thousand British dignitaries at London's historic Guildhall. Reagan declared that the world was on the brink of a new era in human history that might bring peace and freedom to all. Communism is collapsing, just as fascism did before it. Liberal democracies will soon embrace the world, thanks to innovations in Silicon Valley. "I believe," he said, "that the revolution in communications will be the greatest force ever to advance human freedom, more than the military, more than diplomacy, more than the good will of a democracy."

At that time almost everyone thought Reagan was right. Mass media dominated the twentieth century, broadcasting the same programming to millions of people simultaneously through radio and newspapers, movies and television. It is through these one-to-many, top-down mass media that Orwell's Big Brother holds power. Americans, however, had their sights set on the Internet. They believe it can do what the mass media before it could not: it allows people to speak directly to another person on their behalf all over the world. In his 1995 bestseller, Being Digital , MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte wrote: "True personalization is coming." Companies, industries, and even entire countries will soon be transformed as centralization is overthrown. Hierarchies will dissolve and peer-to-peer collaboration will take their place. Negroponte wrote, "The digital age is like a force of nature that cannot be denied or prevented."

The deepest irony of our current situation is that the methods of communication that were conceived to defeat dictators are working for them today. Technology once designed to make politics fair has brought "troll farms" and "Russian bots" to corrupt our elections. The platforms for self-expression that we thought would allow us to empathize with each other and build a more harmonious society are being wooed by the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and even Donald Trump to bring white people together Supremacy becomes the talk of the dinner table. The networked approach that many believed could bring down malicious states, instead of succeeding (think of the Arab Spring), allowed dictators to more closely monitor protests and dissent.

If we are to resist the rise of tyranny, we need to understand how this happened and why we did not foresee it coming. We especially need to grasp the fact that today's right has exploited decades of liberal efforts to decentralize our media. This effort began at the beginning of World War II, reached us through the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and is now thriving in the high-tech greenhouses of Silicon Valley. It is motivated by a deep belief that when engineering replaces politics, the alienation of mass society and the threat of totalitarianism will disappear. We start to see how misplaced this belief is when Trump lashes out on Twitter and Facebook posts related to the genocide in Myanmar. Even as our social media network empowers us to communicate with people around the world, it has spawned a new form of centralization.

This political vision that brings us to this juncture began in the 1930s as a response to fascism. In the years leading up to World War II, Americans wondered why Germany, Europe's most wily country, stumbled into the abyss of Nazism. Today, we might attribute Hitler's rise to the economic chaos and political infighting of the Weimar era. But at that time many people blamed the mass media. When Hitler addressed the row upon row of Nazi soldiers at the torch-lit rallies, the radio broadcast his voice to every German home. The news cameras were there as he drove through the adoring crowd, stood in his Volkswagen convertible, and gave the Nazi salute. In 1933, The New York Times described the plight of ordinary Germans as follows:

The uniform headlines of the newspapers conquered him, the sound of the radio begged him, the news clips and close-up pictures made his blood boil, the politicians and professors reasoned for him, the German was engulfed by a wave of brown, never to be recovered His own self-identity... He lives in a Nazi dream, not in the real world.

In the late 1930s, President Roosevelt began to look for ways to urge Americans to take a unified stand against fascism. Given the heightened sentiment on the American right at the time, he had reason to worry. Racism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany also characterised much of American life. In 1938, many Americans went weekly to hear Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic agitator celebrating the rise of fascism and denigrating Jews. Thousands of American fascists banded together to form groups such as the Silver Legion of America and the Crusader White Shirts. The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, a 25,000-member pro-Nazi group commonly known as the Bund, opened a camp on Long Island called Camp Shagfried. Siegfried), young people marched in Nazi-style uniforms amid cheers from friends and family. On February 20, 1939, the Confederation brought more than 22,000 Americans to Madison Square Garden in New York to welcome fascism to the shores of the United States. As they gathered, a huge banner hung over their heads: Stop Jewish rule over Christians in America!

As America prepared for war, its leaders faced a dilemma: They wanted to use the media to unite Americans against their enemies, but many also feared that using the mass media to do just that would transform Americans For the kind of totalitarianism they are trying to defeat. Roosevelt's cabinet sought advice from a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Committee for National Morale. The committee was established in the summer of 1940 by a Persian art historian named Arthur Upham Pope, who brought together many of America's leading thinkers, including the anthropologist Margaret Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, psychologists Gordon Allport and Kurt Lewin, and journalist Ed Edmond Taylor and Ladislas Farago. For the next two years, they would propose for the Roosevelt administration; produce pamphlets, news articles and books, and lay the foundation stone for our contemporary belief in decentralized media.

The committee first defined national morale in terms of what they called a democratic personality. The members of the committee united a number of American intellectuals who agreed with the anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that culture shapes members' personalities in predictable ways. Germans tended to be strict and authoritative, they argued, so Hitler's famously bureaucratic Nazi regime was a natural extension of the German character. Americans are more open, individualistic, articulate, cooperative, and tolerant, and therefore more comfortable in loose alliances. No matter which propaganda medium the committee promotes, it needs to preserve the individuality of the American citizen. Allport summarized the committee's vision in a 1942 paper. He wrote, "In a democracy, every individual can be a citadel against tyranny. There is an invincible recipe for American morale, coordinated by the intellect and will of the 'all' of 100 million men and women."

As the committee sought to coordinate, not control, American thinking, its members turned to a media system we might call platforms today: museums. Today we are not accustomed to the idea of buildings as a medium system. But the committee thinks about museums the way they think about virtual reality today: as an immersive visual environment where we can increase our resonance with each other. Boas's student Mead, who works at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, points out that in a museum, people can walk among the images and objects scattered on the walls and floor, choosing to pay attention to those that seem most to them. something meaningful. They can hone their personal tastes, they can think about their personal place in the world, and they can do it together.

In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put the committee's vision into practice with a publicity exhibition called "Road to Victory," which it advertised. Most American art exhibitions at the time featured images of nearly the same size at eye level, but this one featured images of all sizes on the ceiling, at the feet of the audience, and anywhere in between. A trail winds its way through the photo's forest. The images were carefully chosen to inspire patriotic fervor, but judging by the critics, it was the way they were presented that attracted the show's audience. As one reviewer put it, the exhibition does not attempt to "shape" the audience's beliefs, "because the word has the connotation of fascism dominating people's minds". It is simply an invitation to Americans to take the road to war, each unique and all in solidarity. Another reviewer wrote: "It is this inescapable sense of identification - the identification of the viewer as an individual with the whole - that makes the exhibition so moving."

It wasn't until 1946 that the first electronic computer was released to the public, and the Internet was still decades away. However, when some members of the committee started working with a mathematician named Norbert Wiener, the committee's vision became very important to how we think about computers today. In the early years of the war, Wiener and colleagues at MIT tried to design a more accurate anti-aircraft gun protection system. Anti-aircraft gunners can only hit enemy planes reliably if they can predict where the shells will be when they reach the sky. At that time, there was no way to make accurate predictions because both the gunner and the pilot moved randomly. Wiener set out to try to solve this problem by viewing the gunner, anti-aircraft guns, enemy pilots, and enemy aircraft as elements of a single system, and imagined mathematically describing the behavior of that system.

Wiener's anti-aircraft gun predictor was never used on the battlefield. But his insights into how both machine and human behavior can be delineated computationally became the foundational tenets of computer science. In 1946, it also became the basic principle of a new political vision. That year, Wiener and his research team traveled to New York to meet with a group of sociologists and psychologists, among whom Mead and Bateson of the National Morale Council stood out. Together, these sociologists and laboratory scientists began to outline a vision for a free world governed and simulated by computers that would develop over the next seven years and would become one of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century: cybernetics .

In 1950, Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings , a hugely popular introduction to the new field. The book argues that modern society operates through a series of exchanges of information, like anti-aircraft gun predictors. Journalists and social scientists collect data; intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians process it, and finally, the systems they control take action. When functioning properly, such processes will naturally tend towards equilibrium, the social order. Wiener argues that computers can help improve the flow of information by providing better data to decision-makers faster. Wiener writes, "Fascists, business powerhouses, and big government...prefer an organization in which all orders come from above and no feedback from below." He argues that the solution to totalitarianism is to see the world as a computer-controlled world. Model and manage flat, distributed communication systems. His point of view suggests that the proper way to achieve the Commission's vision and democratize society is to move power from the hands of politicians to the hands of engineers.

Wiener's writings sparked the imagination of an unusual group of American youth, members of the countercultural movement of the 1960s who would later have a huge impact on the computer industry. Between 1965 and 1973, as many as 750,000 Americans left their apartments and suburban homes to create new collective communities. Some of these communes were religious communes, but most were secular gatherings of white, middle-class, and upper-middle-class young people seeking to abandon the American mainstream. In northern California, refugees from Haight-Ashbury moved north to the forests of Mendocino and east to the highlands of Colorado and the mountains of New Mexico. Some even set up shop on the hills around Stanford University, overlooking what we now call Silicon Valley.

Elsewhere I will refer to this generation of pilgrims as "the New Communalist" to distinguish them from the New Left at odds with them. Unlike these young dissidents who organized political parties and wrote manifestos, the New Communalists wanted to abolish politics altogether. They want to organize their community around a shared mindset, a unified consciousness. Charles Reich, in his 1970 bestseller The Greening of America , wrote that industrial society offers "a machine life in which people lose their existence. , becomes merely a role, a profession, or a function." Many agree with this view. The solution, according to Leitch, is to develop a new awareness of your own desires and needs, of the connection between your body, mind and the natural world. Such a consciousness, he explained, could become the basis for a new society that is non-hierarchical and collaborative.

Stewart Brand, a former multimedia artist and former member of Ken Kesey's psychedelic trick-or-treating group Merry Pranksters, has seen this shift take shape. . In 1968, Brand and his wife, Lois, drove their old pickup truck to a string of neighborhoods to see what tools these newcomers needed. That fall, the Brands set up shop in Menlo Park, Calif., not far from Facebook’s headquarters today, and went on to publish what would soon become a must-read in the counterculture: The Whole Earth Catalog . ). Even with that name, the Catalog doesn't actually sell anything. Instead, it collects suggestions for some tools that might be useful to people returning to the land. One of them was Wiener's first book, Cybernetics, and the other was an early Hewlett-Packard mainframe computer.

These "New Communalists" eschewed what Reich called the "machine world" of tanks and bombs, and the industrial bureaucracy that produced them. They argue that this well-established hierarchy of corporations and states alienates their members from their own feelings and turns them into stereotyped bureaucrats capable of waging a nuclear war. Even so, the "New Communalists" embraced little techniques they hoped would help them live as autonomous citizens in the world where everything is interconnected by information as described by Wiener and the Commission. The Catalog provides readers with Buckminster Fuller's proposal for a geodesic dome and a guide to everything from poor travel to shipbuilding. It might have been difficult to find a commune back then if you didn't know someone who lived in the commune, and the Catalog became a map of the commune world and its relatives. When the first nodes of the Internet were connected, the Directory became a paper search engine.

Silicon Valley's future leaders have taken notice. Steve Jobs spent some time in a commune called All one farm before calling the Catalog "the bible of our generation...it's kind of like a paper version" Google, 35 years before Google.” Alan Kay, who designed the graphical user interface that shaped generations of Apple computers, explained that he and his colleagues saw the Directory itself as an information system. In that sense, he says he "sees the Global Catalog as the paper version of the Internet of the future."

In the mid-1980s, computers were small enough to fit on a desk, and individual users were able to message each other in real time. Most of the communes have disintegrated, but Northern California's computer industry has grown rapidly, and it has welcomed former commune supporters. Brand worked with Larry Brilliant — who would later push the creation of Google.org — to set up a program called Whole Earth Lectronic Link) or “WELL” online discussion system for short. On the WELL, users dial up to a server where they can see messages from other users in threaded sessions. Howard Rheingold, a journalist and early member, sees the WELL as a fusion of minds, a virtual community. He later wrote, "The PC and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts who saw the failure of the LSD revolution, the failure of the political revolution. Computers for the people were the last in the same battle."

In the late 1980s, when Reagan hailed "Microchip David," many in Silicon Valley believed they were capable of creating the kind of human-centered democracy envisioned by the committee. They can do it through open communication spaces like WELL and engineered public spheres where people can speak out about their experiences, gather feedback from their peers, and change their behavior accordingly. Wiener believes that information systems have the power to liberate users, who share Wiener's beliefs and the committee's confidence that individuals can create their own as long as they have the opportunity to express themselves, without the need for government control from above. social order. They believed that if the age of mass media brought us Hitler and Stalin, the Internet would bring back our individuality. Finally, we can do away with hierarchy, bureaucracy and totalitarianism. In the end we can just have to, together, be ourselves.

That sense of utopian mission still pervades Silicon Valley today. A month after Trump's inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his social vision in a post titled "Building a Global Community." At only a few thousand words in length, this document is full of ambitions like Wiener's "The Usefulness of Human Beings" from start to finish. Like Wiener, Zuckerberg envisions a world in which individuals, communities, and nations create an ideal social order through the constant exchange of information, that is, by staying "connected." “Our greatest opportunities today are global, such as spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating technological development,” he wrote, sounding very much like a Cold War-era State Department representative. He continued, "In times like these, the most important thing we can do at Facebook is to develop the social infrastructure that empowers people to build a global community that serves us all."

For Zuckerberg, as for most of the left today, the key to a more egalitarian society lies in liberating individual voices, expressing diverse life experiences, and social groups organized around shared identities . Yet Facebook is trying to make this kind of society possible by creating private, for-profit digital technology. As Zuckerberg posted, in line with the goals of the Global Catalog 50 years ago, "our commitment is to continuously improve our tools and give you the power to share your own experiences." For engineers like Zuckerberg , even Wiener, has little interest in partisan politics: if you want to change the world, you don't have to lobby or vote; you just develop new technology.

This view has proven very lucrative in Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it facilitates the transformation of expressions of personal experience into raw materials that can be mined, processed and sold. Large social media companies, which usually began with the dream of creating a massive WELL-like virtual community, are now fully commercialized and committed to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listen to each other, trying to get a feel for who they are and how they can work together. Today, user data is automatically optimized and sold to advertisers and other media companies in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at the speed of light, making them profitable. In 2017, Facebook generated as much as $40 billion in annual revenue.

Social media, which both solicits and monitors people's communications, has transformed not only the democratic dream of personalised expression into a cash cow, but the basis of a new totalitarianism. Fascists were once known for their penchant for submission, submission, and self-effacement, giving dictators the right to express their feelings publicly. This is why both Wiener and the Commission emphasize the independent and self-conscious qualities of the democratic personality. It was in the context of fascism, the 1960s and beyond, that the anti-Vietnamese wars, civil rights activists, feminists, queer power activists, and various other community members who advanced identity politics advocated for their personal Life experience is the basis for gaining political power. If totalitarianism is based on collective self-erasing, then democracy must be based on asserting collective individuality.

Today, radio stations, TV talk shows, podcasts, blogs, and of course social media, are part of a new media ecosystem that has made the expression of personal experience so accessible and powerful that it has become a way of appealing to both the left and the right. tool. People like Richard Spencer, for example, have adopted the hilarious, candid style of influencers everywhere. Since Spencer coined the euphemistic term "alt-right" in 2008, the term has come to patronize white nationalists, anti-Semites, radical misogynists and neo-Nazis. The movement has survived in the public eye precisely because of its use of social media. For the past two years, academics at the Data & Society Research Institute, an independent New York-based think tank, have been tracking the rise of the alt-right online. In a series of reports, they reveal a world in which people in Charlottesville and Virginia who repeatedly chanted "Jews won't replace us!", like online beauty instructors, Express yourself in the first person. They are designed to be read by others as a whole person, witty, warm, and truthful.

Rebecca Lewis, a researcher at the Institute for Data and Society and now a doctoral student at Stanford University, studied 65 such right-wing influencers on YouTube. Most of them know how to sell well. They brand themselves discreetly, create as much attention-grabbing controversy as possible, link to other people's URLs, appear on other people's YouTube videos, and optimize search rankings for their video shows. Lewis points out that despite their cognitive differences, they can give the impression that they are a unified political force. Their intimate, millennial-appetite style, she suggests, largely suggests to viewers that anti-Semitism and violence, racial riots, are something that every thoughtful young man around the world should embrace.

The alt-right consciously shaped their online behavior according to the political logic of the countercultural movements of the 1960s, especially using the "New Communalists" as their template. In a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, when Spencer said, "We're really trying to change the world, and we're going to change the world by changing people's consciousness, changing the way people see the world and themselves." , maybe he's posing as an entire generation of community builders. The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer wrote Spencer's plan in a more sinister form into a "code of practice," according to leaked documents, "to study the 1960s. The way the Jews conquered our culture...they created a subculture by infecting certain elements of the existing culture. And that's our goal."

Identity-based movements on the left have been particularly effective at changing American culture, and the alt-right clearly wants to replicate their success. With the cloak of defiance, the alt-right can take to the streets to protest as if anticolonialism in the classroom was the new Vietnam War. They can argue that their ability to vent their hatred is in fact a civil right, arguing that their movement is a new version of the 1964 "free speech movement." On YouTube, they can tell the story of their transition to conservatism in a phrase pioneered by the gay movement: coming out. Lewis noted that conservative campaigner Candace Owens rose to the YouTube charts after posting a humorous video revealing her political beliefs to her parents on her channel Red Pill Black, with the caption "Mom." , Dad? . . . I'm a conservative." When friends and family find their new politics immoral, those who tend to change don't really have to worry. The style of their storytelling itself suggests that racism and nationalism are in fact as natural and real as one's sexuality.

Leftist pundits like to remind us how Trump is in a fit of rage, and the White House has no control over his tantrums and anger. Those same experts went on to be amazed that about 40 percent of Americans still thought he was doing good things. What they fail to grasp is that Trump is well versed in the politics of innocence in the age of new media. Mainstream analysts see it as mentally handicapped, while Trump fans see the man as just being himself. And his anger, his rants, his intense narcissism played out the feelings of those who believe immigrants, women, and people of color are disenfranchising them. Not only is Trump true to his own emotions, he is the personification of the resentment of his supporters. He is to his political stronghold what Hitler was to most Germans or Mussolini to Italians, the living embodiment of the country.

Identity-centric liberalism has dominated so much public life since World War II, and now it has come full circle. It has won many battles, from civil rights to legalizing abortion and gay marriage, and they have significantly changed American life for the better. Individualism, exposing the whole person in public debate, has long been a bulwark against totalitarianism. But individualism, in the form of the likes of Trump and Spencer, also functions to claim a new legitimacy for today's totalitarians. Fifty years ago, the New Left marched through the Pentagon, hoping to undermine the military-industrial complex behind the Vietnam War. Today, Trump is attacking the FBI and the Department of Justice in an attempt to destroy an imaginary Minoan minotaur called the "deep state." Fifty years ago, the countercultural movement hoped to bring about a world where everyone could be more authentic and where hierarchies of organizations and nations would disappear. And today, all those hierarchies are between us and the cult of personality.

If the communes of the 1960s have taught us anything, it is that a community that replaces laws and institutions with the cacophony of individuals invites paranoia and disintegration. In the absence of clear, democratically generated rules for the allocation of resources, these communes took on unwritten cultural norms to govern their lives. Women are often tied to the most traditional gender roles; informal apartheid is common; charismatic leaders (almost always men) are in charge. Even the best-hearted communes are beginning to repeat the racial and gender dynamics that dominate mainstream American society. Lois Brand recalls the communities they lived in where men would do "important things" like roofing, yet she and other women just put a small amount of bleach in the water to come Prevent residents from getting sick.

No matter how well thought out, the algorithms that drive Facebook can’t stop the recurrence of the racism and sexism that plagued the Commune. Instead, social media platforms have revived them globally. And those systems are ingrained today. Social media technology has spawned a plethora of companies that make money by mapping and mining the social world. Like the extractive industries of previous centuries, they were very aggressive in expanding their territories and subjugating local elites to their will. Without substantial pressure, they would hardly take the initiative to serve the public other than shareholders. Just as Mobil Oil once dominated the oil industry, companies like Facebook and Twitter are gradually taking over our public sphere to the same extent. They should also be subject to antitrust laws. We have every right to apply our standards for other mining industries to social media companies. We cannot allow them to contaminate mined lands or harm their workers, surrounding residents or those who use their products.

As Columbia law professor Tim Wu has shown, social media companies are enabling a new form of censorship in which people or bot users mute enemies by flooding their inboxes, and the First Amendment to the Constitution A few seldom-used clauses are enough to radically slow down this behavior. In addition to the traditional private ownership and shareholding system, there are other options for our social media. We have seen some possibilities for sharing practices develop in the computing industry, such as open source code and "public copyright" management. For some time now, an international community of academics and technologists has sought to create an online platform for collaborative ownership. Nathan Schneider, a professor at the University of Colorado and one of the leaders of the movement, noted that member-owned co-ops account for 100 percent of the electricity used in the United States. Eleven points. He asks, if social media is as important to our lives as electricity, why don't we take ownership and manage it ourselves?

That's a good question, but it doesn't quite capture our specific historical situation. The new totalitarianism that Spencer and Trump represent is not just a product of "who owns the media today." It is also the product of the political vision that initially drove the creation of social media—it distrusts public ownership and political processes, while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance. Since World War II, critics have questioned the legitimacy of our civic institutions simply because they are bureaucratic and slow to reform. However, organizations such as hospitals demonstrate the value of these characteristics. These organizations remind us that it is not enough for a democracy to allow its citizens to speak, it must also help them live. Most importantly, it must work towards a more equitable distribution of wealth, ensuring that every member of society is both self-reliant and secure. The work requires intense negotiation between groups with conflicting material interests and often deep cultural differences. And there must be institutions that can consistently follow through on the outcome of the negotiations, and must fulfill their public service obligations before serving their own interests.

Today's social media will never be able to do the hard and concrete work of democracy. Computer-supported interconnectivity is no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the effort of living together. The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force in liberating us from the fiction that everything is fine. But if the changes these campaigners are calling for are not enshrined in enforceable laws, their efforts will have little effect. Even though the American state may be inefficient, unjust, corrupt, and discriminatory, the representative logic that underlies it is the most effective mechanism for ensuring the fair distribution of our collective wealth.

Over time, as new media flooded our public lives, and as the children of the 1960s grew into the elites of today, we've learned that if we want a place on the political scene, we need to reveal our inner lives , we need to say who we are. We need to be honest. When Spencer calls himself part of a victimized minority, or Trump tweets out his anger, they deploy the same tactics as the protesters of the 1960s, and at this point, OK Say the same strategy as today's #MeToo movement participants. This observation is not to say that their goals are the same in any way, far from it. But whether lying like Trump or exposing long-buried truths like members of the #MeToo movement, those who want power in today’s public sphere must do so in a very personal way. They had to show their true personalities, which members of the National Morale Council had thought could be the only bulwark against totalitarianism abroad and at home.

Telling our truth is always necessary, but it is never sufficient to maintain our democracy. It's time to let go of these fantasies: Engineers can settle politics for us, and all we need to do to change the world is to voice our desires in the public forums they've built. For much of the 20th century, the American left and right were convinced that the state apparatus was the enemy and that bureaucracy was inherently totalitarian. Our challenge now is to reinvigorate the institutions they rejected and do the long, hard work of establishing the truth of our experience into regulations.