Martin Moore & Jamie Susskind: Politics in the Digital Realm
The Spark Theatre, Edinburgh International Book Festival
2pm, 15thAugust 2019
reviewed by Paul Thompson
The best events at the Book Festival, given that most events aim to sell a book, are the ones that engage with your intellect and make you look down avenues of enquiry you might otherwise have passed by. These events are fascinating almost despite the related publication. Three years ago the Festival hosted Richard Susskind and his son Daniel, who were promoting their book The Future of Professionals, in which they predicted the demise of “experts” and their replacement by internet-based “communities of experience.” They pointed out, for example, that in America more people looked to online forums for answers to medical problems than visited their general practitioner. The instant danger I saw in this was that all that had to happen was that a community formed around the experience of the second- or third-best remedy for a particular condition, for health in general to suffer. The thought of communities forming, ignorant of the fact that, as Alexander Pope said, “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” did not inspire me with confidence in our future.
Another Susskind, Jamie, with his book Future Politics, and Martin Moore with his Democracy Hacked, took this a stage further at the Spark Theatre today, when they spoke about how “increasingly competent systems” – to use Jamie’s term – were not only being used to target us, but almost on their own initiative now seek us out. They asked whether these systems that could be and had been employed to manipulate us, could actually empower us, and change the face of how politics is done.
As someone who keeps a deliberately diverse set of ‘friends’ on Facebook – the set includes communists and nationalists, evangelical Christians and atheists, believers in and deniers of climate change, pacifists and former soldiers, people gay and straight, ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’, and so on – I get to see memes and links, I get to see the comment threads, the ‘likes’, and the shares. I get to see communities forming around confirmation biases, and I do not exclude from that process communities that hold the same convictions as I do myself. It’s not just the other guy who suffers from confirmation bias. I would have liked to have questioned Martin and Jamie on this, but as with any Book Festival event of this calibre, there was a healthy surplus of contributors to the Q&A session.
Martin’s lead-in to the whole subject of computer technology, if I may use what must now be thought of as an outdated term, came from his admitted confusion about the “chaotic… volatile” world statecraft of 2015. “I couldn’t really understand what was happening in politics,” he said. Join the club! Where were all the “outsider” candidates emerging from? How come unfamiliar parties formed overnight? As someone with over two decades professional experience looking politics and the media, he was surprised by the use of technology in the fighting of political campaigns. Who, for example, was this small, elusive Canadian business, AggregateIQ, who had provided forty percent of the funding for the UK’s ‘Leave’ campaign at the time of the referendum on EU membership? He declared that “democracy is under sever threat and is many ways dying,” and that the politics of the future is “up for grabs.”
Jamie seemed to take a slightly more sanguine view. He spoke of “a change which could be as transformative as the Agricultural Revolution or the invention of writing,” of artificial intelligence systems becoming so ubiquitous and integrated into our very environment – even our bodies if we so wished – that the distinction between online and offline, between reality and virtuality, would soon no longer exist. Our children would not be able to understand the distinction. “Google,” he said, “has more insight into the human soul than any priest or prophet that came before it.” He asked what effect all this would have on power, democracy, freedom, and justice. And in case you are reading this and finding a more and more dystopian, sci-fi scenario, the positive message that both Jamie and Martin gave was not one of Luddism, but rather of engagement with this future, of seizing hold of it in the name of a more direct democracy, rather than shunning it and leaving it as a realm of fake news, blatant manipulation, and inward-looking groups who feed their own prejudices and have those same prejudices fed back to them.
This whole event was a nugget of what can be found when you pan the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Not everyone can get hold of tickets for the big “names” in authorship, entertainment, and politics that come here every August. But a presentation like this shows that it pays to study the Festival’s calendar, and to pick something that might surprise you.
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