We worry about the eventual impact of artificial intelligence. We worry it will take over the world… maybe in ways that are malevolent. But, if we’re going to worry about the tyranny of technology, I suggest we do so starting now. No matter where we are in the hierarchy of power – high or low – technology has the potential to do us in.
In 2012 I published a book titled The End of Leadership. My primary argument was that in many countries around the world leaders were getting weaker and followers stronger. For this there were, there are, two primary reasons: changes in culture and in technology.
About changes in culture, I wrote, “Once upon a time we simply obeyed orders issued by our superiors, our leaders and managers. Now we are more inclined to challenge them…. The evidence of the decline in respect for authority is everywhere – and everywhere are leaders who labor to lead.”
About changes in technology, I wrote that weaker leaders and stronger followers were also the result of “advances in communications technologies that led to 1) more information, 2) greater self-expression and 3) expanded connection.” The sequence is important for expanded connection leads logically, if not inevitably, to action. To action in which a few of the powerless can take on many or even all the powerful.
Should anyone doubt the point about technology I would suggest they look at the front page of Sunday’s New York Times. It featured two articles that make precisely, if only implicitly, the argument that technology is changing the nature of power. This especially applies to democracies in which technology has been free to run rampant, the consequences, including threats to democratic governance, be damned.*
Consider what happened in recent weeks in South Korea. For decades the American foreign policy establishment assumed that South Korea was a stable, virtually unshakable, democracy. But this conventional wisdom has now been upended. This is not to say the country will slide into autocracy. Rather it is to indicate that the government of South Korea is in crisis – and that the fear and loathing was fueled and then fanned by technology. On the one side have been South Korean Youtubers who are persuaded that “North Korean followers” are poisoning South Korea’s country and culture. And on the other side are South Koreans who are convinced the Youtubers are being lured by “online demagoguery,” spread by right-wingers “with the help of social media algorithms.”
Not so very different from what has happened in recent weeks in South Korea has been what has happened in recent years in the United States. Technology has changed the political dynamic: it has weakened establishment leaders and strengthened those who are anti-establishment.
As far back as the 2016 election, Donald Trump used technology to his advantage whereas his Democratic opponent in the race for the White House, Hillary Clinton, did not. One study, by researchers at Columbia University, concluded that Trump had been “highly effective” in his use of social media, specifically to connect with the American people. Unlike Clinton, with her “sober position papers and policy proposals,” Trump forged a “direct and rapid link with the electorate,” absent the delays and edits that for old media were still standard practice.
In plenty of time for the 2024 election Trump and his team did something similar. They used technology to “flip the script.” They managed to turn what was, and was initially expected to remain a crippling political liability – the deadly January 6th, 2021, attack on the U. S. Capitol – into what is now seen by many as something of a political asset. As the Times put it, “violent rioters – prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned – somehow became patriotic martyrs.”
“Somehow” – but how precisely? Again, primarily by using technology, in this case to rewrite history. To claim that it was Trump not Joe Biden who won the 2020 presidential election. It was this lie that fueled the January 6th attack which, even in its immediate aftermath, was reconfigured to suit Trump. A hard right Republican Congressman promptly tweeted the mayhem had all the “hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Within hours Fox regurgitated the lie, which then was again repeated, the next morning, by another hard right Republican Congressman. According to the M.I.T Technology Review, within 24 hours the blatant falsehood reverberated online more than 400,000 times.
Lest anyone think that the overweening impact of technology is limited to state actors, and to actors within states, think again. The recent attack by a lone wolf ISIS supporter in New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, reminds us that nonstate actors not only use technology, but they also depend on it. It is their lifeline – without an online presence a loosely knit group such as ISIS would not exist or, if it did, its reach would be narrowly confined. How did ISIS connect with Texas born, American citizen and denizen Jabbar? Initially at least, only one way: through online videos and social media platforms.
Technologies are the new power players. Leaders who don’t master them will be mastered by them. Followers who don’t master them will be mastered by them.
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*Some countries – such as those in the European Union – do more to rein in new technologies than others. Additionally, even in the United States, where tech has been nearly entirely unfettered, is some evidence that times are changing, slightly. Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Anxious Generation, made the case that social media increase anxiety and depression, especially in teens, which is leading more schools to ban phones from their classrooms.