Trends in High Technology -- Part 1
How technology perpetuates ideological isolation.
Better technology has resulted in a decrease in price and increase in quantity of personal computing power at a much faster rate than occurred with the printing press, the only comparably significant time in which technology so dramatically transformed society (although the spread of the printing press occurred at a much slower rate, over centuries rather than decades).
Online searches themselves may also contain their own political bias. Another study of the algorithms that define Google search results found that “top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a ‘Left’ or ‘Far Left’ slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results. Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.” A September, 2018, AllSides report also found that “Google News and Google News search results have a strong preference for media outlets that have perspective that is from the left of the US political spectrum.”
(Insofar as search engine algorithms simply rely on the popularity of news outlets to rank search results, those algorithms are tainted by the media bias inherent in the news sources themselves, a phenomenon that will be explored in a future essay series.)
Research by Robert Epstein published in the National Academy of Sciences show that people’s preference in political candidates can be dramatically altered by the manipulation of search engine results. His research has also shown that Google’s (and Yahoo’s) search results, however derived, favored presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
As has also been reported: “Google is apparently manipulating its search algorithms to advance a [certain] social justice agenda.”
Employees in the tech sector of the economy overwhelmingly contribute to Democratic candidates.
The tech sector companies themselves contribute more evenly to the two major political parties.
Perhaps not surprisingly then, as the Wall Street Journal reported, tech companies are increasingly acting to suppress views that run counter to the prevailing ideologies among their employees:
After Wednesday’s [January 6, 2021] mob invasion of the Capitol that disrupted the counting of electoral votes, big tech firms have moved, aggressively and in unison, against Donald Trump and his supporters. The companies say they want to marginalize the violent fringe, but their censorship will grow it instead. On Thursday and Friday came the Facebook and Twitter bans of Mr. Trump. Given the extraordinary circumstances, some commentators who normally oppose web censorship were untroubled. An exception who deserves to be listened to is Alexei Navalny, the Russian democracy advocate and scourge of Vladimir Putin who was poisoned last year. He pointed out that, unlike the open election process that ousted Mr. Trump, social-media decisions to de-platform elected officials are unaccountable and arbitrary. “Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone,” Mr. Navalny tweeted. He added that while Twitter is a private company, “we have seen many examples in Russian and China of such private companies becoming the state’s best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship.” Then the tech giants moved against Parler, Twitter’s free-speech competitor that is a haven for Trump supporters as well as more extreme figures. Google and Apple indefinitely booted Parler from their app stores over the weekend, crippling its viability on mobile phones. Then Amazon went for the kill, announcing that on Sunday it would withdraw its cloud service that Parler relies on to store data. The stampeding tech giants say Parler hosts material that encourages violence. Though Parler has a policy against incitement, Apple pointed to recent violent posts the site didn’t take down. It’s not as if violent content hasn’t been posted on the larger platforms. None other than former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo posted last year that “me-first capitalists” would be “the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution.” Parler’s more lax content moderation resembles the approach taken by social-media companies in the early and mid-2010s, before Silicon Valley soured on its earlier theories about an open internet promoting democracy … Sociologists have documented how America’s political tribes increasingly shop at different stores, live in different places and have different tastes. That cultural gap contributed to Donald Trump’s rise, and political segregation of the internet will widen it. Conservatives of all stripes watched as Twitter and Facebook took extraordinary measures to black out legitimate reporting on Hunter Biden in the run-up to the election. Now an informal confederation of web gatekeepers is methodically destroying a competitor that was created to accommodate their views. Dissenting opinion won’t vanish because tech CEOs ban it. The views will go underground, perhaps become radicalized in frustration, and eventually burst into the open in the streets. Perceived political abuses by tech firms are becoming a major engine of populism in the 21st century, and the companies’ moves on Parler will supply an infusion of fuel … The big tech firms may be private, but their censorship at the behest of the powerful in government raises moral and legal issues.
These moves by the tech sector recall a time when royal authority tried to shut down the voices in coffee houses in the 1670’s. As contributors to The Coffee House Culture website explain:
In the 1670’s, coffeehouses were appearing everywhere. They were becoming extremely popular. Of course, with popularity for most things, there is usually opposition. The same applies to the coffeehouse explosion. In 1675 King Charles II made an attempt to shut down coffeehouses with an edict. King Charles II stated that coffeehouses ‘have produced very evil and dangerous effects,’ and were also a ‘disturbance of the peace and quiet realm.’ This edict put an end to the sale of coffee, tea and chocolate in coffeehouses and in homes as well. However shortly after this went into effect there was too much of an outcry from the public that King Charles II had to back off and allow coffee and such to be sold (Coffee Houses and Mathematics).
Another researcher found the following regarding the connection between taverns and patents before and after Prohibition, indicating that the opening up of forums for discussion fosters progress and innovation:
To understand the importance of informal social interactions for invention, I examine a massive and involuntary disruption of informal social networks from U.S. history: alcohol prohibition. The enactment of state-level prohibition laws differentially treated counties depending on whether those counties were wet or dry prior to prohibition. After the imposition of state-level prohibition, previously wet counties had 8-18% fewer patents per year relative to consistently dry counties. The effect was largest in the first three years after the imposition of prohibition and rebounds thereafter. The effect was smaller for groups that were less likely to frequent saloons, namely women and particular ethnic groups. Next, I use the imposition of prohibition to document the sensitivity of collaboration patterns to shocks to the informal social network. As individuals rebuilt their networks following prohibition, they connected with new individuals and patented in new technology classes. Thus, while prohibition had only a temporary effect on the rate of invention, it had a lasting effect on the direction of inventive activity. Finally, I exploit the imposition of prohibition to show that informal and formal interactions are complements in the invention production function.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at how high technology often leads to low spirits.