The Bill Simmons Podcast is one of my most consistent diversions. When I’m making coffee, riding the bus, or doing dishes, there’s no more better escape than free-flowing conversation about NBA trade rumors, GOAT athletes, or sports/pop culture analogies. But his recent episode with Buzzfeed internet writer Charlie Warzel set my intellectual tuning forks abuzz. After talking about fake news, deepfakes pornography, and AI-assisted spearphishing, they turned to our government’s lack of response to the era of fabrication:
SIMMONS: I don’t see anybody in our government, even having the wherewithal or the foresight to do, and I’m not just talking about Trump, I’m talking about anybody, Democrats. Like who is...people always complain about the Republicans and Trump and all this stuff, but it’s not like Democrats have emerged, like these great voices have emerged on that side either. Who are gonna be the voices that fight for this stuff?
WARZEL: I mean, it’s really hard. So that story that we initially talked about, I went to Washington as like the first stop in that story. Didn’t end up using anything, because the meetings that I had with people were just sort of like, “oh, yeah, you know, we’re thinking about it.” You know, there’s no real, I think the State Department just announced there’s like gonna be a cybersecurity initiative thing, but it’s very vague…
SIMMONS: It would seem like the cyber department would be the single most important department the country could have at this point other than homeland security.
I agree, Bill! Let’s make a deal: in the next administration, I’ll run a public campaign for you to be made Sports Czar, like you’ve always wanted. In exchange, you can lean on POTUS to tap me as Cyber Czar. Here are four policy areas that are hurting for debate and leadership:
Security: Cybersecurity remains a mythical concept even among politicians who claim to be national security experts. It’s unfathomable to them that computers could knock America off the superpower pedestal. But the cybersecurity warning signs have been flashing red for a decade. Hackers attaining operational control of our electrical grid? Check. Terabytes of data on the control systems for our most advanced military aircraft stolen by China? Check. Air traffic control systems with worse security than your aunt’s AOL account? You got it. To avoid a cyber 9/11, someone needs to devise and oversee cybersecurity defense for critical infrastructure. Nobody is doing that right now.
Income inequality: Interconnected digital systems are changing the skills valued by the economy. Owners of these digital systems are accumulating disproportionate economic wealth and power. Whether it’s a tax on data, our sudden arrival at a blockchain-enabled promised land of open protocols, or something else, correcting for inequality will mean changing how we’ve set up digital technologies to interact with people. Most politicians either don’t acknowledge inequality is a problem, or think that free college and Medicare-for-all will work on their own.
Privacy: Privacy seems antithetical to the kinds of technologies we’re adopting, the whole point of which is to collect data and send it to some far away computer. The intellectual and legal concepts for keeping information private were built in times when there was a tiny fraction of the amount of information in existence on earth as there is today. Someone needs to lead a conversation about what privacy means when sharing information has become a fact of life.
Culture/Truth: The biggest mindfuck issue of all. As my friend Elliot said to me after my post about fabricated celebrity images, “Either general skepticism in the population goes up (that's the happier ending) or we end up with ever more volatile culture wars as the memes control everything. Who controls the memes? It's kinda scary to think about the fact that we may soon have no strong evidence to lean on as everything can be fabricated.” Other than senatorial chastisements of Facebook about the relatively tiny amount Russians spend on fake news, I don’t see anybody in power talking about this.
One of the things I like about Simmons is how he’ll decide how important something is today by imagining how it’ll be remembered in the future. For example: The Shape of Water shouldn’t have won best picture, he says, because in 10 years the movie we’ll still be talking about the most will be Get Out. No disrespect to people who liked The Shape of Water, but he's probably right. This happens all the time with the Oscars: Dancing with Wolves beating out Goodfellas in 1990 is the canonical case study.
I think about political issues in the same way. When historians look back on this time, they are going to evaluate us on how we handled the internet, mobile, social media, AI, and all the other forms of data collection and processing we’ve brought into our lives.
Simmons and Warzel are exactly right: our leaders are at best distracted, and in most cases, totally clueless, about the effects of technological change. It’s ironic that the people who care the most in the world about how they’ll be seen by history aren’t paying attention to what’s most historic about this moment.