When the iPhone launched, I thought it was extravagant. Content with my 15 GB iPod and Samsung slider, I wondered: why mash functions together into one machine?
Then I saw those “there’s an app for that” commercials, and experienced the marvel of it. “You mean I can do that with my phone?” That campaign was brilliant for how it conveyed that this device could do almost anything.
One afternoon during my junior year of college I was sitting in my friend’s dorm room between classes, bored with watching him surf canyons in Team Fortress 2, and started staring off into space. A few minutes later, I realized I had been staring at my iPhone 4, held in my hand with a blank screen, for the entire time. I started wondering what this shiny black brick's multifunctional power really meant. Green shoots of realization started arising in my conscious experience.
Everything in human life involves information; so, I reasoned, information technology could transform any aspect of social organization. National politics had always been the most important thing in my world, and I consumed copious news coverage of Obamacare, the election, Iraq, the stimulus package, and anything else that powerful people in Washington argued about. As I sat there gazing, I pieced together an intuition that my iPhone might have implications that were much more important than the debates in Washington I obsessed over. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but my goal became to understand exactly how.
Six years, three election campaigns, one tech company, and a lot of books and research papers later, I know that we can’t just layer digital technologies on top of our existing social order to make it more fun and convenient. Adding to the human brain's basic function affects society in ways we are just beginning to understand, presenting challenges that demand collective action. Here are just a few:
- Digital technologies have been a huge driver of inequality. When an industry gets digitized, the group of people earning most of the income shrinks. We can’t stop people from using software, so how do we reduce wealth stratification?
- Automation is a sticky subject and predicting the future is hard. But even if we don’t see really high levels of unemployment, machines are going to be handling most routine manual and cognitive work in a few decades. How can we prepare people to transition into the technical or creative jobs they will need to earn a living?
- Voter turnout and trust in government are dispiritingly low. That’s not going to change for people under 30 unless we can transform voting and other government services into convenient online experiences. How can we overcome the security challenges to make online elections a reality?
We need to start thinking of answers to these questions today. The challenges of a digital world will metastasize as the underlying tech develops at growing speeds. People who care about American government must think and talk more more about what the future might look like, the goals of progress, and the policies we'll need to maintain prosperity and social harmony this century.
I’m resurrecting my blog to contribute to this conversation and to learn. As I continue to research, I’ll share the things I find interesting. My opinions are works-in-progress, so when I’m inevitably wrong about something, please comment or email me. Thank you for reading.