Technology and the quaintification of politics
When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, privacy and mass surveillance by governments were a major topic of discussion. Laws like the Patriot Act (and the local equivalents around the world) were endlessly fretted over in the media and debated in legislatures. This probably peaked in 2013 with the Snowden leaks, which revealed that American and allied intelligence agencies were sucking up data from major tech companies and tapping the very backbone of the Internet itself.
We imagined mass surveillance as a problem of centralized government power; we feared the government having the power to monitor everyone. But then the best minds of our generation got thinking about how to make people click online ads. First, we gave over all our data willingly enough to social media companies, and then without really noticing to a never-ending stream of data brokers and whatever category of company Palantir is (mass-surveillance-as-a-service?). Mass surveillance was no longer only a fearsome tool of the state. It was just the business model of the Internet: available for governments and anyone else willing to sign a contract. That’s how a nonprofit ends up spending millions of dollars to figure out which priests are using Grindr.
Technology quaintified the issue of mass surveillance. The old debate was not resolved; it was buried under the world that came next. The arguments still mattered, but they belonged to a world where mass surveillance was something governments had to build intentionally, not something they could buy off the shelf from a company that developed it to maximize click-through rates.
More generally, technology quaintifies politics when it changes the facts on the ground so completely that an old debate starts to sound like it happened in a smaller, more innocent world. The debate was not necessarily wrong. Often it saw the danger clearly enough. But it was built around the assumptions of its time: what was expensive, what was rare, what required a giant institution, what still needed a person in the loop. Then the machinery changes. The scarce thing becomes abundant, the exceptional thing becomes ambient, and the major project becomes an unremarkable feature of everyday life.
Another issue that has been quaintified is the regulation of broadcast media. Historically, these regulations have been justified on the basis of a scarce public good: the electromagnetic spectrum. But with the Internet, there is no real limitation on the number of channels, and thus little justification for importing the old logic wholesale. The scarcity has moved elsewhere: it is no longer a question of who gets access to the airwaves, but who gets put in front of us by the platforms that direct our attention.
Mass surveillance itself is up for a second round of quaintification. Even if we could collect data at mass scale, analyzing it and acting on it was still constrained by the human bottleneck. But with AI, all of this information can be searched, summarized, inferred from, and acted upon automatically. The old authoritarian dream was “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” But at least the man had to be shown. Someone had to notice you first. Now noticing can be automated.