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 that the state would build a machine capable of watching 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. Then, without really noticing, we handed it over to a never-ending stream of data brokers and middlemen and whatever category of company Palantir is (mass-surveillance-as-a-service?). Mass surveillance was no longer only a feared 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 surveillance debate. It’s almost nostalgic to recall a world where we feared the government weaving together the disparate threads of our online lives into a sinister surveillance machine. Because now ad tech has built the same system, only bigger and cheaper and off-the-shelf for anyone to buy. The old arguments about government power weren’t wrong, it’s just that government didn’t have to win them. Ad tech quietly changed the terms of the debate while trying to convince people to click ads.
More broadly, this is what I mean by quaintification. A lot of political debates are really about constraints: how should government focus its time and energy to pull off projects only a giant institution can? Then technology comes in and changes those constraints. What was scarce and difficult and required massive scale is suddenly commodified. No one had to defeat the old argument because innovation dragged us forward and stranded the old debate in the past, where the constraints being argued over made sense.
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. Not everyone could run a radio or TV station, so the government had a say on who got access and under what terms. 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. Not who gets access to the airwaves, but who gets shoveled into the feed.
Mass surveillance itself is up for a second round of quaintification. The first round made it easy to know everything about you. But for a long a long time, there was still a gap between collection and use: someone had to care enough to do something with all this information. But with AI, it 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.” What’s quaint is the notion that you have to start with the man.