How our misunderstanding of the digital and computing revolutions puts democracy at risk

Abstract

Today, the digital and computing revolutions we are living through give the false impression that risk is evaporating across the GPUs of computing clusters, deftly driven around by self‐driving cars, or is being arbitraged against at near light‐speed by financial algorithms. Those researchers that extol the virtues of the computing and digital revolutions emphasize the access to information and connections empowered by the internet, smart phones, and social media. Yet, these aggregate sketches obscure the fact that unequal access to information allows some, but not all, to manage these risks. Elites can block and warp access to the internet and individual information environments for their own ends. Social media amplifies anxiety and addiction, especially for vulnerable populations. Moreover, there is recent evidence that even news alerts on phones, by optimizing attention‐grabbing text instead of knowledge, polarize instead of generating common knowledge. In this essay, I hope to lay out a clear logic for why unequal access to technology that reduces specific predictive risks for some (using big data and machine learning) increases anxiety and perceptual risks for most others, including democratic citizens in the US and Europe.