Thinking together: citizenship and the web
Jennifer Szalai concludes her recent NYTimes column, Hannah Arendt is not your icon (gift link), with this paragraph:
For Arendt, loneliness was dangerous; it was precisely under conditions of isolation that one’s imagination could untether itself from reality and “develop its own lines of ‘thought.’” She offers not a guide but a goad — to partake in an activity that can enact our freedom and also help to sustain it. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple,” she once wrote. “It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”
As the beginning of the paragraph implies, the plural pronoun in that last sentence is crucial. We need to think and speak together. But there’s another element to Arendt’s point here. The thinking in community that’s so crucial is not the sort of process than leads to a nicely packaged solution that can be set on the shelf. Nor can the thinking be left to the experts who will solve the problems for us. There’s a role for experts, an expectation that they will make their own contributions to the thinking community. But “the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of ‘wise men’; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew” (The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 88).
Recovering — or developing — this ability to think together in community is crucial if we are to regain anything like a government of, by, and for the people. And this thinking can’t be just a one-off activity — we need to find ways to focus our attention together, to attend to the problems that we face over the long haul. Simply casting a ballot is not enough. Arendt suggests that she’s not the first to see this problem:
Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time, had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people a share in public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being republicans and of acting as citizens. In other words, the danger was that all power had been given to the people in their private capacity, and that there was no space established for them in their capacity of being citizens (On Revolution, p. 256).
As Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan develops the point, “there was little in the constitutional structure of the United States to remind Americans that they are citizens as well as consumers. … If the individual is given a vote in a secret ballot, but no public arena in which to join with others in debating public affairs, he is liable to do what American voters were in fact doing in enormous numbers, namely to use his vote as a means of defending his private interests, something to be bartered to politicians in return for election promises” (Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, p. 232).
The current design and implementation of social media platforms present at least two significant threats to our democracy. First, they co-opt our attention in service of their drive to make a profit. Many of us are losing the ability to think critically and deeply about an issue. Second, their algorithms make the sort of conversation — of thinking together — we need in order to function as a democracy both difficult and rare. I, like many others, had hoped that the web would provide a public space in which such debates and conversations could take place. I, like many others, find that the enshittified web instead makes productive debates and conversations much less likely. Last week I wrote a brief piece about the connections between authoritarianism and the control of fossil fuels. I’m thinking now that there’s a similar connection between authoritarian tendencies, on one hand, and the appropriation and manipulation of online discussions by a few men, on the other. I’m more and more convinced that taking back our democracy requires that we also take back the web.
