We just witnessed the first fully modern campaign cycle. If you are versed in science fiction, it played out exactly as predicted. It wasn’t pretty.
The public discussion about technology’s impact on the election has mostly centered on the direct-to-consumer populism of Donald Trump on social media, but this goes way beyond Twitter and Facebook. The real story is about what it means to operate a democracy in a world of perfect memory and free communication.
The first reason this cycle has been different is that there is a lot more access to history today than there has been in the past. Henry Kissinger has warned for years about how the transparency of the modern era is destroying diplomacy and the effectiveness of diplomats. This election seems to be proving his point.
Hillary Clinton has been dogged throughout the campaign by email records—those on her private server and those found by WikiLeaks—which didn’t exist as a recorded medium even a few decades ago. In a world where business was done face-to-face and through letters, scandals were easily concealed. It’s not that there wasn’t questionable behavior before. There was just no accessible record of it.
Trump’s campaign has been similarly forced to deal with new forms of recorded history. Setting aside tax records, there was the infamous Access Hollywood tape and remarks to Howard Stern. In an earlier era, most of his historical transgressions would have been debatable hearsay of partial recollections. Today they are recorded irrefutable fact.
And I suspect the campaigns have probably capitalized on this, pacing their release of recorded “history” for maximal impact. This changes the strategy of campaigning to focus more on the past than the future.
Of course, this isn’t just about the internet and computers. Xerox, which turned the copying of records into a cultural norm, has only been around since the 1960s. Personal history just isn’t that old. Candidates up until very recently have had at most a small percentage of their lives recorded.
Forgetting the Future
How are we going to deal with a world where the only candidates without recorded foibles are the ones with no history at all?
For a long time there has been a question of whether a world in which everything is transparent will make us more open or turn us into repressed automatons.
I would argue that most signs point toward transparency making us as people more open, honest and forgiving. Even at the presidential level we went, in one generation, from “I did not inhale” to it being perfectly acceptable that Obama experimented with cocaine.
But, when it comes to a split nation and derisive politics, perfect memory is either going to outright disqualify most candidates for high office, or make it so unappealing to run that no one talented and sane is going to bother.
We have to come to terms with the fact that if everything is remembered, there will be tons of unflattering stuff available on everyone. Of course, not all embarrassing stuff is equal, and we have to learn to forgive some things without excusing the unforgivable.
We also have to learn how to have a conversation about the future when the past is both so mesmerizing and easily at hand.
Instant Free Communication
The second factor that makes this election cycle truly modern is the media the candidates have received at zero incremental cost.
Facebook and Twitter are part of the story—but only a small part. After all, while we have been inundated with Trump, he only has 12.9 million Twitter followers and 11 million Facebook likes—and let’s be honest about the percentage of those that are likely bots. Jessica made a good point about the impact of something as basic as email in her post on Friday.
As the candidates have gained access to unmediated direct forms of communication through social, email and video, they have brought the bulk of the rest of the media, and the discussion, along with them at zero incremental cost.
One way to think about this is to recognize just how little each candidate actually spent this cycle to get their message out to the whole country. According to the Washington Post, Hillary has raised $1.3 billion ($556 million directly to the campaign). Trump has raised $795 million ($248 million directly to the campaign).
While those numbers might seem large, remember that the most generous view of the Democrats’ spending on the campaign is basically $4.30 per American, or less than 30 minutes of work at the California state minimum wage.
Or, if you want to compare the numbers to private tech company fundraising, the Hillary campaign has raised half of what Snapchat has raised to date and just about a third of what Uber has raised last summer alone. That is a pittance for control of an $18 trillion economy.
The reason that the numbers are so low relative to the impact is that the bulk of the actual “financing” for both campaigns has come through readily accessible free media, where the currency that sells is extremism, not reason or honest debate. It is the echo chamber of Fox and CNN that is permanently “breaking news,” along with the newspapers and the radio stations scraping for pennies as their business models crumble, that are providing all the real financing for the campaigns.
So, campaigns are cheaper to run than ever, and the media, without any meaningful remaining control over distribution, is forced to kowtow to extremism. Facebook and Twitter might represent the spearhead that is morphing the rest of the public discourse in their wake, but they are just the tip of the spear, not the whole story.
The Transition Isn’t Over
What are we to do about it all? Here are two scary ideas.
To deal with the race to the bottom of instant free communication, we might have to start making it unprofitable for attention-driven, advertising-supported platforms to cover politics. One idea would be to force news platforms to give back to the government a percentage of their revenue in proportion to the amount of time they spend covering candidates—a coverage tax. It wouldn't be insane for CNN to give 50% of its revenue to the government because 50% of their content is election coverage.
That would basically say that you can’t profit off the public discourse at all. We the people own it. (Covering private industry is another matter.)
If that isn’t sufficiently strange to consider, let’s talk about how to destroy history to save the republic.
It is already possible to manipulate video and audio so that people will be able to credibly forge visual and audio history of events that never happened.
A world where anyone can create a fake video of anyone else saying almost anything is almost too cataclysmic to our way of interacting to contemplate. But it would take care of the issue of us being overly fixated on history; it would be impossible to trust most of what you see and hear as truth. People would rapidly get bored of talking about it and focus instead on coming up with sound plans for the future.
This is obviously crazy, and not a world I necessarily want to see myself. But, the reality is that the ultimate solution to privacy is almost certainly robust misinformation, not trying to hide information anymore. The modern way to destroy information is by hiding it in even more information.
That’s a scenario Kissinger probably never contemplated but that could prove his words even more true.