The Effort to Tame Tech Is Bound to Fail

T ristan Harris is the winsome face of the Center for Humane Technology, and I should be a sucker for the gospel he is preaching. A former tech executive whose company was acquired by Google, he has become a kind of perpetual whistleblower. He has argued that we are letting a handful of companies colonize our attention, devour our privacy, and psychologically manipulate our voting. He says we aren’t sufficiently guarding against the social-transformational potential that is in the algorithms that drive our daily lives.

Harris argues that when faced with the advent of artificial intelligence, we are trending toward one of two undesirable end points. The first is a future where we “let AI rip” and let it be decentralized, leading all individuals, firms, and countries to use it as they wish — creating an endless sea of information pollution and chaos. The other is centralized control, in which a handful of oligarch-run firms, or perhaps a government behind them, enslaves us with their monopoly on all the economic growth and power promised by this tech revolution.

Harris has a vision of cutting a narrow path that doesn’t lead to destruction, in which AI power is joined to responsibility. This should be music to my ears. My own critique of social media behemoths is that I believe our regulations misalign (profit-making) power from normal responsibility. He also, cheeringly, preaches a can-do attitude, arguing that we don’t have to accept social outcomes based on the idea that there is an inevitable quality to the tech itself. The future is something we decide together, and if we don’t — others will decide on it for us. I share his allergy to arguments that technology makes irresistible demands upon us.

Unfortunately, the approach that Harris and the Center for Humane Technology are taking is — to borrow from their language — misaligned to the problem at hand. Instead of a truly humane vision of freedom, Harris and his confreres are captured by a liberal technologist’s nostalgia for the 1990s when large, trusted media corporations still superintended our political debates, trusted bodies of academics oversaw the formation of consensus across not just scientific but social-scientific fields, and the elite class had confidence in itself. The internet was just going to be an empowering gateway to sharing trusted information. Harris’s combination of tech insider self-confidence, but utter innocence when it comes to philosophy or history, leads him to catastrophism on the one hand and a set of completely mismatched Band-Aid–style solutions on the other.

You can tell this from Harris’s own retelling of the problems of social media, which he says “led to a social catastrophe” of populism and atomization, and “destroyed our democracy.” The documentary he is featured in, The Social Dilemma, portrayed political polarization, disagreement about facts, disinformation, and heated political contestation as if they were intolerable novelties forced on us by social media, rather than normal or as trends long predating social media. Polarization has been increasing in America since the 1960 election, with notable jumps in 1972, 2000, and 2016. If you wanted kooky theories about the world, or media parading political extremism in an attention economy, try daytime television from the 1980s. But the didactic thread running through this documentary is that the internet might turn you into a brain-poisoned conservative. The documentary, released in September of 2020, and everything Harris has put out since then, shows no real awareness or reflection about how social media companies, in their attempt to stop the spread of disinformation, simply made themselves megaphones for government-approved information, which did not always have the advantage of being true. At the time, even the New York Times could find itself printing urban legends and false stories in a panicked attempt to stop disinformation.

But, over a smattering of clips featuring political violence and experts on disinformation, Harris could proclaim: “If we don’t agree on what is true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.” I almost feel sorry to inform him that disagreement over the truth has been a Western political problem since the Protestant Reformation — it’s not just the fault of his pecunious friends in Silicon Valley. The fact is that many of the problems of digital media are just extensions of having a for-profit media industry that runs on advertising. The digital media just overturned some of the commercial and status hierarchies of one media age before rebuilding them for another.

Take one example of his tin-eared approach to these issues. On a recent episode of the podcast The Diary of a CEO, Harris marvels that mass populism across the Western world is the result of mass immigration, while also arguing that AI threatens many types of jobs. But computers aren’t people. They only change the culture in ways we permit them to do so. Computers don’t erect mosques in Europe, which then claim the public space for Islam through the call to prayer; Muslim immigrants do. At the more extreme end, computers don’t drive trucks into Christmas markets.

This is part of Harris’s congenial, 1990s style of liberalism, which sees humans as interchangeable and fundamentally as customers and users. Having a fundamental commitment to liberal individualism, he and his team still believe the function of technology is to help liberate us from the unchosen bonds of solidarity that define us as members of families, communicants at church, or citizens of nations. Radical individualism and the commercial spirit thus become co-workers in building the conditions for tyranny by liberating us from the forms of solidarity and identity in which freedom is practically realized and guarded. Harris’s project, whether he intends it or not, will repel conservative-minded people, since his idea of freedom means re-subjecting them to institutions whose authority they do not recognize. But more important, he has excluded from his view the prime conservative insight about how freedom is realized in the world. And so, he will continue to confuse the signs of resistance to the tech-borg with signs of collapse in front of it.