Publication day!! The People Vs Tech is out in paperback today. To celebrate, I'll share a few short reflections from the book (which is available from all good stores, hopefully some bad ones too, and from @PenguinUKBooks here: penguin.co.uk/books/1116305/…) Thread! 👇🏻
This isn’t an anti-tech whinge. Rather an argument that there is an incompatibility problem, between an old system (mass party nation state level representative democracy) and a new one (borderless, networked internet technology).
Central argument: we are blinded by the v big benefits to individual liberty the internet creates & ignore the boring things that make democracy work: strong middle class, shared sense of reality, local journalism, elections we trust, effective policing etc.They are being eroded.
This is not about stupid proles voting the wrong way - a patronising liberal orthodoxy - but the long term challenges to modern democracy in a world of AI, big data, ubiquitous connectivity. 
Similarly, anyone using the Cambridge Analytica story as a way to undermine Brexit or the Trump vote is missing the point: people’s trust in elections and the long-term effect of profiling & micro-targeting on politics. The way politics is reduced to a data science.
Similarly, societal worry about algorithms & nudges online should think ahead ten years as these systems improve. What if powerful machines means we slowly lose the practice & ability to think for ourselves, and act as moral agents?
What I think we should fear is not an anarcho-capitalist collapse; but the slow erosion of trust in democracy as a system that gets things done & delivers for people - and a happy drift into some dreadful techno-authoritarianism.
It’s not too late of course! Democracy will have to upgrade, it’s not all the fault of ‘big tech’. A lot we can do, and I’ve twenty ideas - for citizens, governments and tech firms - to defend democracy. It’s a job for all of us. Hope you find it stimulating, and enjoyable. /end
Had a great event @RSAEvents - great questions and discussion. Thanks everyone who helped. Aaaaand they even had to turn people away as it was so full! Turns out people care about this democracy business...
Cc: maybe of interest @justinbieber @ArianaGrande @BarackObama @jack @Cristiano @usainbolt @realDonaldTrump and especially @KateBushMusic
It really is the ideal weather to go to a bookstore, find a dark room, put the fire on, get a warm bovril going, and read this new book.
