Jamie Bartlett

In the bowels of every inspirationally branded tech firm some of the world’s smartest minds are paid small fortunes to work out why you click on things, and to get you to click on more things.

Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, recently called the ‘like’ button ‘a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’. He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and others understood this, ‘And we did it anyway’.10

For example, the ability to forget is an important part of self-development, because changing one’s mind is how we are able to mature and grow

Here’s the real kicker. The danger is not in machines coughing up poor solutions, but the opposite. As they improve, they will repeatedly produce extremely good, money-saving solutions (at least, compared to human decisions), which will further establish their importance in our lives, even if they are unjust in invisible ways. If a machine diagnosis were repeatedly better than a human doctor, it would potentially be unethical to ignore the machine’s advice. A government with a machine telling them a certain policing allocation would save money and cut crime would be hard to resist, even if it didn’t solve any long-term problems.

They are never neutral. For example, some police forces rely on data models to decide where to put police officers. However, crime tends to take place in poor neighbourhoods, which means more cops in those areas. That generally means more people in those neighbourhoods getting arrested, which feeds back into the model, creating a self-perpetuating loop of growing inequality and algorithm-driven injustice

We’ve had enough civil wars to know that the need to belong to a group is deep-rooted.

Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation.

Tribalism is understandable, but ultimately it is damaging to democracy, because it has the effect of magnifying the small differences between us, and transforming them into enormous, unsurpassable gulfs

System one’ thinking is fast, instinctive and emotional. It’s the reptilian brain, running on instinct. By contrast, ‘system two’ thinking is slow, deliberative and more logical.7 It sometimes, but not always, acts as a check on those wilder rages.
Modern democracies aspire to run on ‘system two’ logic, and its ideal citizens are McLuhan’s literate man. Its institutions are arranged to arrive at logical, thought-out, fact-driven decisions. The internet, by contrast, more closely resembles ‘system one’: everyone and everything is immediate, instinct-ive and emotional

It is important that everyone receives the same message – or at least knows what others are receiving. That’s how we are able to thrash out the issues of the day. If everyone receives personalised messages, there is no common public debate – just millions of private ones. In addition to narrowing the scope of political debate (research suggests that candidates are more likely to campaign on polarising issues when the forum is not public), this will diminish political accountability