The Past and Future of Information Politics
TODAY’S NEED TO MATCH SOCIAL GOVERNANCE to technological change is but the latest chapter in a long story of political adaptations to material innovation. Improvement in social governance has tracked the improvement of the political information sphere—the sum of political institutions that facilitate the creation, distribution, and use of social knowledge. Improvements in the information sphere have in turn depended on technological innovation. In the information age, information can now be readily seen as a driving force of history, one that is probably more important than race, ethnicity, class, or religion.
The history of the symbiosis of information, technology, and governance cannot be written here. Nonetheless, a few vignettes from ancient Athens, Britain on the cusp of the industrial age, and our country’s own founding can display the arc of change, the manner in which successful societies exploit the technologies of the time to construct a more productive information sphere to better assess and predict social policy. Despite the differences among these societies in time and place, their successes depended on the same kinds of reforms necessary for our own society, such as creating a more powerful compound of expert and dispersed information, distributing social knowledge more efficiently, and giving political actors better incentives to use it. These sketches thus confirm that our need for better mechanisms of social assessment is not unique to our age. They also underscore that even if we adopt reforms today, new information mechanisms will be needed tomorrow.
From Technological Invention to Innovations in Social Governance
Throughout the history of the world individuals have invented new devices for human benefit. These inventions in turn alter the relations of people to one another, creating opportunities and needs for new forms of political structure. Thus, accumulating acts of individual genius often end up transforming collective governance.
In part, technological innovation itself generates the need for new, more information-rich forms of social governance. As Brian Arthur observes, “Every technology contains the seed of a problem, often several…. The use of carbon-based fuel technologies has brought global warming. The use of atomic power, an environmentally clean source of power, has brought the problem of disposal of atomic waste. The use of air transport has brought the potential of rapid worldwide spread of infection.”1 It was always thus, even from the beginning of recorded history. The technology that created agricultural surpluses made cities possible, generating new problems, like the disposal of human waste, that called for collective solutions. By accumulating wealth within a compact space, cities also attracted marauders, requiring better policies for defense.
But besides such specific problems, technological innovation generates more general difficulties for social governance, because such innovation renders the social environment more and more distant from that in which we were adapted to live. In the evolutionary era, humans inhabited small communities where members were related by sexual bonding or by blood to many other members. Technological innovation, however, has progressively increased the gains from trade and specialization that come from living in larger and larger groups. As the polity moves from the tribe, to the city-state, to the nation-state, and perhaps in the future to a more international structure of governance, society can rely less on the fellow feeling of extended kin and ethnic groups to reach agreement and maintain stability. With specialization and innovation, society also becomes more complex and the relation of its constituent parts often becomes difficult to comprehend. As Ian Morris notes in his history of the last millennia, “The price of growing complexity was growing fragility. This was, and remains, a central piece of the paradox of social development.”2
But if technology creates problems for social governance, it also creates opportunities to improve the production of public goods though better mechanisms of information. One of those opportunities is better coordination for defending society against enemies outside and criminals within. Since technology may improve the coordination and power of attack as well, defense against outsiders is one opportunity that societies must exploit in a world of competing centers of power. The new social structures made possible by technology can also increase the effectiveness of other public goods besides defense. For instance, public education offers a source of prosperity by generating information spillovers that increase economic growth. But to gain these advantages society must make the right collective decisions about such public goods.
The new problems and opportunities for social governance must be addressed by pooling information. An individual working largely on his own can change the world by material invention. But any one individual may find it more difficult to understand the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of public policies as they ripple throughout the social world. Moreover, inhabitants within a polity disagree about what these effects are. These disagreements often reflect not only differences in factual knowledge but also differences driven by ideology and parochial interest. Thus, while technological advance is often spurred by solitary genius, social governance is best advanced collectively by creating mechanisms for capturing more dispersed knowledge within society.
Athens: The Beginning of the Modern Information Sphere
With good reason, the democracy of ancient Greece in general and Athens in particular has long been understood as the beginning of Western progress in social governance. Greek democracy itself was made possible by technology. Improved methods of agriculture like the iron plowshare created a surplus to support cities.3 Cities in the Aegean could prosper as well through specialization, because improved methods of shipping permitted trading for goods that were made more efficiently elsewhere.4 With such commercial surplus, citizens in Greek city-states had more specialized occupations and thus became repositories of knowledge that can be considered expert for the time.
As Steven Johnson notes, cities “cultivate specialized skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of these subcultures.”5 But even if the technology of cities creates information spillovers, political structures must be built to take advantage of them. According to Josiah Ober’s magisterial study of democracy in classical Athens, Athenian democracy was more successful than other city-states at producing public goods, from defense to monuments, because of the way its social structures produced social knowledge.6 Of course, over the long duration of Athenian democracy there were setbacks, notably at the end of the Peloponnesian War. But Ober examines Athens over a period of many centuries and finds that it generally outperformed other city-states.7
Most famously Athens became a direct democracy where primary decision making was made in an assembly of approximately eight thousand male citizens. The assembly itself gathered the dispersed knowledge of citizens.8 But such a group is too large for day-to-day administration. Moreover, its only intermittent attention to public affairs inhibits the setting of agendas and the gathering of expert information. Ober shows that Athenian democracy crucially relied on the Council of 500, a complex social structure for information networking that performed these functions.9
The members of the council were picked by lot from particular areas of the city-state. They then lived in the city proper for a year and were assigned to fifty-member teams or committees within the council. These teams created a network for exchanging information across “regions, kinship groups, and occupational groups.”10 Through this network, members could gain expertise solving the problems of the polity, creating an early example of the compound of dispersed and more expert knowledge that is so necessary for setting democracy’s agenda. The members also had incentives to put this compound to use, because a well-regarded member of the council would improve his “social network” on his return to public life. Thus, long before the rise of prediction markets and dispersed media helped to combine expert and dispersed methods, societies tried to accomplish similar objectives with less advanced mechanisms.
Ober shows that other features of Athenian democracy were designed to facilitate social knowledge as well. For instance, laws were written in easily understood language and prominently posted in public forums.11 Athens thus made use of additional information mechanisms that were consistent with the technology of its time, which gave its members access to social knowledge.
Britain and the Industrial Age: Representative Democracy, Civil Society, and the Information Sphere
As technological innovations in such matters as agriculture, cloth production, and energy capture made societies even wealthier and more mobile, nation-states began to become more salient forms of organization than city-states. Such states provided even greater opportunities for specialization and gains from trade. But technological advances and the structure of the nation-state also offered the possibility of innovations in constructing a more productive information sphere in politics.
First, the larger size of the nation-state naturally led to a theory of representative democracy and the use of elected legislatures rather than popular assemblies for democratic decision making. In a nation-state it is impossible to gather citizens together in one place. But representative democracy has other advantages in information production and deployment over the direct democracy practiced by ancient city-states. The information available to direct democracy is limited by the time and place of voting, whereas a parliament can tap into a more continuous stream. Moreover, legislatures can acquire cumulative knowledge of substance, or at least awareness of where to acquire substantive knowledge.
Parliamentary forms of government also have their own characteristic deficiencies from an information perspective. Most notably, the legislature may become insular and remote. But at the same time as the potential for parliamentary forms of government increased, the rise of the printing press, itself a product of progress in mechanical technology, made possible more sophisticated and reticulated opinion to which legislators concerned with reelection must heed.12 The press also permitted deliberation to stretch over territory and time.
Just as Athens was the society that constructed the best information sphere in the city-states of its time, so England, and then Great Britain as a whole, was the leader in constructing an information sphere for politics in its time. As Joel Mokyr notes, the Parliament in Britain was uniquely powerful.13 It also, for its time, represented the greatest cross-section of interests of any institution in Europe. It thus brought together reports about the world from every corner of the kingdom, offering more varied information than that provided by systems dominated by monarchies and their courts in most nations of Europe. Economic historians have argued that the result was better laws about property and industry that were conducive to economic growth and indeed the forging of the industrial revolution.14
But just as a more powerful and representative parliament injected more information into political decision making, that institution was surrounded by a more vigorous public exchange about policy. While Britain had nothing like the freedom of speech that exists in the United States today, it was substantially freer than elsewhere. The ability to hold and express unorthodox opinions on public affairs was noted by foreign observers like Voltaire.15
Britain also generated more sources of expertise to influence policy. Adam Smith, for instance, was appointed as commissioner of customs despite his criticisms of government policy. The work of such experts, both publicly and privately employed, was important in pushing wealth-producing policies like free trade and resisting the vested interests that often try to obstruct technological progress.16
This overall structure was rewarded in several ways. First, the information-rich polity helped make Britain the cradle of the industrial revolution.17 Second, it helped Britain defend itself against more populous nations and become a world power. Thus, the history of Britain provides an example of how government action can increase the arc of progress for social knowledge. The government permitted more criticism of social policy. It provided support for relatively independent experts. It created as its principal instrument of decision making a structure that represented a greater cross-section of people and made them accountable for decisions by holding elections.
All of these features of the British system were imperfect. Until the nineteenth century the British Parliament contained rotten boroughs, constituencies with very small electorates that represented the interests of a particular patron. As a result, they were not likely to update on information. But these rotten boroughs were slowly reformed to produce a more responsive electorate. From the perspective of creating a better information sphere, that process of reform is not different in kind from our movement to reform gerrymandering. The larger lesson is that even imperfect innovation in the information sphere can deliver benefits despite its defects and that these benefits can grow with further reforms. It provides a useful lesson to remember as our society experiments with innovations such as prediction markets that may initially have shortcomings.
The Founding: The Information Sphere and the Creation of Political Structure
The founding of the American Republic can also be understood as an essential step in the progress of the information sphere. For the first time, the technology of the day permitted a large polity as a whole to participate in consciously choosing its fundamental law: the Constitution. The decisions about structuring this deliberation reflected a concern with combining expertise with dispersed knowledge. In early America communication and transportation costs were falling sufficiently that even a large polity could create the kind of “liquid network of information” that city-states once enjoyed. The speed of transportation was increasing, and thus the time it took for news to travel was decreasing. Newspapers were increasing in circulation and scope, permitting citizens to unite for common purposes. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, such organization for the public good “cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.”18
America’s founders took advantage of these changes to promote an intensive debate about consequences though their structure for ratification. First, the U.S. Constitution was a two-step process. Delegates were initially selected to debate the proposals for a new constitution at a national convention. The members of this small group at Philadelphia were or became intimately familiar with one another, much like the Athenian Council of 500. Working without publicity, the Philadelphia convention established the agenda by coming up with a set of constitutional proposals.
But the Constitution was then ratified in state conventions with an unprecedented diversity of citizens from all walks of life. As Boston’s American Herald wrote at the time of the Massachusetts ratifying convention: “The body now convened is perhaps one of the compleatest representations of the interests and sentiments of their constituents, that ever was assembled. No liberal or mechanic profession, no denomination in religion or party in politics was not present.”19 In each state the ratification debate thrived not only within the conventions but outside as well. Pauline Maier notes that the debate occurred in “newspapers, taverns, coffeehouses, and over dinner tables as well as in the Confederation Congress, state legislatures, and state ratifying conventions.”20 Specifically in Pennsylvania, the state legislature ordered that the Constitution be read publicly to large crowds of citizens and that it be copied in English and German and distributed throughout the state.21 Such subsidies for knowledge reflected the idea that the citizens of a republic should understand matters pertaining to the public welfare.22
Throughout the country, sophisticated students of government discussed the likely consequences of the new design. Crucially, the laws of the day permitted the analyses of the Constitution, both positive and negative, to circulate without fear of government intervention. In fact, the state governments did not apply to this debate the restrictions that the British government had placed on the press, such as criminal libel, government licenses, and onerous taxation.23
The Federalist Papers are now the best-known essays, but scores of others, both critical and supportive of the Constitution, were published in important newspapers, frequently republished in others, and sometimes collected into freestanding pamphlets or books. These essays canvassed the history of Western nations to find support for their claims about the regularities of human behavior. As befits the first deliberation by a nation over the structure of its political system, the debate reflected, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, a new and improved “science of politics.”24 This science posited that political structures could create incentives to encourage or discourage predictable and desirable political results.25
Thus, at the center of the debate about our founding institutions, we see the beginning of an empirical, positive evaluation of political consequences—a kind of inquiry that better technology allows us to update today. While the Constitution is rightly celebrated as a document that generates a better politics though an intricate set of checks and balances, those careful checks and delicate balances were themselves the products of the greatest concentration of dispersed social knowledge for constructing political institutions that the world had ever seen.
Like the information spheres in Athens and Britain, the information sphere surrounding America’s founding paid dividends. Indeed, as a result of the debate over ratification, a consensus developed in favor of the Bill of Rights, the portion of the Constitution perhaps most admired around the world. Prominent among those rights were commitments to free speech and free assembly, permitting citizens to construct better information feedback and assessment of policies.
The first party clash in America also revolved in part over how best to build knowledge in politics. As the historian Gordon Wood has detailed, in Federalist thought political understanding reflected an “intellectual unity” that emerged from an “organic unity.”26 As a result, democracy’s function was to select office holders from among its elite members and then leave them to apply their knowledge to run the government. The infamous Libel and Sedition Acts penalizing criticism of officials reflected a top-down model of social knowledge.
In contrast, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans wanted to produce political knowledge through diversity rather than unity. Democracy should rest on an “ ‘aggregation of individual sentiments,’ the combined product of multitudes of minds reflecting independently, communicating their ideas in a different way, causing opinions to collide and blend with one another, to refine and correct each other, leading toward the ‘ultimate triumph of truth.’ ”27 The contemporary discussion over whether it is better to have a culture of political information dominated by the mainstream media or one generated by the blogosphere echoes the earliest political debates of the young republic.
More generally, ancient Athens, Britain on the cusp of industrialization, and the founding of America all shared similar characteristics, as they maximized the opportunities for the production of social information given the technology of their time. They all attempted to mix expert and lay knowledge in a fruitful compound, tap into dispersed sources of information, and provide political actors with incentives to pay attention to the information produced. The information sphere gradually became more productive, because improvements in technology permitted information to be better categorized, sifted, analyzed, and distributed to assess social policy.
Toward a Multiverse Politics
As this history suggests, the need to make politics more information-rich is an enterprise without any termination date. Of course, new mechanisms for social information cannot be foretold with precision. As with previous transitions, new forms of social governance will take advantage of supply for new technological tools and be driven by a demand for better governance to address technological change. Nevertheless, given the trajectory of what has come before, it is possible to provide a sketch of the future contours of a successful information politics.
The demand side of the equation will likely reflect even greater rates of technological acceleration. Given the prospect for continued exponential technological acceleration, some computer scientists and theorists posit a technological “singularity.”28 In physics a singularity represents a rip in the physical fabric of the universe, such as that caused by a black hole, beyond which it is difficult for outside observers to see. By analogy, a technological singularity creates a rip in the fabric of civilization beyond which it is difficult for observers to comprehend the tenor of human life. The most important marker of this kind of singularity is thought to be computational power equal to human intelligence. Once people design such a computer, its computational power can design further computers of even superhuman intelligence. Because these computers, unlike humans, can work ceaselessly and share information seamlessly, technological change will then be unimaginably rapid. Some theorists put the date for the singularity any time between 2030 and 2100.29
Although this idea has been discussed by technological theorists for two decades, it is now becoming more widely accepted as a possibility worthy of study. Google and NASA are funding the Singularity University that focuses in part on preparing for this event.30 It is not necessary, however, to credit the likelihood of a technological singularity in the near future to believe that the seriousness with which it is taken presages fast change in the next decades.
While the rapid-pace change makes it hard to predict specific technological change, the very speed foretells its capacity to disrupt society. The key to improving social governance to handle these challenges will be to accelerate current trends in the projection of alternate worlds in order to help assess the future policy consequences for the actual world. Alternate worlds can help us better assess both the past and future political results. They also help reduce bias in processing that information by forcing consideration of alternatives. A useful name for this effort is multiverse politics, because it tries to evaluate the policy paths in many states of the world to better understand which one we should choose in ours.
Multiverse politics can most obviously develop through the multiplication of prediction markets. Prediction markets create alternate worlds by assessing the results of alternate policies before they are implemented. As they provide evidence of their accuracy, and as their track records make clear circumstances in which we should have the more confidence in their foretelling, prediction markets may become the stock markets of public policy, prominently covered and displayed as legislators and citizens vote. This development would encourage more discussion of consequences.
Technological change will likely improve prediction markets. Already some theorists are experimenting with combinatorial prediction markets to gather more information.31 These markets take a bet on a variety of events and use computationally demanding algorithms to approximate changes in prices of bets on related events. For instance, assume that a horse race permits a variety of bets on horses—to win, to place, to show—as well as bets on horses to place in a specific order. The outcomes on those bets are, of course, related. A bet on a horse to show raises the predicted probability that the horse will finish first. With algorithms representing those changes, one can get more information on thinly traded markets, because markets can gain information from related markets. The methodology can be used to create combinatorial markets on related public policy events.
Empirical analysis of past policies will also be aided by simulations of other worlds. These simulations will be of different kinds. Some will slightly change the conditions in which past policies worked. If the effects of policy are largely similar given those changes, the conclusions about the past policies will appear more robust. More robust conclusions about past policies then aid the operation of prediction markets and other assessments of current policy.
Counterfactual analysis of past policies will be a more ambitious enterprise. For instance, one might simulate what would have been the effect of different kinds of economic stimulus packages, including no stimulus at all, on the 2008 recession that President Obama inherited. These kinds of simulations will become more possible as computers capture more complete data about the world at every given instance and as greater computing power then permits fuller evaluation of the consequences of past policy.
Computer games also create alternate worlds. We already have games with tens of thousands of simultaneous players experimenting with virtual realities. As John Holland notes, “Traditionally skills in exploring alternatives have been sharpened via board games, war games, and the like, but that context has always been limited. Video games have broadened that context—games like SimCity and Civilization substantially increase our sensitivity to intricate sociopolitical interactions—and the interfaces are much more realistic, allowing the ordinary citizen to explore options with ease.”32 Games could become more and more similar to the real world as prestige and money become part of their play. Besides revealing information about policy effects, these games may become a method of constraining bias as citizens take roles in the game that are different from those they have in real life. This prospect may be less futuristic than it sounds. Already games are harnessing people to solve scientific problems. Gamers used a program called Foldit to collaborate in predicting the structure of an enzyme that had eluded researchers.33 Gaming can produce new and useful information.
The evolution of such specific information mechanisms is uncertain. What is certain is that politics needs to continue the progress in information production and use that has been marked out now for two millennia. The so-called Fermi paradox suggests that the alternatives to such progress may be bleak indeed. Given that many billions of solar systems like our own have existed for billions of years, enough time has passed for forms of extraterrestrial intelligence to have developed and spread across the galaxies. Reflecting on the vastness of time in which extraterrestrial life could have reached the earth, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi wondered, “Where are they?” One of the most plausible explanations of the absence of extraterrestrial intelligence is also one of the most frightening. It is intrinsic to the nature of any intelligent life to expand knowledge collectively over time and for its civilization to develop at an accelerating rate. But it is also intrinsic to the nature of intelligent life that its civilization will destroy itself as the rate of change exceeds its capacity to adapt to the challenges that this acceleration produces.
The only way to beat these possibly cosmic odds is to increase our capacity to make wise decisions. From the time Pericles saw democracy as a way to debate the consequences of political action, successful societies have sought better mechanisms of information to assess policy results. Over time society has made use of technology to make its analysis of policy more sophisticated and comprehensive. Today the pace of change is faster, and thus the need to match political to technological change is more urgent. Man is both Homo faber—nature’s preeminent maker of tools to change the world—and Homo sapiens—nature’s master of symbols and language to represent and understand it. We will continue to thrive only if these capacities develop in tandem.