More Power to You, if You Want It
With governments retreating to old ways, I find myself pondering the concepts of citizenship and civic capacity. What does it mean to be a citizen? How has that varied across time and place? How do some governments limit the rights and powers of citizens? And how do others increase their civic capacity? Or, perhaps more true to history — how have citizens banded together to expand their own civic capacity, and can we do so in our own age?
Such musings transport me back to the Acropolis, to Judea, to Bunker Hill, and the Bastille (with apologies for the narrowness of my Western education). I find myself wandering back to Philadelphia in the 1770s, or beside William Wallace on a Scottish battlefield, or plotting with Cato. But if I return to the here and now, all that heroism feels, well, like ancient history, never to be repeated.
Of course, there are many civic freedoms and capacities still to win. But (perhaps thankfully) there is no sufficiently powerful revolutionary coalition eager to die for them. And for all the teeth-gnashing of late, the U.S. Military is not about to institute Martial Law and precipitate some violent uprising. To be clear, this question of revolution is only relevant because domestic policy has been deadlocked for decades at the national level. Given the stasis, should anyone hold onto any hope that U.S. citizens will become more powerful, individually and collectively? Or have we already reached the high watermark of civic capacity?
Whether my fellow citizens voice such questions aloud, I see these worries in their eyes. They could be Conservatives, frustrated by the Obama years and their inability to reverse his administration’s modest policy wins even while they’ve controlled most of the federal government. They could be Liberals, fearful that the current administration will bend and break the Constitution till our Republic is no longer recognizable. Or, maybe they’re simply fed up with partisan politics altogether, and their burning questions are more directly to the point: Will ‘we the people’ truly direct our government, or will we be cajoled, distracted, hoodwinked, and misled by elites whose interests diverge farther and farther from those of everyday citizens? If the political pathway to change is truly blocked, is there any hope that being a citizen will remain meaningful?
If the political pathway to change is truly blocked, is there any hope that citizenship will remain meaningful?
Wrestling with these questions is disheartening to say the least. But sour as this take on our current moment is, it fits precisely with every theory of government, politics, and social change holding sway from ancient times through the 20th century. Fortunately, that’s precisely why this bleak assessment is wrong.
Something New Under the Sun
There is something about this 21st century that is truly new, and it’s essential for everyone to understand. From the beginning of human existence until recently, there were essentially just four ways an individual (not born into royalty) could make widespread, cross-cutting social change: (1) build an army and coerce others to participate in your plans (e.g. much of Western history); (2) create or co-opt a religion, and use it to divinely popularize your program (e.g. much of world history); (3) control nature and distribute its bounty in exchange for deference on matters of policy (e.g. Yu the Great of China, and countless agrarian lords worldwide); or (4) win the respect and trust of anyone successfully deploying one (or more) of the first three strategies and convince them your change-making ideas are worth implementing. Democracies, of course, represent the institutionalization of the last approach (while preserving some elements of at least the first and third strategies).
All of these approaches to change-making have one thing in common: in each case power and policy always extend from some elite at the top of some hierarchy. Even in the fourth case, even in large democracies like the U.S., ideas flow up the hierarchy to those empowered to institute policy, and then, if the appointed/elected elites agree to it, the policy is delivered down to the people in the form or rights, privileges, and/or obligations. The power to change on a large scale has operated this way for literally all of human history. But now, a new way is emerging.
In our 21st century, things are different. Think about the Catholic Church, or Islam, or even China. There are about 1.2 billion Catholics, 1.8 billion Muslims, and 1.3 billion Chinese living on Earth today. Establishing such large populations of adherents required several centuries of steady recruitment and human reproduction, and no small amount of coercion. Meanwhile — and this is what is so new and surprising about our century — Facebook boasts over 2 billion voluntary users, and it achieved these numbers in only fifteen years. And arguably, these 2 billion users dedicate more time, energy, and care to their Facebook experiences than Catholics or Chinese do to their experiences as parishioners or subjects.
This is not to say that Facebook is better than any of these other institutions, or even good for citizenship. But Facebook exemplifies what is new about this 21st century and highly relevant for social change today: Internet-based software makes it possible for change agents to rapidly and radically shift the behaviors of billions of people without recourse to governments, religious authorities, or other elite-driven institutions.
Internet-based software makes it possible for change agents to rapidly and radically shift the behaviors of billions of people without recourse to governments, religious authorities, or other elite-driven institutions.
Though Facebook has its problems — and I leave it to others to debate their magnitude — it, along with Google, Amazon, Weibo and others, have shown us all a path forward to create massive social change. So, to the four social change methods we have known since humanity began, we can add a fifth: create Internet-based software people can use, voluntarily, to communicate, organize, and act at massive scales, whether individually or in concert.
21st Century Citizenship
As Facebook’s own executives would readily admit, the social connection platform was never designed to have any particular effect on citizenship or civic capacity. For awhile, especially around the time of the Arab Spring uprisings, we saw Facebook being used by protesters and activists to facilitate movements for more democratic governments. Many of us cheered. But, more recently, in Myanmar, the Philippines, the UK, and the US, we’ve seen Facebook used in ways that divide and even imperil the lives of everyday people. But Facebook’s use of Internet software is not the only way forward.
At the Goodly Labs, we’ve spent the better part of a decade quietly working on ways to bring people together with Internet-based software built specifically to improve civic capacity, citizenship, and the functioning of democracy. In 2020, we’re thrilled to finally launch three of our many projects with the public. These projects invite citizens like you to take an active role improving major democratic institutions like the Media, Congress, Police, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Reserve. All of Goodly’s projects are totally non-partisan, including people from various political affiliations, age groups, and backgrounds. And you can participate in any of them alongside friends, family, and colleagues, or from the comfort of your home.
Public Editor
We’ve all witnessed the degradation of news quality over the last several years. As news aggregators and social media platforms have encouraged us to choose which news we want to read, media outlets have become increasingly partisan and news content itself has become more slanted. The result: two separate ‘realities’ dividing the country, and destroying the hope of common ground and common patriotism. At Goodly Labs, we’ve been working on this problem since 2015, before ‘fake news’ was even a thing. And we’re excited to launch a people-powered solution. Public Editor invites everyone to spend 15 minutes each week answering a few questions about excerpts from news articles. The questions get at the biases apparent in the article, the ways evidence is used, and whether the arguments are logical. All these assessments — developed by a team of cognitive scientists, journalists, and science educators — are then stitched together to provide newsreaders with informative labels and credibility scores, so they know how articles might be misleading them (intentionally or not). When operating at scale, Public Editor will provide metrics that news aggregators and readers can use to avoid low-quality content. And, the collaborative system will help everyone wise up and learn to spot bogus arguments, and misleading reasoning wherever it appears. It’s often said that a healthy democracy requires an informed citizenry. With Public Editor, we can all work together to ensure that the information fueling our collective decisions is worthy of our attention.
Demo Watch
When political channels for social change are blocked, people often take to the streets to voice their demands and coerce governments to act (a combination of social change methods 4 and 1 described above). Such street protests have produced important and celebrated outcomes like expanding civic capacity for minorities and women, but they can also be dangerous. People get hurt and even killed, and street protests can quickly escalate in ways that break down the trust and respect that exists between healthy governments and their citizens. Often, the outcome of such an episode, and any long-term fallout affecting government-community relations, has less to do with the rightness of either side’s position and more to do with the approaches and tactics they use during the struggle. Unfortunately, no one — not police departments, city governments, the public, or even political scientists and sociologists — have a clear understanding of how on-the-ground dynamics lead to violence, compromise or other outcomes. There are simply too many factors and too many differences between separate episodes of protest for anyone to clearly identify which strategies and actions reliably escalate or de-escalate the violence. Fortunately, Goodly Labs’ Demo Watch project has been working on this problem (with modest support from the National Science Foundation) since 2012, and we’re finally in a position to solve it — with the help of citizens like you. By closely analyzing thousands of protest events occurring across 185 US cities and towns during the Occupy movement, we’re developing intricate models of protester-police dynamics that will finally answer longstanding questions about what works and what doesn’t to prevent violence and the downward spiral to more authoritarian relationships between ‘we the people’ and our local, state, and national governments. With new tools allowing citizen volunteers to sift through thousands of reports detailing precisely what happened across all those very similar Occupy campaigns, we’re getting answers that will help police keep their fellow citizens safe, and help protesters be heard without being hurt.
Liberating Archives
In any democracy, citizens should be able to know what their government is up to (with some temporary exceptions regarding covert national security operations). This principle has motivated many non-controversial ‘open government’ laws allowing citizens to witness Congressional hearings and floor debates, attend Supreme Court cases, and review countless reports generated by these and other government agencies. Much of this information is available on the Internet now, via the Government Publishing Office. But anyone who accesses these archives can tell you, they are not easy to navigate. In a world where most information is just seconds away via a Google search, using these archives is nearly as slow as using a card catalog. They do not provide citizens with basic Internet search functionality or allow them to filter by obvious variables like ‘party affiliation,’ ‘state/district,’ etc. If you want to know what your Representative is up to, you have to know what committees they sit on, click through an online catalog of links to view those committee transcripts one at a time, then repeat that procedure dozens or hundreds of times. Only someone with excellent data science skills and incredible patience, working for hundreds of hours, can actually find out everything a particular official has said or done while in Congress. Or at least that was true until recently. Over the past four years (with seed funding from the Social Science Research Council), Goodly Labs has been working to liberate these archives, so that the public, journalists, and researchers can quickly access every word uttered by their Representative on the floor of Congress or in public hearings. We’ve done the same for Supreme Court transcripts, and for reports of the Federal Reserve. Our tools allow citizens to search their government’s activities by party, by district, by state and even by gender. With the Liberating Archives project, we’re making government transparency more meaningful so everyday citizens, the media, and researchers can know what governmental officials are up to in D.C., and hold them accountable.
A Better Republic, If You Want It
These projects are just the beginning. Goodly is also working on prototypes of Internet-based tools that can help you, your family, your organizations, and even your towns and cities make better decisions together. We’re working on technology to create emotionally intelligent and ethical AI. And we’re designing mobile tools to help all of us become more socially adept and cooperative.
But none of this work takes off without you and people like you lending a hand. We’re not going to use coercion. We’re not going to lobby for a new law that forces people to adopt our ways. That’s not how change happens in the 21st century. We’re simply going to build great tools that help you become more powerful, more responsible, better informed, and wiser — and we’re going to ask you to use them!
Goodly Labs is building great tools that help you become more powerful, more responsible, better informed, and wiser — and we’re going to ask you to use them!
If we want a better world, it won’t take much. If just 1 out of every 60,000 Americans spends 10 minutes a day doing fun little tasks with Public Editor, we can correct 95% of the misinformation circulating on Internet news sites. If just 1 out of every 100,000 Americans spends 10 minutes a day on Demo Watch for one season (just a summer or fall!), we will have a thorough and nuanced understanding of how protesters and police interact, and how we can prevent and de-escalate violence in the future. None of this is terribly difficult. It only requires a small fraction of us to decide that citizenship matters, our democracy matters, and they matter more than watching another TV episode, or scrolling through another social media feed.
We hope you’ll join us. We hope you’ll sign up for updates and be ready to join one or more of our projects. And if you have it to spare, we hope you’ll donate to our non-profit, volunteer efforts. All of these projects are ready to go in 2020, but none of them can have national impact without financial and volunteer support. We hope — for all of us — that you’ll take this opportunity to expand the power of your citizenship.
Brigham Adams is the Founder and Chief Scientist of the Goodly Labs, a tech for social good non-profit based in Oakland, CA. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and is the inventor of the TagWorks mass-collaborative data-labeling platform.