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Reclaiming the Waters of Democracy
from the PIT UNiverse Newsletter
Building Blocks of Democracy
February, 2024
Deb Donig is an Assistant Professor of English at Cal Poly, a fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and a lecturer on faculty at UC Berkeley’s iSchool. She is the co-founder of the Cal Poly Ethical Tech Initiative, hosts the Technically Human podcast and is 2023-2024 Belfer Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League.
There is an anecdote made famous by the great writer David Foster Wallace in a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, wherein he told the tale of an old fish who swims past two young fish going the other way. The old fish nods at the two younger fish and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit before one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
When we are swimming in something all the time, we don’t question it. We don’t wonder at it. We don’t even know that it is there to begin with, or that we rely on it to live.
For those of us who grew up with various forms of privilege, access and opportunities in the U.S., democracy has been our “water.” Prior to 2020, many of us did not have cause to stop and wonder at how incredible it is to elect our leaders and have a say in our governance — what a historically anomalous system democracy actually is. Of course, fish of older generations remember and may remind us that the water of democracy is, in fact, very recent. And fish from communities and classes shut out of democratic practices remind us of our democracy’s deep flaws and unfulfilled promises. They know what it is like to be fish out of water.
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As educators, researchers, and technologists, we must re-sensitize ourselves to the concept of democracy and regularly tell ourselves and the younger fish with whom we work why they should care about it, why they, too, need it to swim and to breathe. We are now in the middle of a both literal and metaphorical climate crisis, where we are being reminded that water may not always be there. It’s worth taking a moment to interrogate democracy’s composition, its principles, to describe this ideology so basic, so essential, that we don’t even stop to wonder that we’re breathing it constantly, that we have always been swimming in it.
Furthermore, many young people may be wondering whether democracy is a resource worth preserving. They also may be wondering – and with good reason – whether its values fit the shape of our technological and globalized world. As Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor and founding member of the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), likes to say, the structure of our democracy is increasingly defined by technology — and specifically by just a few tech companies.
In other words, technology is not value-neutral, and neither is democracy. Democracy is a proposition that says each person matters, and therefore decisions about what our society should look like should be made collectively, together. One basic proposition so essential to collective decision-making as to be water is that we have to first collectively know, agree, and consent to the basic shared structure of our reality. But it is impossible for a society to deliberate about the values it should pursue or where it should go in the future if members of that society cannot agree on the shared nature of its current reality.
Democracy: Slow by Design
Our digital age has been hailed as one that has “democratized speech” or “democratized creativity” or “democratized access.” Anyone can go on TikTok and create, then make their creations accessible to a global audience, and we can by and large say whatever we want on Facebook or X or Truth Social. Today we have more access to more audiences, and more access to more information, than perhaps any time in history. Yet this access has produced neither a better informed populace nor equity in representation. In fact, as a study by MIT notes, false information travels six times faster than factual information on Twitter. As 2022 research by Brooke Erin Duffy and Colten Meisner on the digital ecology of creative professionals shows, due to algorithmic structures enlisted by platforms, only a small percentage of top producers controls the bulk of what audiences see in their social media feeds. Creators outside of this tiny group — particularly those from historically marginalized identities — will never see their content reach audiences at all. While it may be true that more people can create, fewer creators can access a meaningful outlet for their work.
Equally concerning is what the algorithms prioritize: incentivizing the most controversial or salacious content and pushing into the center fringe extremist views that would normally occupy the periphery. Those of us who work tirelessly to enact social change, who devote our lives to progress and to a vision of a better world get frustrated with the cumbersome slowness and the moderate politics of our nation. But we would do well to remember that true democracy is slow, and that its slowness is a feature, not a bug, because its process must be inclusive and broad and must account for the right of all to have our say. We would do well to remember that democracy tends to favor moderation, because when everyone truly has their say, and democracy is truly working, we are less likely, overall, to ultimately land on the views and decisions of fringe extremists. In a truly democratic culture, we can expect progress to be slow and moderate, and, as irritating as that might feel, we should credit it for keeping us from going off the deep end, into even more perilous waters.
The pace of technological production and progress is fast because it is not democratic. It is governed by the interests of a very elite few who are motivated by and are in service of a very narrow set of values that do not extend far beyond profit and power for that elite few. It is no wonder that our democratic process has a hard time keeping up with that pace, with enacting regulations, and with providing pathways for our democracy to function in the water of tech culture.
PIT-UN, as the cornerstone organization that converges tech with a vision of public interest, must grapple with questions of how we maintain democracy in our tech age and how we fight against the prioritization of profit and power as values that trump the other values — such as justice, shared care for our collective wellbeing, and truth — that are necessary for democracy to function. And, in its capacity as an organization with a dedicated wing of academic institutions, PIT-UN must deliberate and determine how we teach the young fish to see, understand, and swim in the water of tech culture. When they ask us how the water is, we better know enough about and agree enough on what we’re all collectively swimming in to tell them what water is, and to help them together, as a school, navigate the incoming tides.