THE ALGORITHM IS A NOVEL PROBLEM for democracy. Technology companies boast, with little shyness, about how they can nudge users toward more virtuous behavior—how they can induce us to click, to read, to buy, or even to vote. These tactics are potent, because we don’t see the hand steering us. We don’t know how information has been patterned to prod us. Despite all Silicon Valley’s sloganeering about building a more transparent world, their ideals stop at the threshold of their offices.
In any other line of business, this secrecy wouldn’t much matter. But the knowledge monopolists have unique power in our democracy. They don’t just have the ability to pick the fate of a book, they can influence the fate of the Republic. By sorting information, they make decisions that shape our opinions of issues and politicians. Even free-market conservatives will worry about concentrations of power among companies that control the flow of words and ideas, because that power has been so blatantly abused in the past—both the distant past and the not-so-distant past.
Before there was the Internet, there was the telegraph, or what one book dubbed the “Victorian Internet.” It’s now hard to conjure its long reign. Unlike the radio or the mail, other supposedly antiquated forms of communication, the telegraph was declared lifeless and buried in the graveyard of technology. There was nothing about telegraphy—no charm, no necessity—that could survive change or even persist as a decorative reminder of bygone days. The last telegram was sent in 2006 without elegy.
This little-noted death should not obscure a brilliant life. The telegraph was the first instance of electronic communication. It relayed information instantaneously, across nations and then oceans. When it appeared, the speed and range of the telegraph sparked paroxysms of euphoria, much like the rhapsodic predictions that greeted the arrival of the World Wide Web. Pundits of the mid-nineteenth century credited the newfangled technology with collapsing time and space, rendering distant swaths of geography into a cozy neighborhood. Samuel Morse’s famous message, sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844, trembled in the face of his invention’s import: What Hath God Wrought?
It took decades—and a catastrophic war—for an answer to Morse’s question. When Abraham Lincoln became president, he had seen his first telegraph key only three years earlier. But, in time, he became something of an addict. Sitting in the basement of the War Department, he would send instructions to his generals on the front, a highly personal and highly effective method of command. Over the course of the long war, the Union army strung fifteen thousand miles of telegraph wire, as opposed to the one thousand miles that the rebels managed. This proved an enormous tactical advantage. It allowed for savvy shifting of troops and supplies across the map. When the country exited the war, the telegraph system was national in scale—a tangle of trunks and branches that could quickly relay commercial prices and news. One company, Western Union, was best positioned to privatize this network, and it would come to dominate telegraphy for the next hundred years.
The Western Union monopoly had many accomplices. It received a boost from the government, even before the war. The Congress had created a strong incentive for connecting the two coasts by wire. It granted free use of federal lands for that purpose—and rewarded Western Union with a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus when it completed the task in 1861. Western Union wasn’t more technologically adept than its competitors; it simply seized the opportunities as they came. When the industry became overcrowded with ill-fated competitors, Western Union swallowed the weaker firms and combined into an implacable behemoth.
At that early moment in the history of the American regulatory state, there were no antitrust laws to constrain Western Union. Still, the company continually dodged political spears. In 1870, the Brits nationalized their telegraph system, housing it within their postal service. Ulysses S. Grant and a raft of politicians openly contemplated doing the same here. Between 1866 and 1900, congressmen introduced seventy bills to have the postal service take over telegraphy.
The success of Western Union, therefore, hinged on its ability to control the terms of the political debate. And its tactics for swaying members of Congress could be quite raw. Until the 1910s, telegraphy was so expensive that only businesses could afford the service. But Western Union wired offices in the Capitol Building and gave elected officials unlimited free use of the system. According to memos in the Western Union archive, the company privately considered this the “cheapest means” of calming its critics in Washington.
Freebies were merely a first line of defense—and relatively innocuous compared with Western Union’s other ploys. Its protective shell was the press. More specifically, Western Union formed an impregnable alliance with the Associated Press (AP)—an organization that had achieved an impressive monopoly of its own. The AP supplied American newspapers with an endless stream of copy that helped them to economically fill their pages. Most American newspapers couldn’t afford to send correspondents to Washington or Europe, and the AP’s network of reporters allowed them to fill that gap. More than 80 percent of the copy in western papers, according to one survey, came from the wire service. Newspapers relied on the AP, and the AP exploited that reliance. It insisted that its clients use no other wire service. Even worse, it insisted that its clients never say a bad public word about the organization.
It was an enviable business model. Certainly, Western Union salivated over the prospect of acquiring a piece of that action. But the optics of the monopolist acquiring even greater power were terrible. So Western Union stumbled upon an even more elegant solution. The two monopolists of the wires would conspire so that they mutually protected each other. Western Union would grant the AP exclusive use of its wires, at a nicely discounted rate. In return, the AP signed a contract that declared that its members would “not in any way encourage or support any opposition or competing telegraph companies.” The quid pro quo couldn’t have been any clearer. Newspapers that spoke ill of Western Union were tossed from the AP—as was the case with the Omaha Republican, punished for having the temerity to describe the telegraph company as an “onerous” and “grievous” monopoly. The alliance of monopolists served its purpose. In his magisterial history of media, Paul Starr has argued, “Unlike the British telegraph companies, Western Union had the press on its side and, in no small measure because of that means of attenuating hostile public opinion, was able to avoid the fate of its British counterparts.”
A sense of public duty didn’t loom large in the AP’s calculus in those years. The AP archives are filled with instances of Republican malfeasance that the organization had uncovered through tips and various other reportorial channels. But the men who ran the AP were rock-ribbed Republicans themselves. The AP chiefs, without a pang of self-consciousness or guilt, committed to burying any evidence of wrongdoing by the leaders of their party.
There’s no doubt that many political pundits and reporters have dreamed of making a candidate—taking a ball of political clay and using their journalistic powers to mold a winner. But only the AP had the power to pull off such a mythological assignment. In the election of 1876, the chief of the western branch of the AP, a small, cadaverous man called William Henry Smith, set out to install his friend from Ohio, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, in the White House. Hayes was no lock for the Republican nomination, let alone greater things. One journalist called him a “third rate nonentity.” Still, there was some raw material to work with, as well as brute journalistic force to be deployed. Smith used the AP to paint a glorious image of his candidate. He asked prominent Republican politicians to write glowing private testimonials about Hayes’s first-rate character. These missives somehow materialized on the wires and then in papers across the country. Whenever a potentially explosive charge against Hayes surfaced, the AP used overwhelming resources to refute it. (Smith was shrewd, and carefully leaked rumors against Hayes’s opponents to newspapers that had no clear connection to him.) So obvious was the propaganda that the organization came to be known as the “Hayesociated Press.”
The Hayes campaign was one of American political history’s great slogs. It took seven ballots to make him the Republican nominee. And that foreshadowed greater difficulties to come. On election night, Hayes trailed his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, by 250,000 votes. The candidate himself was close to conceding defeat, but he didn’t. A New York Times editor passed along intelligence that the paper had gleaned from Democratic operatives in the South. In private, the Tilden camp breathed a heavy sigh of relief that Hayes hadn’t looked more carefully at the electoral results in three southern states. The vote tally might even have gone Hayes’s way and tipped the Electoral College. This intelligence was enough to forestall Hayes’s concession. For four months, the result of the election remained hotly contested—so hotly that there were fears that the controversy would culminate in violence and a second civil war. During that long stretch of squabbling, Western Union gave Smith unfettered access to telegrams sent by Democratic strategists. Smith then passed along the purloined information to Hayes—which allowed the Republicans to outmaneuver Tilden and his allies.
Behind the scenes, Associated Press executives helped steer the negotiations between prudent men of goodwill, on both sides, toward an equitable outcome—that’s how they described their grand bargain. In retrospect, the resulting deal was diabolical. Hayes prevailed only when his party agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South. In effect, the Hayes camp had relinquished the dream of reconstructing the South in a spirit of racial equality—the bum deal a small price for installing the AP’s man in the White House.
It seems paranoid to fear the repetition of such machinations—and it was certainly easier to pull off a stunt like that more than one hundred years ago, in an era when smoke-filled rooms were the preferred venue for practicing politics. Still, there are lessons that extend to our own time. The owners of powerful companies will always have their own interests and agendas. If they have the means to promote and protect their self-interest and deep beliefs, refraining from the opportunity will require restraint that isn’t universally present in human beings. That temptation grows even stronger when technology permits hidden-handed interventions in the political process. It’s foolish to believe that it can’t happen here, when it already has.
• • •
MY OWN SMALL BRUSH with monopoly came at an ill-timed juncture in my career as editor of the New Republic. In one hundred years, the magazine had never had a chief executive officer. We had owners who ran the institution with a sense of public mission and personal vanity. (The one year we turned a profit, we celebrated with a pizza party that pushed us back into the red.) But Chris Hughes, the owner of the magazine and my boss, wanted to turn a profit. He freely admitted that it required greater business acumen than he possessed, or than he could hire without offering a big, enticing title.
The thing about CEOs is that they have “chief” in their title, and with that the implied power to fire the editor. I found that an unsettling shift in the chain of command. (Before the arrival of the CEO, I had reported directly to Chris.) It seemed somewhat unpromising that the new CEO waited nearly two weeks to meet with me after starting. There were, however, mitigating circumstances. I worked in Washington, the magazine’s main editorial office, and he worked in New York, where we housed our business side. I clung to that fact and held out hope that I might persist into the new regime.
After my first meeting with the CEO, I wasn’t so sure. His name was Guy Vidra, an alumnus of various tech start-ups, with the requisite Fitbit around his wrist, rectangular spectacles, and trimmed facial hair. He came to us, most recently, by way of Yahoo! As I entered his office, this suddenly seemed like an entirely different planet.
I was hoping for a bit of get-to-know-you chat as I sank down into a low-slung leather chair in his office and then leaned forward into a posture of hyper-agreeability. My mission was to charm him and persuade him of my commercial spirit. But before I could begin to court him, he rose from behind his walnut-and-steel desk, grabbed a marker, and headed to the whiteboard on his wall. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said as he began to sketch a plan for remaking the editorial structure of the magazine. I saw an incomprehensible tangle of arrows and circles quickly materialize. But as he spoke, I caught the drift. What attracted Vidra was the transformation of the New Republic into a technology company with the ethos of a start-up. This required an overhaul of our mission and core character.
My reputation in the office was as a nostalgist and traditionalist. I liked to tell the story of how my father had turned me into a reader of the New Republic by slipping his finished issues under my bedroom door. And I had just edited a centennial anthology of writings from the magazine’s back catalog. This reputation reinforced an impression that I resented: Vidra considered me insensitive to the imperative to make money. I certainly didn’t mean to confirm this impression. But the magazine had a void in its cover lineup, and I quickly pulled together an essay on Amazon.
This was the fall of 2014—and contract negotiations between Amazon and the publishing giant Hachette had grown protracted and foul. I hadn’t much cared about the early months of the contretemps, which pitted a monopoly against an oligopoly. Neither side struck me as worthy of huge sympathy. But then the battlefront encroached uncomfortably close to home. I watched as Amazon punished Hachette’s writers in its effort to make the publisher feel pain. Books, the products of years of passionate labor, were prevented from reaching the market. Amazon used its bully’s arm to delay their shipments or direct readers to older books on similar subjects, as well as a raft of other vengeful tactics. It’s a failure of moral imagination that writers respond only to injustices that they can envision suffering themselves. But I had published with Hachette and it wasn’t hard to make the empathetic leap that landed me in solidarity with the writers whose sales Amazon crashed.
My essay appeared under a headline that had fists. The cover blared, “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” The piece described why the government should get tough with Amazon for transgressing antitrust laws. It found an audience, but fairly quickly receded from the forefront of my mind. Attention was pretty clearly needed elsewhere. My intraoffice campaign for survival seemed to be floundering. One afternoon, I sat at my computer as I received email from six different media reporters seeking to confirm rumors that I was about to be fired. “This isn’t the most comfortable question, but here goes . . .”
It was at that awkward moment that Amazon decided that it would punish the New Republic. Our ad sales department received a note, informing us that Amazon would be yanking its advertising for its new political comedy, Alpha House. The missive left nothing to the imagination. “In light of the cover article about Amazon, Amazon has decided to terminate the Alpha House campaign currently running on the New Republic. Please confirm receipt of this email and that the campaign has been terminated.” It was signed, “Team Amazon.”
When I asked Chris Hughes if I could pick a fight over Amazon’s cancellation, he sent me a curt note instructing me to remain quiet. Unfortunately, I had already forwarded Amazon’s note to a friend—who, in turn, excitedly and unadvisedly forwarded it to the New York Times. Before I could stuff the controversy back into a quiet corner, a reporter had written Chris asking him to comment. While my boss was fuming at my disobedience, I was sitting on a cross-country flight from San Francisco with painfully slow WiFi. I sent an email furiously pleading with my friend to help make the story go away. I could hear the backswing of the executioner.
We shouldn’t be hyperbolic about the knowledge monopolies. The Associated Press’s schemes from the nineteenth century are an extreme case. Most media barons don’t aspire to rig presidential elections. Their interests are far more parochial. In this way, they are no different from any other big business. They want to stave off the regulators and the tax man; they want to protect their business from the incursions of government, and to inhale government largesse, when profit can be made.
But, then again, knowledge monopolists are not like every other business. Every writer, every media outlet, every book publisher depends on these companies for their financial survival. These companies, therefore, have a unique ability to inhibit criticism of themselves. They don’t need to lift a finger to ward off naysayers. By virtue of their size, the fact that they dominate much of the market for disseminating ideas, criticizing them often seems like a suicidal gesture.
After writing my essay on Amazon, I crossed from critic to activist. I accompanied the Authors Guild on trips to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to discuss the perils of Amazon’s size. These meetings were private. That condition provided the safety that permitted writers to make the trip to Washington to press their case against Amazon. I assumed that any writer willing to blare complaints at the U.S. government would be willing to blare those complaints in public.
This was the one way in which I had significantly underestimated the power of Jeff Bezos. When I worked with colleagues to put together a conference on Amazon at a center-left think tank, some of our comrades suddenly lost their nerve. They had books on the way. There was no way that they would risk their hard work by attaching their name to the cause. Loss of nerve was hardly an isolated incident. When we asked a Washington lawyer to speak at the event, it didn’t matter that he had a long record of crossing swords with big companies. “I think I’m going to pass for personal reasons,” he wrote. “My daughter has been working on a book that her agent will send out to publishers shortly. So, the manuscript will be under consideration at about the same time as your program. The publishers are so paranoid about what Amazon could do that I think it might affect their behavior. So, I think that I need to keep a lower profile on this one at this stage.” This logic flabbergasted me. I called a literary agent to relay the incident. The agent had delivered anti-Amazon zingers to reporters over the years, but he surprised me with his fatalism. “You’ve done your bit,” he told me, just before hanging up. “It’s important to consider your own interests now.”
Amazon is hardly immune from public outcry. The New York Times has rigorously reported on the company. And there’s safety in numbers. When activist groups circulate letters criticizing Amazon, plenty of writers sign them. Still, it’s possible to catch a glimpse of a more frigid future that follows the current arc toward monopoly. Even if Amazon behaves in saintly fashion, its size will intimidate. Courage doesn’t grow if one glances over at the Washington Post. Since Bezos bought it, the paper has hardly replicated the Times’ tough coverage. Bezos could have declared that he deserves the same treatment that the paper dishes out to the rest of the world. Instead, the paper tiptoes around him, which seems to be the way he likes it.
This might seem like a minor point. But as Amazon continues its march, its ambition keeps expanding. It wants to populate the skies with drones. It will provide the essential technological infrastructure for governments. It will set the tone for the future of the workplace and the future of the economy, as well as the future of the culture. Amazon’s power isn’t an incidental subject for public debate; it is an essential one.
• • •
THE HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR Jonathan Zittrain has spun the following hypothetical scenario. There’s a down-to-the-wire election. Mark Zuckerberg has a strong opinion about the candidate he would like to prevail. As we have seen, Facebook claims that it can boost voter turnout, carefully placing reminders of civic duty in News Feeds on Election Day, generating social pressure to head to the polls. That this experiment worked isn’t just a public relations claim, but an established finding of social science. In the Zittrain scenario, Zuckerberg launches another get-out-the-vote effort. Only this time, the reminders are placed selectively. Facebook has a pretty good sense of your political affiliation, based on all the items you’ve liked. Facebook can also discern your voting precinct. So instead of urging all citizens to perform their civic duty, Facebook calibrates its call to action to target only the voters who will pull the lever for Zuckerberg’s candidate.
The idea that a tech company would favor a candidate is hardly novel. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, threw himself behind Barack Obama in the 2012 election. He muddied himself in the arcane details of the campaign, not just writing checks, but recruiting talent and helping build its technological apparatus. His recruits scoured massive data sets to target voters with unprecedented precision. “On election night he was in our boiler room,” says Obama campaign guru David Plouffe. These efforts made a difference. “Obama campaign veterans say that applying this rigor to their half-billion-dollar media budget made it 15 percent more efficient, saving tens of millions of dollars,” Bloomberg reported after the campaign.
This wasn’t just a freelance effort. Google published a case study about the role it played in re-electing the president, titled “Obama for America uses Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making.” The paper has attracted barely any attention, but contains brash claims about Google’s centrality to the outcome of the election. “Early on, [the Obama campaign] turned to Google Analytics to help the web, email, and ads teams understand what motivated new supporters to become more vocal advocates and regular donors over time.” Google boasted about how its data helped the Obama campaign shape the information voters turned up when they wanted to verify claims made during debates, and as they mulled their choices in the days leading up to the election. “Real-Time reports in Google Analytics provided the campaign a window into voters’ questions and concerns, and allowed them to deliver answers directly from the campaign through search ads.” Google was hardly modest in assessing how it contributed to the campaign’s success: “The results from Election Day speak for themselves: a resounding victory, with nearly every battleground state falling into the President’s column.”
We don’t need to assume the worst about the tech companies to fear their capacity to swing votes. As we have seen from the Edward Snowden saga, a rogue programmer can find ways to undermine highly secure systems. Marius Milner, an engineer at Google, abused his access to Google’s street-mapping vehicles. These cars traversed the roadways of America, taking pictures, which Google would stitch together into a coherent view. Milner programmed Google’s cars to tap the WiFi signals coming from the homes they passed, sweeping up private data, even email correspondence. Instead of cooperating with a government investigation, Google “deliberately impeded and delayed,” earning a fine from the Federal Communications Commission in the process. Indeed, the company refrained from firing Milner. The case hardly builds confidence in Google’s commitment to transparency or in its safeguards against abuse.
It wouldn’t take much for a search engine to tip public opinion. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempted to simulate the workings of Google. Researchers rigged up a fake search engine, which they called Kadoodle, and simulated a phony election with phony candidates. In the experiment, the authors kept reordering search results and then asking respondents to divulge their opinion. Placement in the search engine, it turns out, matters a lot: “On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings. Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably.”
• • •
WE USED TO BE highly intolerant of media’s subterranean attempts to shape us, even in commercial contexts. In 1973, ads for a board game called Hūsker Dū? attempted to goose Christmas sales. The words “get it” flashed so quickly across the TV screen that nobody would ever have noticed. But when the owners of the ad agency that cut the spots learned that their minions had slipped in the subliminal message without any authorization, they panicked and informed the networks of its presence. Word of the stunt leaked and a national furor ensued. There’s no evidence that subliminal messaging of this sort actually works. Nevertheless, the government decided that it wouldn’t abide subliminal messaging. It amounted to a form of deception and a violation of the public’s trust. Soon after the Hūsker Dū? kerfuffle, the FCC declared the practice “contrary to the public interest.” With the rise of the big technology companies, we’ve turned away from that view. We’ve accepted a whole new level of subconscious manipulation of our behavior. But where televised subliminal messaging was ultimately meaningless, the new behaviorism is highly effective, and therefore plausibly dangerous.
Transparency is one of the great promises of new technology, and with transparency we’re meant to enter a new age of accountability. Yet the knowledge monopolies take us in the other direction. They contain the trappings of openness—customers who can shout back at companies, the space to blare an unpopular opinion, a world seemingly without human gatekeepers. But if you stare hard enough at Google, Facebook, and Amazon they become a bit like Italy, a country where it’s never entirely clear how power really operates. Rules exist but are never convincingly spelled out. We have a dim awareness that we’re being subconsciously influenced, but never know when and how. We see some types of information given more favorable treatment, but not for any explicit reason. Though the tech companies preach liberal values, they crave access to markets in authoritarian countries, where compromise with ugly regimes is the cost of doing business. Facebook has shown how noble sentiment doesn’t preclude collaboration with the censor. Would they ever do the same here? The threat to our democracy may never be more than a theoretical one. Then again, how will we ever know?
The failure to internalize—or perhaps even comprehend—the meaning of their own rhetoric about transparency is characteristic. American democracy was built on richly deserved fear, an anxiety that power might pool in one institution at everyone else’s expense. The tech companies have no such fear. The more they can insinuate themselves into our lives the better. There is no limit. Of course, it’s not their job to worry about their power. That anxiety falls to the rest of us, and we should be far clearer about the problem: Companies that are indifferent to democracy have acquired an outsized role in it.