You have probably heard about the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. I listened to Sam Harris interview one of the contributors, Tristan Harris, on his podcast and considered that it was worth a watch. essentially, it's about how social media impacts relationships, behaviour and democracy. The very aims of the platforms - to make money through advertising - are responsible for much of this, while the use of such media by bad actors adds to the problem.
What really struck me was an aspect that relates to our prolonged consideration of 'On Liberty' - how rational people can come to agree on what is good or right or true. the documentary suggests that because newsfeeds and recommendations are individually tailored to keep you on the site, you will 'see' an entirely different world from that seen by someone else. Because the platforms have so many billions of datapoints on you - and their power and speed is awe inspiring (indeed, watching the show and thinking about the computational power did actually give me the same buzz of awe that I get looking at a starry sky and thinking of infinity... proof, perhaps, that awe is not a good guide for moral intuitions) - they perfectly curate according to your tastes - and according to what will outrage you. Outrage is just great for social media engagement.
What this means is that two people can't 'discuss the news' because they have a completely and utterly different conception of what the news is. They will have contrasting evidence bases and authorities. They will be talking at cross purposes. They no longer share the same world.
It does make that search for understanding have to root back to some prior innocent state that is so far in the past - as we absorb more and more and more information from opposing sources - that we inhabit parallel rather than tangential lives.
I was thinking about this in my reading too as I had been studying some papers on 'autonomy'. The philosopher Thomas Hurka made the point that there is a crucial difference between me choosing a when I have been offered a, b, c and d and me choosing a when I have only had the option to choose a. Of course, assuming I'd choose a anyway, there would be a huge disadvantage if I were only offered d. But he's says I'm still disadvantaged because I wasn't offered b, c and d. The reason is that I'm not just defining my choice as pro-a, I'm also able to see that my choice is not-b, not-c and not-d. I have had the opportunity to rationally deliberate on the merits and demerits of all of them and I know more about who I am and what I value by virtue of having had that choice. What's more, I am also responsible for choosing a - and that gives me agency. And agency is intrinsically good. In his view, and I think in mine.
Now, if you only get messages from Labour, as John Stuart Mill said, though you might agree with those messages, you haven't had the chance to defend your views against the opposing views of the Conservatives. You haven't tested the steel of your beliefs. Nor have you taken agential action.
Hurka's ideas also relate to something else that worries me: because we have so much freedom to choose what TV we want or what car, what pension or what fast-food outlet, what documentary or what cross-breed poodle, we believe that we are actually free - while in fact we have lost social mobility, we have lost the chance to debate ideas freely, we have lost control of what we know and believe and granted in to newsfeeds.
He writes:
Some free choices have more intrinsic worth, as choices, than others, and by exploiting the parallel with knowledge we can explain which they are. It is most valuable to choose goals that organize and encompass many others subordinate to them in a means-end hierarchy.*
He's saying here that the choice of which trainers matters less than the choice of whether to be an athlete or an architect and if your educational opportunities did not grant you the choice to be the latter you a missing something more crucial than if you could only buy Nike trainers. Likewise, it matters more that you understand what the Labour and Conservative parties' values are and can freely choose to support or not support them than it matters whether or not you can walk into a shop only if you're wearing a mask.
Jonathan Pugh, like Hurka, claims that autonomy is key to wellbeing. And we might assume that this is entirely because we are rational and so on and so forth. But anyone who has spent time with non-human animals knows that they value autonomy. The cat does not want to sit where you put him. Even if that actually is where he wants to sit. He will get up, go off, consider and then, autonomously, sit there himself. My friend Clare says her chickens express their individuality. An animal lover - indeed probably the closest person I know to a real life Dr. Doolittle - she said she's only just got chickens and has been overwhelmed by their expressions of personality. Sure, they may not be conscious of agency, but they have preferences and their wellbeing increases by virtue of being able to act upon them rather than not. Perhaps the chickens would be as 'happy' with just a, rather than choosing a from a,b.c and d. But we do not know. Some birds - scrub jays - do make active choices on different occasions depending on the circumstances: choices which show both memory and future-oriented cognition. Why not agency too?
NOTES
*'Why Value Autonomy?' from Drawing Morals, Thomas Hurka, DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199743094.003.0008
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