Technology, Centralization, and Re-Centralization

Stephen Karlson, writing at X, said: You couldn’t circulate a manifesto to millions of followers using a teletype; you couldn’t run multiple errands without a motor vehicle; and Super Sized humans are a different public health problem than starving humans.

Responding to the first of these points, I noted:

“You couldn’t circulate a manifesto to millions of followers using a teletype”…you could, however, use the teletype network to circulate stories to thousands of newspapers…which is exactly what Associated Press did…and thereby indirectly circulate your news and ‘news’ articles to millions of people

To which Stephen accurately replied: Yes, for arbitrary values of “you” generally limited to people who had press credentials

…which inspires the following thoughts:

The invention of the printing press drove, over several centuries, the decentralization of information and an explosion of opinion influence. With the arrival of the steam-powered printing press and associated equipment (expensive) and the telegraph network for information transmission across thousands of miles, a re-centralizing effect transpired. This was further driven by the introduction of broadcast radio and, especially, television, with their limited availability of frequencies/channels.

The early days of the commercial Internet, especially with the addition of message boards and blogs, drove a new decentralization in a way analogous to the printing press upheaval. A single individual could now take on the factual errors or the misrepresentations of a heavily capitalized news organization and actually win—the old saying that you can’t win against somebody who buys ink by the barrel was no longer so true. But with the coming of social media, there has been a re-centralization effect: algorithms could be tuned to deemphasize or totally suppress certain voices or opinions. Facebook, YouTube, and the (pre-Elon) Twitter all did this, sometimes at the behest of the government.

Many see a risk of AI further driving re-centralization, as popular LLMs become regarded as the single source of truth and people lose the habit of searching more broadly. With that comes the danger that governments will seek to control this source of truth. In Germany, Chancellor Merz is quite explicitly opposed to free speech. Britain is now routinely arresting people for sharing opinions. And in the US, Barack Obama has surfaced to say, “We’re going to have to create new town squares, where everybody is having a common dialogue with certain rules.” Care to guess who he would want to be in charge of making these rules?

I'm pretty sure that these speech-control attitudes are pretty common among today’s Democrats. Old-fashioned liberals, these are not. A Democratic administration, especially combined with a Democratic Congress, would quite likely use social media and AI technologies to clamp down on non-approved opinions in a way that would be difficult to be freed from.

[Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz]