Ro Khanna makes the case for digital public space
A chat with Silicon Valley’s congressman on how to make social media work for democracy
As Elon Musk made his bid for Twitter, I reached out to Silicon Valley’s Representative Ro Khanna, one of Congress’ most visionary technologists. I wanted to talk about his forward-looking new book, “Dignity in a Digital Age”—which lays out an argument for how to create an economy and internet built on human dignity and community rather than warped commercial imperatives.
In it, Khanna describes his aspirations to build a “digital public sphere, with a plurality of speech communities.” He calls for the development of platforms, “public and private, that do not promote lies or divisiveness but facts and constructive discussion.” At stake, he argues, is trust in our democracy itself. We, of course, agree!
We spoke about the line between public and private platforms and the responsibilities of both, the importance of place and community, and what a future internet might offer people that our current one does not.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
—Eli Pariser, Co-director, New_ Public
Eli Pariser: I have to ask about Elon Musk and what it means that the world’s wealthiest person is buying Twitter. What does that say about the prospects for digital dignity?
Rep. Ro Khanna: The very fact that we are so concerned over a change in ownership of Twitter, and the impact that that may have on the digital public sphere, highlights the complete lack of regulatory oversight and the lack of any set of ethical norms that have been established for social media.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, there were obviously rumblings—is The Washington Post going to be biased? And on the deepest levels, if you read Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent I’m sure there’s some systemic bias that media may have towards corporate interests. But no one thought on a practical basis that Jeff Bezos was really going to change the character of The Washington Post and be making day-to-day decisions.
And that’s because there’s a regulatory framework governing newspapers and there are strict journalistic norms, and it was made very clear that there was going to be separate corporate governance from editorial decision-making at the Post.
So one question is, is Musk really going to run Twitter day-to-day, or is he going to do a more prudent thing and have Twitter be separate? The fact that we’re even having to ask that question shows the problem: unlike in the newspaper business and in the broadcast business, social media has no separate sphere that’s divorced from profit maximization.
I’m always interested in this question. What we’re trying to do at New_ Public is make the case for and build nonprofit digital spaces for exactly this reason. But I’m curious about where you would draw the line between broadening the focus on public interest in private corporations and actually building public digital infrastructure.
We need both. And the reason we need both, I think, stems from a philosophical basis of the public sphere. If you look at (German philosopher Jürgen) Habermas’ ideal speech community, everyone has to be equals, and everyone has to have good intentions. This is the sense of an ideal public speech that then at its best leads to moral truths and legal legitimacy.
But he realizes in his later works, Between Facts and Norms, that democracy is messy and you’re not going to have ideal speech conditions. So what he and many others argue is: what you really need is a lot of different discursive spaces.
I would argue that what you need is a mix of the public and the private. You need more digital public spheres—both local governments could create it; nonprofits could create it.
The federal government could create a space. It could be like a Nextdoor, but a little bit more robust in terms of engagement in a local community. The best model may be what Audrey Tang is doing in Taiwan, where you get citizen engagement locally; that’s a case of individuals actively participating in solving legislative dilemmas and finding common ground.
The thing people say to me sometimes is, “You’re starting in one of the hardest countries to make the case for publicness. This is an easier project in Europe than it is in America.” How can we make the case for publicness in a culture that’s very used to private companies?
Well, we need to make two cases.
We need to make a case where even private companies have a sphere of public obligation and public interest. Right now social media doesn’t have that, and that is a glaring weakness because it has such an effect on democracy.
Beyond that, we have to call for true public forums like PBS, but I think a better case can be made for those if they’re seen as active engagement in citizenship.
Why is it that we don’t even know what Congress people are voting on? If, let’s say, we put congressional bills online, and allowed people to comment on that, or participate in that—I think that would catch on, and people would say, yeah, that’s a public function.
In your book, you started by talking about the idea of geographic place and why it matters. Why do you think it’s hard for Silicon Valley platform people to remember that different places have different characters and qualities?
Well, I don’t think it’s just hard for Silicon Valley. I think it’s been hard for our country over the last 30, 40 years.
We said, globalization is happening. Don’t move to the jobs; new industry is coming. Let the markets figure this out. And we underappreciated people’s attachment to place. We underappreciated the necessity of community. I think now we’re suffering the consequence of that with a lot of communities destroyed—many of them now feeling they don’t have a place in a modern economy, and don’t have a sense of identity.
So what we need to do is rethink this sense of unfettered capitalism in an age of globalization and say, no, we still have to value community, we still have to value place, and we need to have a capitalist system that allows for enough state intervention, that helps places survive and thrive.
I hear a parallel between that way of thinking and your vision for a “plurality of speech communities” online. It feels like a similar argument where instead of one monolithic totalizing system, we’ve got lots of different sorts of special purpose communities. Am I reading that right?
That’s a great analogy. One of the advantages of a plurality of places is the sense that if America is going to be a composite nation—what Frederick Douglass said is sort of a composite of all different cultures at any given time, with all of us working in a democratic way to create it—that it works better if there are also spaces in such a democracy to allow for thicker versions of tradition and culture to exist that may not be predominant in the national culture.
For a multiracial multi-ethnic democracy to thrive, my intuition is that having different places with different customs and traditions makes it easier for people to also embrace a national culture, even if the national culture is not quite exactly what they want. Because they can have their locality to live their daily life and hold on to some of their traditions.
Let’s say the internet that you want—and I think that I want—comes to pass. What do you think that offers people that the current internet doesn’t?
It would be more empowering.
People right now are disconnected from the decision making of government. And the idea of a public sphere is not just conversation. Habermas said this is critical for democracy: to have informal channels that can actually shape government action.
Currently, I would argue that’s not really the case with digital forums. Yeah, you can spout off, but there’s not this sense of an empowered link where people feel like they’re really shaping congressional legislation, they’re really shaping the president’s action.
One of the points I make is that the amount of time people spend on Twitter and Facebook and like and share and comment is partly a function of not having any other way of having a voice in government, a sense of disaffection.
So what we have to do, in my view, is to make the participation of the digital sphere more active, more empowering. There are many ways you could do that, but I’m thinking of a site that’s a bit more formal and inclusive of everyone, discussing issues affecting the community.
I imagine there may be models like that around the country that I’m not aware of, where local towns or communities are doing that. And I think that could be very interesting. 🌳
Eli Pariser is an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. He helped lead MoveOn.org, co-founded Avaaz.org (now the world’s largest citizen’s organization), wrote the 2011 bestseller The Filter Bubble, and co-founded Upworthy. He is currently Co-director of New_ Public at the National Conference on Citizenship.
Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress. He has taught economics at Stanford, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration, and represented tech companies and startups in private practice. He is the author of Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two children in Washington, DC, and Fremont, California.
Design by Josh Kramer.
Photo via the Office of Congressman Ro Khanna.