By Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, November 4, 2024
“Jacob Javits of New York is the first United States senator to become fully automated,” the Chicago Tribune announced in 1962 from the Republican state convention in Buffalo, where an electronic Javits spat out slips of paper with answers to questions about everything from Cuba’s missiles (“a serious threat”) to the Cubs’ prospects (dim). “Mr. Javits also harbors thoughts on medical care for the elderly, Berlin, the communist menace,” and more than a hundred other subjects, the Tribune reported after an interview with the machine.
Javits may have been the first automated American politician, but he wasn’t the last. Since the nineteen-sixties, much of American public life has become automated, driven by computers and predictive algorithms that can do the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents, and even crafting policy. In that same stretch of time, the proportion of Americans who say that they trust the U.S. government to do what is right most of the time has fallen from nearly eighty per cent to about twenty per cent. Automated politics, it would seem, makes for very bad government, helping produce an electorate that is alienated, polarized, and mistrustful, and elected officials who are paralyzed by their ability to calculate, in advance, the likely consequences of their actions, down to the last lost primary or donated dollar.
Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign was vastly influenced by the data-driven ad tester Future Forward, the biggest PAC in the United States. Donald Trump, for all his piffle about his indifference to data, is as much a creature of automated politics as anyone. The man doesn’t stay on message, but his campaign does. The 2016 Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, which exploited the data of up to eighty-seven million Facebook users to create targeted messaging. “I pretty much used Facebook to get Trump elected in 2016,” a Trump campaign adviser, Brad Parscale, boasted. This year, the R.N.C. is working with Parscale’s A.I. company, Campaign Nucleus. And although the Trump campaign insists that it “does not engage in or utilize A.I.,” it does use “a set of proprietary algorithmic tools.”
These days, Americans are worried not only about this election but about this democracy and its future….
Read more at the The New Yorker