Good afternoon, and welcome to the Media Lab Talks series. I'm Andy Lipman, and I'm your interlocutor and host for the day. And I have to admit, I am truly intimidated by this circumstance. As any of you who know me know, I'm not usually intimidated. And what's intimidating me is that it's uncommon for me to be talking with somebody who knows so much more than I know about almost anything I could say or ask. Now, I spend most of my life talking with people who know more about anything that I could say or ask, but seldom do I admit it. So today, I'm going to freely admit it. But our guest is Jill LePore, who's a professor at Harvard and also a staff writer for the New Yorker. And I invited Jill because she occupies a unique place in my mind that I hope yours. And that is to say, she is one of those people who is so skilled at writing, so energetic, so knowledgeable, and so broad in her investigations that it almost wouldn't matter what she was writing about when you got to the first or passed the first sentence, you would have to continue to the end. And by the time you were done, you would feel intimately connected with and drawn into the topic that she's written about. And she's written about things as diverse as political parties and Barbie dolls and Wonder Woman and stuff like that. It's a pantheon that, in my mind, is occupied by people like John McPhee, who also was a writer for the New Yorker. And it didn't matter whether you cared about orange trees and the Indian River in Florida or tugboats in Mississippi, just the skill of his writing could draw you in. But in this case, what's different here is that the topics are ones that I think are of great interest and importance to all of us. And that is to say, the social history and understanding of how we, as people, interact with each other, learn from each other, develop ideas, communicate those ideas, and in general, learn to become thinking participants in modern society. So in keeping with the format of the way we do things, for the Media Lab Talk series, Jill will present whatever she wants for however long she wants on the order of half an hour or so. And then I, as sort of like the host, get to ask questions. And when I run out of dumb questions, you guys by then will have thought of brilliant questions to ask, and so will engage you. Sometime during the next hour or so, the network that we have may start to work again. But in the meantime, we don't. But if it does, then people will start to tune in externally. And some of them I know are sitting around waiting to do so. And so we'll be joined by tweets and questions from those beyond the laboratory. But for the moment, it's a private conversation among us. And so have at. Great, thanks. Well, thanks again for the invitation. It's really fun to be here. I've never been to the Media Lab before. It occupies this very mysterious, glamorous role in my imagination. So it did not disappoint walking around. It's really fun to be here. And when I was asked to come, I wasn't entirely sure what would be of interest to you all. One of the things that, I'm an American historian. I'm chiefly an American political and intellectual historian. I'll really write about anything, the history of anything. But I'm sort of fascinated, I happen to be married to a computer scientist, but I'm sort of fascinated by in some ways the principle disavowal or lack of attention to history in certain technical fields. And also generally, I think in scientific exploration, there seems to be a presumption that attention to older ideas just hobbles you in thinking innovatively about your own work. So I'm trying to think about what would be something that I could compel you with that actually is of relevance to all the kind of amazing work that goes on in this series of labs. And so what I thought I would talk a little bit about here, I'm not gonna talk for a whole half an hour because there's a lot that we could talk about. I'm gonna talk about a project that I'm working on for a few years that is broadly in the realm of a very small field known as the history of evidence. I teach a class at the Harvard Law School that's open to law school students and undergraduates and PhD students. So it draws a lot of students who are doing PhDs in scientific fields as well. Where we look at the history of evidence across four realms of knowledge, science, the law, journalism, and history across the last millennium. And we look at the evolution of ideas about how you establish what's true and what's not true, what counts as evidence, what are the standards and rules by which evidence is admitted within those realms of knowledge or rejected or excluded in those realms of knowledge, what's the relationship between the rules of evidence in a court of law, say, and scientific method and the rules of evidence in bench research, for instance, what's the difference between the rules of evidence that historians use when they work in the archives and the rules of evidence that journalists have or the ethical questions that journalists raise about when they're interviewing people. Historically, all these kinds of evidence are related to one another and their rules derive from one another, but they are also, you may have noticed, all of those rules and standards of evidence are falling apart at the moment. So there's a certain urgency in thinking through these, where we got the rules that we are now very much at risk of losing. And I think one way that we can do a better job of thinking about evidence and how we know what's true and how we talk to one another about how we inquire and investigate and then how we accept the credibility of a conclusion or the plausibility of a contention or the probability of an explanation. We need to be able to talk better and across disciplines about those things. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that project and just offer up some provocations that come out of that work. They come out of teaching this class, but also my own thinking about the history of evidence. So I just have a totally measly two slides to talk about. But again, just to offer some provocation here. What I wanna talk about is what I think of as the evolution of the elemental unit of knowledge across time. And I'll propose for the sake of discussion that the elemental unit of knowledge across the last millennium has changed from the fact to the number to most recently data. And it's not to say that the one replaces the other. We obviously talk about facts, numbers and data. Often we mean the same thing when we use those terms, but nevertheless I think they can be pulled apart in meaningful ways. So I'm gonna give you just a brief history of these different notions of a quantity, sort of the divisible quantity, the indivisible quantity of evidence and where these ideas came from and how they change. And I should say when I talk about this, by these elemental units of knowledge, I mean largely as they are expressed and understood in a civic sphere, in a public society, not in the realm of obscure research, but in the realm of a civic sphere. So the fact has its origins in 1215 in a very precise year. Not that the word fact didn't exist before that time, but in the year 1215, the Pope abolished trial by ordeal and said you could no longer tell whether someone was guilty or innocent of a crime by subjecting that person to an ordeal, like drowning or burning to see if they survived. That was how you test whether or not someone's guilty or innocent. The rationale between trial by ordeal was there are some things that we cannot know. There are mysteries to us. They can only be known by God. There's a whole realm of knowledge that can only be known by God and it is to all of us a mystery. One of those things is the guilt or innocence of most people. That mankind shouldn't be judging other men and subjecting them to execution. Only God could make that judgment. Trial by ordeal was supposed to leave the determination of the guilt or innocence of accused criminal in the hands of God. But the Pope outlawed trial by ordeal in the year 1215 because it was abused and corrupted. And in England, trial by ordeal was replaced with trial by jury.  And this is, think about what that means to go from saying only God can know whether you should be hanged to 12 year peers can know that. Well, how are they gonna know that? So there's beginnings of a whole legal apparatus around the gathering and evaluation of facts. A fact is literally something that happened. It just, in an elemental sense, it's like comes from the word, for the same origins of the word feet, like a thing that happened. So a fact is just a thing that happened that can be established as having happened. Usually it has to have been witnessed. There can be other forms of evidence. It can be the material evidence that established that it happened. But the role of the jury was to decide the facts of the case. And the role of the judge would be to decide the law. But the role of the jury was to decide the facts of the case. So this idea of the fact and what intellectual historians call the culture of the fact begins in English law in the 13th century. The priority of facts is the act of discernment. That work that you do, if you've ever served on a jury, you're trying to discern from the facts the truth of the matter. Did this happen? Did this not happen? Is this a fact or is this not a fact? It requires this active capacity of discernment. And in the judicial context, it requires a community of a conversation. You don't decide alone whether something happened. You decided with a group of people. So it's where the fact comes from in our language and in our practice and as a form of evidence. And by, you know, over the centuries, it's diffused across culture because all laymen, women, not women, but laymen can serve, every layman can serve on a jury and needs to therefore learn what a fact is. So anybody who serves on a jury helps diffuse the idea that a fact is a thing that we can know that it happened because there's evidence. And that notion of a fact diffuses into other realms, into what is called natural history, but we now call science by the 16th century and animates the empiricism of the scientific revolution. We are discerning facts and we have certain rules of evidence. So the very idea that animates the scientific revolution really comes from the law. And a lot of the standards and safeguards, you should test your hypothesis. You need to be able to convince other people. It needs to be verifiable. Well, actually, a lot of those things come from trial by jury where we're concerned about the life or death decision that we mere mortals make about other people's lives. So there's this diffusion of the idea of the fact into the realm of what comes to be science and also into the realm of history. By the 18th century, the first quantitative age, people talk about numbers in the way that they used to talk about facts for the first time. Numbers, the measurement as a unit of knowledge that involves simply the measurement of the size of a thing, the scale of a thing, the sound of a thing, the weight of a thing. This obviously is a crucial unit of measurement for the scientific revolution, but it comes into the civic realm in the 18th century with the rise of democratic theory. So I really date the rise of the number as an elemental unit of knowledge in the civic realm with the US Constitution, which is the first constitution in the history of the was the first written constitution of any nation, in any case, but it also was the first, United States is the first state to mandate a count. We count the people. It's in the constitution. The census is a mandated quantitative act. The state itself is formed on the act of quantification. We couldn't have a representative democracy if we could not count the people. Democracy depends on demography, on the science of demography. It is in expression in many ways of the glorification of demography and of quantitative scientific research. So there's this sort of new, the kind of culture of the fact is becoming replaced with the culture of numbers by the late 18th century. And there's a lot that you could think about in the 19th century that takes on that same expression as democracy is extended with the rise of industrialism, the rise of capitalism, all those forms of bookkeeping and measurement and counting that we associate with industrialization and with capitalism place the number at the very center as the most sort of important way of understanding the world. What can we count? So you have by the end of the 18th century, the birth of statistics, that is the counting that is done by the state. That's where the word statistics comes from. It's numbers that the state cares about. So this is close relationship between numbers and the power of the state in the civic realm. Data really doesn't, I think in a sense that I mean to use it now, which is the aggregation of numbers that are, for my purposes I might say are too large to be counted by people, where the computational work needs to be done by machine. That begins in the 1890s with the first adding machines and calculating machines. But I might say that I would write the beginning of data as the elemental unit of knowledge with 1952 when the UNEVAC is calculating the 1950 federal census. It's the first time the census is calculated using a general purpose computer and it accelerates the counting of the census. It's also used in 1952 to predict the outcome of the presidential election. So there's the rise of this era of data. I would really date to sort of the post World War II era. So we have, I wanna sort of make the argument that these elemental units of knowledge are not equivalent to one another. There are different kinds of things as I've suggested here in this minimalist slide that facts involve humans engaging in the act of discernment, weighing evidence to establish a thing that happened. Numbers involve measuring things that can be identified in the natural world. It's such a way that tends to be involved in some way with the power of the state. And computational work with numbers is generally involved in a kind of detection of patterns that cannot be done by humans. And so these things have different purposes I would contend here. Again, attempting to offer a provocation that facts which come from the realm of the law, the end that is the object of working with facts and discerning facts is truth. What happened? Are you guilty? Did you kill her? That work, that work of a jury, that act of discernment of material evidence and testimony, confessional evidence, circumstantial evidence, how whatever rules and safeguards we wanna use, we're trying to find out what happened. The end of knowledge is truth in the realm of the fact. In the realm of the number, the end of knowledge here, again, as I've defined it, is power. It tends to be the power of the state. I can make that claim beginning with the founding of representative democracy with the idea that the people exist and that the people can be represented numerically with a ratio. The three fifth slave clause that's in the Constitution also a calculation, much that is in the US Constitution involves quantification. And it is all about a way that the counting of people can, I'm not talking about the state grabbing power. I'm talking about the state exercising forms of power that it may have already had, but exercising them here, ideally, in a way that is more fair. That's the hope of use. That's the hope of democracy. That is why we have one person, one vote. We believe somehow that that is more fair than other systems of political expressions of power that numbers offer this opportunity for equality. Our belief in equality is a mathematical idea. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. We talk about equality in this quite meaningful mathematical way in the founding era of American history, but what we are talking about is power. And here I don't necessarily mean, again, the state cabining power so much as the people claiming power, right? It is the power of the people that we assume an era of numbers is being exercised and that becomes a contest, but that's the promise of that era. And in the era of data, the end of knowledge is prediction, which is actually, to my view, a loss, because predicting what's gonna happen in the future seems to be significantly less valuable than truth or democracy. So I guess I put that to us as a point for conversation. What is the value of work that produces knowledge if the knowledge that it produces is prediction, which could be seen as an uncertain kind of knowledge, which could be seen as a kind of knowledge that takes power away from people. There are all kinds of reasons I think to be concerned about if we are living in a realm, in a moment in which the fact has slowly yielded to data as the elemental unit of knowledge, the one that has the greatest authority in our society and in our politics, that's something I think to be concerned about. So the reason that I offer this all out in this large conceptual framework is I hope to situate what seemed to me sort of more recent moral panics about social media or fake news or polling, that as if these are disparate phenomenon, they're actually all a consequence of the era of data. I have a list of questions. Did I talk for two? No, I didn't talk for two. No, you didn't at all. When you tie things to the modern world of fake news and false facts, I get the idea of the transformational impact of changing things from a trial by ordeal, which actually we still practiced in Salem where I lived today for 300 years after the Magna Carta was signed, but to a notion of, that's a transformational goal changing into facts, but you're teaching in a law school and there's one thing we know about the law school and what lawyers do, it seems to me, is that the job of a lawyer is to make sure that they present exactly the facts that will support their case and suppress all of the facts that won't support their case. And that's very much different from a trial by ordeal. And God, I hope it's better, but on the other hand, it sure ain't perfect, is it? So I think that's both right and wrong. It's right in the sense that, yes, it is the job of a lawyer acting as an advocate to argue a point of view, right? But that is, so that's the right part. The wrong part is that that is in a system of an adversarial battle, right? We have replaced the battle, there's also trial by combat, right? Where you just fight it out with a battle of facts. Like that is actually, it's not that the one lawyer says what she wants to say and then it's over. The other lawyer, the defendant says something and the state makes its argument. So for instance, an example of, I think how people misperceive that, did anybody listen to Serial, the podcast? Yes. Okay, so people will say one of the things that Serial got wrong or the making of a murder or the Netflix documentary series is that it assumed that journalists could act as advocates the way lawyers do when lawyers are defending someone who's accused of a crime.   And that you're gonna emphasize the evidence that exonerates your client and you're gonna try to explain away the evidence that implicates your client, right? The reason that those two journalistic ventures fail to meet journalistic ethics is that they have extracted from the courtroom the adversarial nature of the proceeding, right? In a courtroom, you don't just get the defense lawyer to go up and say, exonerate the client. The defense lawyer is in conversation in his cross-examining witnesses in conversation with the prosecutor. So that, I'm not saying, I don't have some positiveistic view of the law. I take your point, but I do think it's important to remember that there are safeguards in a criminal trial or in a civil trial that are designed to be sure that we do, that there is a battle of evidence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't wanna dispute, I'm not trying to be disputed. You can be disputed if it's important for people to be disputed. Yeah, okay, but I'm trying to map it into the world I live in, which is not the courtroom usually. Unless I get caught speeding or something like that, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that lawyers are doing, yes, you're right, that there's an adversarial proceeding, and yes, you're right that the alternative to what one side presents is presented usually when it's not suppressed, but that might be just an imperfection, but in the public sphere, that's less often the case. And as you say, it's just not the case, and so the facts don't stand alone. The facts stand in a context, and the context is the framing. So when you begin your book with reference to Franklin, one of our earliest newspaper publishers, the thing that I read when I saw that was that Franklin was very much like what today we would call Fox News, which is to say fair and balanced. I'm gonna do what the court does and present the facts on both sides, and we present, you decide. We've heard that before. Interestingly enough, I have a friend who's a journalist, and he gets the sense, this is not literal, but it's a paraphrasing of the way his experience was, that when he went to journalism school, what he was taught was journalism was about being fair and complete. And his view now is what journalism is supposed to be about is about fair and balanced, and those two things seem to be different, and you might get away with fair and balanced in the courtroom, but do you think that you get away with it in the public sphere as well? Or do we have an obligation to go and present, and I don't wanna go as far as the Walter Lipman case, but to go and present those facts in a context that is also fair. So in the realm of journalism, just to establish, put Franklin in a context, for the overwhelming majority of American history, the press was partisan. There's only a very brief era in American history where we had a nonpartisan press. It's really only from the 1920s to the 1980s. There's no assumption that the press would be nonpartisan. The idea of the press is that it would be partisan. Absolutely. And that is in fact where our notion of the freedom of the press comes from. So our tolerance for disputation in public comes from our tolerance for what would have been heretical religious beliefs in earlier eras. So political tolerance in the history of our country comes from religious tolerance. And the work of religious tolerance, if you think about the writing of someone like John Milton, Milton went to see Galileo when Galileo was in jail, right? Galileo was in jail for saying that the earth revolved around the sun and not the reverse, and that was heresy. And Milton came away from that meeting, newly committed to the idea that there was not an opposition between freedom of thought and truth. Milton, in the road, attract about this afterward. He came to believe that instead of suppressing people that don't believe in the gospel, as it would have been the case in the Church of England or the Church of Rome at the time, or who have heretical ideas, who challenge you received real religion, that people should be free to express their own ideas about religion and the truth will out, right? It is a notion that there would be a battle of opinions. And that ultimately in a fair fight, and this is where I'm getting to fair and bell, in a fair fight on a fair field, if truth and falsehood do battle, truth will always win. That is why we have freedom of the press. So when Thomas Jefferson writes a kind of statement on religious freedom in Virginia, he says this just basically echoes Milton. Like, if we have truth and error on a fair field and they have a contest, as long as the rules are fair, truth will always win. Which is how scientific research works as well, right? Like, as long as you publish stuff and it's gonna get struck down because no one can reproduce it, replicate your work, it's gonna be left behind and the more compelling explanation will survive. This, it comes, it does come from the trial by jury, but it enters, religion and enters our political realm and it's the foundation for how we work as a democracy. That means under that way of thinking, a partisan press is just fine. So long as there's plenty of presses around, right? So long as you have, so Benjamin Franklin starts printing in 1722, he works for a newspaper in Boston. He says, oh, newspaper by 1728 and he writes this essay about the freedom of the press in 1731, 18th century. This is just presses in every town. There's a press that likes the governor, a press that doesn't like the governor, they're all four pages long, they all print once a week. There was an equivalency that is, we later in the 20th century, sort of this fairness doctrine that both sides should play out. When the press takes on the guise of being nonpartisan, really not until the 20th century, then there's a new ethics around that which is really, really complicated. But it becomes part of the mission of the federal government as it comes to understand itself during the new deal to ensure that fairness. So with radio, first with radio in beginning of 1927, then with all communications and up through the Reagan era, there are licenses and there are requirements for broadcasters in radio and television to offer both, to accept that their work has to be in the public interest and to offer both sides of the story. That is just a kind of refashioning of the idea. But that's where you get the sort of fair and complete. We live in a very different media environment. Fair and balanced. The fair and balanced idea now, the idea that a single publication would do all of that is an awkward idea historically. Oh yeah. No, I buy that. I actually sort of date that kind of responsibility in the newspapers to Oaks Buying the Times, which was like sort of the 1880s, right? But you still had Pulitzer and Hearst. And I don't know, when I grew up in New York, so New York at the turn of the century, when I grew up in New York, New York had four or five papers but each one of those papers was four or five papers in 1900, right? So there was the World Telegram and Sun. So at the turn of the century in New York, there was the World, that was Pulitzer, I believe, right? There was the Telegram, there was the Sun, there was the Herald, there was the Tribune, the Journal, the American. All the ones that when I was growing up were paired up. So there were maybe 12 or 13 different papers in New York and clearly one spoke to the Irish, another one spoke to a different political constituency and that's probably a good thing. When we tried to solve that problem with radio with the fairness doctrine, that always ran into trouble, right? And eventually in the Reagan era was eliminated. Right, right, because the assumption, the argument that conservatives made even as early as the 30s was that that doctrine suppresses conservative speech because it's considered outside the realm of the plausible two sides, you know? It's just like crazy and that was a fair, that was actually a fair critique but the thing that's interesting about that Oaks era, I think he buys at times in 1896, just at that moment, is that it's really influenced by social science. So journalism suddenly wants to professionalize and become a social science. So that's when journalists are like, well, we're gonna be objective and we're gonna have a lot of numbers in our stories and they begin to do a lot of quantitative work and it's like the Chicago Tribune has this wall of signs that is like, who, what, where, why, when? Facts, facts, facts, facts, numbers, numbers, numbers, accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. And like that's the motto in the newsroom which has just never been the motto before but they're really trying to acquire legitimacy that there's borrowing from the methods of social science which is itself borrowing from the methods of the natural sciences which is itself borrowing from the law. So this is kind of weirdly like fourth level derivative version of what's going on in journalism and they can't really pull it off. Right. The thing that starts to scare me today is that we're getting better at all of this, okay? So you make reference to Walter Lippmann worrying about propaganda and the rise of the public relations industry in 1922 and Borstin who was Librarian of Congress, right? 40 years later also worrying about the same thing and that the emergence of mechanized publication by radio and television and by the press in Borstin's mind caused there to come into existence a thing called the news cycle and as a result of the cycle needing to be fed things that weren't news became news so therefore someone anticipating the news was something that was news itself or a press conference became news itself and so what now happens is it's not neither fair nor balanced nor accurate nor complete but almost synthetic and the thing that scares me about it reaching the point of that kind of synthesis which some people think of as celebrity versus heroism, right? So it's created by the press is now we're getting good at behavioral stuff now we're getting good at data and knowledge and prediction and patterns and applying it in cases and so in a sense we're not only creating information out of numbers, facts and lies and damn lies and statistics but also making predictions about it and figuring out the right way that those predictions can be used to manipulate the most people i.e. there was some truth to what these people said in the past that that notion of propaganda and that notion of public relations which we've always been relatively immune to and that is to say when we fall victim to it we build up an immunity now we're getting past the age where the next antibiotic will help us is that so no that's absolutely right but I wanna try to situate that on a longer timeline to kind of go back to my truth and error battling on a field like do we believe that? That truth would always win on a field like that's one question, right? Like that is a weird ideal in which to direct a whole political system and culture but then when you believe in democracy that the majority should govern then often and this is what Lippmann was concerned about you get to a point and the franchise expands and everybody can vote but what we know things about that we have to make decisions about policy decisions about are more and more obscure things so we have like the knowledge required to make an informed decision is rising the number of people who can make who can be part of that decision making is also rising but their inability which means that their relative capacity to fully understand these issues is falling as a group right not as individuals but as a group so this came to a head in 1925 at the scopes trial which Lippmann was fascinated by because the basic premises so Tennessee was one of many states that outlawed the teaching of evolution for interesting and much more complicated reasons than you might suppose but the idea is if you believe that people can govern and the people have decided that evolution is wrong then they can say it can't be taught but then how could anybody evaluate the hypothesis of evolution if it's banned from being taught but if you believe that the people should be able to say like you just kind of go back and forth you just go around in the circle so if the people get to decide if climate change is real because we believe that the people get to decide because we're in a democracy that becomes a problem so that's where Lippmann's concern about the asymmetry of the diffusion of information so especially where even how schools what schools are allowed to teach and the same thing's true with climate change science whether they're places where it's not or the same thing's true with the history of slavery and the civil rights movement like we have state legislatures and school boards of education that make decisions about what our children are allowed to hear about and that's self-government but it's in some tension with the idea that truth and error have to battle their way out so you think about these more modern forms of the manipulation of public opinion well there's a lot of manipulation of public opinion in the 1820s as well but I think we would all agree that's a lot easier to manipulate public opinion from a technological vantage in 2018 than it was in 1828 there were a lot of things you could do you could print a lot of pamphlets saying Andrew Jackson is awesome but not everybody could even read you know like there's a kind of limit and it's quite expensive to print those pamphlets like you could do a lot to try to convince people that Andrew Jackson was great and he does win so they must have succeeded but it's a completely different endeavor in our moment so the point is it is not a fair field right and there's a notion of friction in that you made the point that it costs it costs a certain amount of money to print those kinds of pamphlets in the last election for example if you wanted to advertise on Facebook and you were the Trump campaign or the Hillary campaign Facebook would provide a service for you and they'd say well give us 10 ads and we'll test those 10 ads and we'll find out where each one of them is effective and we'll apply those ads and the Trump campaign being relative neophytes at this kind of said okay sounds good to us gave them 10 ads they would test those ads and use the right ones the Clinton campaign on the other hand because they were professionals said no no no this is the ad we're gonna use use this ad and so the result was was that the lack of friction or cost of printing that pamphlet allows you to have that degree of freedom to be be more more effective I wanna ask a different question slightly cause you know we think about Facebook here somewhat because it kind of impinges on the ways we think in the kinds of stuff that we do and you wrote stuff about political parties as you know being malleable and kind of fought over and you know from the early days days of the Constitution and I'm beginning to wonder is it possible that like you know Umberto Eco came in and gave a talk here a long time ago and he made the analogy and said well you know the stained glass in church was the television of the 15th century so television is the 20th century but the stained glass was the TV of the 15th century is it kind of remotely possible that parties are the Facebook of the 18th century and that in reality it may be that the Facebook kind of approach to things as an organizing principle can become as powerful as parties have been in the past that that may be one of the things the technology does change the notion of how we organize I think it is changing the notion that how we organize I also think it's also completely falling apart so I'm not as concerned which one? The parties of the Facebook I think it's important to remember that parties are not in the constitutional they're not constitutional themselves they're also they were much derided in the 18th century the idea that people would form associations and object to the sitting government people were terrified of that idea in the 18th century what's kind of you know historians, political historians who wax patriotic will say this is the genius of the American system that in the 1790s people decided they could get together in common and object to the government and that that would be okay and it kind of almost wasn't okay because in 1798 John Adams administration passed the Sedition Act and said no you can't object to the government we'll put you in prison and they put you know political they put printers of opposition newspapers in prison Jefferson wins the election and he you know the Sedition Act expires and he says you know every election is a contest of opinion and this is a good thing and we should be happy to have parties and from there on in there are parties and we understand that the two party system is foundational to our political stability but they're not you know they had a beginning they will have an end like there won't always be parties parties have been we have worked very differently but the thing the thing about parties that is important is that they both organize and legitimize political dissent and the legitimizing is important but that doesn't seem especially in jeopardy at the moment but the organizing of political dissent is important because you can be effective at arguing against people in power if you work collaboratively and parties make that happen there's also there's a whole kind of interesting history to parties but as opposed to say interest group party politics is one thing interest group politics would be another which we see a lot of in the 20th century we don't really have party politics anymore in the sense that since the early 70s even argue a little bit before we had targeted advertising to American voters that was by fairly narrow demographic I mean this was it's kind of the great success of Nixon's 1968 campaign was identifying exactly okay so we're gonna get you know we're gonna we're gonna pull those those white Catholic Democratic party in the southern strategy you know and then saying you know we're gonna buy 1978 1976 and we're gonna give up women we're gonna give up white women let the Democrats have the white women we wanna go we wanna make sure we hold on to the white men we're gonna get all the ex-union people you know like this sort of that that is identity politics identity politics isn't some you know nefarious invention of the left it's real identity politics is market research you know which has been driving American politics since the 1930s it is now a dominant thing I think that Facebook is a kind of it's a it isn't what Facebook and other forms of social media have done is automated that form of political polarization it was kind of manually created it was created by hand by people like the DNC and the RNC in the 1960s and early 1970s and now it's on it's it's an automated process which is why it's very difficult to escape but it is about atomizing the voter that the elemental political unit is the individual votecaster like we're talking about the user the user has this difference the user and the voter have this the user the voter and the consumer have this weird identity as a as a single thing like which is about the abdication of family and community and all these forms of association in that real world that that social media is utterly about the abdication of right okay um but when has ever been a change in communication there's been a change in the political organizations that have that have that have come about and and so I guess you know are we now at the threshold of a change in the political organization I understand that the roots of the idea of identity politics and the roots of the idea of targeted voting are earlier than modern media but on the other hand modern media is a change in scope and scale of such magnitude that I guess what I'm really asking is is that likely to generate some change in the political structure absolutely we do things going forward I mean you could say I think you could pretty well prove and I did attempt to demonstrate this in an essay once that that every change in the party system that is to say we've always had two parties but we have had seven party systems where there were different parties involved where they're in these realigning elections which create a new part every shift to a new party system is associated with a communications revolution that is a really interesting pattern and we are absolutely in the middle of both a party realignment and a communications revolution at the moment so I just to say that I think that's a kind of unquestionable proposition and it's a really interesting and important one remember she said that but there is well yes yes unquestionable but the but the but another way to think about that pattern right which is to say if you were to map out party system change, party realignment, party realignment, oh on timeline you would also have communications revolution they'd all map they'd all line up more or less which I did I made this chart but what you also see is that communications revolutions almost always do the same thing that is to say they democratize information so they take power away from elites they they they dismantle an elite monopoly on knowledge so that's both liberating and kind of anarchic and so the question I think that people are in asking the moment is like well where like does this do we reach equilibrium again with that or like where do we where do we where do we land when when we come through the other side of this transformation yeah yeah I don't know I mean we use the word friction okay to to it's a more hip word to democratize these days right so you say but they're frictionless we've removed the friction from our communication systems and utterly consumerized them and I'm not sure that you don't want to add something back and I won't call it friction because that's a negative connotation but I'll call it viscosity something that's a little bit of a flywheel on on stuff you don't want to consumerize everything you consumerize nuclear weapons you give the terrorists an advantage you consumerize media with zero friction you might give the info terrorists an advantage but I I think the media of today is not just a realignment as in the case of multiplicity of different party systems but rather is going to be change in form and as we go forward the elections that come in the future will be done communicated campaigned and and and fought in a different way from the way that they were done before it won't be targeted advertising at all it will be a different mechanism rather brought about but anyway you know you've associated these changes in political alignments with changes in communications have another question which is a not a leading question I really don't know and any insight into the answer at all but in reading some of what you wrote in in in your book on American history it seems to me that very often when there is a technical innovation in communications or even otherwise it's followed by arise in fundamentalism and religion and is that a pattern that that is is is even really true or just one or two special cases like after the steam engine or after something else yeah so I think that is a pattern and I think it's it's important and interesting but another way to think about it that another pattern that maps on to it across the same timeline is utopianism and dystopianism so if you say you think about the steam engine the unbearably tiresome technological utopianism of the boosters of the steam engine like all human suffering was going to come to an end because we now had the steam engine is only matched by wired magazine of the 1990s when I mean if you go back and read wired magazine in the 1990s hey dude we like reinvented fire here like it's the most it's just contemptuous of everything that has ever happened ever before it's the most ego driven celebration of the genius of the entrepreneur slash disruptive innovator and it's like these people are dismantling the world as we know it and they're just sitting around congratulating one another I mean there is literally a piece that says not since the invention of fire has man ever been just so kick-ass like it's just that is but I'm so glad I invited you here I just mean to say like this sort of like macho technological utopianism of the kind of woman hating Silicon Valley world from that era to our era is there are antecedents to that as well you know you can look at James Watt or Samuel F. B. Morse like these people are making like Morse says when he uses a telegraph like there will never be another war because I invented the telegraph like look I mean who's ever gonna fight when you could have an instant communication like you get into dispute with another country you just send them a little message in my code and like we'll resolve the dispute so thanks everybody like that is so you have that and I'm the only people to blame for that I'm an economist also thought if we get everyone to trade together they'll be another war so we're not the only ones so you get this incredible utopianism which has an even itself has an evangelical zeal right and then there is a reaction to it often from people who are left behind so the era of the great utopianism that's a technological sublime of the railroad is really answered by abolitionists who are Christian evangelicals who are like yeah this is only going to make us more unequal what we really need to do is think about ending slavery hello like this is our urgent concern and your telegraph isn't helping and so there's a there's which you know it's not a rise a rise of fundamentalism but there's a often a lot of religious fervor associated with technological fantasy that is answered by social social concerns so the same you know we think it to fundamentalism in the in the the latter part of the 19th century and populism sort of right-wing populism that is a response to people being left behind by the industrial revolution then they're critiquing that revolution it's sort of the progress and poverty argument of like a Henry George that discovery after discovery only makes people the rich richer and the poor poorer like what how is that progress like the the the 19th century questioning of the idea of progress is bringing about economic inequality and widening income inequality it is a lot of that fuels fundamentalism and fundamentalists are like you know what we've forgotten is that we are all equal before god and so we're going back to church and that i think that has been really left out of the story of american history that is a really important critique of technological utopianism it has been a big part of american history it has fueled the civil rights movement in the 20th century which is you know in many ways an evangelical revival a religious you know a religious revival movement so i i think it's important to think about those patterns but not to say the new machine is great and the the revival is is not great they're actually they are in conversation with one another but i think that the the revival is is is daring the technologists to actually think about what they're doing perhaps as long as neither one goes too far yeah okay well sort of by that i'm just nervous about the rise of fund some fundamentalism there's that seems to balance yeah what we think of is democratization and yes the ones we're left out and i think in particular one of the things that that sort of troubles me is there's um we have this word religion and the problem with it is it's applied to two things that are orthogonal to each other and on the one hand it's applied to a belief in higher being which is one meaning of when we use the word religion but in the other it's also as a mode of thought which is to say based on faith and not on evidence or or facts and we use the same word to imply both but the one that troubles me as a reaction to the worlds of facts and numbers of data is a return to a style of thought that is now based on on faith and that's the balancing it's associated sometimes with fundamentalism but that i think is one of the concerns that i you know yeah no i share that concern but i do think the other piece of that i would add an element to how we think about religion which is religion has a place for mystery right the reign of the fact doesn't really work there are things that are mysterious like how you cherish somebody what you you know what grief feels like there are things that like i don't actually want neuroscientists to explain to me that i that there are things in the human experience and in the history of the world whose mysteriousness i quite cherish and i find solace in that and that whether that's a secular act or an act of devotion or some the practice of piety i think that is there is a deep and meaningful way to be in the world and the idea that we should have contempt that the intellectuals ought to have contempt for that for people who cherish the mysterious uh that is a it is a strangeness to me it's an artifact of mid 20th century liberalism it's it's among the big problems with mid 20th century american liberalism so i think that's a we're going too far astray from what we were talking about but that is a that is a big that is a big conversation that's good i love it i'm a fan of mister all right it's your turn um we're gonna i believe we're online so i believe there is an external audience with may mean that some people have been tweeting in i want to be disputatious since since your invite okay could i can i just ask people to identify themselves so i don't know i don't know who anybody is um my name is anna has some real quite teaching innovation here i'm a vast historian of science um i i would like to to just dispute the the categories i love the you know the story to go back to those thousand yes a thousand four and in three that's wonderful um but i would like to maybe say if you could give us the quotes at the bottom also there that was one more okay so the end of knowledge is power in all three cases um in different ways right so now the end of knowledge who's wielding the knowledge it's corporate knowledge now right so the end of corporate knowledge is prediction which is market power and it gets more and more pervasive and so it also gets invasive which is the unease that you just expressed in the middle we have the knowledge of power yeah the state power is power taxation don't doesn't need any change and on the left the end of knowledge is who's wielding the power it's the church or the lord something and it's not at all pervasive it's just trying to command the scent a little bit so the unruly citizens don't you know do too much damage behaving badly um so so in all cases it's it's it's about it's about power um but it's about who's wielding it and just how intense it gets we're living in a time of incredibly intense wielding of power but now by corporations no that's my disputation okay thank you very much for that i i i want to know if elapsed historian of science is like elapsed catholic i'm kind of fascinated by that um i i guess i would just begin by saying you're right uh we could i could have had slides up here that said these things are all about power and made and made that set of claims as i tried to be careful to say these are provocations to get us to think conceptually about evidence over time um i guess maybe to defend my conceptualization a bit more there's another slide that i didn't show you i have this three hour long lecture that i give about this so um but the slide that i didn't show you actually um relates to this this previous slide about discernment measurement and pattern detection which to say what is the object of these forms of knowledge and i had another slide that is about what are these forms of knowledge in opposition to um which i guess i'm just gonna suggest maybe defend my other conceptualization facts i oppose to mystery like fact is you should be able to find this out like we are people we can investigate it there's evidence we can know mysteries are things we're not supposed to know like the mystery of immaculate conception or the mystery of what happens to us after we die in the medieval church whatever the mystery of generation like we're numbers in my view are opposed to secrecy um the the idea of a democracy the idea the fundamental idea of a democracy needs to be public uh that the working of the government needs to be publicized the notion of transparency or what in the 18th century like a jeremy bentham and called publicity right and the older sense of publicity that um numbers are opposed to secrecy you you make available to people like you figure out you do the census and then you publish it you hold you have a representative lower house of the legislature and then you open the doors um that the reign of the number is opposed to the reign of secrecy and the secrecy of the state and the reign of data its opposition is privacy like what we give up in this reign is is is the is the private so i this isn't really an answer to your question but i'm just trying to find a way to stand by my proposition here because i do think there are deeper ways to look at these um and there's also a part of me that as a lapsed cultural historian just rejects the idea that everything is about power because it seems sort of fucodian to me and and i don't buy that anymore so i just i think things are about other things in power often but it comes down to in the kind of bill clinton sense what we mean by power i'm glad that some people get the bill clinton jokes still we've got you have to be holding the box so the box will be tossed to the next person microphone so in line with that so i'm i'm richard i'm a secondary phd candidate in applied mathematics uh i have two short questions the first one is in line of what the john mentioned i want to say that uh at the end everything at the end of knowledge is actually prediction because even at the height of scientific determinism um we what we're trying to do is we're trying to uh predict what the future is going to look like based on uh the the derived the physical loss that you know we have we we know everything about every particle you know in this room that you know if this moving in this direction and with this momentum at this point and we know exactly what's going to happen you know two seconds later um so it's it's also a form of prediction and what we're seeing with you know machine learning and data sciences it's trying to bring some form of determinism you know into the the process of you know predicting say social social phenomena right um so i wonder what your response to that uh is and my second question is um you mentioned that um that there every time there's a technological utopianism there's some fundamentalist movement or some kind of social policy change so i wonder in light of you know the recent scandals by cambridge analytica and facebook people realize you know how abusive facebook and uh you know data companies are so uh data companies are so i wonder what you predict the next social movement uh would be yeah yeah yeah thank you for that that's great um yeah i do i see your your point about about prediction uh and i want to say about that though that i think what we don't do a very good job about at is separating out what things we should be predicting and what things are not that useful to predict or maybe harmful to predict so um or maybe bad for certain groups of people for us to be involved in the predicting of so for instance if you take the question of criminal law we still understand that if someone is charged with first-degree murder the jury has to deliver the verdict the jury will still the verdict meaning the truth right the jury will still look at the facts and decide it's person guilty or not guilty but the judge does the sentencing that's fairly recent in history most crimes didn't had a sentence everybody was killed like it was everything was a capital crime or you would be you would be maimed you know if you robbed something you you know you'd be branded and if you killed somebody you'd be killed and that was that there was no separate sentencing phase to a trial so the jury was the sentencer there was no separate role for a judge but since we separated out degrees of of offense and we engaged in the work of building penitentiaries and having this imprisonment regime we now have like you could go to prison for x amount of years and it's a scalable thing right it's a quantitative sentence so i mean i guess there could be like how many how many times you're going to be last with a whip but it's a scalable thing so that means the judge has to make a decision about your sentence and how how long it will be that's the kind of thing where a lot of people doing data science have suggested that there is good predictive work that could do that just make that decision for the judge because really what that decision should be about is whether another person is likely to reoffend and that the likelihood that you know if if i commit a crime that i will reoffend uh can be well predicted by a whole bunch of data that is there they're data banks that have this information about people like me who have committed crimes like me and increasingly judges are being asked to defer to the algorithm to do the sentencing um i don't think we have had a conversation as a society the algorithm is is private private intellectual property that is unknowable by the public the judge is paid by me and you uh we pay for the prison that person is going to how can a private corporation own an algorithm that decides whether or not that person is going to prison and for how long that seems to be fundamentally unethical and that we are not having i mean there is not that there haven't been conversations about this we could decide you know what we've inspected our best minds have inspected the algorithm and this is what we're going to do from here on out because if it's better than all judges or most judges then maybe we should be doing it um but should we do we know that you know like that that sort of like i yes we tend to believe that stuff that either that is why the whole like database you know data based on data like it's just it's a can't phrase like evidence-based research like as opposed to what other kind of research like it's a it's a like even journalism now like oh we should read the 538 because that's data and everything else is just opinion or failure we we have a kind of cult cultural worship of data that the facebook and cambridge analytical scan just to get to your second party question it hasn't lifted the film from our eyes right people like oh well we were about to wrote mark zuckerberg to be president just a couple years ago but now we hate him like it's just like that is totally kooky and not at all what we should be increasingly concerned about or troubling to inform ourselves about the bigger question is what crap you can get away with now by saying you're working with data i think and what you can impose on other people and even uh foot attacks bill for by by saying that it's it diminishes all other ways of knowing and realms of knowledge uh and that is a huge crisis you know why we can't understand you might understand you might know more about the crime i committed by reading a poem than working with this outlook we don't think about that as a form of knowledge uh it tends to the ways in which this the reign of data discredits all kinds of realms of knowledge and you know among other things the experience of women and children and families and the intimate and the sexual and demeans the private as something that can purely just exist for commodification there's a whole set of assumptions in that world that we just we should be talking about i mean not to say there's not amazing extraordinary research being done that is data driven or working you know that falls under the heading of data science but we uh there were a lot of mistakes made when people decided in the 1890s that social science would solve every problem um it was kind of important for other people to say you know what social science can't necessarily solve every problem it's really useful but it's important to think about when we should use it and when not has there ever been a time when we have said that what we're doing doesn't solve every problem maybe you need more women scientists we're working on it dave oh hi david aranima research affiliate here at the lab um there may be another difference about data and i'm curious whether this resonates at all which is that in the in the euro should we say of facts and truth there was a conceit possibly true possibly not that once that's established it doesn't change you know you establish something and when you go back and look at it later an historian might decide it yeah you got it wrong but there's a conceit that things become invalid they become solid when those when those things happen and in and in the the domain of numbers people's behavior or future change doesn't go back and change the laws of physics it doesn't change the measurement and what what you did is science what seems potentially really different about this data stuff is that as the changes the predictions actually have a feedback cycle that changes the data and we may be entering a period where at least our thought that we have something firm to stand on isn't there anymore and i'm curious if you think that's actually something to think about or whether whether you actually have that even before we just thought we did yeah can you give me a real world example of that well you know just if you want to take an adversarial thing people go into facebook or other things and they and they they attempt to change the the statistics they add data to the system based on their behavior that changes the predictions of the system and that could either be organized or unorganized i mean the endpoint of that you know i don't want to bring science fiction into this but you know most people have seen minority report in which case the behavior of people is actually heavily modified by the predictions of the system so you create this feedback that yeah may have had before but there was a conceit that that those were single-ended systems right you finished with the truth you finished that the trial was over that was the truth you're over move on the the data you did the measurement that's what the science tells you yeah yeah that doesn't seem to be the case with data and prediction yeah that is a really interesting question i don't i don't sorry i don't have an answer for that question i mean i can think of analog versions of that um we do revisit verdicts all the time i mean innocence project takes you know dna that isn't in newly examines it and offers it you know asks people to re-examine it we reopen criminal cases um for instance there are uh so we have ways of reopening something and that the tampering with the evidence that you're suggesting here i would suggest their analogs to that as well you can't work in the archival collections of any person of any importance and not notice how carefully they have whitewashed stuff it's kind of amazing when you find something you know they didn't mean for it to be in there i was reading someone's papers recently and i then i found his wife's memoir and his wife talks about spending three years preparing the papers to give them to actually to the mit archives and i'm like what takes three years like you have to like you have to bury all the bodies like it doesn't take three years like if you died tomorrow like it would take three years to go through your papers and decide what could be seen like there's a we we we jury rig the evidence all the time in all kinds of in all kinds of realms but there are challenges to that we have adopted methods that check those things so if you were going to write if you were going to write a history of you know biography of robert mac de mara uh you know the the department of defense during the uh vietnam war you wouldn't just use mac de mara's papers like that would be you would know they have a lot of selections a lot of culling bingo you would use a lot of other evidence you would assemble a world of other interlocutors took forms of corroboration and challenges to his evidence so we have methods in other other realms for doing that with regard to some of this predictive stuff i'm less worried about the tampering than about the ways that forms of inequality are amplified and exacerbated uh by predicting from the world in which we live we're actually trying to build a better world right so if we're trying to make predictions based on am i likely to recommit that murder are people other women my age of my background recommitting murders after committing one like does that does that the right way to to to judge how long i should be in prison that's to me is an it was an open and very debatable question so that's where i kind of get back to what why predict these things what what do we want to predict and what do we not want to predict and i think this is just to go off topic a little bit but one reason we are so enamored of these forms of prediction is that they are a lot like conspiratorial thinking um we live in a world where people have a very hard time detecting patterns we have a surfeit of information we we used to live in a world of information scarcity humans have a hard time with a surfeit of information with a surfeit of information we want to find patterns either we can have a machine find a pattern for us or we'll find a pattern but most people natively looking at the way the world there seems to be a lot of conspiracies like like that that that is just the way we will pull together a pattern uh i think that's a counterpart to the conversation about machine learning and prediction sort of like a people learning problem uh down there them were you're external hi i'm agnes i'm one of andy's students um i had a question kind of relating to dimensionality and abstractions kind of maybe building a little bit off david's question um so in the kind of slide that you present and also i guess when you're talking about how these forms of communication um kind of revolutionized the way we think about politics or vice versa it strikes me that what's happening in each case is that the form of knowledge that is represented as being abstracted and simplified from its representation in the real world so a fact is you know linked to a physical object numbers are derived from kind of collections of physical objects and more over this kind of aggregation and simplification of data it's you know one of the big problems with algorithmic bias the kind of murder trial scenario you're talking about is it's taking thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of facts and it's turning them into one statistic which is then used to you know kind of predict and i wonder whether that kind of reduction in information and simplification is something you think is reversible or something you think is happening a and then also something you think might be reversible or kind of counterable in the way we think about technology do you have a way you and will you can imagine countering it if that were desirable no yeah um i think that's a pretty urgent question though i guess i wish we were using our imaginations more to think about that problem and so because i don't have the answer either obviously i don't have the answer and there isn't an answer my job just you know i'm a teacher is what i do pretty much all day is to try it like here with this tripartite concept just to say hey wait let's like think about these things what's you know why is this different than that and what where is this taking us i mean we spend a lot of time getting machines to do predictions for us but have we really thought about what we what it means when we do devise an algorithm to do criminal sentencing um it has congress had a conversation about that have have a council of justices had a cover like i just don't know that we we we've really relieved ourselves of the burden of having these ethical conversations um we have something from the outside world janine should i go i have the box hi my name is emilia i'm a first-year master's of city planning student here and i wanted to return a little bit to your conversation around um kind of observation of people's behavior to reign in this data and how it relates to power whether that's state power or otherwise and how often in the discussion of progress we have people who are often left behind um how all of those conversations can refer back to a concept of the public and public space in particular and whether or not you see a kind of prevailing not necessarily a form but like a metaphor for form in the public space and how we that can how it can kind of defer to these ideas in a way that um also is understanding that public space is more and more of a commodified experience and that yes we can have all these quantified discussions of what's happening online but so much of it is also happening in the public sphere outside space and how planners and architects are complicit in this but at the same time beholden to it by the economic systems that they operate in so if you have an idea moving forward on how public space might try to inhabit all these ideas and and communicate them yeah that too that like this question is a is a kind of great unanswered problem of a of a question i think we have somewhat unknowingly slipped into accepting the metaphor as true that the social media world is the public sphere um the supreme court recently ruled as much in a case where i guess the guy was convicted and released and he was a sex offender and his part of his condition of release was that he was not allowed to use the internet as a convicted sex offender and he appealed that sent that element of his sentence saying that you know the president of the united states is tweeting therefore and all members of there's not a single member of congress who doesn't tweet and therefore twitter is the public sphere and therefore you're denying me my rights as a citizen to participate in the public sphere by banishing me from twitter and the the court there was a kind of fast didn't want to read this ruling the opinions kind of the oral arguments are great because the justices are like what is twitter again is that the one with the bird or is that the one with the like the ghost or like no they they the justices don't know what the hell anyways but they're like okay i guess they must be right if the president and every member of congress has one of these it is now the public square and we cannot deny it to someone who's a sex offender is a really interesting ruling it's like a free speech ruling i'm not sure that i'm totally down with that ruling not about what what this guy should or should not be barred from but about i didn't sign on to that and i don't participate in twitter and i it does that mean that i've disenfranchised myself should i understand that as a form of disenfranchisement if twitter starts charging people to you to have an account then what happens if that's become our new public sphere so i i i i think we have seeded a lot of uh analytical ground inadvertently on this question to where i just i mean i think like in places like this you guys are having this conversation all the time when i say there isn't a conversation going obviously you guys are having this conversation all the time and like leaving this conversation but i mean maybe it just on down the road we're not having that conversation or at my kitchen table we're not having that conversation or at most kitchen tables we're not having that conversation so i do think that it took a long time to build a public sphere and it took a long time to democratize the public sphere and there are a lot of critics who would say uh it is no longer democratic public sphere that what you know what that is some of the argument about the platforming and the that people want to argue for decentralization that that the very opposite has happened and if you look historically at the kind of sort of myth of digital democracy argument it suggests just this in fact predicts just this that that would happen that in fact this public sphere is actually a great narrowing of political conversation rather than a broadening of political conversation wait wait wait just to reiterate what you're saying whether twitter is the public sphere or not i think many of us think the internet is the public sphere and is sort of a fundamental right of all of us so it would be unduly restrictive to restrict somebody from the internet don't you think i i don't think that the internet is the public sphere no it's part of it sure i mean i i what i all i was saying was that to see that that has become the public sphere and i'm sorry okay i don't mean to the exclusion of anything else yeah but i wouldn't give you a sentence that would say when you can't read the new york times i'm not arguing against that court decision i think it's an important i'm just saying it's a a landmark and how the question was how we think about the public and who's responsible for that thinking and i was suggesting that there's a kind of there's been some shifts that maybe have not gotten the attention that they do yeah sure uh who's got the magic oh janine let's let somebody outside come in hi there so i'm janine i'm here representing social media so we have a couple of questions from putter and facebook i'll start with this one from suna from turkey um asking you to speak to uh what happens when data uh manipulates or destroys the truth how can we defend our minds and our research against the exaggerated data yeah so i guess where i one of the reasons i like studying history is i find a lot of sauce in the realization that few problems are genuinely new so this was a big problem in the 1930s with radio uh it's the problem that orson wells was trying to call attention to when he did the war of the world's broadcast which was a fake radio news broadcast of an invasion from mars uh you know he said later said when interviewed about like i was trying to alert people that they shouldn't believe everything they hear on the radio because uh what people had expressed a lot of concern about in the 1930s which what what was then called fake news the term was used in the 1930s to refer to nazi shortwave broadcast the nazis had shortwave radio radios that they were broadcasting all across the united states in latin america and they would just send false news reports it'd be like news break from civilization like it'd just be false it'd just fake news about nazi success in europe and it was especially about the number of americans who supported germany and uh people of discernment were really concerned that americans had been asked to really trust the radio especially asked by fdr to trust the radio who used the radio in much the same way that trump uses twitter as has been commonly observed to just oh bypass congress and the other branches of government and just talk to the american people and get support for a kind of planned potential support for his agenda directly from the people and that there hadn't been enough done to help people understand that not everything you heard on the radio was the same uh so there are really interesting campaigns waged in the 1930s by the FCC to address that problem and it worked many of the many of those campaigns were extremely successful because they were run by the government and because they were working to help people see this new medium as one that would allow them to to participate in the work of deliberation that is part of being a good citizen rather than to receive opinions passively from the radio so one of the programs that nbc radio devised starting in 1935 was a show called america's town meeting of the air on every week was immensely popular they would have tape it you know broadcast it live and then also on broadcast it taped from a big lecture hall in clumbie university they'd bring a bunch of policy people to the front they'd fill the audience and they would have a debate you know like resolve the united state should have universal national health insurance and then people would argue for against proposition they take questions from the audience and then in towns people would have little debates that would be after the debate and the idea was you should use the radio as a vehicle to ask people to learn about something in order to argue about it better with one another and figure out what they believed as opposed to do what nazi propaganda radio do which is gobbles at his desk with a button telling people in germany and austria how to think so it takes a lot of care but you know that was a really important innovation like if there had been uh in mit media lab and center for civic engagement town america's town hall meeting of the air would have been the thing they would have invented i think it's also interesting how people can be fooled by the form the thing that's striking to me about wells's broadcast was broadcast radio was 10 or 11 years old at the time you know it's hard for us to think about radio as not existing forever but broadcast radio at least in the united states was not very old and actually the notion of breaking into a program with breaking news was maybe only about a year or so yeah from the munich crisis somebody had to invent breaking news somebody had to invent the idea of breaking into a program and giving you an instant newscast and it wasn't it might have been somewhat common over the year before that i don't know but but in any case it wasn't a common concept it was something that was that had only recently been invented and so what wells was able to do was to exploit your unfamiliarity with that exact style and use of the medium which is what wells was a master of throughout his entire career in theater and in radio and in movie making in fact that's exactly what he did was he he exploited your um mis familiarity or unfamiliarity with the medium in order to make his his points and everything from times at midnight back so i mean that's that's sort of his signal thing but the unfamiliarity with the medium is the thing that i think was what bollocks the people so that's where we have to learn where the form is who else have we have we got we've got one up here and that may bring us to the end hi i'm salt and i'm a member of the public the the pope may have abolished trial by or or deal but isn't the sphere of social media the press and the public ish sphere of that sort of reinventing it for the modern age i mean when you said trial by ordeal my first association was hillary clinton's presidential you know which didn't drown her but subjected her um you know to a case of pneumonia that she wasn't going to survive um and you know accused her of crimes which government officials think she should be locked up for you know without a trial you know by jury or a judge or or whatever i mean i think i'm high the metaphor is a little bit hyperbolic but i think it also has some truth and i'm curious what you think yeah no that's an interesting question i mean i guess i would remove it from the realm of a partisan conversation and say i do think there's probably something to be said about the experience of say the trolling the call-out culture you know both from the far left and from the far right the the the the the running the gauntlet that is the experience of engaging in public conversation at this moment that is largely responsible for the suppression of political moderation i mean you think about who would want like you're you introduce yourself as a member of the public like god bless you know god bless well thank you and thank you for coming here and let's hope we get to explore the past present and future again and thank you for joining us