[Working notes in progress, as I try to drink from and reflect on this firehose...]
Tech Policy Press has become increasingly essential reading and reveals increasing energy in "issues and ideas at the intersection of tech & democracy."I begin this working draft post today because, in addition to being pleased to see my own new piece on AI and Democracy (7/16/25) join ten others I have done since 2021, I saw stimulating connections with other TPP pieces through the week that deserve comment. Today I found still more in editor Justin Hendrix's weekly newsletter recap, even though I can only keep up with a fraction of TPPs continuing growth as a key focal point for this community that Justin is catalyzing.
This post serves as my point of connection for comments that link some of them (and from other sources) to complementary ideas from my work. [This may expand.]
These two triggered this idea for a connection point for my commentary:
- Making Media Pluralism Work in the Age of Algorithms, by Urbano Reviglio (7/17/25)
- AI Isn’t Responsible for Slop. We Are Doing It to Ourselves, by José Marichal (7/15/25)
Reviglio's insightful Pluralism piece first struck me, as a variant perspective on issues in my new piece and throughout my work -- the challenge of balancing bottom-up individual agency versus democratically legitimate top-down group influence on discourse. One can drive to silos, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and the madness of crowds. The other can lead to sterile, conformist groupthink, or authoritarian Huxwell dystopias.
Reviglo suggests that "plurality typically denotes market diversity and anti-monopoly safeguards, while pluralism generally refers to ensuring broad access and visibility of diverse voices and perspectives." I read his "algorithmic plurality" as a purely bottom-up influence, and his "algorithmic pluralism" as a lateral influence (for both serendipity and "prosocial" "bridging" of diverse viewpoints) that emerges from either a seeking from the bottom-up, or a positive nudging that can be either top-down or side-peer. (That contrasts with more negative top-down nudging to conformity or subservience.)
My latest piece emphasizes the need for attention agents to serve their users, and my Three Pillars piece broadens the ideas of algorithmic choice to factor in strong levels of social influence. Pieces out of and building on the Stanford symposium on middleware that I helped organize address the these debates and how it is not an issue of technology for user control, but the sociotechnical issues of how society chooses to support and influence the use of these tools that cut in whatever direction we shape. Our urgent task is to build the sociotechnical infrastructure to support development and use of more prosocial algorithmic services.
Algorithmic pluralism is also central to my earlier Delegation series with Chris Riley, with a broader look at these issues especially in the last two installments on the Community roles in moderation of a Digital Public Hypersquare, and on Contending as agonistic versus antagonistic.
Marechal's piece on AI Slop presents a thought-provoking summary of how algorithms and broader factors have driven us toward "optimized" culture of "fast-food" for the mind, the opposite of the vision of "bicycles for the mind" were to offer us. He laments the downranking of outliers, "...a deeply illiberal optimization ethic that rejects “outlier” perspectives. Rather than seeing deviations from the “algorithmic models in our heads” as opportunities to grow, we increasingly see outliers as dangerous anomalies to be ignored or ridiculed."
That is where we have let ourselves be taken, but my half-century vision of bicycles for the mind has always been to enable the opposite, as my latest piece notes. I did a 2012 piece, Filtering for Serendipity -- Extremism, 'Filter Bubbles' and 'Surprising Validators' on how to optimize for serendipity and challenging ideas (drawing on my 2003 system design) and a forerunner to recent work by others on "bridging systems."
Here again, the problem is not in the tech or in algorithms in general, but in how we have let that be hijacked to serve platforms not users and communities (my Three Pillars). Marechal suggests "becoming an algorithmic problem" by insisting on better algorithms. That is exactly why I advocate for middleware to "Free Our Feeds" -- not just for individual agency run wild, but in a context of a "social mediation ecosystem" that creates more enlightened and challenging algorithms to be mixed in with the junk food. People are beginning to realize that we are "amusing ourselves to death." What we need is a whole of society effort to change that, and middleware and algorithmic choice is the only technology that can enable that. It is up to us to use it wisely.*
One older piece that I finally read today (not from Tech Policy Press) also ties in with these issues of how algorithms work for or against us.
- Digital Sovereignty, by Robin Berjon (2/25/25)
Berjon points out that "digital sovereignty had a bad reputation...[but] is a real problem that matters to real people and real businesses in the real world, it can be explained in concrete terms, and we can devise pragmatic strategies to improve it." The visions that many are now working toward for open infrastructure, and communities, especially the "semi-permeable" open "hyper-communities" referred to above can enable the positive forms of digital sovereignty that Berjon delineates, and he provides an excellent overview of a wide range of strategies for building on such an open infrastructure. My Delegation series (the Contending installment) and many other works have emphasized the need for "subsidiarity," as the basis for true federalism.
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Comments? I invite comments, and posted about this on LinkedIn, as a vehicle to facilitate that -- please make any comments there.
*Apropos of this issue, I happened to just watch the 2005 movie Good Night and Good Luck, including the very on point "Wires and Lights in a Box" speech by Edward R. Murrow from 1958. I highly recommend the full speech, and this shortened rendition from the movie.