Protecting Our Digital Environment

Who bears responsibility — or the cost — for sustaining the digital commons in which we increasingly live?

I think a ton these days about our digital environment — and I use that phrasing with purpose.

Just as we depend on the climate and biosphere that surround us, we’ve been enveloped by an array of digital services — spaces where we work, entertain ourselves, gather information, and where information is gathered on us. And without much fanfare, our society has grown dependent on those spaces’ health.

In each of those cases, by taking a closer look, one can spot an externality: a cost imposed on people who never chose to bear it.

In Flint, the state of Michigan sent lead pollution soaring when it switched the debt-saddled city to a cheaper water source. Volkswagen blew off its obligation to make diesel engines burn cleanly — which let the company sell cars at lower prices, but polluted the skies. With the climate … well, we all bear the cost of advanced economies’ fossil-fuel dependence.

I’ve said a lot now, so here’s my point: consider some of the dystopian stories in headlines these days. Aren’t many of them, at bottom, tales of externalities — ones in the digital environment, but externalities nonetheless?

This situation, at its core, amounts to an externality.

Democratic societies rely on accurate news; voting publics and elected officials alike use information, preferably the well-grounded kind, to make decisions. Facebook, as it grew into a behemoth, shrugged off the labor-intensive task of vetting information for accuracy, and passed the cost of ferreting out fake news in our digital environment to … well, us.

More thoughts on how our societies should come to grips with that reality soon.

The above is an excerpt from Ctrl Alt Right Delete — the weekly newsletter about understanding how the right operates online and developing strategies and tactics to fight back.

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