The political battles between right and left often leave out the two elephants in the room: markets and technology and their combined effects. Two hundred fifty years after their ascendancy in human lives, markets and technology have become too complex and dominant, thus making their management too demanding and confounding for both conservatives and liberals. What I mean by that is that the respective basic tenets of conservativism and liberalism, preservation of tradition and expanding personal freedom, are challenged and even undermined by the way markets and technology work if left unchecked.
Consider first the challenges posed by markets. They move goods around with great efficiency based on trust and reputation developed across buyers and sellers. At the same time, markets have no loyalty. A seller is happy to find a buyer anywhere in the world. But this diminishes the bonds among the members of local communities. Markets can produce the best combinations of price and quality but they can also be left to degenerate into greedy and wasteful monopolies or monopsonies. Markets allow capital owners to move their capital with little geographical constraint motivated only by the prospect of profit. But when the capital moves so must the labor. If labor does not move it becomes unemployed. That’s what happened to the deindustrialized American Midwest. But then, labor mobility also leads to the decline of communities and the erosion of traditions.
So, we can see the conundrum for conservatives and liberals. To protect traditional and closely-knit societies the market must be somehow restrained; to let the individual and entrepreneurial spirit flourish the local must give way to the cosmopolitan.
Technology makes markets more complex and difficult to manage. The reason for this is that technology creates products that are more intangible and cognitively more difficult to understand, especially when it comes to their potential risks. The information, and more specifically the digital, markets are a good example. As we navigate the digital space we are constantly invited to buy or subscribe to myriads of products with just a click of the keyboard. Do we really know what we buy into? Or when governments and private business digitize every piece of information, do we really know how this information about our private lives will be used?
The speed of technological innovations and their transformation into consumer products also contributes to our difficulty to appreciate the consequences of what we are offered. Thus, an asymmetrical informational gap concerning the consequences of innovations starts to grow between their creators and the consuming public. In the markets of the past, we bought a product and that was it. In the digital economy, every transaction opens up a deeper and more lasting interaction with the vendor, which usually translates into a one-way flow of information from the consumer to the digital seller.
But if the public is faced with a veil that obscures the consequences of market transactions or how technology works in the hands of the state, then a society can be driven willy-nilly down a path to a new order of things without the informed consent of its members. That is, an informational gap concerning the products we consume and the means our governments adopt to organize our societies creates a deficit in democracy.
The growing complexity of markets and technology and the lack of serious democratic input from the public explains, I believe, a great part of the anxiety and the political repercussions we now observe in western societies. As more and more people feel that they lose agency in shaping the future, they start to mistrust mainstream politicians and the drivers of change, that is, science, research, and experts. That leads many people to a wholesale rejection of fact-based policies. We see this in the populist movement in the US.
This broad sentiment of disenfranchisement can also explain the polarization between those who have greater difficulty positioning themselves in the driving seat of the new global digital ecosystem and those who by virtue of knowledge and adaptability feel comfortable in it. In the context of American politics this usually correlates with differences in educational attainment and geographically describes the chasm between the coastal “elites” and the middle of the country.
Unfortunately, the politicians that represent the American populist movement are not actually honest with their constituencies. Republicans talk about communal bonds, traditional families, and individual freedoms but they keep adopting policies that favor unregulated markets, keep child rearing unaffordable to less privileged parents, dislocate communities, weaken government support for civic initiatives, silence dissenting voices and let digital behemoths operate with little restraint and accountability.
Democrats on their part, though historically the party of the common man and woman, they have let their exuberance about the pathbreaking benefits of technology to drive them into an alliance with a bipartisan cadre of technocrats and globalism enthusiasts, often failing to appreciate any negative effects on social and economic structures.
In short, I believe, the forces of the market and technology are left to be mediated by politicians who are unprepared or unwilling to grasp the full extent of the inherent risks and by experts who are not trusted by a large segment of the population. Meanwhile tech companies continue to expand their accumulation of private data, to grow their monopolistic power, to expand their political influence and, thus, to shape our future guided only by profit seeking and their vision while the rest of us are reduced to passive watchers and consumers.
The reality faced by democracies is that those who control the markets for the most consequential technologies will shape our future without adequate representation by the people. Under these circumstances neither the principles of classical conservativism nor those of classical liberalism will survive.
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