Artificial Interruption

by Alexander Urbelis (alex@urbel.is)

On Charisma and Competence in the Age of Algorithms

A tumultuous election season is squarely behind us.  For me, this has prompted deep reflection on the nature of our democratic processes and the ways that technology has reshaped the manner by which we elect our leaders.  We have come a long way since the days of the Athenian Agora, where citizens directly debated policy, scrutinized elected officials, and even practiced ostracism, i.e., the banishing of leaders who were perceived as threats to democracy.  But since those heady days of hands-on democracy, I am not convinced that technology has served us well, especially in the last decade, during which we have seen - on both the right and the left - the rise to power of manifestly unqualified leaders whose social media charisma overshadowed their incompetence.

Platforms have replaced the Agora.  In-person debates happen, but they are hardly as important as they once were.  The primary areas for public discourse and political debate have become the likes of Twitter/X, TikTok, and Facebook, where algorithms determine digital visibility, rather than local engagement or reputation.

And of course, those very algorithms place premiums on qualities that have nothing whatsoever to do with public service or discourse.  They identify and amplify content that sparks engagement, which is often content or positions that are emotionally charged, divisive, or sensationalist.  Intentionally or not, extremism is rewarded in this context because it promotes likes, shares, and comments, all of which further the overarching goal of platform engagement.

Thus, put simply, divisive political candidates who are skilled at creating viral content will eclipse rivals who may be better suited for government office.  These algorithms don't give weight to one candidate's experience or competence when determining whether to promote certain content or ideas.  And because of this, there is no corresponding metric to counterbalance the impact of divisive and charisma-driven virality.

The result of the last decade or so of social media-centric election processes is that substance and policy is sidelined in favor of spectacle.  The qualities of a political candidate that actually matter - e.g., competence, policy stances, experience, et alia - seem to play a smaller and smaller part in our electoral processes.

Add to this the fact that platforms allow candidates to analyze user data to micro-target certain segments of an electorate, which leads to echo chambers, fewer diverse ideas, and little exposure to contrary viewpoints.  Online discussions are Balkanized, fragmented, and with little cross-pollination between viewpoints or parties.  Of course, we have all seen the ridiculousness of a Facebook comment thread that contains opposing viewpoints and memes of people shouting at and over each other, but this raises the very real question of whether that type of interaction is suited for political dialogue in the first place.  Shouting matches on Facebook with your uncle underneath a meme accusing Jesus of being a communist, after all, can hardly be compared to the Athenian Agora.

All of this leads to a missing and yet absolutely critical raw ingredient for democracies to function and sustain themselves over time: an informed populace.

Without properly informed constituents, there is no accountability.  And without accountability, any democracy will fail.  When voters are continually exposed to drama and emotionally charged and divisive content that is devoid of any meaningful policy discussion, context, or even a reasonable relationship to governance itself, one can only expect voters to make poor decisions.  Sadly, however, I believe that the situation is worse than just that.  The polity is not just ignorant but also subject to manipulation that causes otherwise rational persons to vote against their own interests.  To use the parlance of the classics again, this is very much an Achilles' heel of democracy.

In my opinion, we are seeing the effects of this already.  There occurred in New York an incident that I find extremely hard to reconcile with any form of rational thought or political precedent.  About two weeks before the mayoral election in New York City, the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, publicized his visit with Imam Siraj Wahhaj by posting smiling group photographs on X.  This was particularly brazen and callous: Imam Wahhaj is not only an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, but he also testified in support of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "blind sheik" who has been linked to several terrorist attacks and who was convicted of a plot to bomb numerous New York City landmarks.  Going further, Imam Wahhaj is also known for making particularly vitriolic statements about gay persons and the LGBTQIA+ community while also promoting the subjugation of women.

Two weeks later, New Yorkers elected Mamdani as their next mayor.  I cannot think of a more apt example of the consequences of algorithmically-fueled politics of charisma and division than this result.  New Yorkers who suffered so much and so directly at the hands of terrorists and on account of extremism were for some reason completely unperturbed.  There should have been a reckoning.  There was none, not even a blip.  This is unprecedented in American politics and portends danger ahead.

I took my children to the ballot box that November morning as I do every Election Day.  I give them the same lecture each year about the importance of the franchise, how many men and women fought and died so we can continue to be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, and hopefully those sentiments will sink into their psyches through this repetition or osmosis.  But privately I find myself wondering what the point of the exercise is if rational thought and self-interest is anesthetized by algorithmic indulgence.

There is a form of engineered amnesia plaguing not just New Yorkers but all of us now.  We have reels and reels of digital pageantry and posts claiming to represent the interests of the masses, but lack any sense of accountability or methodology to assess those purporting to represent us.  Are we voting now not as distinct rational actors but as tribes?  And what moves us towards one candidate or another is not the quality of their positions but their carefully choreographed outrage and performative partisanship.  We do not even care to weigh policy stances of the most pressing issues of our day - no, for most of the population, they seem to have abdicated that responsibility to others in exchange for another hit of dopamine.

We need to very seriously and carefully consider what our manipulated social media feeds (some of which are indeed directly accountable to hostile foreign nations, e.g., TikTok) have done to the machinery of democracy.  The machine still hums along, but without rational choice and accountability, can we still consider the result of the process to even resemble democracy?

Perhaps it is an unpopular opinion to hold these days, but I do not believe that democracy should be a form of entertainment.  Just as our federalist system of government relies on distributed checks for resilience, so too does democracy require a fundamental respect for baseline competence.  As we saw with the mayoral race in New York City, candidates with experience were branded as "establishment" hacks or "elitists," but as interesting as government can be, it often is not and should not be.  The real work of government is not sexy; it's about contracts for basic services, clean water, education policy choices, policing, health and safety, and reaching consensus with disparate political factions on any number of related issues.  The real work of government requires the sort of administrative expertise that cannot be showcased on an Instagram reel.  But so long as social media visibility equates to a candidate's political viability, it will come with a profound and persistent cost to the basic functions of government.

We must sincerely ask ourselves: do we want to ruled not by showmen or statesmen?  Do we want the functions of government to be run by administrators or avatars?  If we continue to allow algorithms to freely, and without accountability, control or confuse engagement for wisdom, the project of self-government slides inexorably toward a popularity contest untethered from reality and unaccountable to the populace.

Long gone are the days when we gathered in the Agora to weigh a candidate's words and wisdom - instead, democracy unfolds through ceaseless scrolling of professionally curated charisma, created not for constituents, but to attract the amplification of algorithms.  We must dig for the grit below the glamor.  Democracy is a living assembly with ever-changing subjects to be discerned and debated through the ages.  But if applause overshadows achievement for much longer, we will forever forfeit the wisdom of the Agora and squander the promise of self-government - our legacy for which generations fought, and which we are duty-bound to defend for those yet to come.