Citizen Dollar Bill
Citizenship slides into consumerism
And we’re back. This is the second to last post in a series of posts countering the optimistic case for Web 2.0 in transforming government to better serve citizens as outlined in Gavin Newsom’s 2013 book, Citizenville. While it might seem a bit stale to be talking about Web 2.0 in the age of generative AI and the chatter on the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there are a couple of reasons it’s worth discussing:
AGI could be a long way off (the next post will be about misaligned AI).
Newsom’s points are even more relevant after the past decade, especially for what hasn’t come to pass in the evolution of democratic government.
Misplaced Optimism?
The most powerful part of Citizenville is the unbridled optimism for the role of government in society, for the community that it can help create, nurture, and fundamentally improve. The book rightfully points out that while technology changes our world drastically, government fails to adapt. We lose the sense of commonwealth - a shared purpose that binds us together and to the institutions that represent us.
This decline still exists today. And without that government innovation or adaptation, the bonds of citizenship fray. And we look to other institutions to fill that gap. In many cases, we look to brands and companies to fill that gap, and the role of citizen blurs with that of consumer. And this permeates into how we see government, the services it provides (or fails to provide).
This trend becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government is seen as incompetent and slow-moving, citizens lose trust in it and disengage, the disengagement results in no shared sense of ownership or participation in our governing institutions, and we see even worse government outcomes and citizens look elsewhere. Or so the argument goes.
The following post outlines this trend and argues that the move from citizenship to consumerism as an attitude has not been effectively countered by governments embracing Web 2.0, as Newsom hoped. Instead, we are still at a loss for how to evolve effectively.
Trust in government is low
A shock to no one reading this post, public approval in government is quite low:
However…what is somewhat surprising, trust in government in the U.S. in 2022 is only one percentage point lower than it was in 2013 (20% vs 21%). The trend over the past 65 years is quite stark but the past decade has been pretty steady, if uniformly dismal. It is a bit surprising, given the political animus around the 2016 election, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and the general conspiratorial air that has permeated American politics, that trust hasn’t declined further in recent years.
Two reasons this might be the case:
There is a natural floor on how low trust in government will go. Even given the events of the past decade, we “can’t” really go lower than ~20%. And we’ve been there for awhile.
Conspiracy theories actually haven’t increased. This 2022 paper reviews multiple studies and finds that overall belief in conspicarcy theories have not increased meaningfully over time. Which is counter to the narrative (and my thinking) that conspiracy theories have run rampant over reasoned political discourse in the past decade.1
Regardless of the last decade, the trend over the past half century is concerning for government. Notably, looking at the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, people trust businesses more than other institutions in society.
Trust in business itself isn’t a bad thing. It is mistrust in government that is insidious here. And the implication that companies must pick up the slack. As Emily Stewart writes in Vox in 2021:
Corporate social responsibility is fine. There are, however, limits.“Of course we want businesses to be responsible,” said Suzanne Kahn, managing director of research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute. But she emphasized that this does not constitute a plan for how to organize society. “Private companies don’t, can’t, or won’t plan with the same values that we demand and expect the government to.”
And this expectation is something that Newsom lamented in Citizenville, pointing to technology as the solution for helping citizens restore that sense of purpose and trust in government:
It is only through our futuristic new twenty-first-century technology that we can hope to recapture the age-old notion of commonwealth – meaning a public good or welfare that exists among a community of people. For centuries, the idea of commonwealth held people together during wars, famine, and political upheaval. Commonwealth was the foundation of society, the glue that held communities together and drove public life. It’s a notion that began to disappear in twentieth–century America, as urbanization and greater mobility led to the fracturing of community life. But now it can be resurrected through technology. (page 230)
The decline in community is not something that Newsom is the first to point out. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone published in 2000 laments this decline and points to many factors, including technology (TV) and mobility as part of the problem. Not surprisingly, he also looks to technology to help enhance social connection instead of inhibiting it.
Consumer over Community
The call to create community through technology is appealing. It makes sense. If I want to discuss an esoteric interest for hours, I can find people on Reddit or Twitter (maybe not for too much longer) who share my interests. This sorting can happen quickly and with much less effort than trying to find someone in my geographic proximity who shares this interest. This belonging is quite nice if I move or travel - an online community is always there. But if I am locked out of my apartment, my online community won’t invite me in and give me a cup of coffee while I await my landlord.
While the Internet provides community, it is a community that is inherently mismatched with the structure of government. Connection on the internet is global and instantaneous. Local government is by definition local and works on a periodic cadence (a weekly Council meeting for example). Community engagement at the local level is much more consumer focused. “What can I get that I need now?” versus “how do I establish stronger connectivity with people around me?”
Combine this mismatch in physical proximity and community with the increased speed of consumerism - I can order anything on Amazon to arrive at my house in 48 hours - and we expect more and contribute less to the commonwealth around us. We benefit from online consumerism but cannot also see how this convenience frays our ability to engage around us.
Newsom proposes creating a version of Farmville for civic engagement (“Citizenville”) to gamify greater community involvement. He points to the town of Manor, Texas creating “Innobucks” as fake currency that is awarded to citizens for suggesting innovations around the town. This currency can then be exchanged for real rewards. The idea is attractive, but ten years later there is more squabbles and gossip on NextDoor than structured community incentives. There could be further engagement, but the trend seems clear, a world-wide web (understandably) incentives global connectivity, not local community. When I can consume any information or talk to anyone around the world in real time on a computer that fits in my pocket, it is much easier to ignore any sense of obligation to those in my immediate surroundings.
Conclusion
The title “Citizen Dollar Bill” is a bit of a misnomer here. It may conjour visions of the privatization of government services or the influence of lobbying on our legislative process. But it is the mindset shift from citizen to consumer that is more subtle and important when thinking about how technology can and should impact the way we interact with government and those around us.
The Internet enabled us to be instantaneous consumers of goods and information from around the world. Citizenship is defined in large part by geography and by time. No wonder then that we continue to be frustrated when government won’t match the pace of any other online interaction. Government becomes an impediment to the consumerist tendencies nurtured elsewhere.
One thing to note on this is that there is actually a small time horizon for measuring the adoption of conspiracy theories. For example, one study looks at Qanon belief time gap for measurement of some conspiracy theories (Qanon being a notable one here) was quite small, focused on recent years, not back to 2016.