Examining 'dignity in the digital age'

Former president Donald J. Trump’s October 2024 call to revoke the broadcast license of CBS for election interference put the spotlight (perhaps just for a hot second) on another place it belongs in American culture: our government policy toward media and the technology overrunning our lives.

“TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference.,” the ex-President posted, evidence-free, on his own platform, Truth Social.

“An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!!”

“[T]he Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History.”

At the end of the 19th century, the Lumière brothers premiered the first moving image film in Paris and Thomas Edison figured out electricity, the light bulb, and the phonograph. Advance the clock 130 years and toss in the advent of computational power and you get the technology steering our present moment: one where Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft have a combined market capitalization of $10 trillion but hardly any regulations over how they control our society.

Author Frank McCourt knows. A billionaire investor turned philanthropist and author, McCourt presents us with details about how our information system has failed us, but brings with them a game plan for urgent reform – what he calls, rightfully and with no exaggeration, “a once-in-a-civilization opportunity.”

We’ve become enthralled to our digital overlords, McCourt (and his co-author William J. Casey) tell us, each of us the digital equivalent of a feudal serf working land we don’t own.

When Amazon Web Services, for example, hosts a third of all websites; Google (with its 4+ billion users!) dominates search, email, video hosting, GPS services, document sharing, and smartphone software; Facebook collects 50,000 data points on each user; and Amazon and Facebook together take in “fully half” of all online advertising dollars, we’ve let our modern Rockefellers and Carnegies rule the roost.

"Our Biggest Fight" explains how these companies and the Internet as a whole have “evolved away” from earlier ideals into a system that is choking us. Inspired by Thomas Paine and his pamphlet Common Sense and the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt, McCourt presents plans for the “NewNet” and what he calls Project Liberty at www.projectliberty.io/

We need to “rearchitect” our media and technology ecosystem, McCourt says, with deeper and systematic consideration of data storage and portability and ownership, cybersecurity, and digital property rights. And it’s not just about the money. People and machines are now sliding “an array of racist, misogynist, judgmental, bullying, reductionist, untruthful content into our increasingly toxic online environments.”

He’s right.

And how about the math? In 2022 we each spent 151 minutes a day on social media. If you figure five billion people are online, and add up all the days in a year, that’s a lot of time that these companies have “sucked out of our lives” and “converted into advertising dollars.”

“We have a serious, global addition problem,” McCourt writes. “A public health threat that overshadows even the recent global pandemic.” “Society is shaped by information,” McCourt tells us. Letting everything get away from us may turn out to be “one of the greatest mistakes human civilization has ever made.”

Frank McCourt one of the few who can see the symptoms of crisis today, diagnose it, and propose and help administer treatment. Those interested in building a new “social contract” for the Internet age should dive into his plan of action today. And now’s the time, before others with other plans, or concepts of plans, start taking away our broadcast licenses and more – by force.

* Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, comes out in February.