Living in the Bubble

I spent last week visiting Washington to polish a news report on the November elections when control of the Senate, a long list of local political offices, as well as the balance of power in the House of Representatives will be at stake. I spoke with pollsters, activists and political analysts. Everyone, in one way or another, gravitated toward one of two conclusions. First, the Republican party will most likely take control of the Senate and will spend the next two years trying to undo Obama’s legacy and setting up the battlefield for the very difficult fight it faces in 2016, when it hopes to defeat Hillary Clinton — who seems all but invincible today. The second general conclusion those I interviewed had reached is actually a diagnosis: Today, more than ever, U.S. politics suffers from a chronic disease called polarization. It really doesn’t matter, they said, if the Republicans are able to attain their goal of seizing legislative power. The majority they would obtain would be so small that it would guarantee yet another period of paralysis. One would expect such a fragile majority to provide the ideal incentive to generate enough consensus between the moderate members of both parties, so as to be able to run the country. Yet the opposite has occurred: The U.S. bipartisan system has turned into a war between two islands cut off from each other. This preoccupies Washington professionals, and rightly so.

The problem — as explained to me by one of the president’s advisers who is an expert on data and demographics — is that such polarization has increased as a result of the geographic partitioning of districts, something that has generated true ideological bubbles wherein people’s votes are homogeneous, and worse yet, people’s way of thinking is unmoved by other opinions. To this, one must add another contemporary phenomenon, which in the long run is perhaps more troubling for America’s democracy — and for other democracies, of course — the ideological bubbles generated by the virtual world. According to a person I interviewed, the fact that search engines and social networks like Facebook can offer, through sophisticated personalization tools, a stream of information and analyses tailored to the likes and preferences of their users can lead to the emergence of a society condemned to political solipsism. In fact, it would be worthwhile to consider what would happen to a society made up of isolated citizens, each one absolutely disinterested in, and even hostile to, other viewpoints.

Some years ago, I read a book that tried to tackle this question. It was written by Eli Pariser, former director of MoveOn.org, and is titled “The Filter Bubble.” According to Pariser, the filters employed by Google, Facebook, and other virtual media have managed to reduce to a minimum the presence of the “other” — he or she who thinks differently or conceives of life differently than I do. If ours is already the generation of the “selfie” — the radical obsession with the first person — the algorithms deployed by search engines are propelling a generation of informational narcissists, those for whom only their own interests exist. Pariser insists that this phenomenon could result in the dissolution of our ability to debate. Why would I want to tolerate the person in front of me when I can just “filter” —eliminate — him or her by adjusting my search preferences or by simply putting my trust in the information network as it feeds me daily through the web?

The risk, of course, is that these virtual bubbles have tangible repercussions in our everyday lives, and even more so in our political lives. Democracy is unthinkable without a recognition of the other’s existence and without a willingness to not only tolerate completely his or her viewpoint, but to even learn from that perspective. This was precisely the spirit of the assemblies that instituted the people’s government. There were no filters and no algorithms then. One had to listen to conflicting voices without having the choice to press “delete.” Rescuing dialogue is another challenge of our oh-so-fascinating era.