The Failure of the Modern Marketplace of Ideas

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

 Fair warning: there is no hiding my personal politics on this one.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas. It’s hard not to, when arguably living in the most information-accessible period in all of history, wonder how we find ourselves divided into strict camps, all equally, intensely convinced of entirely perpendicular realities of the world. Even after Trump’s presidency is over, it’s depressingly clear that his reign over the willing minds of millions of Americans will continue. It’s also clear that no matter who’s in the White House, morally-bankrupt pawns like Giuliani will continue to spew unhinged, unfounded propaganda for however long it keeps them relevant. They are not doing this in a void – millions of people are listening to and believing in their lies, deepening the rift between citizens to a dangerous level. Globally, there are instances like Brazil and Myanmar, where entire democracies have been eroded by bad actors using platforms like Facebook. As long as this is the case, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands.

 

The vexing part – and what I’m still grappling with – is that, as much as I want to, I largely do not blame Trump supporters for their outlandish, conspiratorial views and misguided actions; I blame those propagating it. I blame the tech companies that subtly relegate our feeds to nothing but extremism and propaganda, knowing it will earn the most clicks. Economists tend to assume that people act “rationally” in a free market, but deeming something “rational” is entirely circumstantial, dependent on whatever end the subject desires to reach. Beyond that, the concept also assumes a certain fairness in the way all ideas would be presented, allowing the “rational” public to evaluate each equally and come to the best conclusion. In reality, there is no single, public sphere in which ideas can be debated, and especially not one free from various social and historical influences. There are, instead, a rotating door of media platforms, each subject to their own biases, agendas, and limitations. They are each, after all, packaged by humans. In fact, nowadays, a rapidly increasing amount of people are receiving more and more of their information courtesy of algorithms literally nobody understands, which, put bluntly, is making us more stupid. If that wasn’t bad enough, MIT recently published a study finding that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth on Twitter. Of course, this does not make for a proper marketplace in the slightest, as all those inevitable influences have a significant impact on what information can rise to the top.

 

Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center, 2019.

 

Though what if – for the sake of thought – we could relieve our channels of such blockage, and all ideas could truly be represented fairly? Here’s something that probably shouldn’t surprise you: the merit of ideas is rarely the deciding factor in what anyone believes. We tend to believe that, nearly regardless of what happened, our guy won. There are a plethora of psychological terms for this dynamic, from good ol’ “confirmation bias” to “cognitive consistency theory.”

 

To put it mildly, humans are overwhelmingly susceptible to group decision-making; desperately attracted to belonging like a moth to flame. If everyone around you is headed in a similar direction, at some point, you can’t help but start to wonder if that just might be the right way. Check out this experiment by Jens Krause that measures group mentality in an ultra-literal way: by putting a bunch of people in a circle and tracking where they decide to go.

 

 

Many, like myself, would like to believe that such dynamics would shift if the topic at hand was one of much greater importance – say, politics, for example. What we seem to be learning, however, is how far from the truth that is. There is very, very little in our lives free from the influence of group mentalities.

 

I want to make one thing clear: I genuinely, and with all my heart, wish we lived in a world where the marketplace of ideas worked. It’s a gloriously shiny idea, and would undoubtedly remedy the world of a vast, vast array of challenges. Yet, when I look around at the world – a world which, post-internet, has ostensibly come closer to such a market than ever in history – I do not see one in which the truth is widely accepted, and is even actively fought against. I see, like we have for much of history, schools of thought that largely represent the ideas of the elite, sneakily disseminated down the totem pole (although notably, I suppose this very essay suggests that such a “look around” at the state of affairs would be impossible for anyone to truly achieve). 

 

I don’t have the solution; I sincerely fear that this is perhaps the single most complex, dire hazard currently threating any progress toward an informed, functional society. What I believe would help, at least, is a more widespread understanding of how and why we fall into these “thought traps.” So much of the issue seems to be in thinking that it’s the other side exclusively at fault for the current state of the world, and if only they would change, things could be better. We all have blind spots, but all too often, we fail to turn the ideas around on ourselves, content to either deny or ignore our biases. To think, how much better off we could all be if you people would stop blaming the world’s problems on everyone else’s behavior!