The possibilities (and dangers) of analog populism

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

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It is almost a cliché, these days, to point out that digital technology is a double-edged sword. Thanks to social media platforms, we are more connected than ever, but we spend less time socializing in person. Our attention spans are getting shorter. We’re seriously worried about the collapse of the constitutional order. That’s life, you know?

Maybe there’s something more to unpack here.

Maybe people are feeling resentful about the false promises of the digital establishment. The ethos of “sharing” did not bring about a new age of enlightenment. Quite the opposite. The world feels more chaotic than ever. Old structures are falling apart, but not in a good way.

Could these feelings be channeled into a populist political campaign?

Ezra Klein raised this question on a recent podcast episode about the role of attention in the political economy. He said that one of his “big theories” is that we are ready for a “true backlash” against the digital-cultural status quo:

And I think that the next really successful Democrat, although it could be a Republican, is going to be oppositional to it. In the way that when Barack Obama ran in ’08 — and I really think people forget this part of his appeal — he ran against cable news, against 24-hour news cycles, against political consultants.

People didn’t like the structure and feeling of political attention then. And I don’t think there was anywhere near the level of disgust and concern and feeling that we were being corroded in our souls as there is now.

And I think that, at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. They’re going to run against all of it — that society and modernity and politics shouldn’t feel like this.

And some of that will be banning phones in schools. It’ll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be absolutely radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves.

Ezra Klein clarified that he was not talking about a movement to unplug from the digital world. He was talking about a movement to balance the scales — perhaps following the lead of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who wants to see better standards to protect young people from the damaging effects of a phone-based upbringing.

So it’s not analog populism, exactly, but it involves tapping into our collective memory of the analog world in order to criticize the excesses of the digital world.

The opportunity for anti-tech populism is ripe for Democrats because Elon Musk is a living caricature of the excesses of the digital sphere. He is an eccentric billionaire who purchased a social media platform and then trolled his way into a position of enormous power.

Democrats are attacking Musk and DOGE, but nobody is quite channeling the combination of resentments that Ezra Klein is referring to. There are glimpses of it in Europe, though.

Pedro Sánchez, a democratic-socialist who is the prime minister of Spain, has been integrating anti-tech populism into his rhetoric. Here is a line of attack he’s been making against his right-wing opponents: They have the richest man in the world, they have their algorithms, they have power on social media. But in their arrogance, they forget who has the real power in a democracy: the people and their votes.

You could imagine Democrats in the United States using similar lines of attack ahead of the midterm elections next year, especially if public opinion sours on DOGE and the strange relationship between Musk and Trump.

Sánchez appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month and dedicated his entire speech to the topic of social media. Here’s a sample of his rhetoric:

Now we know that the seamless and free connectivity offered by social media also came with cyberbullying, hate speech, sex offences, privacy violations and a terrible rise of anxiety, violence and loneliness.

Now we know that far from bringing humanity together and “empowering the people”, these platforms have resulted in a concentration of power and wealth in the hands of just a few. All of this at the cost of our social cohesion, our mental health, and our democracies.

The risk of this rhetoric, from the perspective of those trying to win elections, is that the message will fall flat. People like their smartphones, don’t they? They appreciate digital tools for what they do. As we saw with the changing politics around the TikTok ban, people might not care too much about the other side of the double-edged sword.

The danger of this rhetoric, for the rest of us, is that it will empower overzealous progressives who will enact bad policies. If progressives got the chance, they might try to turn online platforms into public utilities or something, and try to ban what they decree to be disinformation.

At the Economic Forum, Pedro Sánchez presented three policy ideas:

1. Outlaw anonymous speech by requiring people to use ID to create accounts

2. Regulate how algorithms work and require them to be transparent

3. Hold social media platforms legally accountable for their damaging effects

To a certain extent, we are already doing the third idea here in the United States. I’ve written previously about the lawsuits against Meta and other platforms. The lawsuits have to do mainly with mental health resources, but the idea could also be applied, politically, to student performance in schools.

Republicans are currently attacking “the left” by blaming them for the declining test scores in public schools as measured by the NAEP. As a teacher and a writer, I’ve got my own ideas on how to improve literacy in schools. But if I were a Democratic politician, I would be tempted to shift the blame onto social media companies for these declines. What do you expect to happen when Meta and TikTok have our kids addicted to scrolling through dumb video clips all day long?

Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, is floating another idea for accountability: an “attention tax” to be paid by social media corporations who are buying our attention with their addictive technologies. As part of the reason for why he wants to impose a tax, he cites the “greed for our attention spans that these corporations exhibit”.

As for banning anonymous speech and regulating algorithms, those ideas won’t fly here in the United States. One of the reasons why Musk became a folk hero for MAGA in the first place is that he attacked the censorious nature of the progressive elites. Now that Twitter/X is basically a government-operated social media platform, Democrats should reflect on what has happened over the past few years. They might adopt a new posture rooted in the spirit of the Bill of Rights.

I agree with Ezra Klein when he says that Jonathan Haidt strikes the right tone. Haidt doesn’t scold adults about their digital habits. He wants the government to protect young people from addictive algorithms, just like the government prevents cigarette companies from selling and advertising to minors. Haidt wants stricter age-verification policies on social media platforms, and he wants stricter “no phone” policies in schools. Apart from that, he wants to foster a healthier culture that allows young people to grow up in the “real world” before they decide for themselves how to leap into the digital world.

I should note in closing that I’m not a big fan of populism in general. Populist energy has a tendency to spiral out of control, as we are seeing right now with the MAGA squad thrashing our institutions out of spite.

However, there is the potential for a strategy that, if executed by people grounded in principle, could provide a much-needed response to the ills that have weakened civil society in recent years.