Democracy runs on understanding, yet technology increasingly divides us. When we rely on technology to drive information, communication, and culture, it's even more important to examine whether those tools drive or hurt understanding — and think about what to do about it.
I spoke last week at the San Francisco Democracy Week & Tech Week. It continued in Los Angeles this week.
Democracy Week is a cross-partisan effort to reinvigorate civic life, and it deliberately coincides with Tech Week — because technology is reshaping how people find information, and that has enormous consequences for democracy, for better or worse.
Here’s the message I shared last Thursday in San Francisco.
We are all here today because we are worried about the state of democracy. But why is that a problem? Why does Democracy Week even exist? How did we get here?
We need to start with the core cause of the problem if we really want to fix it.
We should not just jump into the blame game and rant about whatever political figure or policy we hate the most. Nor should we just pick the sexiest new idea we run into, or the one that fits our own biases.
That might feel good, but it probably won’t change things.
We must focus on the core cause. The core cause of the problem is this: the way we get information and the way we communicate with each other has fundamentally changed in the last 10-20 years.
It has broken the ways we understand the world and understand each other – and that is breaking democracy.
AllSides started creating technologies and market solutions to address this core problem about 14 years ago, long before most people saw the problem.
For me, it really started in 1997, the year I joined Netscape. I gave a speech that year about the great things that the Web would bring, but also predicted that when we started getting news and information from the Web, that it would train us to discriminate against each other in new ways.
Today we talk about that problem as filter bubbles, tribalism, division and isolation — how they prevent us from understanding the facts, what is really going on, and prevent us from understanding each other.
For democracy to work, people must have balanced, reliable information, and we must be able to talk honestly with each other, especially when we disagree.
That is what AllSides provides — tech and systems we are scaling to bring understanding to our nation. Balanced understanding of the facts, mutual understanding of each other.
We know how to do this – in theory, in practice, and proven in the market. With up to eighty million monthly views through all our channels, and around four million monthly unique visitors just to our website and app – we are only getting started.
Today — finally! — our nation sees the problem, we know something is terribly wrong and we crave understanding and connection. Our nation is ready for something better — a world where we understand what is going on and we understand each other.
Join AllSides, help us scale understanding to revive democracy.
