There’s something special about walking into a new car dealership or a recreational sport showroom and when you look at the new and shiny vehicle there is not a scratch or a smudge on it, it is brand spanking new.  But you know, as soon as it leaves the showroom it won’t be long before is gets its first scratch, blemish or dent. In the same way, life with its wear and tear takes its inevitable toll on each of us and we may feel banged up and nicked and dinged before too long. That’s just the way it is, but that doesn’t mean we have less value. Sometimes the worn and torn look adds character, or least is an indicator of something that has been put to good use over the years. In this week’s service we take a look at how our less than perfect lives still have a lot to offer to those around us and (indeed) to the world’s betterment. Even damaged goods have good value. The title of the talk is “Damaged Goods” and we also have a song by Travis James Humphrey that ties into the theme (“Broken Vessels”).

We have two articles in the support page this week sent in by members relating to our UU winter study topic on Social Media, Surveillance Capitalism and Privacy. 

Oh yes, and don’t forget to turn your clocks ahead on Saturday night! 

 Have a great week-end everyone and we hope you can join us for the UUHoulton weekly service.

The recorded service will be available to view at 10AM on Sunday morning and archived so it can be watched later at your convenience.  I will send out the service link to YouTube later today and the link will be live on Sunday morning at 9:45AM (in case you want to come to the service early).  If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you can locate it automatically on your YouTube home page under subscriptions. 

The 10AM service will be followed by a Zoom coffee hour and check-in at 11AM for those who are interested in discussing the service or just want to check in. I’ll send the Zoom links out today. 

Practice patience and kindness.

In Ministry,

Dave

Virtual Offering Plate

If you would like to send in your pledge or donation (we still have to pay the bills) simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below.  Thank you for your support!
UU Church of Houlton, 61 Military Street, Houlton, ME  04730

Message from the UUA President

This week many of us are marking the one year anniversary when nearly all of our congregations and the UUA moved to virtual operations. As I have been mindful of the anniversary, the words of UU minister Max Coots came to me: “When holidays and holy days and such times come, When anniversaries arrive by calendar or consciousness, Mark the time.” Anniversaries invite us to remember, and in a year like this, that is a heavy reality. I’ve noticed the way grief is coming over me more this past week. Grief and forgetfulness and exhaustion. If you are feeling this way, know you are not alone. Know that this is expected. We are all mourning the collective trauma of this year. And we are still experiencing it. We still have loved ones getting sick and too many people dying. We still live with distance from loved ones, isolation, and the myriad stresses of our circumstances. Many of our leaders and members (many of you!) have been on the frontlines of the crises this year. As doctors and nurses and essential workers, as chaplains and caregivers and pastors, as first responders, as religious educators and teachers, as organizers and community leaders, as artists and musicians, as loved ones and family—we have, in a year of incredible loss, continued to nurture the bonds of care and love, community and hope. It is my hope that as we mark this anniversary, we remember not just the sorrows, but also the ways we have shown up for each other, for our communities and for our values. We learned more deeply what it means to center collective care and compassion in our ministries. We learned to more fully recognize our interdependence and prioritize the needs of those most vulnerable within and beyond our communities. We’ve helped people survive. We’ve cared for our children and young people. We’ve created reminders of beauty and grace to sustain us. We’ve been present to those in their dying moments and to their loved ones in saying goodbye. So many of you, and your communities as a whole, have done so much to nurture life and care and hope in this time. May this have a lasting impact on our lives and ministries, reminding us always of what is most important. Anniversaries, whether we acknowledge them consciously or not, take their toll. May you have moments over this week of rest and love and beauty to renew your spirit. May you be gentle and compassionate with yourself and may others show you compassion and gentleness. May you be held in the same grace and generosity that you offer others. Yours, Susan Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray spends her days strengthening the thriving mission of this faith. In her spare time, she enjoys being with her family and playing with their dog, Hercules. Article sent in by MaryAlice Mowry This Rural Liberal Set Out to Talk to His Conservative Neighbors; It Didn’t Go Well – Until it Did Washington Post Magazineby Bill DonahueFebruary 24, 2021 On a quiet evening in June, I planted a Black Lives Matter lawn sign on the village green in my hometown, Gilmanton, N.H., population 3,758. Then, as I crouched low in the grass, shooting a photo of the sign, I made sure that our town hall, the two-story white clapboard Gilmanton Academy, built in 1894, loomed large in the background. Erected to house a long-vanished private school, the Academy building has, for the past three decades, been the civic soul of our town, which sits in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, amid piney forests and sheep pastures and rolling hills. Numerous Fourth of July dances have been held at the Academy, and once every four years we stomp the snow off our boots and file up the Academy’s worn wooden staircase to take part in a local rite, New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. My plan was to use the photo to promote a Black Lives Matter rally that I’d be hosting in a few days on Gilmanton’s green. I was allying with the decentralized racial justice movement, which decries violence against Black people, because I wanted to suggest that, even in a tradition-bound small town, change is possible. My neighbors have long baked pies for one another and run errands for the sick; I hoped that conscientious racial inclusion could come to be regarded as just another form of caring. But I knew that I was taking a controversial stance. In Gilmanton, as of 2019, 96.5 percent of the residents were, like me, White. In November, 57 percent of the voters here chose to reelect Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the political gap between rural and urban America continues to widen. According to Decision Desk HQ, a website focused on elections, voters in the country’s least dense counties picked Trump by a margin of 35 percentage points, up from 32 in 2016. After I carried my sign home and announced the rally on the community Facebook page, the vitriol flowed in. There were over 300 comments in the first 24 hours. One of Gilmanton’s most outspoken Black Lives Matter advocates, a 32-year-old legal assistant named Grace Sisti, was being savaged in one of many side threads: “this whole virtue signaling stunt will turn this whole town against you,” wrote a woman named Rita Canole, whose children attended school in Gilmanton with Sisti. “Think this thru. … you have lived here your whole life and [will] probably spend the rest of it here. … don’t make people remember you for this.” “Grace Sisti is a radical leftist,” proclaimed another local, Rick Lucas, in a two-sentence post. “These are the facts!!” My event listing was soon deleted, and I discovered why when I ran into the website moderator, who told me, “You were getting threats, and so was I.” I was a little terrified, but on June 20, when 90 people gathered on the town green here to mark George Floyd’s suffocation by lying in the grass for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, there were no counterdemonstrators. The only opposition came from a couple of hooligans who shouted sarcastic remarks as they sped by in a car. Still, as the presidential election neared, the situation grew stranger. In October, one local conservative — Phil Wittmann, a selectman in neighboring Alton — took a swipe at me in a letter to our local paper, the Laconia Daily Sun. “While taking a nice Sunday drive through Gilmanton,” Wittmann wrote, “I passed a house where a man who used to be a reporter for the Arab Muslim News Service, Al Jazeera lives. … On his front lawn he proudly displays a Black Lives Matter sign. Most people now know that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization bent on destroying the American family and way of life.” Wittmann has a good memory. I’ve done some writing for Al Jazeera America, and in 2015, while I was covering a Trump rally in New Hampshire for the news service, he denied my request for a man-on-the-street interview. But how did he know where I lived? And how was I to stomach his letter’s scary suggestion that, amid the coronaviruspandemic, our rural county had become nothing but a constellation of isolates holed up in their respective homes, Googling one another as they lobbed decimating insults over the Internet? I settled in Gilmanton in 2015, after being a lifelong summer visitor, guided by a belief that the place was, even compared with other New England villages, a sanctuary of idyllic beauty and calm. My ancestors have been coming here duringsummer since the late 19th century, and in writing a locally popular 1993 memoir, “Gilmanton Summers,” my grandmother, Jane Scriven Cumming, evoked a sweet antique world appointed by kindly, approachable neighbors. “Every evening at dusk,” she wrote, “old Mr. Valpey stood on a little ladder to light the lantern.”For rural liberals like me, Joe Biden’s win certainly didn’t usher in a new era of sweetness and light. Belknap County, which comprises Gilmanton and 10 other towns, and is home to 61,000 people, proved itself the Trump-friendliest county in New Hampshire. All 18 of the politicians we just sent to New Hampshire’s very large state legislature are Republican, and before you call them New England moderates, consider that when the delegation met in December, in a small room, it made protective face coverings optional, in defiance of a statewide mask mandate. And delegation chair Michael Sylvia is pressing his fellow legislators to impeach New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, the Trump supporter who’d imposed the mask mandate. “Simply, we are violating the rights of our people,” Sylvia recently explained to the Concord Monitor. “This is not something that we can tolerate now or in the future.” Belknap County is crackling with pronouncements like Sylvia’s these days — with righteous political declamations that seek to foreclose all dialogue. I’ve been guilty of high-flown rhetoric myself. In my worst moment on Facebook, in June, I lashed out after a friend posted a meme I deemed racist, saying, “This makes you look like an a–. Take it down.” I’ve worried that Gilmanton has become a casualty of Trump-inspired Internet sniping, so in the days after the election, I embarked on an experiment. I began approaching the myriad locals who, in writing, have attacked me and my political allies. I wanted to know whether liberals and conservatives can still even talk to each other in rural America, and I wondered: What if we took the dialogue offline? The selectmen’s meetings in Alton take place on the first and third Mondays of each month, just off Main Street, in the red brick town hall near the True Value hardware store and Alton Village Pizza, and when I step inside in late November, the selectman who insinuated that I’m a jihadist, Marxist family wrecker is easy to spot. Slight and wiry, with a white beard and glasses, Phil Wittmann, 72, sits behind a wooden placard bearing his name, discussing last weekend’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington. “I have some friends who went,” he’s telling a neighbor, “and they’re supposed to send me some photos.” I linger behind him, quiet, obsequious, awaiting an opening. “Um,” I begin when Wittmann makes eye contact, “I think we’ve met before. And you wrote about me in the paper, actually.” “That’s right,” Wittmann says, chuckling. “I did.”His manner is jaunty. He seems to have cast aside the squinting skepticism that shrouded our 2015 encounter, opting instead to relish the rough-and-tumble of politics. Is he making a show of bravado for the Alton voters now filing into the room, pre-meeting? It’s not clear, but when I offer to treat him to breakfast, he says, “Sure,” and gives me his number. When I call Wittmann the next day, I leave a message — and then begin studying up for the interview. Wittmann’s political priority, I learn, is defunding the Lakes Region Planning Commission, an agency that fosters multi-town cooperation on environmental issues. His approach — I think of it as “Alton First” — has thus far failed to stop the commission, though, and as I read about Wittmann, it’s his wife who comes through in bolder strokes. I settled in this little town guided by a belief in its friendly spirit, and even now, as our political divide hangs on, I can still see that friendly spirit glimmering at times. Chris Wittmann runs Cats in the Cradle, a quaint online shop that sells antiques and handcrafted soaps, each bar “a work of art,” according to the website, “beautifully packaged with nostalgia in mind.” The accompanying photos seem straight out of my grandmother’s book: Here’s a lissome circa 1900 beauty in a white bonnet; here’s a woman trundling her worn milk pail out of the barn. Chris Wittmann’s prose, meanwhile, is incendiary — more alarmist, even, than her husband’s. At least, it is in a letter she sent recently to the Baysider, a local paper. Writing of the “trained Marxists” running the Black Lives Matter movement, Chris Wittmann says that for them, “It’s all about their hatred for President Trump, eliminating America as we know it, and mob rule.” The idea that anti-American troublemakers are poised to shatter our pastoral dreams is nothing new, of course. A century ago, misguided patriotism precipitated a crackdown on labor organizers and Asian farmworkers in the American West. And the current fears about the racial justice movement are of a piece with what I witnessed at that 2015 Trump rally I covered. That was the one where a man in the audience rose to infamously tell our future president, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.” As Trump expressed tolerance for this view, the man stepped up his anti-Muslim rhetoric, asking, “How can we get rid of them?” And so I want to ask the Wittmanns: Can’t our pastoral dreams accommodate racial diversity, and how can we soothe such fears? How can we get past seeing the monsters that simply aren’t there? But when Phil Wittmann calls me back late that night, there’s a hesitancy in his voice. “I’ve done some thinking about your interview request,” he says, “and I’m going to respectfully decline.” I reach out to a few more of my local right-leaning critics, asking to meet for an interview. All of them ghost me, though, and eventually I have to recognize that the silence is stemming not only from what I’ve said and done but from who I am. I could never claim to be “from” Gilmanton. My grandmother’s book is still being reprinted by the local historical society, sure, and in the 1970s, when I was a kid, I spent scads of time here, swimming in Loon Pond and training for cross country on the back roads. Whatever patriotism that’s in me was shaped here in Gilmanton, at the Fourth of July parades, when the firetrucks paused in front of the Academy building and a deep solemn voice (was it the fire chief?) intoned, “Will you join us, please, for the singing of our national anthem?” Still, I was just another affluent summer person when I was a kid, a flatlander from Connecticut. And after I finished college, in 1986, I spent nearly three decades living in Portland, Ore., a city known for its liberalism. When I landed in Gilmanton I was single. But then in 2018 that, too, changed. I logged on to the dating app Bumble and found a public interest lawyer situated in the crunchy, left-leaning outskirts of Burlington, Vt. Michele is Mexican American. She told me this in an early text, adding, “Trump calls us an infestation. It isn’t just that he doesn’t see us as humans. He is a corrupt, greedy, power-hungry man with no morals.” On an early date, Michele explained how, in law school, she came across graffiti slurring minority students and then decided it was time to embrace her racial identity. She legally changed her last name. She’d grown up Michele Coker, but Coker was a name her father adopted for the convenience of having an American-sounding name. He was born an Olvera, and in 1995 Michele Coker became Michele Cristina Fontana Olvera. Late last summer, Michele moved in with me, just in time to help stack firewood for winter, and now she’s running a few miles on Gilmanton’s back roads most mornings as she navigates the trickiness of being Latinx in lily White northern New England. When I decided to host that Black Lives Matter rally, I was animated in part by the alienation Michele sometimes feels here — and by the hopeful sense that our community could become richer, more robust and vibrant, if it grew more diverse. But was there reason for such hope? In the years I lived in Portland, Gilmanton had, like so many American small towns, lost some of its neighborly cohesion. The Gilmanton Corner Store closed the year I arrived, and it had been a mainstay of the community for 75 years. During World War II, Gilmanton soldiers sent letters to the store so they could be posted on a community bulletin board.The population of Gilmanton — 1,010 in 1970 — has nearly quadrupled over the past half-century. There have been no Fourth of July dances since 2003 when a vaunted volunteer organizer retired, and since 2018, the town hall has been locked during business hours. Visitors have to buzz at the door and then confer with clerks from behind bulletproof plexiglass. Septic permits are now a big deal in Gilmanton, and the zoning laws have gotten quite finicky. There have been positive changes, too. Small farms are enjoying a renaissance here, and these days we’ve got a bustling farmers market and a nonprofit, Gilmanton’s Own Inc., that sells local food and crafts in a small storefront. The town dump and the post office are, as ever, splendid places to chew the fat with your neighbors. Yet local consensus holds that something essential has been lost here, and blame for this loss falls quite often on outsiders. In particular, it falls on the many newcomers who emigrate here from Massachusetts. There’s an oft-invoked slur for these folks — “Massholes” — and on the Gilmanton Facebook page they get copious grief. “Do you know why it’s so windy in New Hampshire?” read a recent post. “Because Massachusetts sucks.”The opposite of a Masshole is an “old-timer,” an individual whose roots here go generations deep — a person so at home on our rugged, granite-strewn hills that, on a cold winter’s night, he can spend hours outside tending to the livestock without ever donning a jacket. The old-timer looms large in local mythology, and when I finally land my first interview with a political foe, I’m not shocked to hear Dick Burchell, a 77-year-old former Belknap County commissioner, speak of old-timers. “The people I’m closest to,” Burchell says, “the people I tried to represent, they’re traditional. They’re hard-working and down-to-earth. They’ve never made a lot of money, and now the forces of our economy are tilted against them.” As Burchell sees it, “There’s such an imbalance between these working-class people and affluent second homeowners. There’s a real difference between their local conservatism and a more global way of looking at things.” Black Lives Matter, Burchell believes, is a “myopic” organization that’s “fomenting violence” to serve a globalist agenda. “There’s some very powerful forces driving it,” he says, “Wall Street establishment types. Globalization works for them.”We’re meeting in Burchell’s lavish modern wood house, which sits at the end of a long dirt road in Gilmanton Iron Works, a satellite village. It’s late on a November afternoon, and the light filtering down through the leafless maples lining Sunset Lake, just outside the window, is dim and gray. I’m masked and eight feet away from Burchell. Still, there’s a convivial feel to our talk, even though I’m painfully aware that we’re just two White guys talking about Black people. When I stepped into the half-darkness of Burchell’s living room, he quipped, “Welcome to the gloaming.” And now he’s canted back in his brown leather easy chair, a large, white-haired man in a green zip-up sweater. He’s in fragile health, recently treated for kidney issues, but still he’s expounding on his worldview in ruminative, deliberate tones.“We’ve become increasingly fragile as a society,” Burchell continues. “The hypertension surrounding race these days is totally unnecessary. And what’s being ignored is that you can be marginalized in ways beyond race. There are people who’ve been here for generations, and they’re working two jobs and just getting by.” Burchell isn’t one of these people, though. He moved to New Hampshire in the mid-1980s and earned a handsome living as a real estate agent. Then, late in life, he became an inveterate writer of letters to the Laconia Daily Sun. One of his most frequent targets is a Democratic politician, Ruth Larson, who in November lost a bid to become a state representative. Larson, 72, is a lawyer and lifelong seasonal visitor who became a year-round New Hampshire resident in 2010. She’s an avowed Black Lives Matter supporter, a feminist and an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights. After Phil Wittmann attacked me in print, she bought an advertisement in the Sun to declare that his letter exuded “both bigotry and a complete lack of understanding of journalism. I count Mr. Donahue as a friend,” she continued, “and as an ally attempting to offer an alternative to the narrow and obsolete views of you and your allies.” In his Sun letters, Burchell has called Larson “an extremist” and “screechy and preachy” and complained that she doesn’t believe in either the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. Now, in the gloaming, Burchell surprises me, revealing that he and Larson used to be friends — “when she first moved here,” he says, “before either of us got involved in politics.” He gestures across the lake, for both of us know that Larson lives on the opposite shore, a half mile away. “My wife and Ruth have spent a lot of time together,” he says. “They’ve gone kayaking. Until covid came along, the ladies who live nearby would all get together on Tuesday nights and drink wine and rip at their husbands.” Listening to this, I remember a letter Larson wrote to the Sun in early 2020, pre-pandemic, inviting Burchell and eight other conservatives who’ve lambasted her in print — “frenemies,” she called them — to join her for breakfast or lunch on the Democrat’s dime. Only one “frenemy” accepted the offer, and it wasn’t Burchell. Now, his demurral saddens me. There’s just a sliver of water between these two avid rhetoricians. Gingerly, I offer a proposal. “What if we got Ruth involved in this conversation?” I say. “We could just call her and ask her to come over.” Burchell doesn’t warm to the idea. “No,” he says, shaking his head, “my sensibilities are nothing like hers. I was brought up to be respectful. I’m not a sledgehammer. Talking with Ruth, it just wouldn’t work.” Two weeks after meeting with Burchell, I write Larson for a response. But by now Burchell’s health has worsened. He’s back in the hospital, and Larson elects not to comment. “I am quite friendly with his wife,” she explains, “and I want to be sensitive to her.”Not long after that, Burchell passes away, a victim of renal failure. Larson expresses condolences by sending flowers to his family. All told, I write to 13 detractors. They’ve shown great swagger on Facebook, but now they’re ducking me, almost en masse. What’s going on? To be fair, I’m more or less ambushing them. An average of 350 million photos go up on Facebook every day. They’re public pronouncements, but almost none of them elicit a call from a journalist. Paul Oman, an online epoxy salesman who scored 25 likes casting doubt on my September Black Lives Matter rally, declines my request for an interview. “I’m working my tail off and I want to keep a low profile,” he says. When I reach out to a man named Scott Febonio, I expect a little more fire. Febonio’s profile photo captures him shirtless, his six-pack impeccable, and on the community page he’s positioned himself as the stone-cold voice of sobriety. When one local contested the notion that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group, Febonio wrote, “when they show up and destroy your property and drag you out of your home you may think differently. Open your eyes its happening all over the country this is not up for debate.” Later, going after another Black Lives Matter supporter, Febonio typed, “please move… .back to Mass.” Never mind that his interlocutor was a lifelong Gilmantonite.In responding to my request for an interview, Febonio writes, “I don’t support mainstream media or news organizations that are corrupt.” He goes on to suggest that I “write an article about the corruption and Fraud that is occurring. Talk about the overwhelming evidence and demand this be investigated for the good of our country. I challenge you to stand up.”Intrigued, I write back, wondering whether he is referencing the presidential election or a “wider pattern of fraud and corruption.”“Please don’t insult my intelligence,” he replies. “Have a good day.” Eventually, I meet with Rick Notkin, a 65-year-old retired nurse and gun advocate whose vanity license plate reads BEARARMS. When I slide into the booth to meet him at T-Bones, a steakhouse in our county seat, Laconia, the restaurant is nearly empty. He has a 9mm Smith & Wesson holstered on his right hip — fully legal per New Hampshire’s open-carry laws. “Is that gun loaded?” I ask, trepidatious.“Well, I hope so.” Notkin’s voice is cheery and gentle. “Because if it’s not, it’s really useless.” He tells me that, as a bespectacled Jewish boy growing up outside Boston, he was repeatedly bullied. For a while he thought the answer was Gandhian nonviolence. Then in college he happened to watch an old movie, “The Incident,” which sees an injured vigilante taking action against two thugs terrorizing passengers on a New York City subway car. The film’s hero, played by Beau Bridges, slams his plaster arm cast at one of the villains until he is unconscious. Watching it, Notkin was transfixed. “I thought back on all the times people beat me up and nobody did anything.” Today, Notkin packs his sidearm each time he steps into Temple B’nai Israel, in Laconia. “There have been a lot of attacks on Jews historically,” he explains, “and on churches of many faiths.” His gun has spurred controversy at the synagogue, and personally I feel for his congregants. Then Notkin tells me that he spends 10 hours a week running the synagogue’s soup kitchen.“Do you carry your gun when you’re ministering to the homeless?” I ask.“I carry it all the time,” Notkin says patiently, ‘“but that doesn’t mean I’m raring to shoot somebody. I’d use it only if I was threatened, or someone I love was. If I went to my grave never having shot somebody, I’d be fine with that.”Our luncheon chat is doing whatdialogue should do: It’s making me see my opponent as complex and human. But there’s a formality to it, a careful, distant tone, and it’s set a full 11 miles from my home. The place I care about most is the town that I live in. I want a spirited, uninhibited back-and-forth with a Gilmanton neighbor on the other side of the political fence. So I’m happy when I get a warm reply from local conservative Valerie Cote, whose Facebook screen name is Tocho A’Hagi. “Would not mind speaking about politics,” Cote writes. “Thank you for reaching out!” Article sent in by Bruce Glick How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster FireOur democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization, and rage. Here’s how to fix that. Story by  Anne Applebaum and Peter PomerantsevThe Atlantic

To read the diary of Gustave de Beaumont, the traveling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, is to understand just how primitive the American wilderness once seemed to visiting Frenchmen. In a single month, December 1831, Tocqueville and Beaumont were on a steamship that crashed; rode a stagecoach that broke an axle; and took shelter in a cabin—one of them bedridden from an unidentified illness—while the nearest doctor was a two-day hike away. Yet they kept meeting people whose resourcefulness they admired, and they kept collecting the observations that eventually led Tocqueville to write Democracy in America—the classic account of the ordering principles, behaviors, and institutions that made democracy function within this sprawling country.

Tocqueville’s interest in American institutions reflected more than mere curiosity: In his native France, a revolution launched with similarly high ideals about equality and democracy had ended badly. His parents had nearly been guillotined during the wave of violence that followed the momentous events of 1789. By contrast, American democracy worked—and he wanted to understand why.

Famously, he found many of the answers in state, local, and even neighborhood institutions. He wrote approvingly of American federalism, which “permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.” He liked the traditions of local democracy too, the “township institutions” that “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Despite the vast empty spaces of their country, Americans met one another, made decisions together, carried out projects together. Americans were good at democracy because they practiced democracy. They formed what he called “associations,” the myriad organizations that we now call “civil society,” and they did so everywhere:

Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States

Tocqueville reckoned that the true success of democracy in America rested not on the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution, but in these habits and practices. In France, philosophes in grand salons discussed abstract principles of democracy, yet ordinary Frenchmen had no special links to one another. By contrast, Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

In the nearly two centuries that have passed since Tocqueville wrote these words, many of those institutions and habits have deteriorated or disappeared. Most Americans no longer have much experience of “township” democracy. Some no longer have much experience of associations, in the Tocquevillian sense, either. Twenty-five years ago, the political scientist Robert Putnam was already describing the decline of what he called “social capital” in the U.S.: the disappearance of clubs and committees, community and solidarity. As internet platforms allow Americans to experience the world through a lonely, personalized lens, this problem has morphed into something altogether different.

An internet that promotes democratic values instead of destroying them—that makes conversation better instead of worse—lies within our grasp.

With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.

Conversation in this new American public sphere is governed not by established customs and traditions in service of democracy but by rules set by a few for-profit companies in service of their needs and revenues. Instead of the procedural regulations that guide a real-life town meeting, conversation is ruled by algorithms that are designed to capture attention, harvest data, and sell advertising. The voices of the angriest, most emotional, most divisive—and often the most duplicitous—participants are amplified. Reasonable, rational, and nuanced voices are much harder to hear; radicalization spreads quickly. Americans feel powerless because they are.

In this new wilderness, democracy is becoming impossible. If one half of the country can’t hear the other, then Americans can no longer have shared institutions, apolitical courts, a professional civil service, or a bipartisan foreign policy. We can’t compromise. We can’t make collective decisions—we can’t even agree on what we’re deciding. No wonder millions of Americans refuse to accept the results of the most recent presidential election, despite the verdicts of state electoral committees, elected Republican officials, courts, and Congress. We no longer are the America Tocqueville admired, but have become the enfeebled democracy he feared, a place where each person,

withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.

The world’s autocracies have long understood the possibilities afforded by the tools tech companies have created, and have made use of them. China’s leaders have built an internet based on censorship, intimidation, entertainment, and surveillance; Iran bans Western websites; Russian security services have the legal right to obtain personal data from Kremlin-friendly social-media platforms, while Kremlin-friendly troll farms swamp the world with disinformation. Autocrats, both aspiring and actual, manipulate algorithms and use fake accounts to distort, harass, and spread “alternative facts.” The United States has no real answer to these challenges, and no wonder: We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.

And yet even as America’s national conversation reaches new levels of vitriol, we could be close to a turning point. Even as our polity deteriorates, an internet that promotes democratic values instead of destroying them—that makes conversation better instead of worse—lies within our grasp. Once upon a time, digital idealists were dreamers. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and an early internet utopian, predicted that a new dawn of democracy was about to break: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” he declared, a place where “the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville [sic], and Brandeis … must now be born anew.”

Those ideas sound quaint—as outdated as that other 1990s idea, the inevitability of liberal democracy. Yet they don’t have to. A new generation of internet activists, lawyers, designers, regulators, and philosophers is offering us that vision, but now grounded in modern technology, legal scholarship, and social science. They want to resurrect the habits and customs that Tocqueville admired, to bring them online, not only in America but all across the democratic world.

how social media made the world crazier

In the surreal interregnum that followed the 2020 election, the price of America’s refusal to reform its internet suddenly became very high. Then-President Donald Trump and his supporters pushed out an entirely false narrative of electoral fraud. Those claims were reinforced on extreme-right television channels, then repeated and amplified in cyberspace, creating an alternative reality inhabited by millions of people where Trump had indeed won. QAnon—a conspiracy theory that had burst out of the subterranean internet and flooded onto platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, convincing millions that political elites are a cabal of globalist pedophiles—spilled into the real world and helped inspire the mobs that stormed the Capitol. Twitter made the extraordinary decision to ban the U.S. president for encouraging violence; the amount of election disinformation in circulation immediately dropped.

The very fact that this kind of shift is possible points to a brutal truth: Facebook can make its site “nicer,” not just after an election but all the time. It can do more to encourage civil conversation, discourage disinformation, and reveal its own thinking about these things. But it doesn’t, because Facebook’s interests are not necessarily the same as the interests of the American public, or any democratic public. Although the company does have policies designed to fight disinformation, and although it has been willing to make adjustments to improve discourse, it is a for-profit organization that wants users to stay on Facebook as long as possible and keep coming back. Sometimes that goal may lead the company in a “nicer” direction, but not always, especially if users stay on the site to connect to fellow extremists, or to hear their prejudices reinforced. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who now leads the Center for Humane Technology, put it more bluntly. “News feeds on Facebook or Twitter operate on a business model of commodifying the attention of billions of people per day,” he wrote recently.* “They have led to narrower and crazier views of the world.”

Not that Facebook bears sole responsibility. Hyper-partisanship and conspiracy thinking predate social media, and message manipulation is as old as politics. But the current design of the internet makes it easier than ever to target vulnerable audiences with propaganda, and gives conspiracy thinking more prominence.

The buttons we press and the statements we make online are turned into data, which are then fed back into algorithms that can be used to profile and target us through advertising. Self-expression no longer necessarily leads to emancipation: The more we speak, click, and swipe online, the less powerful we are. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe this system. The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted. When we spoke recently with Věra Jourová, who—as the wonderfully titled vice president for values and transparency—is the European Union official directly responsible for thinking about online democracy, she told us that when she first understood that “people in the online sphere are losing their freedoms by providing their private data that are used in an opaque way, by becoming objects and not subjects, it was a strong reminder of my life before 1989 in Czechoslovakia.” As everything in our homes and lives goes online—not just our phones but our fridges and stationary bikes, our family photos and parking fines—every bit of our behavior gets turned into bytes and used by artificial-intelligence systems that we do not control but that can dictate what we see, read, and buy. If Tocqueville were to visit cyberspace, it would be as if he had arrived in pre-1776 America and found a people who were essentially powerless.

We know alternatives are possible, because we used to have them. Before private commercial platforms definitively took over, online public-interest projects briefly flourished. Some of the fruits of that moment live on. In 2002, the Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig helped create the Creative Commons license, allowing programmers to make their inventions available to anyone online; Wikipedia—which for all the mockery once directed its way has emerged as a widely used and mostly unbiased source of information—still operates under one. Wikipedia is a glimpse of the internet that might have been: a not-for-profit, collaborative space where disparate people follow a common set of norms as to what constitutes evidence and truth, helped along by public-spirited moderators. Online collaboration was also put to impressive use from 2007 to 2014, when a Brazilian lawyer named Ronaldo Lemos used a simple tool, a WordPress plug-in, to allow Brazilians from all classes and professions to help write an “internet bill of rights.” The document was eventually inscribed in Brazilian law, guaranteeing people freedom of speech and privacy from government intrusion online.

All of that began to change with the mass-market arrival of smartphones and a shift in the tactics of the major platforms. What the Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generative” model of the internet—an open system in which anyone could introduce unexpected innovations—gave way to a model that was controlled, top-down, and homogeneous. The experience of using the internet shifted from active to passive; after Facebook introduced its News Feed, for example, users no longer simply searched the site but were provided a constant stream of information, tailored to what the algorithm thought they wanted to read. As a few companies came to control the market, they used their monopoly power to undermine competitors, track users across the internet, collect massive troves of data, and dominate advertising.

It’s a grim story, and yet not entirely unfamiliar. Americans should recognize it from their own history. After all, only a few decades after Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the U.S. economy came to be controlled by just a few very large companies. By the end of the 19th century, the country seemed condemned to monopoly capitalism, financial crisis, deep inequality, a loss of trust in institutions, and political violence. After the 25th president, William McKinley, was murdered by an anarchist, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt—who denounced the “unfair money-getting” that created a “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power”—rewrote the rules. He broke up monopolies to make the economy more fair, returning power to small businesses and entrepreneurs. He enacted protections for working people. And he created the national parks, public spaces for all to enjoy.

In this sense, the internet has taken us back to the 1890s: Once again, we have a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful people whose obligations are to themselves, and perhaps to their shareholders, but not to the greater good. But Americans didn’t accept this reality in the 1890s, and we don’t need to accept it now. We are a democracy; we can change the rules again. This is not just a matter of taking down content or even of removing a president’s Twitter account—decisions that should be determined by a public process, not a lone company’s discretion. We must alter the design and structure of online spaces so that citizens, businesses, and political actors have better incentives, more choices, and more rights.

Theodore Roosevelt 2.0

Tom Malinowski knows that algorithms can cause real-world harm. Last year, the U.S. representative from New Jersey introduced a bill, the Protecting Americans From Dangerous Algorithms Act, that would, among other things, hold companies liable if their algorithms promoted content tied to acts of terrorism. The legislation was partly inspired by a 2016 lawsuit claiming that Facebook had provided “material support” to the terrorist group Hamas—its algorithm allegedly helped steer potential recruits Hamas’s way. The courts held that Facebook wasn’t liable for Hamas’s activity, a legal shield that Malinowski hopes to chip away at. Regulators, he told us, need to “get under the hood” of companies, and not become caught up in arguments about this or that website or blog. Others in Congress have demanded investigations of possibly illegal racial biases perpetuated by algorithms that, for example, show Black people and white people different advertisements. These ideas represent the beginning of an understanding of just how different internet regulation will need to be from anything we have tried previously.

This way of thinking has some distinct advantages. Right now companies fight intensely to retain their exemption from “intermediary liability,” guaranteed to them by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This frees them from legal responsibility for nearly all content posted on their platform. Yet striking down Section 230 could mean that the companies will either be sued out of existence or start taking down swaths of content to avoid being sued. Focusing on regulating algorithms, by contrast, would mean that companies wouldn’t be liable for each tiny piece of content, but would have legal responsibility for how their products distribute and amplify material. This is, after all, what these companies actually do: organize, target, and magnify other people’s content and data. Shouldn’t they take responsibility for that?Other countries are already focusing their regulatory efforts on engineering and design. France has discussed appointing an algorithm auditor, who would oversee the effects of platform engineering on the French public. The U.K. has proposed that companies assess the impact of algorithms on illegal content distribution and illegal activity on their platforms. Europe is heading in that direction too. The EU doesn’t want to create a 1984-style “Ministry of Truth,” Věra Jourová has said, but it cannot ignore the existence of “organized structures aimed at sowing mistrust, undermining democratic stability.” Action must be taken against “inauthentic use” and “automated exploitation” if they harm “civic discourse,” according to the EU’s Digital Services Act, which seeks to update the legal framework for policing platforms. The regulatory focus in Europe is on monitoring scale and distribution, not content moderation. One person writing a tweet would still qualify for free-speech protections—but a million bot accounts pretending to be real people and distorting debate in the public square would not. Facebook and other platforms already track and dismantle inauthentic disinformation and amplification campaigns—they all have invested heavily in staff and software to carry out this job—but there is hardly any way to audit their success. European governments are seeking ways that they and other civic-minded actors can at least monitor what the platforms are doing.

Still, some of the conceptual challenges here are large. What qualifies as “legal but harmful” content, as the U.K. government calls it? Who will draw the line between disinformation and civic discourse? Some think that agreeing on these definitions in America will be impossible. It’s a “chimera” to imagine otherwise, says Francis Fukuyama, one of America’s leading philosophers of democracy; “you cannot prevent people from believing really crazy stuff, as we’ve seen in the past month,” he told us in December. What Fukuyama and a team of thinkers at Stanford have proposed instead is a means of introducing competition into the system through “middleware,” software that allows people to choose an algorithm that, say, prioritizes content from news sites with high editorial standards. Conspiracy theories and hate campaigns would still exist on the internet, but they would not end up dominating the digital public square the way they do now.

A deeper problem, though, is the ingrained attitudes we bring to this debate. Most of us treat algorithms as if they constitute a recognizable evil that can be defined and controlled. What if they’re not? J. Nathan Matias, a scholar who has migrated from the humanities to the study of online behavior, argues that algorithms are totally unlike any other product devised by human beings. “If you buy a car from Pennsylvania and drive it to Connecticut,” he told us, “you know that it will work the same way in both places. And when someone else takes the driver’s seat, the engine is going to do what it always did.” Algorithms, by contrast, change as human behavior changes. They resemble not the cars or coal mines we have regulated in the past, but something more like the bacteria in our intestines, living organisms that interact with us. In one experiment, for example, Matias observed that when users on Reddit worked together to promote news from reliable sources, the Reddit algorithm itself began to prioritize higher-quality content. That observation could point us in a better direction for internet governance.

Matias has his own lab, the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, dedicated to making digital technologies that serve the public and not just private companies. He reckons labs like his could be part of internet governance in the future, supporting a new generation of citizen-scientists who could work with the companies to understand how their algorithms function, find ways of holding them accountable if they refuse to cooperate, and experiment with fresh approaches to governing them. This idea, he argues, is nothing new: As far back as the 19th century, independent scientists and consumer-rights advocates have tested such factors as the strength of light bulbs and the effects of pharmaceuticals, even inventing elaborate machines to test the durability of socks. In response, companies have improved their products accordingly. Maybe it’s time to let independent researchers test the impact of algorithms, share the results, and—with the public’s participation—decide which ones are most useful.

This project should engage anyone who cares about the health of our democracy. Matias sees the behavior of the tech platforms as essentially authoritarian; in some ways, they sound far more like the Chinese state than we usually assume. Both American tech platforms and Chinese bureaucrats conduct social-engineering experiments in the dark; both have aims that differ from those of the public. Inspired by the philosopher Karl Popper, the doyen of “open society” and a critic of untransparent social engineering, Matias thinks we have to not just take control of our own data, but also help oversee the design of algorithmic experiments, with “individual participation and consent at all decision levels possible.” For example, victims of prejudice should be able to help create experiments that explore how algorithms can reduce racism. Rohingya in Myanmar should be able to insist on social-media design that doesn’t facilitate their oppression. Russians, and for that matter non-Russians, should be able to limit the amount of government propaganda they see.

This kind of dynamic regulation would solve one of the most embarrassing problems for would-be regulators: At the moment, they lag years behind the science. The EU’s first attempt to regulate Google Shopping using antitrust law proved a giant waste of time; by the time regulators handed down their judgment, the technology in question had become irrelevant. Other attempts are too focused on simply breaking up the platforms, as if that alone will solve the problem. Dozens of U.S. states and the Justice Department are already suing Google for cornering the markets in search and digital advertising, which is not surprising, because the breakup of the oil and railroad companies is the Progressive regulation everyone learned about in school. Yet the parallels to the early 20th century are not exact. Historically, antitrust regulation sought to break up price-setting cartels and to lower costs for consumers. But in this case the products are free—consumers don’t pay to use Google or Facebook. And while breaking up the big companies could help diversify the online economy, it won’t automatically be good for democracy. Why would 20 data-sucking disinformation machines be better than one? “If Facebook is forced to divest WhatsApp and Instagram,” Fukuyama told us, “that’s not going to solve the core issue—the ability of these large platforms to either amplify or suppress certain kinds of political information in a way that potentially could sway a democratic election.”Perhaps the most apt historical model for algorithmic regulation is not trust-busting, but environmental protection. To improve the ecology around a river, it isn’t enough to simply regulate companies’ pollution. Nor will it help to just break up the polluting companies. You need to think about how the river is used by citizens—what sort of residential buildings are constructed along the banks, what is transported up and down the river—and the fish that swim in the water. Fishermen, yachtsmen, ecologists, property developers, and area residents all need a say. Apply that metaphor to the online world: Politicians, citizen-scientists, activists, and ordinary people will all have to work together to co-govern a technology whose impact is dependent on everyone’s behavior, and that will be as integral to our lives and our economies as rivers once were to the emergence of early civilizations.

Reconstructing the Public Sphere

The internet is not the first promising technology to have quickly turned dystopian. In the early 20th century, radio was greeted with as much enthusiasm as the internet was in the early 21st. Radio will “fuse together all mankind” wrote Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet, in the 1920s. Radio would connect people, end war, promote peace!

Almost immediately, a generation of authoritarians learned how to use radio for hate propaganda and social control. In the Soviet Union, radio speakers in apartments and on street corners blared Communist agitprop. The Nazis introduced the Volksempfänger, a cheap wireless radio, to broadcast Hitler’s speeches; in the 1930s, Germany had more radios per capita than anywhere else in the world.** In America, the new information sphere was taken over not by the state but by private media companies chasing ratings—and one of the best ways to get ratings was to promote hatred. Every week, more than 30 million would tune in to the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit priest who eventually turned against American democracy itselfIn Britain, John Reith, the visionary son of a Scottish clergyman, began to look for an alternative: radio that was controlled neither by the state, as it was in dictatorships, nor by polarizing, profit-seeking companies. Reith’s idea was publicradio, funded by taxpayers but independent of the government. It would not only “inform, educate and entertain”; it would facilitate democracy by bringing society together: “The voice of the leaders of thought or action coming to the fireside; the news of the world at the ear of the rustic … the facts of great issues, hitherto distorted by partisan interpretation, now put directly and clearly before them; a return of the City-State of old.” This vision of a radio broadcaster that could create a cohesive yet pluralistic national conversation eventually became the BBC, where Reith was the first director-general.
Reith’s legacy lives on in a new generation of thinkers, among them Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a tech wizard who wrote the code that underlies the pop-up ad, one of the biggest milestones in the growth of online advertising. Partly as penance, Zuckerman now dedicates his time to thinking about nonprofit online spaces that could compete with the online commercial world he helped create. Social media, he told us, is broken: “I helped break it. Now I am interested in building new systems from scratch. And part of what we should be building are networks that have explicit social promise.”Invoking the example of Reith’s BBC, Zuckerman imagines social-media sites designed deliberately in the public interest that could promote civil discourse, not just absorb your attention and data, and that would help reduce the angry tone of American debate. As proof that polarization really can be reduced, Zuckerman, borrowing from a colleague, cited the example of Quebec, the Canadian province that had been deeply polarized between French speakers who wanted independence and English speakers who wanted to remain part of Canada. Nowadays, Quebec is pleasingly dull. “It took an enormous amount of work to get politics to be that boring,” Zuckerman said. “It involved putting real issues on the table that forced people to work together and compromise.” He reckons that if at least a part of the internet becomes a place where partisan groups argue about specific problems, not a place where people show off and parade their identities, it too can become usefully boring. Instead of making people angry, participation in online forums can give them the same civic thrill that town halls or social clubs once did. “Elks Club meetings were what gave us experience in democracy,” he said. “We learned how to run an organization. We learned how to handle disagreement. We learned how to be civilized people who don’t storm out of an argument.”Versions of this idea already exist. A Vermont-based site, Front Porch Forum, is used by roughly a quarter of the state’s residents for all sorts of community activity, from natural-disaster response to job-hunting, as well as civic discussion. Instead of encouraging users to interact as much and as fast as possible, Front Porch slows the conversation down: Your posts come online 24 hours after you’ve written them. Sometimes, people reach out to the moderators to retract something said in anger. Everyone on the forum is real, and they have to sign up using real Vermont addresses. When you go on the site, you interact with your actual neighbors, not online avatars.

Of course, moderated public-service social media can’t be created for free. It needs funding, just like the BBC. Zuckerman suggests raising the money through a tax on online advertising that collects lots of user data—perhaps a 2 percent levy to start: “That money is going to go into a fund that is analogous to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And it’s going to be available for people who want to try different ideas of what online communities, online spaces could look like.” The idea is to then let a thousand flowers bloom—let people apply to use the money to create different types of communities—and see which ones flourish.

Larger-scale versions of community forums already exist too, most notably in Taiwan, where they have been pioneered by Audrey Tang, a child prodigy who became a high-school dropout who became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who became a political activist who became the digital minister of Taiwan, the role she occupies today. Tang prefers to say that she works with the government, not for the government; her co-workers are “given a space to form a rough consensus.” She publishes transcripts of all of her conversations with almost everybody, including us, because “the state needs to be transparent to its citizens.”Among many other experimental projects, Tang has sponsored the use of software called Polis, invented in Seattle. This is a platform that lets people make tweet-like, 140-character statements, and lets others vote on them. There is no “reply” function, and thus no trolling or personal attacks. As statements are made, the system identifies those that generate the most agreement among different groups. Instead of favoring outrageous or shocking views, the Polis algorithm highlights consensus.Polis is often used to produce recommendations for government action. For example, when the Taiwanese government designed a Polis debate around the subject of Uber, participants included people from the company itself, as well as from the Taiwanese taxi associations, which were angered by some of Uber’s behavior—and yet a consensus was reached. Uber agreed to train its drivers and pay transport taxes; Taiwan Taxi, one of the country’s largest fleets, promised to offer better services. It’s possible to imagine a world in which local governments hold such online consultations regularly, thereby increasing participation in politics and giving people some influence over their society and environment.

Of course, this system works only if real people—not bots—join these debates. Anonymity does have its place online, just as in real life: It allows dissidents in repressive countries a way of speaking. Anonymity also has a long and distinguished history in American politics, going back to The Federalist Papers, which were signed with a collective pseudonym, “Publius.” But Publius never conceived of a world in which anonymous accounts promoting the hashtag #stopthesteal could convince millions of Americans that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

One possible solution to the anonymity problem comes from Ronaldo Lemos, the Brazilian lawyer who crowdsourced his country’s internet bill of rights. Lemos advocates for a system known as “self-sovereign identity,” which would accrue through the symbols of trust built up through different activities—your diploma, your driver’s license, your work record—to create a connective tissue of trusted sources that proves you are real. A self-sovereign identity would still allow you to use pseudonyms online, but it would assure everyone else that you are an actual human, making it possible for platforms to screen out bots. The relative prominence of various ideas in our public conversation would more accurately reflect what real people really think, and not what an army of bots and trolls is promulgating. Solving the online-identity problem is also, of course, one of the keys to fighting organized disinformation campaigns.
But once real humans have provable identities, once governments or online activists have created the groups and set the rules, how many people will really want to participate in worthy online civic discussions? Even in Taiwan, where Tang encourages what she calls the “social sector” to get involved in governing, it’s not easy. Ttcat, a Taiwanese “hacktivist” whose work involves countering disinformation campaigns, and who has collaborated extensively with Tang, told us he worries that the number of people using Polis remains too low. Most people still have their political discussions on Facebook. Tiago C. Peixoto, a Mozambique-based political scientist who promotes online participatory democracy around the world, thinks that the issues will have to be higher-stakes if people are to join the forums. Peixoto has developed projects that could, for example, allow citizens to help put together a city budget. But those would require politicians to cede real power, which is not something many politicians like to do. Even beyond that, some skepticism about the attraction of the forums is surely warranted: Aren’t we all addicted to the rage and culture wars available on social media? Don’t we use social media to perform, or to virtue signal, or to express identity—and don’t we like it that way?
Maybe. Or maybe we think that way only because we lack the imagination to think differently. That’s the conclusion drawn by Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Avaaz and Upworthy, two websites designed to foster online political engagement, and Talia Stroud, the director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Pariser and Stroud have spent the past few years running polls and focus groups across 20 countries, trying to find out what people actually want from their internet, and how that matches up to what they have. Among other things, they found that Twitter super-users—people who use Twitter more than other social media—rate the platform highly for making them “feel connected,” but give it low marks for “encouraging the humanization of others,” ensuring people’s safety, and producing reliable information. YouTube super-users care about “inviting everyone to participate,” and they like that the platform does that, but they don’t think it does a good job of providing reliable information. Facebook super-users have the same fear, and aren’t convinced that the platform keeps their personal information secure, although Facebook contends that it has numerous tools in place to protect its users’ information, and says that it does not share this information without users’ permission. Pariser and Stroud’s research suggests that the current menu of options does not completely satisfy us. People are eager for alternatives—and they want to help invent them.
In early January, while America was convulsed by a lurid crisis perpetrated by people who had absorbed paranoid conspiracy theories online, Pariser and Stroud hosted a virtual festival they described as a “dispatch from the future of digital public space.” Designers who build ad-free social media that don’t extract your data chatted with engineers who design apps that filter out harassment on Twitter. Even as men in paramilitary costumes posted pictures of themselves smashing up the Capitol, Pariser and Stroud were hosting discussions about how to build algorithms that favor online connection, empathy, and understanding, and how to design online communities that favor evidence, calm, and respect over disinformation, outrage, and vitriol. One of the festival speakers was Deb Roy, a former chief media scientist at Twitter, who is now a professor at MIT. In January, he launched a new center aimed at creating technology that fosters “constructive communication”—such as algorithms designed to overcome divides.
None of these initiatives will ever be “the new Facebook”—but that’s exactly the point. They are intended to solve specific problems, not to create another monolithic mega-platform. This is the heart of Pariser and Stroud’s vision, the one shared by Zuckerman and Tang. Just as John Reith once looked at radio as a way to re-create the “City-State of old,” Pariser and Stroud argue that we should think of cyberspace as an urban environment. Nobody wants to live in a city where everything is owned by a few giant corporations, consisting of nothing but malls and billboards—yet that is essentially what the internet has become. To flourish, democratic cities need parks and libraries, department stores and street markets, schools and police stations, sidewalks and art galleries. As the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs wrote, the best urban design helps people interact with one another, and the best architecture facilitates the best conversation. The same is true of the internet.

If we were to visit this online democratic city of the future, what might it be like? It would not be anarchy, or a wilderness. Rather, we might find, as Tocqueville wrote in describing the America of the 1830s, not only “commercial and industrial associations in which all take part,” but also “a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.” We might discover thousands of participatory “township institutions” of the sort pioneered by Tang, inhabited by real people using the secure identities proposed by Lemos—all of them sharing ideas and opinions free of digital manipulation or distortion, thanks to the citizen-scientists Matias has taught to work with the algorithms. In this city, government would cede power to citizens who use digital tools to get involved in budgets and building projects, schools and the environment.

Let your imagination loose: What would it really mean to have human rights online? Instead of giving private companies the ultimate decision about whose accounts—whether yours or the president’s—should be deleted, it might mean online citizens could have recourse to a court that would examine whether they violated their terms of service. It would also mean being in charge of your own data. You could give medics all the information they need to help fight diseases, for example, but would also be guaranteed that these data couldn’t be repurposed. If you were to see advertising, political or otherwise, you would have the right to know not only who was behind it, but how your data were used to target you specifically.

There are other possible benefits too. Rebuilding a civically healthier internet would give us common cause with our old alliances, and help build new ones. Our relationships with Europe and with the democracies of Asia, which so often feel obsolete, would have a new center and focus: Together we could create this technology, and together we could offer it to the world as an empowering alternative to China’s closed internet, and to Russia’s distorted disinformation machine. We would have something to offer beleaguered democrats, from Moscow to Minsk to Hong Kong: the hope of a more democratic public space.

Happily, this future democratic city is not some far-off utopia. Its features derive not from an abstract grand theory, but from harsh experience. We often forget that the U.S. Constitution was the product of a decade of failure. By 1789, its authors knew exactly how bad confederation had been, and they understood what needed to be fixed. Our new internet would also embrace all of the lessons we have so bitterly learned, not only in the past 20 years but in the almost two centuries since Tocqueville wrote his famous book. We now know that cyberspace did not, in the end, escape the legacy of John Perry Barlow’s “weary giants of flesh and steel.” It just recapitulated the pathologies of the past: financial bubbles, exploitative commercialization, vicious polarization, attacks from dictatorships, crime.

But these are problems democracies have solved before. The solutions are in our history, in our DNA, in our own memories of how we have fixed broken systems in other eras. The internet was the future once, and it can be again, if we remember Reith and Roosevelt, Popper and Jacobs—if we apply the best of the past to the present.

Resources
In zoom coffee hour a couple of weeks ago we discussed “Straight Talk” and the need for accurate and trusted sources of news and information in this increasingly complex and contradictory world the group started sharing where they got their news. We thought it might be helpful to share our sources and recommendations here on the support page. So here’s a start. These are just a sample of sources (and so much could be said about each one), but the links will take you where you need to go to find out more.Please keep sending in your contributions and we’ll continue doing this for a couple of weeks. 

Resources from Dave’s List:
New York Times    nytimes.com
Common Dreams   common dreams.com  Daily headlines and articles from various sources. Independent, non-profit, advertising free and 100% reader supported.    
Informed Comment  juancole.com       Founded by Juan Cole, Professor of History at University of Michigan. Specializes in Middle East history and energy technology research.
Heather Cox Richardson   heathercoxrichardson.substack.com  American historian and professor of history at Boston College
Chris Hedges  scheerpost.com    Journalist, Harvard Divinity School, host of “On Contact” (RT America) and columnist.  
Bill McKibben    billmckibben.com    Environmental author and founder of 350.org
Naomi Klein    naomiklein.org     Environmental author and activist. Delivered the Ware Lecture at UU General Assembly 2020
Dr. Cornel West  cornelwest.com  Minister, activist and scholar; Delivered the Ware Lecture at UU General Assembly 2015
Bill Moyers  billmoyers.com    American journalist and political commentator
Noam Chomsky   chomsky.info      American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.
Neal DeGrass Tyson  haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/    American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator.    

Resources from Audrey’s List:

Link to Yes! magazine which I mentioned at coffee hour:https://www.yesmagazine.org
I look to this organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, for research on social/economic issues related to the U.S. I get their weekly newsletter, “Inequality This Week.” They are clearly ‘left, progressive’ ideology and the data is often depressing, but they have been around for 20+ years and I trust their research and numbers:https://inequality.org
I love this woman’s gem of a blog for the unusual and curiosities that are mostly delightful—mostly European based but sometimes U.S.—and off the beaten path of world maps, history books, and the internet. It’s a fun place to lose time in times past and present.https://www.messynessychic.com
And I like to read, usually, what these NY Times reporters—Max Fisher and Amanda Taub—have to say about current issues in their column, “The Interpreter.” Their analysis looks at what is happening and links it to past similar incidents and outcomes, and also to bigger picture theories about the dynamics of what is going on. I especially like at the bottom of each entry their list of what they are reading now.https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-interpreter

Joys & Concerns

When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.

Don’t forget to spring ahead!!  Of course our smart devices do this for us these days but I still like to say it. I remember we would usually have one or two people show up for the Sunday service at 10:50AM (instead of the regular 10AM) and we’d say “At least you’re ten minutes early for coffee hour…”

HAPPY SAINT PATRICK’S DAY!!

We would like to announce that UUHoulton has a new treasurer!  Donna Rich has graciously volunteered to serve a one year term. A BIG THANK YOU to out-going treasurers Mary Blocher and Barbara Erickson and “Welcome on board!” to Donna. 

This is the one year anniversary of when the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 changed the world as we’ve known it.  A year ago we canceled our March 14 Houlton Coffeehouse and March 15 Sunday Service and it’s been twelve months of extended loss, hardship and unsolicited change. So we mark this date and we continue on with hope, tenaciousness and creativity in the days ahead. 

Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.

The joy or the sorrow of one is shared by all. May our hearts be as one on this day.  Let us carry each thought or concern expressed in our heart and may the light of our love and compassion transform suffering into non suffering and ease the difficulties of life.  We radiate love and the light that we are.  Blessed are we all.

The Named Prayer List is sent out in personal emails to church members.

We also pray for the state of MaineLocal emergency personnel and hospital staff

For our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisis

For those working for social justice and societal change 

Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation

The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.

May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.

May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.

May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.

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