A Course Correction for the World Wide Web

July 15, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pink shock and emerald green in the back yard

Emily was here for breakfast on Thursday and I had the morning’s news on public radio—the same stories staring at me from the front page of my newspaper—and she said with millennial weariness: Why are you listening to that?

It was a good question, and one I often answer for myself by turning it off because it’s mostly journalist shock, outrage or shame about whatever the newsmakers think is going on. Who needs their sense of urgency in those first moments when you’re still trying to figure out whether you’re fully conscious or even alive?

On the other hand, short ventures into my yard quickly provide more hopeful messages. It’s the early summer flush, fueled by plenty of rain, and everything is still emerald green. Summer is telling different stories than the radio, sees different horizons, including the one some kind of watermelon sprawl is trying to reach with its tentacles. These co-venturers aren’t fretting about the future, they’re claiming it by inches and feet, or celebrating it with explosions in the air.

While shock, outrage or shame can push you to do good work, it’s hope that sustains it by giving it directions, goals, and better horizons. Everything around the creeping reality of surveillance capitalism tiggers all those negative feelings and keeps me snapping at its purveyors with my canines because—well—because it deserves to be pierced and wounded.

But then what?

That’s where others who have shared these angry and disgusted reactions start showing me more hopeful responses in their own good work–the productive places where gut reaction sometimes enable you to go–and that my radio provides little if any of (ok, so now what?) on most mornings.

In the early days of the internet, the geeks and tinkerers in their basements and garages had utopian dreams for this new way of communicating with one another and sharing information. In the thirty-odd-years that have followed, many of those creative possibilities have been squandered. What we’ve gotten instead are dominant platforms that are fueled by their sale of our personal data. They have colonized and monetized the internet not to share its wealth but to hoard whatever they can take for themselves.

One would be right in thinking that many of the internet’s inventors are horrified by these developments, that some of them have expressed their shock, outrage and shame, and that a few have ridden these emotions into a drive to find better ways to utilize this world-changing technology. Perhaps first among them is Tim Berners-Lee.

Like some of my backyard’s denizens, he’s never lost sight of the horizons that he saw when he first poked his head above the ground. He also feels responsible for helping to set right what others have gotten so woefully wrong after he made his first breathtaking gift to us thirty years ago.

1. The Inventor of the Internet

At one point the joke was that Al Gore had invented the internet, but, in fact, it was Tim Berners-Lee. It’s been three decades since he gathered the critical components, linked them together, and called his creation “the world wide web.” Today however, he’s profoundly disconcerted by several of the directions that his creation has taken and he aims to do something about it.

In 1989, Berners-Lee didn’t sell his original web architecture and the protocols he assembled or attempt to get rich from them. He didn’t think anyone should own the internet, so no patents were ever gotten or royalties sought. The operating standards, developed by a consortium of companies he convened, were also made available to everyone, without cost, so the world wide web could be rapidly adopted. In 2014, the British Council asked prominent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders to chose the cultural moments that had shaped the world most profoundly in the previous 80 years, and they ranked the invention of the World Wide Web number one. This is how they described Berners-Lee’s invention:

The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.

Because he gave it away with every good intention, perhaps Berners-Lee has more reasons than anyone to be concerned about the poor use that others have made of it. Instead of remaining the de-centralized communication and information sharing platform he envisioned, the internet still isn’t available everywhere, has frequently been weaponized, and is increasingly controlled by a few dominant platforms for their own private gain. But he’s also convinced that these ill winds can be reversed.

He reads and shares an open letter every year on the anniversary of the internet’s creation. His March 2018 and March 2019 letters lay out his primary concerns today.

Last year, Berners-Lee renewed his commitment “to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space – for everyone. That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people [instead of against them].” After making proposals that aim to expand internet access for the poor (and for poor women and girls in particular), he discusses various ways that the web has failed to work “for us.”

What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared….the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponise the web at scale. In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data.

Additionally troubling is the fact that we’ve left these same companies to police themselves, something they can never do effectively given their incentives to maximize profits instead of social goods. “A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions,” he says.

Berners-Lee sees a similar misalignment of incentives between the tech giants and the users they have herded into their platforms.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people – and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. …Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.

As the late internet activist, John Perry Barlow, once said: “A good way to invent the future is to predict it.” It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve… but I want us to imagine that future and build it.

In March, 2018, most of us didn’t know what Berners-Lee had in mind when he talked about building.

This year’s letter mostly elaborated on last year’s themes. In addition to governments “translating laws and regulations for the digital age,” he calls on the tech companies to be a constructive part of the societal conversation (while never mentioning the positive role that their teams of Washington lobbyists might play). In other words, it’s more of a plea or attempt to shame them into action since their profits instead of their public interest remain their primary motivators. It is also unclear what he expects from government leaders and regulators as politics becomes more polarized, but he is plainly calling on the web’s theorizers, inventors and commentators and on its billions of users to pitch in and help.

Berners-Lee proposes a new Contract for the Web, a global collaboration that was launched in Lisbon last November. His Web Summit brought together those:

who agree we need to establish clear norms, laws and standards that underpin the web. Those who support it endorse its starting principles and together we are working out the specific commitments in each area. No one group should do this alone, and all input will be appreciated. Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.

It’s like the founding spiritual leader convening the increasingly divergent members of his flock before setting out on the next leg of the journey.

The web is for everyone, and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

In the meantime however, while a new Contract for the Web is clearly necessary, it is not where Berners-Lee is pinning all of his hopes.

The seed came from somewhere and now it’s (maybe) making watermelons

2. An App for an App

The way that the internet was created, any webpage should be accessible from any device that has a web browser, including a smart phone, a personal computer or even an internet-enabled refrigerator. That kind of free access is blocked, however, when the content or the services are locked inside an app and the app distributor (such as Google or Facebook) controls where and how users interact with “what’s inside.” As noted recently in the Guardian: “the rise of the app economy fundamentally bypasses the web, and all the principles associated with it, of openness, interoperability and ease of access.”

On the other hand, perhaps the web’s greatest strength has been the ability of almost anyone to build almost anything on top of it. Since Berners-Lee built the web’s foundation and its first couple of floors, he’s well-positioned to build an alternative that provides the openness, interoperability and ease of access that has been lost while also serving the public’s interest in principles like personal data privacy. At the same time that he has been sponsoring a global quest for new standards to govern the internet, Berner-Lee has also been building an alternative infrastructure on top of the internet’s common foundation.

One irony is that he’s building it with a new kind of app.

Last September, Berners-Lee announced a new, open-source web-based infrastructure called Solid that he has been working on quietly with colleagues at MIT for several years. “Open-source” means that once the rudimentary structures are made public, anyone can contribute to that infrastructure’s web-based applications. Making the original internet free and widely available lead to its rapid adoption and Berners-Lee is plainly hoping that “open source” will have the same impact on Solid. Shortly after his announcement, an article in Tech Crunch reported that open-source developers were already pouring into the Solid platform “in droves.” As Fast Company reported at the time: Berner-Lee’s objective for Solid, and the company behind it called Inrupt, was “to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it.” Like a second great awakening.

First and foremost, the Solid web infrastructure is intended to give people back control of their personal data on-line. Every data point that’s created in or added to a Solid software application exists in a Solid “pod,” which is an acronym for “personal on-line data store” that can be kept on Solid’s server or anywhere else that a user chooses. Berners-Lee previewed one of the first Solid apps for the Fast Company reporter after his new platform was announced:

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsAp.

The difference is that his (or your) personal information is secured within a Solid pod from others who might seek to make use of it in some way.

Inrupt is the start-up company that Berners-Lee and John Bruce launched to drive development of Solid, secure the necessary funding and transform Solid from a radical idea into a viable platform for businesses and individuals. According to Tech Crunch, Inrupt is already gearing up to work on a new digital assistant called Charlie that it describes as “a decentralized version of Alexa.”

What will success look like for Inrupt and Solid? A Wired magazine story last February described it this way:

Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting for the current generation of tech giants to switch to an open and decentralised model; Amazon and Facebook are unlikely to ever give up their user data caches. But they hope their alternative model will be adopted by an increasingly privacy-aware population of web users and the organisations that wish to cater to them. ‘In the web as we envision it, entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will emerge and thrive, including hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers,’ Bruce says. ‘Everyday web users will find incredible value in new kinds of apps that are impossible on today’s web.

In other words, if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web that we want.

+ + +

At this stage in his life (Berners-Lee is 64) and given his world-bending accomplishments, he could have retired to a beach or mountaintop somewhere to rest on his laurels, but he hasn’t. Instead, because he can, he heeds the call of his discomfort and is diving back in to champion his original vision. It’s the capability and commitment, hope and action that are the arc of all good work.

Telling him that Solid is a pipe-dream would be like telling my backyard encouragers to stop shouting, trumpeting and fruiting.

This post was adapted from my July 14, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Citizens Will Decide What’s Important in Smart Cities

July 8, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The norms that dictate the acceptable use of artificial intelligence in technology are in flux. That’s partly because the AI-enabled, personal data gathering by companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon has caused a spirited debate about the right of privacy that individuals have over their personal information. With your “behavioral” data, the tech giants can target you with specific products, influence your political views, manipulate you into spending more time on their platforms, and weaken the control that you have over your own decision-making.

In most of the debate about the harms of these platforms thus far, our privacy rights have been poorly understood. In fact, our anything-but-clear commitments to the integrity of our personal information have enabled these tech giants to overwhelm our initial, instinctive caution as they seduced us into believing that “free” searches, social networks or next day deliveries might be worth giving them our personal data in return. Moreover, what alternatives did we have to the exchange they were offering?

Where were the privacy-protecting search engines, social networks and on-line shopping hubs?
Moreover, once we got hooked on to these data-sucking platforms, wasn’t it already too late to “put the ketchup back in the bottle” where our private information was concerned? Don’t these companies (and the data brokers that enrich them) already have everything that they need to know about us?

Overwhelmed by the draw of  “free” services from these tech giants, we never bothered to define the scope of the privacy rights that we relinquished when we accepted their “terms of service.”  Now, several years into this brave new world of surveillance and manipulation, many feel that it’s already too late to do anything, and even if it weren’t, we are hardly willing to relinquish the advantages of these platforms when they are unavailable elsewhere.

So is there really “no way out”?

A rising crescendo of voices is gradually finding a way, and they are coming at it from several different directions.

In places like Toronto (London, Helsinki, Chicago and Barcelona) policy makers and citizens alike are defining the norms around personal data privacy at the same time that they’re grappling with the potential fallout of similar data-tracking, analyzing and decision-making technologies in smart-city initiatives.

Our first stop today is to eavesdrop on how these cities are grappling with both the advantages and harms of smart-city technologies, and how we’re all learning—from the host of scenarios they’re considering—why it makes sense to shield our personal data from those who seek to profit from it. The rising debate around smart-city initiatives is giving us new perspectives on how surveillance-based technologies are likely to impact our daily lives and work. As the risks to our privacy are played out in new, easy-to-imagine contexts, more of us will become more willing to protect our personal information from those who could turn it against us in the future.

How and why norms change (and even explode) during civic conversations like this is a topic that Cass Sunstein explores in his new book How Change Happens. Sunstein considers the personal impacts when norms involving issues like data privacy are in flux, and the role that understanding other people’s priorities always seems to play. Some of his conclusions are also discussed below. As “dataveillance” is increasingly challenged and we contextualize our privacy interests even further, the smart-city debate is likely to usher in a more durable norm regarding data privacy while, at the same time, allowing us to realize the benefits of AI-driven technologies that can improve urban efficiency, convenience and quality of life.

With the growing certainty that our personal privacy rights are worth protecting, it is perhaps no coincidence that there are new companies on the horizon that promise to provide access to the on-line services we’ve come to expect without our having to pay an unacceptable price for them.  Next week, I’ll be sharing perhaps the most promising of these new business models with you as we begin to imagine a future that safeguards instead of exploits our personal information.

1. Smart-City Debates Are Telling Us Why Our Personal Data Needs Protecting

Over the past 6 months, I’ve talked repeatedly about smart-city technologies and one of you reached out to me this week wondering: “What (exactly) are these new “technologies”?” (Thanks for your question, George!).

As a general matter, smart-city technologies gather and analyze information about how a city functions, while improving urban decision-making around that new information. Throughout, these data-gathering, analyzing, and decision-making processes rely on artificial intelligence. In his recent article “What Would It Take to Help Cities Innovate Responsibly With AI?” Eddie Copeland begins by describing the many useful things that AI enables us to do in this context:

AI can codify [a] best practice and roll it out at scale, remove human bias, enable evidence-based decision making in the field, spot patterns that humans can’t see, optimise systems too complex for humans to model, quickly digest and interpret vast quantities of data and automate demanding cognitive activities.

In other words, in a broad range of urban contexts, a smart-city system with AI capabilities can make progressively better decisions about nearly every aspect of a city’s operations by gaining an increasingly refined understanding of how its citizens use the city and are, in turn, served by its managers.

Of course, the potential benefits of greater or more equitable access to city services as well as their optimized delivery are enormous. Despite some of the current hew and cry, a smart-cities future does not have to resemble Big Brother. Instead, it could liberate time and money that’s currently being wasted, permitting their reinvestment into areas that produce a wider variety of benefits to citizens at every level of government.

Over the past weeks and months, I’ve been extolling the optimism that drove Toronto to launch its smart-cities initiative called Quayside and how its debate has entered a stormy patch more recently. Amidst the finger pointing among Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs, government leaders and civil rights advocates, Sidewalk (which is providing the AI-driven tech interface) has consistently stated that no citizen-specific data it collects will be sold, but the devil (as they say) remains in the as-yet to be disclosed details. This is from a statement the company issued in April:

Sidewalk Labs is strongly committed to the protection and privacy of urban data. In fact, we’ve been clear in our belief that decisions about the collection and use of urban data should be up to an independent data trust, which we are proposing for the Quayside project. This organization would be run by an independent third party in partnership with the government and ensure urban data is only used in ways that benefit the community, protect privacy, and spur innovation and investment. This independent body would have full oversight over Quayside. Sidewalk Labs fully supports a robust and healthy discussion regarding privacy, data ownership, and governance. But this debate must be rooted in fact, not fiction and fear-mongering.

As a result of experiences like Toronto’s (and many others, where a new technology is introduced to unsuspecting users), I argued in last week’s post for longer “public ventilation periods” to understand the risks as well as rewards before potentially transformative products are launched and actually used by the public.

In the meantime, other cities have also been engaging their citizens in just this kind of information-sharing and debate. Last week, a piece in the New York Times elaborated on citizen-oriented initiatives in Chicago and Barcelona after noting that:

[t]he way to create cities that everyone can traverse without fear of surveillance and exploitation is to democratize the development and control of smart city technology.

While Chicago was developing a project to install hundreds of sensors throughout the city to track air quality, traffic and temperature, it also held public meetings and released policy drafts to promote a City-wide discussion on how to protect personal privacy. According to the Times, this exchange shaped policies that reduced, among other things, the amount of footage that monitoring cameras retained. For its part, Barcelona has modified its municipal procurement contracts with smart cities technology vendors to announce its intentions up front about the public’s ownership and control of personal data.

Earlier this year, London and Helsinki announced a collaboration that would enable them to share “best practices and expertise” as they develop their own smart-city systems. A statement by one driver of this collaboration, Smart London, provides the rationale for a robust public exchange:

The successful application of AI in cities relies on the confidence of the citizens it serves.

Decisions made by city governments will often be weightier than those in the consumer sphere, and the consequences of those decisions will often have a deep impact on citizens’ lives.

Fundamentally, cities operate under a democratic mandate, so the use of technology in public services should operate under the same principles of accountability, transparency and citizens’ rights and safety — just as in other work we do.

To create “an ethical framework for public servants and [a] line-of-sight for the city leaders,” Smart London proposed that citizens, subject matter experts, and civic leaders should all ask and vigorously debate the answers to the following 10 questions:

Objective– why is the AI needed and what outcomes is it intended to enable?
Use– in what processes and circumstances is the AI appropriate to be used?
Impacts– what impacts, good and bad, could the use of AI have on people?
Assumptions– what assumptions is the AI based on, and what are their iterations and potential biases?
Data– what data is/was the AI trained on and what are their iterations and potential biases?
Inputs– what new data does the AI use when making decisions?
Mitigation– what actions have been taken to regulate the negative impacts that could result from the AI’s limitations and potential biases?
Ethics– what assessment has been made of the ethics of using this AI? In other words, does the AI serve important, citizen-driven needs as we currently understand those priorities?
Oversight– what human judgment is needed before acting on the AI’s output and who is responsible for ensuring its proper use?
Evaluation– how and by what criteria will the effectiveness of the AI in this smart-city system be assessed and by whom?

As stakeholders debate these questions and answers, smart-city technologies with broad-based support will be implemented while citizens gain a greater appreciation of the privacy boundaries they are protecting.

Eddie Copeland, who described the advantages of smart-city technology above, also urges that steps beyond a city-wide Q&A be undertaken to increase the awareness of what’s at stake and enlist the public’s engagement in the monitoring of these systems. He argues that democratic methods or processes need to be established to determine whether AI-related approaches are likely to solve a specific problem a city faces; that the right people need to be assembled and involved in the decision-making regarding all smart-city systems; and that this group needs to develop and apply new skills, attitudes and mind-sets to ensure that these technologies maintain their citizen-oriented focus.

As I argued last week, the initial ventilation process takes a long, hard time. Moreover, it is difficult (and maybe impossible) to conduct if negotiations with the technology vendor are on-going or that vendor is “on the clock.”

Democracy should have the space and time to be a proactive instead of reactive whenever transformational tech-driven opportunities are presented to the public.

2. A Community’s Conversation Helps Norms to Evolve, One Citizen at a Time

I started this post with the observation that many (if not most) of us initially felt that it was acceptable to trade access to our personal data if the companies that wanted it were providing platforms that offered new kinds of enjoyment or convenience. Many still think it’s an acceptable trade. But over the past several years, as privacy advocates have become more vocal, leading jurisdictions have begun to enact data-privacy laws, and Facebook has been criticized for enabling Russian interference in the 2016 election and the genocide in Myanmar, how we view this trade-off has begun to change.

In a chapter of his new book How Change Happens, legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues that these kinds of widely-seen developments:

can have a crucial and even transformative signaling effect, offering people information about what others think. If people hear the signal, norms may shift, because people are influenced by what they think other people think.

Sunstein describes what happens next as an “unleashing” process where people who never formed a full-blown preference on an issue like “personal data privacy (or were simply reluctant to express it because the trade-offs for “free” platforms seemed acceptable to everybody else), now become more comfortable giving voice to their original qualms. In support, he cites a remarkable study about how a norm that gave Saudi Arabian husbands decision-making power over their wives’ work-lives suddenly began to change when actual preferences became more widely known.

In that country, there remains a custom of “guardianship,” by which husbands are allowed to have the final word on whether their wives work outside the home. The overwhelming majority of young married men are privately in favor of female labor force participation. But those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they think that other, similar men do not want women to join the labor force. When researchers randomly corrected those young men’s beliefs about what other young men believed, they became far more willing to let their wives work. The result was a significant impact on what women actually did. A full four months after the intervention, the wives of men in the experiment were more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job.

When more people either speak up about their preferences or are told that others’ inclinations are similar to theirs, the prevailing norm begins to change.

A robust, democratic process that debates the advantages and risks of AI-driven, smart city technologies will likely have the same change-inducing effect. The prevailing norm that finds it acceptable to exchange our behavioral data for “free” tech platforms will no longer be as acceptable as it once was. The more we ask the right questions about smart-city technologies and the longer we grapple as communities with the acceptable answers, the faster the prevailing norm governing personal data privacy will evolve.

Our good work of citizens is to become more knowledgeable about the issues and to champion what is important to us in dialogue with the people who live and work along side of us. More grounds for protecting our personal information are coming out of the smart-cities debate and we are already deciding where new privacy lines should be drawn around us.

This post was adapted from my July 7, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Dissenting Voices Never Fall On Deaf Ears

June 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hong Kong could still swallow the dragon.

A cover story in the Wall Street Journal today was called “Hong Kong’s Flickering Hopes.” “Flickering” because to Gerard Baker, the Journal’s “editor at large,” it seems inevitable that Hong Kong’s rule of law and civic traditions—it’s utterly unique experiment in Asian democracy—will eventually be swallowed by the giant that surrounds it.

On the other hand, I think it’s far from inevitable.

Over the past month, millions of residents have taken to their City’s humid boulevards to protest an extradition proposal that would allow China’s resident proxies to arrest anyone in Hong Kong that it wants to, extradicting them to “justice” in the motherland—a “chilling effect” on critical thinking and democratic expression. But why I wonder isn’t the personal witness of millions of Hong Kong Chinese a ray of hope instead of a glimmer on the road to subjugation?

Hong Kong could still confound us because, despite having the hottest, wettest and least hospitable climate for masked protest I can imagine, millions of its citizens took to the streets to voice their dissent about this latest erosion of their rights to speak, assemble and disagree. Despite sweat and dehydration, pepper spray and water cannon, they have also managed to protest peacefully so that their resounding “No” conveyed a Confucian depth of confidence and resolve. Constructive instead of destructive.

On the other hand, and demonstrating even more of their British influence, the Hong Kong Chinese have talked and written their rationales for “No” everywhere that they could find a platform for doing so—patiently, painstakingly and exhaustingly—although the meat of their dissenting opinions has received little attention in the press. And finally, the City’s residents have sketched out futures that are not merely a return to the status quo that existed twenty years ago but instead are thoughtful re-workings of Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems.” Despite a divergence of details, their over-arching visions have one thing in common. All imagine a unified China that’s built around the pounding, life-giving heart of Hong Kong today.

Will (1) their acts of dissent; (2) the personal risks that have been taken by, and moral commitment of these dissenters; together with (3) their hopeful vision of a “different and better outcome” persuade the billions of non-Hong Kong Chinese to reconsider their acquiescence to “the Great Firewall,” the desirability of “good citizenship scores,” and the subjugation of a total surveillance state for something more like what these dissenters have in mind?

Could Hong Kong swallow the dragon?

One thing is absolutely certain: the steady, confident voices of Hong Kong’s Chinese dissenters are not falling on deaf ears. There are more than a billion of them, listening or trying to listen.

(In case you don’t recognize it, the image above is of Tankman, a sole protester confronting Chinese state power in Tianamen Square, 1989. The power of dissent. The power in a picture. Inviting us to imagine being that solitary Chinese man.)

Meanwhile, an old service station re-purposed as a coffee joint on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

1. Take a Sad Song and Make It Better

To all of you: I promise to get off this horse soon, I do, but there is a West Coast echo in this story of dissent too.

California, which is also the home of Silicon Valley, passed the toughest data privacy law in the US last year. (Its prohibitions and sanctions will go into effect at the beginning of 2020.) By giving individuals a way to protect themselves from the predations of surveillance capitalism, California’s leaders expressed their dissent from the silence and/or inability of our national representatives to do the same. Disappointingly, the same non-response has come from most other state governments too.

I’ve railed about data privacy repeatedly here because our personal information is being taken without our informed consent and used in ways that track us like animals (“These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom”). I’ve argued that exchanging our personal data for “free” social networks like Facebook’s and “free” search engines like Google’s eliminates sources of potential income in a changing economy (“Blockchain Goes To Work”). And I’ve at least begun to make the case that theft of our personal data undermines our personal autonomy (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”). There are important issues here, and outside of a few leading jurisdictions most policymakers have been neglecting them.

“Leading jurisdiction” is lawyer-speak for “being in the vanguard” or “a dissenter from the prevailing view.” These places have tired of everyone else’s silence on an issue of importance that demands attention. They have talked about the values that drove them to raise their voices, and have painted a picture that speaks to how the future will be better—or at least more manageable—than it is today with their new laws or regulations on the books. They’re holding up their end of the conversation by trying to get their fellow states and the rest of the nation engaged in it.

California lawmakers passed a data privacy bill in 2018 that, among other things, includes an expansive definition of what constitutes personal information, gives the state’s consumers the right to prohibit the sale of their data to third parties, and also allows them to “opt out” of sharing their personal data altogether. It’s common for a new law’s effective date to be a year or more later to allow all parties affected to prepare for its various impacts. As interesting as anything about California’s recent action in support of data privacy has been Congress’s re-action.

According to a news report today:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthey backed the idea of national legislation to safeguard consumer’s data privacy, adding a prominent GOP voice to the bi-partisan support in Congress for tackling how technology companies amass and use that information.

‘There needs to be national-level regulation, not state-by-state on what we’re going to do about privacy,’ Mr. McCarthey, a California Republican said in an interview…

A data privacy law passed last year in California helped spur action from both Mr McCarthey and a bipartisan group of lawmakers working on privacy legislation in the Senate.

As a result of California’s commitment and template for action, Congress is wrestling with its divisiveness and dysfunction to pass a federal data privacy law that will go into effect before California’s to avoid a patchwork of regulation. From one vantage point, it’s like how many clowns can get in the phone booth before the bell goes off. But from another, more serious perspective: where would Congress be today on data privacy if a leading jurisdiction like California had failed to act?

A similar dynamic is currently at play involving state laws (like California’s again) that are aimed at reducing the likely causes of climate change. The impact on state residents of actions like this are immediate and direct, but the impact doesn’t end there. According to two scholars who have studied public opinion around climate change, those who have not bothered to act are also reluctant to be left behind. This is from another recent post:

Egan and Mullin cite research that proves ‘the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion’ and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those ‘watching but not yet acting’ are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard states.

When a commitment is grounded in values and acted upon (by speaking up, passing a law, taking any kind of objective step) to help realize a better future for everyone, others in the room, state or nation are more likely to be mobilized to define their own positions, to move the conversation forward, and sometimes to reach a new consensus than would never have been possible if those in the vanguard hadn’t taken a stand for their beliefs. in the first place.

An apartment building by Herzog & de Meuron in Tribeca

2. Taking a Stand Is Like Playing Jenga

Kids love the game Jenga. Many adults do too.

To play, you begin with a vertical rectangle of interlocking wooden pieces that are slotted in to create a stable structure. In each successive turn, a player attempts to remove one of the slotted pieces without destabilizing the structure and causing the remaining pieces to crash into a heap on the floor.

I’m convinced that the sound explosion of crashing pieces is key to enjoyment of the game. When you lose (or win), you do so shatteringly. There is no question that what you did made a difference.

The Tribeca apartment building above looks like a Jenga tower after—in mid-game—removal of some of the pieces has caused others to move and jut out a bit from the sides.

To harness the metaphor: the original Jenga tower is where prevailing opinion always starts. The room/community/state/nation is for something or against something. Then, in each successive turn, dissenters (along with the other players) modify the prevailing view.

Dissenters, leading jurisdictions, those who can’t keep their convictions to themselves are the key pieces that get removed. Every time they “make their case,” other pieces in the Jenga tower are impacted. Sometimes you can actually see their affect, because certain pieces jut out a little or a lot, their minds visibly beginning to change. Other times the change is imperceptible, but some pieces in the pile have become less stable as their original certainty has been clouded by doubt. Eventually, as the monolith begins to teeter, the moment of truth arrives and one final player’s testimony makes the original certainties dissolve.

Anyone’s turn can shatter the stability or inertia of the prevailing view.

Everyone’s turn affects other pieces either perceptibly or imperceptibly.

Anyone’s dissent can make the original certainties come crashing to the floor.

Anyone’s action can cause the crash that finally allows a different, better future to be built.

Dissenting voices like these are never as lonely or futile as they seem.

And they never fall on deaf ears.

This post was adapted from my June 23, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Face-Offs That Fuel Good Work

May 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Good work always has a long-term goal.

I’m thinking this week about long-term goals of mine, like acting to confront climate change and the assaults on knowledge by misinformation. Both goals are intertwined and both seem difficult if not impossible to impact. How can my actions advance either of these priorities?

I always have a lot on my To Do List, and my impulse is always to check off one big item and move on to the next one. Climate change and misinformation are big items. But then I remember that one of my jobs this time of year is groundskeeper. In the near acre around my home, I’ve learned the hard way to move away from bold, all-at-once kinds of goals like “give the whole place a haircut” to keeping my intentions smaller and closer to the ground.

Nature has forced me to become more modest when it comes to shaping its whims to my demands given the time, tools and sweat I can commit. I have more confidence than I used to that chipping away a little at a time will bring the landscape towards “what I have in mind” for this unruly plot in the middle of a city. Knowing that victories “only I can see” will eventually add up to the embrace of trees, hedges, plots and vistas in my imagination is what turns my job as groundskeeper into good work.

Groundskeeper lessons dovetail nicely with a couple of quotes from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark about even more daunting challenges and where we find the hope to confront them.

in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile, therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake.

Of course, it’s that first rescue that seeds the hope to become a rescuer again: the first act making your next act possible. Solnit gets lyrical here:

You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we carry into the night that is the future.

“You row forward looking back”—even if only you can find anything worth celebrating in what you’ve done already—because you’ve turned what were once only good intentions into the on-going satisfaction of good work.

Whenever my values and priorities have me seeing the battle ahead as light versus darkness, I’ve had to re-learn the wisdom of Voltaire when he told me that “the best is the enemy of the good” and Aesop when he taught me why the tortoise beats the hare. They’re cold water on a hot parade every single time, but also the most sensible marching orders. Lately, I’ve been pondering how they should guide my “face-offs” with climate change and the ongoing assault on knowledge.

What actions will seed enough hope to fuel my next ones?

How does good work on both of these challenges get off the ground?

1. Confronting Climate Change

Celebrating the beauty and wonder of nature and reminders about the gorgeously nuanced ways that we used to talk about them (like Robert MacFarland does) reinforce those who are already believers in nature. Warnings based on the science or on what prophetic observers carry back to us from the frontlines also speak mostly to believers who were already open enough to hear the call (my recent post about Barry Lopez’s Horizon).

These celebrations and warnings only reach unbelievers when they’ve already made themselves available for persuasion—which is not often enough. Communing with believers can feel like a tent revival when most of those who need converting are still outside the tent. Given my experience as an advocate for clients and for new ventures in business and government, I’ve been looking for ways to persuade more of the unbelievers to come into the tent so they can hear the call too.

The challenge for would-be persuaders is enormous given our values (or “political predispositions,” since they are largely the same on an issue like this) and other priorities that we have as Americans. In a widely-read and research-intensive article called “Climate Change: US Public Opinion,” political scientists Patrick J. Egan at NYU and Megan Mullin at Duke describe Americans’ reactions to climate change as of 2016 from polling and other analyses they conducted:

The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans….Even liberals and Democrats who accept climate change science and express concerns about global warming’s affects rank the problem well below many other national priorities…In 2016, for example, Pew found Democrats prioritizing climate change lower than several concerns not traditionally associated with their party, including terrorism and crime…[So] the effort to slow global warming is additionally challenged by the fact that the issue has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in climate change.

It feels much the same today.

Features of climate change in particular have put the challenge of confronting it on a low burner. As examples, Egan and Mullin point to:

– our highly-politicized disagreement about whether there is really a problem with man-made climate change at all; as well as

-how a changing climate is difficult if not impossible for the average person to see;

-the difficulty of attributing events (like a particular fire or a storm) to the broader phenomenon; and

-the often-mentioned fact that the worst effects of climate change will happen in the future and be experienced someplace other than America.

Politics aside, the imperceptibility and remoteness of climate change make it difficult for most of the public to make the imaginative leap into actively addressing it.

I discussed one response that these authors recommend here last week. Within the conservative, libertarian and Republican “values” communities, formerly skeptical thought leaders who have become convinced that the threats of climate change must be addressed are perhaps the only ones who can enlist their communities’ support by “making hay” out of the same reasoning that persuaded them.

Egan and Mullin also identify two avenues for someone like me, who is already convinced about the urgency of the problem but is looking for a way to persuade the vast majority who, while not quite skeptical or politically-opposed, fail to see it as a priority that’s important enough to act upon. These avenues exist in places where the effects of climate change are (in all likelihood) being experienced already, or rely upon policy developments in states like California and New York where climate change has already seized a larger share of the public’s imagination.

According to the authors, the more that members of the public “correlate key weather events they have experienced with climate change,” the more important or “salient” the issue becomes to them. For example, those who experienced flooding in Staten Island or along the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy may not be convinced enough by the correlation to support a comprehensive national climate change policy but they probably want to “adapt” to its likely risks and become more “resilient” in the face of future ones.

If the connection between extreme weather and climate change is strengthened, this may expand the national conversation from mitigation alone to adaptation and resilience. Even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios, infrastructure investments will be needed to reduce the harmful effects of climate change on Americans

Since this article was written, correlations between climate change and practical responses to its likely risks have also been made by Americans who were impacted by the recent wildfires around Paradise California and are regularly inundated by high tides in Miami in the absence of any storm activity. There are clusters of Americans along its vulnerable coastlines and in the more fire-prone West who are correlating climate change with risks that are no longer theoretical.

As people pay the costs of what is probably climate change, the core, underlying problem becomes more of a priority. The “good work” of persuasion is more hopeful when done in places and around events where meeting some of its likely harms have already been bought and paid for. These communities have, in effect, been opened to persuasion by climate-related impacts that seem new to them and out of proportion to what they have experienced before. That means my advocacy to enlist their further commitment to mitigate climate change itself (and not merely react to it) holds out the hope of bearing fruit.

Egan and Mullin also cite research that proves “the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion” and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those “watching but not yet acting” are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard jurisdictions.

Like my groundskeeper or Solnit’s rescuers during Hurricane Katrina, each patient step of persuasive advocacy can build hope in the next step until the core constituency to confront climate change has been assembled and activated by my good work and the good work of many others.

(While I recommend it highly, the Egan-Mullin article is dense with charts and annotations. To make it more accessible, one of its many fans created a comic book version that’s also worth a look.)

2. Speaking Up for What I Know

These days, even what we consider to be “knowledge” (that’s supported by evidence, is worthy of belief, and is accepted as true) isn’t safe in a world of communication that’s dominated by information-sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.

In the climate change debate for example, conclusions that are based on carefully assembled scientific evidence often seem to be given the same weight and claim of legitimacy as the arguments of climate change deniers. Egan and Mullin illustrate how media channels have regularly allowed deniers to create an equivalence between their ignorance and the fact-based evidence that scientists have been gathering.

As the public was learning about the [climate change] problem in the 1990’s, the mainstream media’s adherence to the journalistic norm of balancing coverage between two sides of a dispute resulted in misrepresentation of climate change science [and] understanding the scientific certainty about [the] human contribution to the problem.

Danah Boyd is a principle researcher at Microsoft. Her recent speech to a group of librarians arises out of the same vulnerability that all “knowledge” faces in the current media landscape. She aims her argument at librarians because “[y]ou all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee” because it promised to make what is “not yet knowledgeable” available to more people while reducing overall ignorance. But today she asks them:

-what if the internet and its on-line communities are being subverted by misinformation instead of liberated by knowledge?

-what if this misinformation is being manufactured in order “to purposefully and intentionally seed doubt” and “to fragment society” instead of enabling honest debate and our ability to move on together when the debate is done?

In her speech, Boyd describes how misinformation that is designed to divide is being deployed and what people who are committed to defending knowledge can do about it?

One of the best ways to sow misinformation is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to access than evidence-based material. For example, she cites the gunman who recently massacred Muslims while they were worshipping in Christchurch, New Zealand. He exploited “the information ecosystem” we are all immersed in to ensure that his video recording of his killing spree was widely shared before content moderators could discover it. He filled “the data void” about his mentors and beliefs in a widely-reported counterpoint to those who condemned his actions, as if there were a legitimate debate about it. He “produc[ed] a media spectacle” by using the available channels to disseminate misinformation to millions who were susceptible to his disunifying message.

There are opportunities to provide misinformation whenever there is “a data void” created by the media’s’ (and the public’s) curiosity. Why did he kill Muslims? Why is climate change a hoax? One way to fill the data void is with words that are strategically created to muddle what we know and how we feel about it. Boyd talks about how Frank Luntz accomplished this with words and phrases that were designed to seed doubt around various issues. Luntz is a “public opinion guru” perhaps best known for developing talking points and filling the data void around Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change [or the even more muddling, global warming] and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

All to engender emotional dissonance if not quite rational doubt.

According to Boyd, media manipulators also:

create [information] networks that are hard to undo. YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.

So if “the other side” is misinformation, what should defenders of knowledge do? Here’s the straw man that won’t work:

You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it.

And here’s invitation from Boyd that I’m accepting:

You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

+ + +

Moving from best intentions to good work is the biggest and most important step of all. For me, it involves discovering where and how to take it.

This post was adapted from my May 12, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate

May 5, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Conversations that change minds always appeal to people’s priorities.

These are conversations we’ve had here about subjects like the risks of climate change (“An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World”), the current imbalances in the American economy (“The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken”), the impacts of innovation (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”) and their effects on workers, families and communities.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t talk to anyone about how a warming planet is already impacting us, how the risks are accelerating, and what each of us can do about it. “What has climate change got to do with me?” or more pointedly, “What has global warming got to do with what is important to me?”

What environmentalists consider a horrifying catastrophe barely registers as a concern for many of us, and much of that disconnect comes from how environmentalists have talked about it. It’s almost as if they think the health and beauty of the earth (remember “the snail darter”?) is more important than the freedom or prosperity of the people in it– when the challenge should never be expressed as an either/or.

Arguments about the sanctity of the biosphere that may seem obvious to me won’t persuade skeptics who are far more concerned about making a living off the land. So it’s fair to ask: why can’t the risks of global warming be conveyed in terms of its impacts on human freedom and prosperity—that is, through the lens of a very different set of priorities? Otherwise, we’re doomed to leaving half of the constituency that’s needed for change out of the loop.

Whether a skeptic is open to listening to someone who wants to persuade them is also key. I’m never going to change your mind if you don’t trust me already, and much of that trust comes from having credibility within a community that already shares at least some of your values. It’s how Nixon’s legacy as an anti-communist gave him credibility with conservative constituents when he wanted them to change their minds about improving relations with communist China in the 1970s.

Until recently, there were very few leaders in the community of global warming skeptics whose minds were changed by the environmental record AND who were also willing persuade others who share their values to change their minds too by discussing how they became convinced by the enormous risks that are involved. Whether the issue is climate change or something else, the stature of the persuader and his or her willingness to explain their evolution from skeptic to believer in a language that speaks to common values also matters.

Some recent polling data about the gulf between believers and non-believers when it comes to global warming speaks to the enormity of the bridge-building challenge.

According to a Gallup poll in March, nearly 70% of Republicans believe that alarm over a warming planet is “generally exaggerated” while nearly the same number of Democrats (67%) believe that global warming will pose “a serious threat” in their lifetimes. When political affiliation is removed from the polling questions, the results are equally compelling. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 60% of the public think that global warming will affect people in the US, only 40% believe it will affect them personally, and 2/3rds of those polled never talk about climate change with anyone else. For many people, climate-related threats to our way of life are not even on their radar.

Those most knowledgeable about climate science are almost unanimous in their alarm over global warming. But those who aren’t paying attention or are waiting to be convinced are unlikely to persuaded by “the facts” that fuel the experts’ alarm. On the other hand, they might be persuaded by someone they are listening to already and are open to hearing out.

This openness to persuasion was evident from studies Charlan Nemeth shared in her 2018 book on the power of dissent. I discussed her findings in a couple of posts (“Why Voice Your Dissent?” and “Dissent That Elevates the Group”) about how somebody who disagrees with you–often vehemently–can also change your mind.

As long as a group trusts you enough to “give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,” you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

You raise your voice because what you believe and what you know can’t stay silent any longer. You dissent because you care about being true to yourself and because you care about what will happen to the group if it doesn’t hear what you’re saying. [As a result,] the group will grapple with your knowledge and beliefs even when they don’t agree with them…In addition…the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced that everyone in the group should want. A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but so does her hopeful vision about the future [we can] create together.

When dissenting opinions contain these three elements, those who disagree at first are more likely to open their minds and question their own positions. When you are “in it” together (whatever the basis for that commonality), people will listen to your reasoned testimony when they sense your heart is in it too. Someone else’s grounded, caring and hopeful dissent essentially creates the space for reconsidering what we think and believe to be true.

Of course, to persuade a skeptical group with your “dissenting” opinion, the group has “to give you the floor” in the first place, and the easiest way to receive that invitation is if you already share at least some of the group’s basic values. For example, to reach conservative, often Evangelical communities that have tended to be dismissive of the threat of global warming, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe grounds the facts she knows as a scientist in the biblical values she believes in as a Christian.

In her 2009 A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (co-written with her husband who is a minister himself), as well as in her TED talk last December, Hayhoe’s persuasiveness arises from both her expertise and these shared beliefs.  She’s convinced that fear, even when justified by the science, only causes people to flee the issue or become demoralized because nothing they could ever do will really matter. On the other hand, a “rational hope” that individuals can make a difference when it’s tied to the values of her largely Evangelical audience has a much better chance to change minds and get her listeners to engage in solutions, even small ones.

The Bible calls on Christians “to serve the least of these”—the poorest and most vulnerable in the developing world, who are already among the most affected by global warming. Hayhoe utilizes her scientific knowledge to paint a vivid picture of the suffering that billions of the poorest people will face if the world continues to ignore the scientific evidence. The message in her book and when she’s speaking is always clear. She “connects the dots” between their shared values and why her readers and listeners need to confront the challenges of a changing climate.  “Doing something, anything, about climate change is a step in the direction of caring for people,” she says. It’s a reason to believe that her audiences can feel, understand and act upon.

Hayhoe’s expertise as a climate scientist gives her knowledge-based credibility with her largely Christian audiences. Many of Nemeth’s dissenters who changed skeptical minds also had (or managed to build) subject-matter credibility that could be harnessed to values they shared with the groups they were trying to reach. Jerry Taylor, originally a Republican global-warming skeptic, supplemented his authority by reviewing the evidence of climate change and convincing himself that the risks it poses to his priorities—like its impacts on private property and personal freedom—demand that it be confronted without any more delay. Taylor runs the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank. Over the past 5 years, he and his colleagues have been quietly building support among Republican legislators and staff for an aggressive federal carbon tax.

Since Taylor’s commitment to Republican and libertarian values is unquestioned by his peers, his “change of heart” given the evidence of global warning and the carefully tailored carbon tax he proposes to address it have been taken seriously by his colleagues. “This is one of our own,” he knows what he’s talking about, we need to hear him out, and maybe open our minds to the persuasion in his arguments. The significance of overtures like his to global warming skeptics cannot be overstated.

An April 16 article in the MIT Technology Review argues for the “science” (or at least the method) that seems to be operating here. The article is “How the Science of Persuasion Could Change the Politics of Climate Change,” while its tagline is: “Conservatives have to make the case to conservatives, and a growing number of them are.” In order to change minds on a hot–button issue that has been reduced to partisan sound bites, several factors are relevant.

The first is understanding how political stalemates first arise. We become polarized when members of “our elites,” our so-called “thought leaders,” rally us in one direction or another. By the same token, to reduce political polarization the convictions of these thought leaders are the first convictions that need to be changed.

The real focus shouldn’t be on convincing the public, hitting people over the head again and again with the science and dangers of climate change. Instead, the goal should be to change the minds of the elites.

When they send clear and consistent signals, mass opinions that seemed strong and fixed can swing in the other direction”…. The good news is this means you don’t have to change as many minds. The bad news is the ones you do have to change can be particularly stubborn ones.

This is why Jerry Taylor’s conversion experience is significant. No one else changed his mind. He changed his own mind by studying the evidence around climate change, and, as a result, he and his allies are well-positioned to change similar minds in the elite government circles where they operate.

Another element in this kind of persuasion relates to the common values that the persuader shares with those who need persuading.

[Taylor] and his staff attempt to craft fact-based arguments designed to appeal specifically to their political interests, and present policies they can rationalize within their ideologies.

Notably, the Niskanen Center isn’t pushing the environmental regulations that conservatives despise. They’re advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax, a market-based tool. Carbon pollution costs real people real money. It’s just that the polluters aren’t necessarily the ones bearing those costs. In a market that respects the property rights libertarians champion, that ‘externality’ needs to be priced in, Taylor says.

The MIT Tech article suggests that Taylor has been making headway with Republicans in Congress, but no one is “naming names” yet, suggesting that there is still “a ways to go” in getting these legislators out in front on America’s response to global warming.

To make their changes of heart even more palatable, the article also cites the so-called “co-benefits theory” advanced by some political scientists. In listing our gains once we cut greenhouse gas emissions, the newly converted can claim that they are also promoting goals like technological innovation, energy independence, national security, air quality, health and job creation.

+ + +

The necessary coalition to address global warming will never coalesce until respected leaders in skeptical communities engage with those who deny the seriousness of climate change.

A skeptical community can be reached by both expertise and potential solutions that are consistent with that community’s’ priorities and values.

This kind of outreach recognizes that people’s identities are tied up in their political certainties and how those certainties reflect their basic values.

An appeal to values can change hearts enough so that an expert’s appeal to reason can also change minds.

There is a “rational hope” today that a skeptical public can be engaged deeply enough so that we will be able to come together to address global warming as well as almost every other intractable problem that requires a critical mass of public engagement.

It’s about finding a few leaders who can reach enough people where they live.

This post was adapted from my May 5, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.