Early Edition: Defining Things Is Hard
SCOTUS kicks the can down the road, reaffirms there are no silver bullets
Greetings from Eagle River Coffee Roasters - and during Fourth of July week - a lot of peoples’ office.
Amazingly, there are still parts of the country where not everyone has internet, and this is one. I’ve been trying for years to get my father to buy a Starlink since our side of the lake does not have fiber, but since they are only up here in Summer, he doesn’t want to spend the money. If anyone has used Starlink’s roam subscription option and has opinions, let me know. The option to pause service would be clutch to changing my dad’s mind.
I’m sending this today rather than Wednesday because the final Supreme Court decisions came down today—including on the cases about the Texas and Florida content moderation laws and questions about Presidential immunity. Plus, by Wednesday, I hope most of my American friends are starting to check out for the holiday. For those of you working on the UK and French elections, I’m sorry. I’ve been there. I’ll never forget my sister not believing me when I said I had to do some work around the Indonesia elections in July 2014.
This will be short as I’m still processing much of what happened last week. We’ve had a disastrous U.S. Presidential debate, the far-right is poised to take control in the French Parliament, the conservatives are poised to get destroyed in the UK election, and now, the Supreme Court rulings. Here are some quick takeaways:
This is the start of a rocky Summer. I always tell people that there’s a difference between knowing a hard time is coming up and actually living through it. We knew this Summer would be intense, and it’s so far lived up to that expectation. Have grace with yourself as we go through all this, but know more is likely coming.
Defining things is hard. On both NetChoice (the TX and FL content moderation cases) and the Trump Presidential Immunity case, the Supreme Court kicked the can down the road and moved it to the lower courts. They sort of did the same on Murthy. Rather than provide frameworks or definitions for deciding if something is unconstitutional, they said more work needs to be done to define things. This is the challenge with bringing cases so quickly to the Supreme Court. There is no silver bullet, and no one wants to do this hard work, so the hot potato keeps getting passed around. I keep thinking about Lawrence Lessig’s framework and the four forces constraining our actions: law, code/architecture, markets, and societal norms. This continues to be worked out regarding content moderation, which causes chaos and uncertainty. Regardless, nothing has been settled and so we will continue having the same debates we have been (but maybe some folks other than the tech companies will try to start creating some of these frameworks?)
The same applies to defining what is political, what is news, and what is an official or unofficial act by a president. All around us, people are arguing about definitions, and with the Chevron decision, more of this will be decided by the courts rather than regulators. And, like I’ve said before, if you think politicians don’t get the internet, let me introduce you to the judiciary.
AI is going to change it all. All of these conversations are about an older technology - social media. By the time we figure that out, the way we use platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and others and moderate content on them will be changed by AI. Mary Meeker is out with a new memo about AI and higher education, though her points go well beyond universities. This one stands out, “The advance of AI should drive the fastest and biggest transformations, disruptions, and platform shifts in technology ever seen.” We need to be having the conversations that Murthy and the NetChoice cases brought forth, but we need to apply new lenses to them so that they aren’t absurdly outdated within months.
As a bonus, I want to remind everyone that now is very much the time to panic responsibly. TIME’s cover, which has just the word panic and a picture of Joe Biden, is the opposite. Biden’s performance was very, very bad. It is correct to describe the Democrats as panicking. But a cover like this sends a message to the electorate to panic, and I don’t think that’s constructive. It’s time to be super pragmatic and recognize the reality in front of us. Is it grim? Yes. Is it hopeless? No. But we do need to start hunkering down and doing the hard work because this all isn’t over after November. Not by a long shot.
Plus, America is still pretty great. Props to
for providing six graphs to help remind us of that. Overall, we’re living in exciting, historic times. I don’t find myself depressed as all of this unfolds; I'm filled with thinking about all the ways we still have to shape the future we want. I’ll be spending this week thinking about how I want to do that in the next six months and beyond. I encourage you to do the same.