This aggressive interview with an incredibly defensive Nick Clegg was fascinating as an instance of contemporary tech politics. I was particularly struck by how he explicitly invokes ‘techno-determinism’ to dismiss claims about social platforms generating politics and social harms:
He argues it’s “patronising” to claim that platforms have a significant influence because “people have agency”. There’s an obvious straw man here, in which claims about platform power are construed as people being cognitively hijacked by whatever they find in their feeds*, gets used to dismiss any claim about platform power. Likewise the claim that the technology you use has an “automatic effect” on what you think and believe.
*I do think some people basically believe this. It’s a stupid and dangerous position which we need to oppose.
Mark Carrigan 