Last Year Was a Dress Rehearsal for the Future

As America starts to turn the corner on the Great Pandemic, what have we learned? Plus, how Big Tech is failing to address how AI foments bias.

It’s been a year. And it’s not easy to relive the recent past. I bet many of us would rather just stick 2020 in a box marked “do not open” and shove it deep into storage. I’ve written and rewritten the lede of today’s newsletter several times, because thinking about the experience and lessons of the last year is deeply unsettling. And frankly, we’ve all had our own version of this past year. As we used to say in the blogosphere, your mileage may vary. But there is one lesson of the last year that sticks with me, which is the challenge of converting dire knowledge into purposeful action.

A year ago, as February ended, I was closely following the specter of COVID-19 as it spread from China. At first, while I knew coronavirus would be dangerous, I still imagined that I’d be traveling to Iceland a few weeks later for a big conference on civic tech. Within days, as the first publicly confirmed cases were reported in the US, I had stopped expecting that to happen, and I was pushing my colleagues at Civic Hall to close our office, at least temporarily. My last day commuting to work in New York City was March 6th. A lifetime of taking the commuter train to Grand Central Station and the subway to work from there, ended. (I still can’t believe I haven’t been on the train since then.) On the 7th, I drove to the CUNY School of Law in Queens to give a talk at BetaNYC’s annual School of Data conference, but the whole time I was there I felt exposed and worried about the wisdom of gathering with a few hundred people indoors. Everyone else there seemed to feel the same way. Civic Hall closed its space March 12th, a few days ahead of the citywide shutdown, but not soon enough to protect our staff and members from someone who was infected. Fortunately, no one was harmed.

Those early days of the pandemic were surreal, because while some of us were convinced things were going to get very bad, that wasn’t yet conventional wisdom. I was lucky to be reading warnings from smarter, more informed friends like Zeynep Tufekci, who had paid close attention to how the world had dodged the SARS epidemic, and was therefore writing things in late February like this prescient piece in Scientific American about the need to make serious preparations for the coronavirus to strike the US . It’s worth re-reading that essay again. Zeynep spends the first half of it convincing readers that taking early precautions against the pandemic—like buying up a few weeks stock of food in order to go out as little as possible--was not the equivalent of becoming a “Doomsday Prepper.” She had to do this because back in February and up through mid-March, if you were one of the people who understood that “exponential growth” meant something far more dangerous than just “more” you weren’t just screaming into a void, you were being told by responsible adults to stop fomenting “panic.”

Unfortunately for many Americans, too many of our leaders then were arrogant men who had succeeded in politics by publicly projecting strength and privately governing like autocrats. And I’m not just talking about Trump, I’m talking about the people in charge here in New York, one of the first places hit hard. Instead of listening to scientists who understood the dangers of a highly contagious airborne virus and acting swiftly, they chose the wrong enemy and fought public fear instead of protecting public health. “Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers — I speak for the mayor also on this one — we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on March 2. “So, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.” On March 19, two days after the closure of schools and restaurants, Cuomo said “I’m as afraid of the fear and the panic as I am of the virus, and I think that the fear is more contagious than the virus right now.”

As Rebecca Solnit documents convincingly in her wonderful book A Paradise Built on Hell, ordinary people respond in mostly rational and compassionate ways when disaster strikes. Only elites fear the specter of panic and riots in the streets, and thus they often withhold vital information rather than treating the public as partners in dealing with a crisis. Our brittle, distant leaders failed us here because they feared the wrong thing, and because our governing system wasn’t resilient or collaborative enough to listen to vital feedback. It took a near revolt of threatened mass resignations by health officials and a prairie fire of teachers and parents demanding that the schools be shut to get NYC’s hapless Mayor Bill de Blasio to finally take action. Had New York, the first state to bear the brunt of the pandemic, initiated widespread social distancing measures a week or two earlier than it did, the death toll might have been 50%-80% smaller, Dr. Tom Frieden, the former head of the CDC, has said.

Instead, we went through a version of hell.

I kept a sort of diary during those early months of lockdown, noting each time I heard about someone I knew testing positive, or each trip I made to buy groceries, and how long it took until the local market actually started requiring people to wear masks, and when, weeks later, they actually seemed to finally all be masking up. There’s a two-week period in late April when my wife and I had about ten Zoom funerals and shivas to attend, including two back-to-back for a good friend who lost both of his aged parents days apart from each other. I remember thinking to myself when the crisis started that I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like if, as the models predicted, something like one out of three hundred people would die—and how that meant that people I knew personally would be lost. And then, by the end of April, when about 15,000 people in the NYC metro area had already been taken—just about one out of one thousand, fewer than predicted but still too many—I knew how horribly that felt.

And then, we turned a corner and the worst started to ease up. And even though COVID has been with us continually since then, it no longer quite feels like the Angel of Death is stalking the streets. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett would say, thank goodness for science. Thank goodness for medicine. Thank goodness for the frontline health care workers.

No one’s experience of the last year is the same. Maybe yours was much worse. Maybe you’re still anxious because someone vulnerable is still waiting to get vaccinated. Maybe all the people you know had mild cases. Maybe you live in Seattle, where the political system and the public health community worked in concert and thus made it through the year in much better shape. The New York metro area has been the worst-hit with 294 deaths per 100,000; Seattle has had 64 per 100,000, according to the New York Times. One in three Americans know someone who died of COVID according to the latest Axios-Ipsos poll; more than half have self-quarantined at some point. There’s a collective experience of trauma that we still haven’t processed.

Now, after a year of incompetent leadership and congressional deadlock, we are beginning to see what a pro-active and compassionate government response to the pandemic can look like. It is a time of hope and rising expectations. One quarter of Americans think they’ll be able to return to something like their “normal, pre-COVID life” in the next three to six months, according to that Axios-Ipsos poll. Another third think they’ll be able to do so within a year.

These are natural impulses. But we have to resist them. There is no “normal” to go back to.

The Great Pandemic of 2020-21 is a dress rehearsal. We were hit by a fast-moving global crisis, and we managed to get through it without a full-blown societal breakdown. (In some places, that’s not really true. Hospitals in Brazil, which has been steered by a rightwing megalomaniac who makes Trump look sober, are at the brink.)

The thing is, we are living in a slower-moving global crisis, too. In September and October, Americans on the west coast were reminded of this by a massive wave of fires that killed as many as 3,000 people indirectly, through excess smoke inhalation. Just last month, Texans and others in the nearby states were reminded of this by a massive cold snap and power breakdown that claimed close to 100 lives. In both cases, our collective capacity to respond was stretched and fell short. And our political system just barely held through this whole test.

Fortunately, the same way we ultimately have scienced our way to the other side of COVID, we can science our way to the other side of the climate challenge. Don’t take my word for it—watch this new talk by Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future.

As Cascio argues, we know what we need to do. But we need the political will to do it. Which means we need a rapid change in who leads us and how we hold them accountable. We need leaders who understand the challenge of the next decade is to mobilize all of us to shift how we live more drastically than we did for COVID, and we need to stop rewarding leaders who hide from that truth.

-Related: Rachel Cohen has a terrific piece in The New York Times on all the new policies that got implemented in 2020 after years of people arguing they could never be done. Those have included a massive improvement in the rights of low-income tenants facing eviction, housing for thousands of homeless people in hotel rooms, early compassionate release for many prisoners, reduced rates for high-speed broadband and the provision of hundreds of thousands of tech devices to rural and low-income households. When people say, “it can’t be done, that’s utopian,” remind them of what suddenly became normal to do.

Facebookization, Continued

-The good folks at The Markup’s Citizen Browser team have built Split Screen, a terrific new tool that enables you to see how Facebook’s recommendation engine pushes vastly different streams of content to people based on what it thinks they want to see. We’ve known for a while that the platform creates filter bubbles, but looking at what Biden voters are seeing vs Trump voters is still quite revealing.

-The more I read about decision-making at Facebook, where one man rules and everyone else’s performance reviews and salaries are tied to the successful completion of projects that serve that one man’s goal of maximizing growth, the more it makes me think of corollaries in the political arena, where dominant, narcissistic men have also created similarly destructive patterns of loyal enablers and suppression of dissenting views. That’s one takeaway from Karen Hao’s valuable new report on Karen Hao for MIT Technology Review, which shows how Zuckerberg pushed a key team working on AI bias to look away from how the platform was fueling disinformation and polarization because clamping down on it would reduce its growth among conservative users. Her piece is ostensibly a PR profile of Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, but Hao smartly uses her access to Candela not only to showcase the ethical dilemmas he has faced serving Zuckerberg’s God, but to unearth new details on just how badly that company has harmed the public interest in the process. In one case, she reports that a team led by Joel Kaplan, the company’s head of global policy, “blocked a medical-misinformation detector that had noticeably reduced the reach of anti-vaccine campaigns” because it affected conservatives more than liberals. Lovely.

Odds and Ends

-Speaking of AI and bias, Google’s firing of Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher in ethical artificial intelligence, last December continues to roil the company, Rachel Metz reports in a useful overview for CNN Business. It all started with Gebru’s co-authoring of a research paper questioning whether massive language models that are being increasingly used by places like Google are perpetuating biases, and company leaders’ insistence that she retract it.

-On the Internet, no one knows who is nearby. Which is a problem that dating apps solve for people who opt-in. And as Shamani Joshi reports for Vice, people are using those apps to solve the “whose nearby” problem for all kinds of other purposes, including finding medical help to political organizing.

-Amazon Mechanical Turk workers—the people who take on repetitive research tasks for tiny pay increments—have launched their own crowdsourcing platform, Turkopticon, to collect and share information on exploitative practices and fight for stable, dignified working conditions, and they are seeking donations to help support their work. (Not ironic at all!) Among the problems they are highlighting: requesters on Mechanical Turk can reject work if they say it doesn’t meet their standards and workers don’t get paid, even if they’ve completed a large amount of it.

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