Nick Clegg’s new book is called How to Save the Internet, but a more accurate title would be Don’t Shoot the (Facebook) Messenger. The world is very cross with tech bros right now, but the former president of global affairs at Meta and erstwhile Liberal Democrat leader wants you to know that all the online silos and toxic screaming matches aren’t his fault; and nor are they the fault of Mark Zuckerberg. The real causes are “the 2008 financial crash, the contraction of funding for public services that followed, systemic racism, sexism and homophobia…., the Covid-19 pandemic…, the opioid epidemic, [and] the debt trap that millions of young people find themselves in.”
Since arguably two of these factors were the fault of the Lib Dems under Clegg’s leadership, this is a bold gambit indeed. But the good news for anyone in the UK economically or psychologically crushed by the legacy of the Lib Dems in power is that, according to Clegg, life can get much better. The naysayers about the internet are mostly scaremongering. Regulated correctly in order to keep the flow of information suitably open, transparent, and globalised, new technologies have the power to “empower ordinary people in many ways”.
But who does the public-school-educated multimillionaire Clegg think of as ordinary people? In one section of the new book, he gives us a glimpse. He imagines an ordinary couple with the ordinary names of Clarice and Matteo, and with school-age children called Laura and Pietro. And what such ordinary people allegedly long for is the sort of obsequious daily hand-holding normally afforded only to multimillionaires like him.
First thing in the morning, Matteo asks his personal AI assistant for a “quick and easy breakfast recipe” he can prepare for Clarice and the kids, while Clarice brainstorms the most efficient driving route to work with her own bot. Once at the office, the couple each uses their personal helpers to write emails and presentations, giving Matteo more “time” and freeing Clarice up for the more “creative” bits of her job. Later, Clarice attends a doctor’s appointment, getting AI-powered tips about nutrition, and telling her assistant to “incorporate [them] into her weekly shop” as well as to pass them on to Matteo’s AI assistant too.
Back at home after work, Matteo gets his assistant to help make Pietro’s boring history homework more interesting; while Clarice uses hers to draft a message for a new nutrition-focused chat group she has just joined, “since she feels uncertain about what to say”. She is pleased when the result gets her some friend requests and likes in the group. At the end of the day, the AI helps smooth out one of the pitfalls of modern marriage: “Matteo, sick of the song Clarice has chosen for the morning alarm, instructs his assistant to liaise with hers and pick a new song based on their joint preferences.”
This, then, is the family of the future: they don’t know how to cook, navigate, or communicate in written form; they are obsessed with health as the central goal in life; they have limited powers of concentration, and find traditional forms of information boring; they are delighted with the validation of faceless strangers for things they didn’t accomplish themselves. They passively outsource many decisions, and are good at following instructions issued by a screen. If this is digital empowerment, then I’m not sure I want to see enslavement.
There’s also the question of what Clarice and Matteo — and by extension, us — will do with all that extra time, when they have dispensed with unnecessary tasks and become so much more efficient. One possible answer thrown up by Clegg’s book is “look for another job”, as bosses realise that, thanks to new technologies, they don’t need warm bodies to come to work at all. Clegg is enthusiastic about the opportunities AI affords for increased productivity, and sanguine about the likely resulting job cuts: they will mostly happen quite slowly, he says, and mainly only in white-collar sectors, where people should be offered “flexicurity” and helped to retrain. What role members of the laptop classes might retrain for in an AI-dominated world is left disconcertingly vague: presumably, we can’t all become Lib Dem councillors.
Perhaps, instead, our ordinary couple will be turning their minds to higher things. Clegg is keen to talk about the new possibilities for “creativity” afforded by technology, but it turns out that here too, he means typing commands: creating text, images, and music “without the sort of specialist skills required to do so in the recent past”, so we too can become “writers, graphic designers, film-makers and musicians”. So whether it’s AI pushpin or poetry, it seems it won’t be taking up a lot of brain cells — even leaving aside the question of what satisfaction there could really be in a life spent spawning generic bits of art-slop by hitting return.
A more realistic answer looks tempting: there will be more time to talk to bots. In the world Clegg approves of, there’s always a therapy bot or a virtual friend available to companion you throughout any life transition (including, one assumes, redundancy). You don’t have to spend a week waiting for your next appointment; you can get all that consoling attention and validation on tap, anytime. And if Clarisse gets into an unhealthily co-dependent state with an AI and starts preferring it romantically to Matteo, that’s cool too. “Ultimately, in a free society, if mature adults want to spend their time hanging out with human-like AI agents, in the full knowledge that they are machines and not people, we should find ways to accommodate these relationships”, says Clegg.
He would no doubt argue that I’ve offered a caricature. If people wish to switch the screens off and do something ambitious and scary instead — read Proust, climb K2, talk to a human, or whatever it is — they still can and will. Sceptical of claims that societies are being inadvertently shaped by smartphone technology as much as they are shaping it, he clearly allows that new preferences can come into being as a result of prolonged contact with the internet — as is obvious from the fact that, by his own admission, advertising is the thing it mainly sells. Yet, he also seems to place a great deal of faith in the abilities of consumers to scrutinise their first-order preferences with second-order rational attitudes of approval or disapproval, and to act on the result.
That is, he thinks people can refuse to act on any more basic preferences or impulses of theirs, which they ultimately do not think worth having. It seems to be this conviction that allows him to brush off worries about Big Tech’s responsibility for people falling prey to algorithmic-induced rages, conspiracy theories, or screen addictions. As long as we are talking about adults, it can be assumed that those concerned ultimately rationally endorse their own behaviour in such matters, and Big Tech cannot really be blamed for facilitating it.
All of this is classical liberal fare, as you might expect. It is also deeply unsatisfying, when dressed up as critique. Without a theory of what human life is for, or what makes for a flourishing life, it leaves a person’s second-order preferences no more reliable than the first-order ones they supposedly police. It means Clegg is not going to spend much time worrying about the wider consequences of AI turning us into puzzled, cackhanded strangers to the world, unable to deal with the simplest of chores without prompts. And nor is he going to think much about what else we might be losing along the way, as we move towards what he calls “hyper-personalisation”; things like conviviality, patience, self-denial, or even just a sense of achievement for getting out of the house. At one point, he asks: “Why would one take a time-consuming trip to a Blockbuster video store… when Netflix or Amazon Prime had vastly more movies available, which were never out of stock, and which you could stream directly to your television?”. He doesn’t seem to know why nostalgia for the Blockbusters era is even a thing.
“Clegg is not going to spend much time worrying about the wider consequences of AI turning us into puzzled, cackhanded strangers to the world.”
Equally, as long as it does not pertain to kids, Clegg scrupulously abstains from substantive judgement about the content of what people are consuming online. For on what grounds could he convincingly criticise them, assuming it is what rational people want? This means that in a book about the ethics of the internet, there is only one mention of adult pornography; and that gestures towards what other people think of it, not him.
Time and again, he raises ethical issues about internet content, or patterns of use, which he says we should “consider”; but then draws no conclusion at all, or else downplays them as overblown. Instead, all of Clegg’s manifestly aerated moral judgements are about how fast or slow, open or closed the internet will turn out to be; for a slower, more fragmented network means the people can’t get what they want. While he sounds intensely relaxed about AI-derived unemployment and consequent fundamental changes of ways of life, he sounds positively panicky about the prospect of a balkanised “European internet” versus an “American internet”, each rival system differently regulated and resourced:
“…there won’t be one great watershed moment when we wake up one day and find the internet has changed beyond recognition… Rather, like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, we will probably barely notice the small, gradual changes, but by the time we do it will be too late.”
In short, Clegg represents the sort of person in charge of the virtual world these days, and his book is an instructive, terrifying read because of it. “What do we want the internet to be?” he asks early on; but his implied conclusion is that there couldn’t possibly be an interesting answer, because there is no “we”. Individual preferences radically differ, and the only thing that binds people stuck on screens together is their collective hunger to have their preferences satisfied, as quickly and smoothly and effortlessly as possible. And in that matter, Zuckerberg or his metaverse equivalent is here to help.
