The Dangers of Micro-Targeting in Political Communication

This week on our untitled, unofficial, occasional podcast, Max Read of Read Max and I hosted our second guest: political scientist Henry Farrell, professor at Johns Hopkins University and writer of the tech and politics Substack Programmable Mutter, which we both follow with great interest. Farrell, with Abraham Newman, is the author of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

We had Farrell on to discuss his recent piece for Bloomberg on the “tech canon,” entitled, “Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions.” We also wanted to discuss Henry’s newsletter from January: “We're getting the social media crisis wrong: The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics,” a very generative rethink of the often stale discourse around social media. It was a really fun, enlightening, and even strangely optimistic chat that ranged from democratic theory to sci-fi to whether or not we should reasonably fear a techno-totalitarian future. (I’m gonna give a spoiler and tell you now Henry thinks not, just in case you need a little pick me up.)

Some things we discussed:

* James C Scott’s book Seeing Like A State

* Tanner Greer’s post “The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite”

* Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna’s book Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America

* Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create by Pascal Boyer