“Pops, what do you think of the new president?”
Samantha paused and looked up from her flexEpaper article. It wasn’t clear that her father had heard her. But then his spoon full of cereal slowed its progress toward his mouth, and he looked up. His hair, what was left of it, had gone completely gray years ago, but his eyes remained as bright as ever.
“President Trump thinks he’s king. How can a man run for U.S. president and not understand … no, and not respect the fundamental idea of separation of powers in our system of government?”
She had heard her dad slip into this rant many times, and she knew you either cut it off quickly, or you’d better make yourself comfortable for it would be awhile before it played itself out. “Dad, Trump hasn’t been president for 12 years.”
Her dad’s confusion was understandable. Trump was the last U.S. president elected the old-fashioned way. The days when you had to register to vote, and had individuals declaring themselves candidates for president, were long gone. No more stump speeches. No more rallies. No more, thank god, endless political advertisements and no more cheap theater marketed as candidate debates. The Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November – what a crazy definition – remained the U.S. Election Day, but no U.S. citizen did anything special on that day these days. You simply woke up and learned who we had “elected” based on an analysis of the data collected by the companies constantly mining us for our preferences. That’s what was in today’s headlines. Today was Tuesday, November 2, 2032.
It was a confluence of factors that brought about the change. The Russians had demonstrated how easy it was to manipulate us through our social media platforms and that led us to question what our vote for the 2016 presidential candidates actually meant. To that point, the fears that kept us from electronic voting had focused on the threat of a disgruntled hacker or foreign power changing the actual vote count. But why go to that trouble when you can simply make a mess of the entire campaign process? Subtly manipulating us through our most popular social media platforms each and every day during the ever-increasing length of our presidential campaigns turned out to be much more appealing than trying to surreptitiously change a country-wide vote count in one evening.
Frustration over money in politics certainly was factor too. CBS News estimated that $6.8 billion was spent during the 2016 elections. Seven billion dollars! Well, if you can’t decide how to regulate money in politics, the next best thing, it appears, is to just eliminate the need to spend it at all. There was angst when the suggestion was made, but now everyone wonders why we didn’t make this change earlier given the boost that spending those same dollars on stuff other than political advertising gave to the U.S. economy, especially in the states that had been struggling economically.
The biggest factor, possibly, was Mark Zuckerberg. While his ambitions for political office might have started earlier, 2016 was the year that the media started taking notice. The Silicon Valley tech sector liked to think of itself as disrupting industries to create a better future, and Zuckerberg simply put two and two together. Why should he be forced to get elected the old fashion way? It was messy, expensive, and terribly inefficient.
In 2016, Facebook, Google, and Amazon alone already knew more about each of our likes and dislikes than we knew about ourselves. And they saw that they could acquire this information in what’s today called the shrinking inch, which is a play on the last mile from the telecomm days when telecommunication companies were the most important commercial entities involved in the Internet. No more. Commerce, social, and search companies are now the ones in power, and they have relentlessly moved to eliminate the space between you and their platforms. First they sat on fixed-location desktops fighting for your attention among the many windows on the screen. They then moved to a more prominent position on our smart phones, which we quickly learned were more important than our wallets. Then these companies scattered devices throughout the spaces we live, collecting everything about our every moment. And in their labs right now, these companies are working on ways to integrate their platforms directly into our bodies.
Finally, the incentives align, much to the regret of the Russians. Our data are gold to the Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons of the world. It’s in their interest to ensure that these data are timely and authentic. They still may not protect our data from being eventually stolen, but they benefit from knowing exactly how we feel today.
In Zuckerberg’s amazing mind, this trend was the opportunity. The challenge then became simply a question of the right matching algorithm: integrate, over the entire voting-aged population, what these companies knew about the wants and desires of each U.S. citizen, and then match the result against the characteristics of every U.S. citizen old enough to be the U.S. president, weighted slightly by the requirements of the role of U.S. president.
It is somewhat ironic that a man pushed for this system in the hope that it would improve his chances for election, as we have had nothing but women elected to the Office of the President since.
Samantha tried to think about a range of things she could say next, but only one thought remained. “I wonder if Pops knows that I was elected president.”