Andrew MacDougall: Can Democracy Survive the Attention Economy?

The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail, and the Canadian Climate Institute. Greetings, you curiouser and curiouser Herle Burly-ites! When Ukrainian drones hit the Russian internet giant Yandex this week, bot traffic and propaganda posts reportedly fell off a cliff. That tells you something about how manufactured and polluted our information space has become. Andrew MacDougall, five-time Herle Burly guest, former Director of Communications for Prime Minister Harper, now partner at Trafalgar Strategy in London, and senior policy fellow at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, joins David to explain the attention economy. Are we paying big tech with our time and our brains instead of our money? And is it taking a wrecking our mental health and our democracy? Andrew argues that regulators have spent years trying to clean up the mess instead of shutting off the machine that makes it. He wants to go after the business model itself: make people pay for social media, end anonymous accounts, and use competition and product liability law against addictive design. David offers a few counterpoints. He points out that Canada has managed a genuine national consensus in the face of Trump 2.0, and the two dig into why Mark Carney's steady, analogue style is landing with anxious voters. Then they tackle the AI wave about to supercharge all of it, and why governments are doing nothing about it while 75% of Canadians want it regulated. Is democracy about to fall into the gap between our Paleolithic brains and godlike technology? Have a listen. Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app. Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube. The sponsored ads contained in the podcast are the expressed views of the sponsor and not those of the publisher.