The 31st Amendment (Reconstitution Amendment 4)
A first draft of a proposal for the 31st Amendment to the United States Constitution (Reconstitution Amendment 4) for your feedback.
Included in this email is a link to the Reconstitution’s Amendment 4. In the comment section of this post, we invite you to critique it with your whole heart, getting deep into the nitty-gritty if you so desire. As always, you may also set up a voice or video call if you wish to speak with us directly about the piece.
Remember that we want to cultivate coherent, deliberative multilogues that emphasize curiosity, empathy, and humility. Your input will inform and transform our framing. What you comment here might have a significant impact on the final version of Amendment 4.
The guiding question for Amendment 4 is this: What is the purpose of advertising in a society that aspires to be free of coercion and manipulation?
Included in the Framers’ deliberations were these sub-questions:
How do we transform Madison Avenue and ad tech into Consumer Reports and ed tech?
How can advertising rechannel itself toward its own self-justifying aim of empowering consumers with the information that allows us to make informed economic decisions — a more perfect market?
How do we ensure that the economy we contribute to is working for us rather than working on us?
Our conversations included the use of personal data (privacy, curation, and manipulative targeting), the freedom of the press (freedom to report the news and freedom from undue economic influence), and the ecological role of advertising in a human-centered economy. Here’s what we’ve come up with.
We think private entities and commercial organizations should be prohibited from paid-for use of public spaces for a primary purpose of promotion, publicity, or profit, unless such activity has cultural value or is in the public interest. Basically: no more ads in public parks, beaches, streets, highways, and so on. This is a simple one but we see no need to complicate it: we think public spaces should be sacred and free of manipulation by people who just want to sell you something.
Another proposal has to do with private spaces. We think the capture of personal information has gotten out of control. We’re proposing to prohibit the monitoring and collection of personal data—behavioral, biometric, and psychometric—by anyone, governmental or commercial, unless it’s conducted by law enforcement in a manner consistent with due process or unless it’s explicitly consented to.
Other proposals have to do with setting up a pro-social social media platform and guaranteeing certain protections for media outlets insofar as they act in the public interest, guided by truthful intent and toward civic impact, and in which service to the People supersedes profit motives or other pecuniary interests.
What do you think of our framing? Do you think the specific proposals sound reasonable? Are there any ways they could backfire?
If you think we missed any big and important aspects, please tell us! If you have quibbles about the wording, let it be known! As history shows, precedent-setting Constitutional interpretations can hinge on the most unassuming of phrases or even the placement of a comma. Every little detail matters.
Without further ado: here is the link to the Reconstitution Amendment 4.
Thank you for your co-creation. We can’t wait to hear what you think.
Overall this amendment provides an excellent approach to protecting personal, privacy, property data etc.
Section 1 feels like a good way of cutting down on the massive flood of advertising we get all the time, section 2 feels like a modern update to the fourth amendment that covers digital spaces and use of online platforms.
In Section 3, I think clauses 2 and 3 provide an excellent qualifications of section 230 of the communications decency act, particularly clause 3 requiring a mass decentralized peer review system. Wikipedia is the gold standard for online content moderation today.
I am, however, a little concerned about clause 1 of section 3. What are examples of the protections beyond the first amendment that could be provided? Who decides whether "they act in the public interest, guided by truthful intent and toward civic impact, and in which service to the people supersedes profit motives or other pecuniary interests."
In our divided political system both sides in the debate routinely and genuinely perceive the other side as being either bad faith actors who are only interested in stirring up controversy to increase their own money and power or as being unintelligent or uniformed. While there are always bad faith actors on each side, more often than not this is a failure to sufficiently understand the worldview or perspective from which the other side approaches the issue. In this environment it is very difficult to even agree on basic facts. There would be very sharp disagreement about whether a particular media outlet met the listed characteristics.
I feel that this has the potential to create two tiers of media and that the occupants of each tier would shift based on who is in power. Does the broader systemic structure of the Reconstitution alleviate this concern?
I understand the need to incentivize a truer media, but to the extent that one's perception of truth is rooted in a particular worldview, one will tend to view a media organization that inhabits a different worldview as a purveyor of "fake news" even if the basic facts that that media organization uses are strictly speaking true.