In Chapter 4, we turn to the contemporary manifestations of the managerial approach. To the extent that we view digital technology as a problem, we tend to think of it as a problem with managerial solutions. In other words, we tend to believe that the right experts, in the right institutions, focusing on the right questions, could make the harms of digital technology disappear. Some want to erect new administrative agencies or private “oversight boards” to govern digital life; some want to empower courts to address the “addictive” features of social media; others prefer to use public officials and NGOs to put pressure on technology platforms themselves. In each of these cases, reformers call on private or public managers to resurrect the goods of robust associations without defending associations themselves. We show that seemingly disparate efforts to address “digital addiction,” fight the “loneliness epidemic,” combat “misinformation,” regulate AI development, and reimagine “privacy” all fall into this same trap. These are often misguided attempts to respond to problems better understood and addressed as the consequences of a social order in which intermediary associations lack the three powers.

In Chapter 3, we trace the origins of the “managerial approach” to technology regulation. In the twentieth century, as mass communication weakened America’s associational life, reformers increasingly entrusted experts and managers with the task of producing social goods such as civility and accurate information. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has increasingly extended robust First Amendment rights to mass media companies, paving the way to an emerging status quo in which digital platforms themselves are “protected speakers” because they “select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products." Radically constraining the scope of technology regulation, courts have strengthened the authority of private managers over the terms of social life. The modern First Amendment, which once protected the autonomy of robust associations in the public sphere, has come to do the exact opposite: protect the forces of homogenization that undermine robust associations. Meanwhile, even private actors risk offending the rights of platforms when they attempt to build third-party applications – known as “middleware” – that interoperate with dominant platforms to empower users to modify platform features.

As Chapter 1 discusses, one of the most consistent conservative critiques of social media platforms is that social media is biased against conservative content. A common policy proposal to address this is to regulate such platforms as common carriers. Doing so would require social media platforms to host, on a nondiscriminatory basis, all legal user content and to permit all users to access platforms on equal terms. While this seems an attractive idea – after all, who could object to nondiscrimination – it is not. For one thing, the Supreme Court has now recognized that social media platforms possess "editorial rights" under the First Amendment to control what content they carry, block, and emphasize in their feeds. So, regulating platforms as common carriers, as Texas and Florida have sought to do, is unconstitutional. It is also a terrible idea. Requiring platforms to carry all content on a nondiscriminatory basis, even if limited to legal content (which it would be hard to do) would flood user feeds with such lawful-but-awful content as pornography, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda. This in turn would destroy social media as a usable medium, to the detriment of everyone.