Networked democracy
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact,
prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help
a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of
fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. The very
survival of democracy as a functional reality is dependent upon our
acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and
stewarding the shape and direction of society.
Religions and ideologies are terrific things, so long as no one
actually believes in them. While absolute truths may exist, it is
presumptuous for anyone to conclude he has found and comprehended one.
True, the adoption of an absolutist frame of reference serves many
useful purposes. An accepted story can unify an otherwise diverse
population, provide widespread support for a single regime and
reassure people in times of stress. Except for the resulting
ethnocentrism, repression of autonomy and stifling of new ideas, such
static templates can function well for quite a while. Dictators from
Adolph Hitler to Idi Amin owed a good part of their success to their
ability to develop ethnically based mythologies that united their
people under a single sense of identity. The Biblical myth of Jacob
and his sons served to unify formerly non-allied desert tribes (with
the same names as Jacob's sons) in ancient Sinai. They not only
conquered much of the region, but created a fairly stable regime for
centuries.
So these stories enable a certain kind of functionality. Their
relative stasis, if protected against the effects of time by
fundamentalists, can allow for the adoption and implementation of
long-term projects that span generations, even centuries. But when one
group's absolute truth bumps up against another group's absolute
truth, only conflict can result.
New technologies, global media, and the spread of international
corporate conglomerates have forced just such a clash of worldviews.
While cultures have been reckoning with the impact of cosmopolitanism
since even before the first ships crossed the Mediterranean, today's
proliferation of media, products and their associated sensibilities,
as well as their migration across formerly discreet boundaries, are
unprecedented in magnitude.
Globalism, at least as it is envisioned by the more expansionist
advocates of free market capitalism, only exacerbates the most
dangerously retrograde strains of xenophobia. The market's global
aspirations (as expressed by Global Business Network co-founder Peter
Schwartz's slogan "Open markets good. Closed markets bad. Tattoo it on
your forehead"4) amount to a whitewash of regional cultural values.
They are as reductionist as the tenets of any fundamentalist religion.
In spite of the strident individualism of this brand of globalist
rhetoric, it leaves no room for independent thinking or personal
choice, except insofar as they are permitted by one's consumption
decisions or the way one chooses to participate in the profit-making
game. Mistaking the arbitrary and man-made rules of the marketplace
for a precondition of the natural universe, corporate capitalism's
globalist advocates believe they are liberating the masses from the
artificially imposed restrictions of their own forms of religion and
government. Perceiving the free market model as the way things really
are, they ignore their own fabrications, while seeing everyone else's
models as impediments to the natural and rightful force of evolution.
As a result, globalism to almost anyone but a free market advocate,
has come to mean the spread of the Western corporate value system to
every other place in the world. Further, the bursting of the dot.com
bubble, followed by the revelation of corporate malfeasance and
insider trading, exposed corporate capitalism's dependence on myths;
stories used to captivate and distract the public while the
storytellers ran off with the funds. The spokespeople for globalism
began to be perceived as if they were the 15th century Catholic
missionaries that preceded the Conquistadors, preparing indigenous
populations for eventual colonisation. The free market came to be
understood as just another kind of marketing. Globalism was reduced,
in the minds of most laypeople, to one more opaque mythology used to
exploit the uninitiated majority.
Networked democracy: learning from natural interconnectivity
The current renaissance offers new understandings of what it might
mean to forge a global society that transcends the possibilities
described by the language of financial markets. It might not be too
late to promote a globalism modelled on cooperation instead of
competition, and on organic interchange instead of financial
transaction.
Again, our renaissance insights and inventions aid us in our quest for
a more dimensionalised perspective on our relationship to one another.
Rather famously the first renaissance elevated the Catholic mass into
a congregation of Protestant readers. Thanks to the printing press and
the literacy movement that followed, each person could enjoy his or
her own personal relationship to texts and the mythologies they
described. Our own renaissance offers us the opportunity to enhance
the dimensionality of these relationships even further, as we
transform from readers into writers.
It's no coincidence that early internet users became obsessed with the
fractal images they were capable of producing. The reassuring
self-similarity of these seemingly random graphs of non-linear
equations, evoked the shapes of nature. One simple set of fractal
equations, iterated through a computer, could produce a
three-dimensional image of a fern, a coastline or a cloud. Zooming in
on one small section revealed details and textures reflective of those
on other levels of magnification. Indeed, each tiny part appeared to
reflect the whole.
For early internet users, sitting alone in their homes or offices,
connected to one another only by twisted pairs of copper phone lines,
the notion of being connected, somehow, in the manner of a fractal was
quite inspiring. They began to study new models of interconnectivity
and group mind, such as James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Rupert
Sheldrakes theory of morphogenesis, to explain and confirm their
growing sense of non-local community. By the mid 1990s many internet
users began to see the entire planet as a single organism, with human
beings as the neurons in a global brain. The internet, according to
this scheme, was the neural network being used to wire up this brain
so that it could function in a coordinated fashion. In another model
for group mind, this time celebrated among the rave counterculture,
this connectivity was itself a pre-existing state. The internet was
merely a metaphor, or outward manifestation, of a psychic connection
between human beings that was only then being realised: the
holographic reality.
As functioning models for cooperative activity, these notions are not
totally unsupported by nature. Biologists studying complex systems
have observed coordinated behaviours between creatures that have no
hierarchical communication scheme, or even any apparent communication
scheme whatsoever. The coral reef, for example, exhibits remarkable
levels of coordination even though it is made up of millions of tiny
individual creatures. Surprisingly, perhaps, the strikingly harmonious
behaviour of the collective does not repress the behaviour of the
individual. In fact the vast series of interconnections between the
creatures allows any single one of them to serve as a 'remote high
leverage point' influencing the whole. When one tiny organism decides
it is time for the reproductive cycle to begin, it triggers a
mechanism through which hundreds of miles of coral reef can change
colour within hours.
Another more immediately observable example is the way women living
together will very often synchronise in their menstrual cycles. This
is not a fascistic scheme of nature, supplanting the individual
rhythms of each member, but a way for each member of the social
grouping to become more attuned and responsive to the subtle shifts in
one another's physical and emotional states. Each member has more, not
less, influence over the whole.
These models of phase-locking and self-similarity, first studied by
the chaos mathematicians but eventually adopted by the culture of the
internet, also seemed to be reflected in the ever-expanding
mediaspace. The notion of remote high leverage points (a butterfly
flapping its wings in Brazil leading to a hurricane in New York) was
now proven every day by a datasphere capable of transmitting a single
image globally in a matter of minutes. A black man being beaten by
white cops in Los Angeles is captured on a home video camera and
appears on television sets around the globe overnight. Eventually,
this 30-second segment of police brutality leads to full-scale urban
rioting in a dozen American cities.
These models for interactivity and coordinated behavior may have been
launched in the laboratory, but they were first embraced by
countercultures. Psychedelics enthusiasts (people who either ingested
substances such as LSD or found themselves inspired by the art,
writing and expression of the culture associated with these drugs)
found themselves drawn to technologies that were capable of
reproducing both the visual effects of their hallucinations as well as
the sense of newfound connection with others.
Similarly, the computer and Internet galvanized certain strains of
both the pagan and the grassroots 'do-it-yourself' countercultures as
the 'cyberpunk' movement, which was dedicated to altering reality
through technology, together. Only now are the social effects of these
technologies being considered by political scientists for what they
may teach us about public opinion and civic engagement.
The underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and
in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually
beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. The term
scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a
community is 'emergence'.
As we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a
colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top:
the queen. It turns out that this is not the way individuals in the
complex insect society know what to do. It is not a hierarchical
system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. The
amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a
collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. In a sense,
it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. The
collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon.
Likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all
around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. Most of the
time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their
business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for
food and moving about on its own. But when conditions worsen, food
becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct
creatures coalesce into a single being. The large mass of slime moves
about, amassing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more
hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual
creatures. The collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned
through millennia of evolution. But it is only activated when the
group is under threat. The processes allowing for these alternative
strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only
beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in
understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations.
At first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the
behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap
backwards. An individual human consciousness is infinitely more
advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. But
coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly
structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical
precursors to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, thanks
to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks,
we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body
politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and
maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking
premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it.
This is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open
access to the internet in the early 1990s would herald a new era of
teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the
collective will into public affairs. The emergence of a networked
culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion
and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political
system wherever it spread.
But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former Clinton
pollster Dick Morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat
effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new
versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next
phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites
amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the
gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the
day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy
to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for
a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally
flawed vision of push-button politics. That's the vision shared by
most teledemocracy champions today.
So what went wrong? Why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely
networked engagement in public affairs?
Interference in the emergence
First, by casting itself in the role of cultural and institutional
watchdog, governments, particularly in the United States, became
internet society's enemy. Though built with mostly US government
dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be
impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of
information, images and ideas that the network spread. The
government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of pornography
and the fear of terrorism. The result was a tirade of ill-conceived
legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. New decency
laws aimed at curbing pornography (which were ultimately struck down)
elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. Unsubstantiated and
bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law
enforcement into the Keystone Cops of cyberspace and the US Justice
Department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most
valuable members. Misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing
the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries
turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (This
tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven
internet is contrasted by the early participation of the UK's Labour
government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as
community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially
exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists.
Of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent UK internet
industry, which saw its slow start compared with the US and other
developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and
anti-competitive funding policies.)
So, the US government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture.
Every effort was made to diminish state control over the global
telecommunications infrastructure. The internet itself, a government
project, soon fell into private hands (Internic, and eventually
industry consortiums). For just as a bacteria tends to grow unabated
without the presence of fungus, so too does corporate power grow
without the restrictive influence of government.
This in itself may not have been so terrible. E-commerce certainly has
its strengths and the economic development associated with a
profit-driven internet creates new reasons for new countries to get
their populations online. But an interactive marketplace is not
fertile soil for networked democracy or public participation. As we
have seen, the objective of marketers online is to reduce
interactivity, shorten consideration and induce impulsive purchases.
That's why the software and interfaces developed for the commercial
webspace tended to take user's hands off the keyboard and onto the
mouse. The most successful programs, for them, lead people to the
'buy' button and let them use the keyboard only to enter their credit
card numbers and nothing else. The internet that grew from these
development priorities, dominated by the World Wide Web instead of
discussion groups, treats individuals more as consumers than as
citizens. True, consumers can vote with their dollars, and that in a
way feels something like direct communication with the entity in
charge - the corporation. But this is not a good model for government.
Sadly, though, it's the model being used to implement these first
efforts at teledemocracy. And it's why these efforts suffer from the
worst symptoms of consumer culture: they focus on short-term ideals,
they encourage impulsive, image-driven decision-making and they aim to
convince people that their mouse-clicking is some kind of direct
action. Anyone arguing against such schemes must be an enemy of the
public will, an elitist. Teledemocracy is a populist revival, after
all, isn't it?
Perhaps. But the system of representation on which most democracies
were built was intended to buffer the effects of such populist
revivals. Although they may not always (or even frequently) live up to
it, our representatives' role is to think beyond short-term interests
of the majority. They are elected to protect the rights of minority
interests, the sorts of people and groups who are now increasingly
cast as 'special interest groups'.
Achieving the promise of network democracy
The true promise of a network-enhanced democracy lies not in some form
of web-driven political marketing survey, but in restoring and
encouraging broader participation in some of the internet's more
interactive forums. Activists of all stripes now have the freedom and
facility to network and organise across vast geographical, national,
racial and even ideological differences. And they've begun to do so.
The best evidence we have that something truly new is going on is our
mainstream media's inability to understand it. Major American news
outlets are still incapable of acknowledging the tremendous breadth of
the WTO protest movement because of the multiplicity of cooperating
factions within it. Unable to draw out a single, simplified rationale
that encompasses the logic of each and every protestor, traditional
media storytellers conclude that there is no logic at all. (Just as I
am writing this section, a newscaster on CNBC, reporting from a WTO
demonstration, is condescendingly laughing at the word 'neo-liberal'
on a placard, believing that the teen protestor holding it has
invented the term!) In actuality, the multi-faceted rationale
underlying the WTO protests confirm both their broad based support, as
well as the quite evolved capacity of its members to coalesce across
previously unimaginable ideological chasms. Indeed, these obsolete
ideologies are themselves falling away as a new dynamic emerges from
nascent political organism.
For politicians who mean to lead more effectively in such an
environment, the interactive solution may well be a new emphasis on
education, where elected leaders use the internet to engage with
constituents and justify the decisions they have made on our behalf,
rather than simply soliciting our moment-to-moment opinions.
Politicians cannot hope to reduce the collective will of their entire
constituencies into a series of yes or no votes on the issues put
before them. They can, however, engage the public in an ongoing
exploration and dialogue on issues and their impacts, and attempt to
provide a rationale for their roles in the chamber in which they
participate. They must accept that their constituents are capable of
comprehending legislative bodies as functioning organisms. In doing
so, politicians will relieve themselves of the responsibility for
hyping or spinning their decisions and instead use their time with the
public to engage them in the evolution of the legislative process.
Like teachers and religious leaders, whose roles as authority figures
have been diminished by their students' and congregants' direct access
to formerly secret data, politicians too must learn to function more
like partners than parents.
In doing so, they will leave the certainty of 20th century political
ideologies behind, and admit to the open-ended and uncertain process
of societal co-authorship. Whatever model they choose must shun static
ideologies, and instead acknowledge the evolutionary process through
which anything resembling progress is made.