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 rôle 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’ rôle 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.