[24 hours of democracy] I N T E R N E T A N D D E M O C R A C Y [ Prev | Next | Index ] [ Philippe Palaz's contribution | express yourself ] Author: Michel Bauwens, mbauwens@innet.be, 22-Feb-1996.. Produced with the assistance of io communications. The following mini-essay, written on occasion of the "24 hours for democracy" initiative is an attempt to define the potential benefits of the internet for democratic societies, and to look at potential dangers as well. T H E P O S I T I V E In all societies, power is based on two main fundaments. The very first is the naked power of the gun. No social order can persist, at least in inegalitarian societies, without the monopoly of military might which is entrusted to the state. The second important factor is the consent of the governed. Both elements are needed to achieve a stable social order. No government can survive based on might alone and this is particularly so in democratic societies, where the consent of the governed has to be explicitly given every few years. The important question is: how can one achieve such consent. The answer is that a world view has to be shared by the majority that the current social order is the best, the only one possible, or at least, the lesser of evils. Such a world view depends to a great extent on information, which may or may not contradict the existing predominant world view. A small amount of dissonant information is not a problem as such dissonance can be explained away; a large amount of dissonance however, may invariably lead to a questioning of the status quo. As Lincoln said: you can fool somebody all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time; but you can"t fool everybody all of the time". Hence, the importance of information in the democratic process. Our current democratic societies are characterised by a plurality of competing power centers, and by a plurality of information sources. This balance is theoretically and practically guaranteed by the freedom of the press. A honest analysis will force us to conclude, with Noam Chomsky, that the freedom of the press is the freedom of those who own one, and that hence we do live, to a great extent, in a era of "manufactured consent". Indeed, in a mass society with mass media such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines, the entry price to be a publisher/broadcaster is quite high, and therefore, limited to corporations and organisations with a large financial backing. It is in that context that the internet changes the rules of the game. One of the innovative features of the internet is that it combines within the same medium, both the features of mass media (the ability to reach massive numbers of people), and the features of personal media. This combination makes it so that on the internet every recipient is indeed also a broadcaster. The entry price to become a publisher, a radio broadcaster, a television station, has become dramatically lower. It is now possible to potentially reach large numbers of people, for what is, compared to traditional mass media, a marginal investment. This fact raises the number of people able to broadcast a message. What the internet does on the costing side is to lower the transactional costs of doing business (and this includes political busy-ness), and of organising. It may be said that the internet is, and will become, a major tool for the self-organising of social groups. Combine both the hypothesis of cheaper information diffusion and self-organising and you get the effect of diffusing "information power" and hence "power" itself, to a much larger amount of actors. This will both rebalance power relationships in the public sphere, but may perhaps lead, over a certain, to a another kind of society: a move away from mass society, towards a more diffuse kind of networked society, based on the co-existence of varied subcultures. For a description of such a kind of society, read the "Diamond Age", a "near-future" science-fiction book by Neal Stephenson. I must admit I find his scenarios on the withering away of the central state, and its replacement by a network of networks, i.e. societies (cultures) co-existing within the same " spaces", a rather compelling view of the future. Even if that future won"t be so radical, the "fragmentation" effect of the internet cannot be denied. Such an evolution does pose the problem of how we will organise our collective physical spaces. Apart from that, I consider the internet to be a social laboratory for trying out new ways of developing self-government for the social groups using the internet. I would particularly mention trials like the autonomous "cyberspace countries" like Terra Libra, Oceania, Nexus, and the "social contract" experiments of the Extropians. Even though they are not yet compelling, from these varied experiments may proceed innovative practices. Cyberspace is a "living space" and these people are trying out social practices that may be common for the rest of us in a decade or so. Another important innovation of the internet is the collective discussion that it enables. Indeed, since the Greek Forum, it has not been possible to implement many-to-many dialogue on such a grand scale. True, most newsgroups are of a deplorable quality, but their existence is significant. With more experience, better software, these tools may be adjunct to democratic processes, for example in the information gathering phases. Used intelligently, computer conferencing software has positive potential. But even used spontaneously as it is now, it is not without effects on the political process. Again the reason is that such uncensored forums do create uncontrolled information flows which cannot be controlled by the mass media and the "powers that be". The transactional nature of the internet adds the dimension of enabling participation in the decision-making process itself, because it allows easy polling and voting. It has been noted that such may lead to push-button democracy and to a kind of online "mob" rule. I"m quite sensitive to that charge and do not think that the ability for impulse voting would be an advance. However, I do place my hope that clever conferencing software will lead to new democratic procedures involving larger numbers of citizens in the decision-making process. Most effective would probably be a combination of both electronic and physical semi-direct democracy. It still won"t be perfect democracy (if such can exist in "real life"), but it would be a broadening of the existing processes and a necessary corrective to the skewed rules of today. What about the famous egalitarian features of the internet?Lots has been written about the potential of the internet to do away with hierarchies. Indeed, on the internet "nobody knows if you"re a dog ... or a manager". Most users have experienced this directly, and research in corporations tends to prove that more people do indeed participate creatively to problem-solving when such conferencing software is implemented. Feminists scholars on the other hand, have conducted research which points in the other direction: that sexism does indeed persist. Attitudes from real life do not suddenly disappear in "virtual life". However, networked companies do change because management can no longer control all information flows. Hence power diffuses to lower echelons ("empowerment"), while centralisation is replaced by even greater coordination ("topsight"). I"m convinced that the same process of diffusion will take place in a broader social context as well. We can already witness today that the bureaucratic logic of old, where "what I know that you don"t know" is the basis of power, is replaced by the cyberocratic logic, where "the more I participate to the network, the more I promote the knowledge transfer and hence the competitiveness of my company". This is an altogether positive development. The last argument points to the main feature of cyberspace: that it is a collective mental environment, "a country of the mind" as John Perry Barlow calls it. The internet, and networks in general, are "brains connected in real-time". This simple fact will make it much more difficult for the powers that be to manipulate information flows. Mass media are ideals tool for propaganda, as they cannot be countered. The same is not true of the internet, where every idea can be countered. Corporations and governments will have a harder time in their public relations activities. Generally, I do believe that the existence of such a collective and global forum, will force organisations to act more ethically and truthfully, because the price for dishonesty will be so much higher in such an environment. Lest I be accused of undue optimism or utopianism: with the summing up of all arguments above, I"m not implying a "better society", but I do think that there will be a diffusion of information flows and hence of power, with more chances for minority viewpoints to be heard, or at least to globally self-organise themselves. As Kevin Kelly says in his book: information, and the knowledge it can produce, is now "out of control". T H E N E G A T I V E S As historians pointed out, the invention of mass printing, did undermine the monopoly of information of the Church and the feudal order, and it eventually led to the formation of national states and democracy. But lest we forget, in a long intermediate period, it did lead to the first authoritarian nation-states, to the Inquisition, and to widespread civil war. So we should be very careful when predicting opportunities. We should carefully look at negatives. First, there are the problems associated with the measurability of everything digital: the potential for subtle and not so subtle control, for gross invasion of privacy, is very real. The very weapon against such control, i.e. encryption, creates as many problems as it solves, because it paradoxically allows certain forces to further elude the law (the notorious hyped-up trio of the mafia, terrorists and child abusers). In general, one could say that if destructive and authoritarian/totalitarian political forces would again gain the ascendancy, their toolbox would be dramatically enhanced, and so would be the possibilities of the opposition. Thus, while cyberspace does not directly lead to democracy, it offers lots of possibilities of conducting resistance, and it dramatically "raises the stakes" of the political game. An equally serious problem is the one of the haves and the have-nots. Here I am more optimistic than most. I believe that the political, social, and educational effort to help people use computers, is immeasurably easier than our historically successful effort to teach people to read (at least in the western world). In these same countries, universal access will be a realistic goal. But while the internet will naturally be a dominant medium for knowledge workers (soon to be half of the working population), it will require a public effort to "digitise" larger sectors of the population. I"m more concerned with the cognitive abilities, which are necessary to navigate such a complex information space. All these problems will be compounded in the under-privileged parts of the world. Again, it will be important to deal squarely with this challenge. Perhaps the internet will have the opposite effect, and will be considered a leapfrog technology by these countries, who will use the dramatic new knowledge transfers to develop new sectors and so de-localise even more industries. This at least is the point of view of George Gilder, who points out how Southeast Asian countries have dramatically benefited from information technology. Another concern is this: in a medium where it is hard to "sell" information (because there is an overabundance of free information), advertising becomes primordial, and this may skew the independence of the cyberspace press. Noam Chomsky has expressed concern that progressive magazines may find it more difficult to sell their paper versions, now that their readers are clamouring for free web sites. Referring to the points in the previous section on the "fragmentation effect" of the net: I consider this to be the most far-reaching and subversive effect of the net. Indeed, until now, all politics have been local, and their are simply no agreed upon processes in place, in order to deal with an atomisation of society. There will be other and more dramatic negatives, still unknown to us to this day, and I personally suspect most of them will be the result of us having to deal with a permanent overflow of information. Each historical epoch has a "problem to solve": feeding the people (the agricultural age), providing them with material well-being (the industrial age), and now we are living the information age (with as task the universal availabity of information in a collective "noosphere"). In each epoch we go from problems of scarcity (hunger, poverty, information poverty) to problems of over-abundance. Most of our problems today, in the western world at least, are problems related to an overabundance of food (most modern diseases), of material wealth (pollution), and today information (information anxiety and stress). How to deal with a permanent excess of information will be the key challenge of the near future. C O N C L U S I O N There are two main attitudes towards technology and the internet in particular. One is to embrace it and to look at the potentialities. The danger here is to think that a potentiality is an actuality and hence to become a "digital utopianist". The second attitude is to focus on the negatives and dangers, and to adopt either the cynical attitude of the permanently dissatisfied, or the active opposition towards technology which is so typical of the so-called "neo-Luddittes". Unlike the digital utopians, whose promised land lies in the future, the utopia of the techno-opposition lies in a golden age in the past. I"ll allow myself to opt for a third attitude: an attitude that embraces technology, both because it is unavoidable and has the weight and trust of history behind it, and because it does indeed enhance human abilities and freedom. It moves mankind from a realm of necessity, to a realm of increasing freedom. But it has to be an attitude that wants everybody to share its positive fruits. Such a movement would be a democratic technology movement. It would embrace the democratic potential of the internet, by actively working for their practical realisation. Opportunities must be taken, else they disappear and their vacuum is filled by negative alternatives. A democratic technology movement would actively develop democracy-enhancing tools. It would actively fight to broaden the benefits of technology to all potential have nots. It would actively fight to preserve our hard-won democratic freedoms, in this new dimension of life. The internet will produce the good, the bad and the ugly. Let"s enjoy the good, fight the bad, and beautify the ugly. Cynicism is the last thing we need in a world heading towards an unprecedented ecological catastrophe. Let"s use technology, and the internet, to undo the damage wrought by the industrial revolution. Let"s opt for a new covenant between nature, humanity and technology. Such a covenant is only possible in a democratic society, a real democratic society, without "manufactured consent" and enhanced by the worldwide networking tools such as the internet. So yes, I believe the internet has promise for democracy, if we do seize the historic opportunity it gives us. [iocom logo] io communication © 1996, Michel Bauwens & io communication. Last update: 22-Feb-1996; 20:41:17 (http://www.iocom.be/thepilot/internetanddemocracy.html)