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Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
pagre@ucla.edu
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
2,454 words
posted: october 31, 1999
[This is the text of a paper presented at the Media in Transition
Conference at MIT on October 8, 1999.]
Is the Internet a friend of democracy? The prevailing discourse
says no, that the Internet is actually the end of democracy, and
that democratic laws can no longer be enforced. This discourse
is not only hostile to democracy, of
course -- it is hostile to government as such, and it speaks of
"government" in a way that makes no distinction between
constitutional democracy and totalitarian fascism. This is the
legacy of Friedrich Hayek, among others, extremist opponents of
extremism for whom any amount of democracy, no matter how legitimate,
inevitably leads to harder stuff.
Whatever their
utility as political prescriptions, these philosophies have usefully
directed attention to the complex and variegated institutional
field through which the great bulk of any society is actually
organized. Marx had no time for these institutions of civil society,
which he regarded as epiphenomena of the essentially very simple
structures through which a society and its citizens were defined
(Keane 1988). But civil society is now exceedingly popular, in
a striking way, throughout the world and across the political
spectrum (Keane 1998), whether as a counterbalance to the overreaching
of the state, as an integral constituent of democracy, or as the
real and only substance of a free society.
Yet the libertarian
commitment to civil society is unstable. Civil society, almost
by definition, consists of intermediaries: organizations that
orchestrate and subserve a wide variety of social relationships.
But as Dominique Colas (1997) has observed, the concept of civil
society did not enter European social thought as a liberal antidote
to absolutism; its root meaning does not oppose it to the state.
Rather, civil society was originally opposed to certain extreme
forms of Protestantism that, in overthrowing the putative autocracy
of the Church, also sought to destroy all intermediaries and all
representations -- a mystical radicalism that sought to eliminate
all obstacles to an unmediated communion with God. Political and
technical ideas are routinely found to descend from secularized
versions of medieval theology, and thus here the radicalism of
modern libertarians echoes in some detail the origins of the concept
of civil society -- not it supporters but its enemies: the smashers
of idols, the extremist opponents of centralized authority, the
militants seeking not to create their own intermediary institutions
but to eliminate them altogether.
So it is,
for example, that so many contemporary authors who seem to speak
Hayek's language in fact leave no room in their language for government
at all, not even the minimal constitutional framework that is
supposed to administer the rule of law. They are anarchists, and
they are not concerned about money laundering, or pedophiles,
or any of the genuine if overhyped evils of the age. What matters
above all is the power of the network to connect anyone to anyone,
to circumvent anything, to short-circuit any intermediary, and
therefore supposedly to destroy all hierarchies of whatever
sort. The Church hierarchy, the state hierarchy, the monopoly
-- all will be smashed, all destroyed, all of their atoms scattered
by the ecstasy of the bits. This technological teleology, this
electronic eschatology, is, we are given to understand, the information
revolution to end all revolutions.
But it is
not so. Nothing like that is happening. Intermediaries are changing,
to be sure, multiplying and dividing, their functions rebundling
into different configurations, but they are as necessary as ever.
They are consolidating, indeed, increasing their geographic scope.
States are not shrinking, and in fact they are compensating for
the global reach of technology by creating a vast network of undemocratic
and nontransparent global treaty organizations.
Mediation and representation, with all of the good and evil that
they imply, are the very essence of the age. Once we see this,
we can see at last the real upshot of the technology, the real
action that it has already set in motion. It is not the elimination
of civil society, any more than of the state. It is, however,
in both realms, the renegotiation of the working rules of every
institution of society.
This conception of social institutions as sets of working rules
that govern the roles and relationships of their participants
belongs to John Commons (1934). Largely forgotten now, Commons
was the mechanic philosopher of the New Deal. A printer, he eventually
became a professor of economics and public administration at the
University of Wisconsin, and in that position he trained many
members of the generation that built the American welfare state.
As the welfare state has come under ideological assault, Commons
has been forgotten, mentioned only by a handful of legal theorists.
All theories of institutions are largely compatible; they seem
different on the surface because they all overgeneralize from
the particular case with which the author is most familiar. Commons'
theory started from his experience of the negotiation of work
rules in printing shops through collective bargaining, and that
was the paradigm that he brought to every institution he considered.
He did not imagine that every set of rules arises through the
same kind of formal mechanism by which union contracts are negotiated.
He does not presuppose that organized associations of buyers and
sellers will necessarily
delegate representatives to negotiate over a long table the form
contracts and other customary rules that govern a given industry
at a given point in history. Nonetheless, Commons' project was
to investigate the variety of mechanisms by which the stakeholder
groups in a given institution do act collectively to carve out
a space for their own customs and practices
alongside and by compromise with those of everyone else.
Commons saw no better example of this process than the rise and
evolution of the common law, in which successive social classes
-- merchants at one point, industrialists at another, and then
industrial labor -- wrote elements of
their practices and values into the law as it emerged to govern
the particular relationships of institutional life. How this worked
in practice was a matter for investigation. Normatively, the point
was not for any one group to win out, but quite the contrary for
every group to be able to hold its own, neither imposing its complete
set of preferred rules on everyone else nor having anyone else's
rules completely imposed on them.
As increasingly complex social relationships are mediated by networked
information technology, we are becoming accustomed to the idea
that the protocols of these mediated interactions -- the "code"
in Larry Lessig's terms -- constitutes a set of working rules
in very much the sense that Commons suggests. Computers, like
institutions generally, both enable and constrain, and both computers
and institutions are, in one important aspect anyway, discourses
made material -- made, that is, into machinery that governs to
some degree the lives of the people who use it. Even when they
are not formally part of the government, and even when they have
no legal force, institutions and computers both govern, and it
is this much larger sense of governance that Commons views as
the deep underlying unity of democratic government and democratic
society. It is most unlikely, after all, that one can exist without
the other, and if the Internet encourages a democratic society
then it does so by promoting the diverse mechanisms of collective
bargaining by which a democratic society orders its affairs.
The necessity for such mechanisms is clear. By providing a general
mechanism for moving digital information and a general platform
for constructing digital information utilities, the Internet provides
new opportunities; it opens a vast new design space both for technology
in the narrow sense and for the institutionalized social relationships
within which the
Internet is embedded. The Internet also necessitates a renegotiation
of institutional rules in a more urgent way by destabilizing the
balance of forces to which any successful negotiation gives form;
by lending itself to the amplification of some forces and not
others, the Internet undermines many of the institutionalized
accommodations through which stakeholder groups with distinct
interests and powers have gotten along.
It is not only the Internet that has such effects, of course;
control over the legislature is a much more direct means of upsetting
existing institutional arrangements, and more factors than information
technology drive the disruptions of globalization. Nonetheless,
the Internet, far from transporting its believers into the unmediated
perfection of cyberspace, is unfreezing a multitude of thoroughly
secular institutional arrangements right here on earth, and is
posing the challenge of how these arrangements might be remade,
both efficiently and equitably, in a much more digital world.
Fortunately, what the Internet necessitates it also facilitates.
If the working rules of universities will be remade through a
negotiation between professors and students, among others; if
the medical system will be remade through a negotiation between
physicians, patients, and insurers, among others; if the political
system will be remade through a negotiation among citizens and
their representatives, among others; then the main impact of the
Internet has been to provide tools that allow each of these stakeholder
groups to associate and, each in their own way, to press their
interests. Once again the paradigm of collective bargaining can
mislead if it is taken too literally. The point is not that every
social group forms its own union, or even necessarily its own
organization, and the point is not that the Internet necessarily
facilitates any
kind of formal bargaining process. Collective bargaining can be
mediated by a great diversity of institutional forms, and it is
the genius of the Internet to be indifferent to the details of
such things.
The Internet makes visible a layer of social process that is more
fundamental than organizations, and just as fundamental as institutions,
namely the customs by which people who have something in common
think together. Before collective bargaining comes collective
cognition, and collective cognition in its various modes is greatly
facilitated by the various community-building mechanisms of the
Internet. Ideologies can form in the networked community of computer
programmers; news can spread in the networked community of nurses;
experiences can be shared in the networked community of cancer
patients; patterns can be noticed by the networked community of
pilots; agendas can be compared by the networked community of
environmental activists; ideas can be exchanged in the networked
community of entrepreneurs; stories can be told within the networked
community of parents; and so on.
This sort of cognitive pooling is not an unambiguous good, of
course; if taken too far, it can turn the community into a weakened
intellectual monoculture. Nonetheless, in many cases the Internet
is amplifying collective cognition in ways that equalize playing
fields for all. Cancer patients must no longer confront the medical
and insurance systems as individuals. Parents can listen to other
parents who have been in their shoes. Small players can learn
what angles the big players are likely to work. Collective cognition
is not the same as collective action, much less formally organized
collective bargaining. But it is the soil from which these more
complex phenomena of solidarity grow. Without the habits of association,
without the cultivated taste for sharing, without the concrete
experience of helping others and being helped in turn, without
the very idea that others face the same situation as you, a democratic
culture cannot grow. Whatever its failings, the Internet fertilizes
the soil of democratic culture.
The question, of course, is whether it does so enough -- whether
the Internet provides the conditions for every social group, no
matter how spread out, to take its rightful place at the table,
to play its own role in renegotiating all of
the social institutions in which it takes part. And the answer,
just as clearly, is no. No technology is ever a sufficient condition
for anything. It facilitates, but it doesn't do the job for us.
To truly build a democratic society, it will be necessary to build
new social forms -- new ideas, new movements, and new organizations
that are adequate the opportunities and challenges of a networked
world.
The role of political organizations must change. No longer must
an organization carry the full burden of organizing the collective
cognition of the social group that it claims to represent. This
is good when it frees resources for other purposes, and it is
bad when it reduces the binding force that makes membership in
an organization attractive in the first place. It is good when
it reduces the arbitrary power of the intermediaries through whom
the information had flowed, and it is bad when it makes consensus-building
and leadership impossible. What, then, is the role of an organization
in a
networked world? An organization can put people into complex situations
like legislatures and standards bodies, where there is still no
substitute for being there. It can conduct the research that requires
pulling together more information than any individual could manage.
It can maintain the relationships that make actual negotiations
possible. And it can build the
legitimacy that is required to call for a solidary action. These
are all classical functions of an organization, and they will
not go away. But they will all happen in a much more dynamic environment,
and they will only work if they draw upon and encourage the power
of collective cognition, rather than trying to channel it. This
is hard, because it is much easier to deal with a centralized
representative than a sprawling associative community. But it
is the democratic way, and it is the principal hope today for
a democratic society.
This perspective on democracy certainly has its limitations. Commons
had a clear conception of institutions, but the language of collective
bargaining was dangerously indeterminate in its prescriptions
for the political system, as his misguided endorsement of Mussolini's
corporate state suggests. But this is perhaps the central question
of democracy in its newly wired manifestation: what is the proper
relationship between collective cognition among communities of
shared interest and the actual formal mechanisms of the state?
Unequal access to the means of association is already a tremendous
force for inequality, especially in the United States where professionalized
lobbying on behalf of the powerful has been raised to a high art.
The answer cannot ride on the sort of bargaining that can be bought.
Instead, it must ride on the massed creativity of a diverse people
in diverse situations, all bringing their own experience to bear
on the situations of others. If the Internet is a friend of democracy
then democracy will be won principally on the ground, and the
central task for democratic theory right now is to understand
this ground, and to be useful to the innumerable people of
good will who are out there trying to build on it.
References
Dominique Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories,
translated by Amy Jacobs, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997.
John R. Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political
Economy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1934.
John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of
European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem
of Controlling Social and Political Power, London: Verso, 1988.
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