blaug at sea

Commentary on digital democracy, the impact of the Internet and recent uses of social networking to organise resistance, is either strongly optimistic or equally pessimistic. Seldom is the actual contribution of the information revolution to recent outbreaks of democracy treated in a more careful manner. On one side, we are stirred by declarations of a new and free public sphere, of one-to-many communications and celebrations of people power. On the other, all is junk, information pollution, proprietorial wars and state surveillance of citizens. What, then, does the net do for democracy?

To answer, we require the lens afforded by recent research that examines organisations in terms of the way they process information. Informational economics, epistemic democracy, pragmatist methodology, social epistemology and deliberative democracy all stress the information gains of particular organisational structures – especially of democratic forms.[1] At its simplest, we can see that democracy is superior to authoritarianism because it uses ‘many heads’ instead of one. It does not waste citizens, but instead values their informational input and their differing points of view. Thus, Hilary Putnam is able to assert, “Democracy is the precondition for the full application of human intelligence to the solution of social problems,” and to do so by virtue of its apparent ability to draw on diverse sources of information.[2] We can also consider debate and deliberation as processes of information sharing and preference refinement, and decision-making as an information bottleneck.

In his examination of information filters and flows in ancient Athens, Josiah Ober identifies three information-processing functions of the weekly public Assembly, here in an effort to ‘explain the historical puzzle of Athenian exceptionalism.’[3] These, he suggests, are Aggregation (combination), wherein information is gathered together, shared and tested in public; Alignment (preference sorting), in which large numbers of diverse preferences are ordered and shaped behind selected outcomes; and Codification (the provision of guidance for action), whereby the implementation of decisions is facilitated by individuals following agreed-upon rules. Across all these informational gains, Ober argues, Athens enjoyed the low transaction costs afforded by talking in a whole series of interlocking public forums. It is certainly correct to say, as do many modern commentators, that social networking offers information exchanges at a very low transaction cost and also at great speed. What then, of combination, preference sorting and guidance for implementation?

Social networking does combination really well. With a single click, thousands can contribute information and vast quantities of data suddenly become available. It is this capacity that enables what has been called ‘democracy by disclosure’.[4] There are numerous examples where the net has contributed new information, shone light on unacceptable corporate and government behaviour and threatened elite rule with its second greatest fear: transparency. Famously, World.com, Shell, US health care providers and governments have felt the discipline of public attention brought to bear by Wikileaks, Twitter, Facebook and sites like Indymedia and the Information Clearing House. The Internet thus enables the pooling of vast new sources of information. It does this at great speed and at minimal cost. The more points of view available, the more likely it is that something rather nearer the truth will emerge; something more than government press releases and corporate lies. Lots of knowledge is good for democracy, and the capacity of the net to combine knowledge makes it a valuable friend indeed.

Of course, these combinatory benefits are also available to those inside the citadels of power. Corporations and governments make use of precisely this capacity to track, measure, predict, film, capture, cure, sell to and kill. Fears of the surveillance state are thus well founded, for they are based on a step change in information management by elites, here afforded by the information revolution and its ability to aggregate and interrogate information.

Combination also explains the extraordinary effectiveness of the Internet in enabling the coordination of collective activity. Incoming information to noticeboards, Twitter and messaging, allows many to act together, to go to the same place and do the same thing. Crowds, riots, protests, boycotts and denials of service again feature the net’s ability to pool information, and it is this that stimulates the first and greatest fear of ruling elites, that of mass citizen action. Lots of people are in the square and the net is humming with information. Now what?

It is when we ask about the Internet’s ability to align information that we notice a problem. Alignment, or preference sorting behind a decision, requires multiple and diverse points of view to be grouped, shaped and arranged behind selected outcomes. While the combination of knowledge is of tremendous importance and power, alignment must follow. Here, we confront the need for a decision, a social choice, and thus of a decision-making process that somehow moves from many individual and group preferences to one agreed-upon collective preference. This is perhaps the oldest problem in politics, for it seeks to move beyond the assembled (and well informed) citizenry and towards asking ‘what should we do?’

Mostly, we make collective decisions by voting, by showing and counting individual preferences. But voting is a paltry and binary activity; it carries no gradations of preference intensity and so delivers little information. Still less is learned of the collective choice when we are offered only electoral democracy, spin and millionaire party hacks to vote for. These ‘representatives’ of the people, despite their obvious corruption and incompetence, then make decisions through a carefully immunised parliamentary process. Kenneth Arrow, building on the work of Condorcet, de Borda and Lewis Carroll, showed definitively that no value-free method of crunching individual preferences into a social choice could possibly exist.[5] Some values must inform this transition, some principles of sorting and even some agreement on what constitutes a majority. A political decision is an information bottleneck: it shrinks from the complexity of combination to the focus of alignment. This moment is at the very core of politics, and constitutes a trick that Ober argues was achieved in democratic Athens. Their decision-making process amounted to a network of discussions, deliberations, religious offerings, rhetorical ploys and displays of civic virtue. In this way, they tweaked and shifted and felt their way towards a social choice. Gradually, they became a plural subject, able to commit individually to a collectively agreed end.[6] They knew how to do combination, and they knew how to align behind a decision. Ober goes on to examine their various efforts at codification and the effectiveness of their policy implementation. But now the deficiency of the Internet becomes apparent: for it leaves unchanged the fundamental political problem of arriving at a social choice. It is this that now reappears in the new and virtual public sphere, and reminds us that even the net has its limits.

If we inspect the many sites that offer processes of deliberation and decision-making, we notice how poor we have become in our capacity to make collective choices. Time and again, sites merely combine information, with comments and lists and boxes pouring in from all sides. Yes there is argumentation, but when it comes to alignment, most conduct a rudimentary count, a virtual vote or survey, so that the process of actively constructing a plural subject is impeded. Worse still, the ideological values that (must) underlie the algorithms for crunching many individual preferences into one social preference are occluded. Alignment, it seems, is not much aided by Facebook, and may require the physical enactment of a network of forums feeding a public assembly. This would suggest that if the net is to really help democracy, it will eventually provide nothing short of a virtual agora, where we can, in person and in public, learn again to organise our politics, be democratic and make effective and collective decisions.

I met a man in the street who was cold and broke and could not find the place he thought he had a bed. Bitter cold, we were inspecting a scribbled address when a large black SUV pulled up. A man wound down the window and barked, quite pleasantly, his need for directions. The homeless man and I blinked stupidly at him, stuck, our cognition momentarily jammed.

Some have confidence and privilege; some do not. This, surely, is a class divide, a society ‘broken’ in which a minority live on a glass surface, safe and bright, while others suffer terribly in a seemingly hidden world. Academics have long noted that we can no longer easily distinguish between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Now there are managers, lowly bank workers, shareholders and all manner of blurred boundaries and analytic exceptions. Yet something is broken, and there is a separation. The top of our society has arrested the controls and now ignores the ‘have-nots’. The tragedy is that perhaps a third of our citizenry live lives of extraordinary desperation. The comedy is that our elites can’t control anything, and will sacrifice others to further their own self-interest.

A dungeon with screaming at first nauseates and then outrages. The refusal to accept becomes a flash of revulsion, and indeed, the sheer level of suffering in our society is physically disgusting. In the UK today, citizens face being terrified, maimed and killed by draconian cuts in public services (which barely worked anyway), the collective punishment of those damaged by poverty and the abandonment of any orientation to their wellbeing. Human intention reveals itself in action and its effects. We will go to war to improve the ‘security of our citizens.’ We will bail out the banks because a growing economy is ‘good for citizens.’ Yet it seems acceptable, even normal, to at the same time deny citizens health care, jobs, community services, education and hope. Evidently, it does not matter that disabled children no longer have swimming lessons, that mental health services are a national disgrace, that schools and hospitals are failing and our cities are clogged with cars and drugs and gangs. It is ‘normal that so many lives are chaotic, desperate and systematically abused by institutions. We need to understand this, lest we get fooled again. The actions and the effects of government/corporations reveal that they do not care whether citizens live or die. The separation is in this way a dumb repetition of history, as it entails concurrent and mutual dehumanisation. The gang cannot perceive the reality of their victim’s pain, (they laugh at his screaming and film it). Similarly, policy-makers cannot see the suffering of the mental health patient, discharged into a cold night clutching little more than a ‘Care Plan’, (they pretend they have a policy and that it’s working).

First nausea. It’s physical. Then outrage. What the hell is going on?! Is this normal? If the need to cut 30 minutes off the train journey between London and Birmingham is a problem of such magnitude as to require HS2, what is being done about the rather more pressing problem of widespread avoidable suffering and wasted human potential that characterises the lives of so many? Illegitimate foreign wars, the Olympic Games and the Mesmerised Michael Gove don’t really sort it. The captains, drunk on privilege, are steering the ship onto the rocks. When it sinks, they will be suddenly gone.

We could use some of (our) public funds to hold an (at least) national debate to explore, make decisions and act, but we won’t, and so will watch the deepening of class hatred, more riots and more police mistakes. As it rains outside, we can admit to our adult children that we did not realise the consequences of our actions and simply ‘had to do it that way’. Yes, we heard the screaming, but you have to understand, back then such suffering was normal. At that time, we did not know what to do with our outrage. Only later did we learn to imitate the citizens of ancient Republics and walk, en masse, out of the city until the ‘haves’ pleaded with us to return. Such acts of public disgust were, after all, how the Romans got their ‘Tribune of the People,’ with their power to veto life-threatening elitist policies. By then, of course, everything had changed.