[118885] in Cypherpunks
[RRE]Growing a Democratic Culture
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sat Oct 9 14:11:10 1999
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Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 08:01:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre <pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu>
To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre@lists.gseis.ucla.edu>
Subject: [RRE]Growing a Democratic Culture
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Growing a Democratic Culture:
John Commons on the Wiring of Civil Society
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
pagre@ucla.edu
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a draft. Please do not quote from it.
Version of 8 October 1999.
2400 words.
References and footnotes to follow.
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.
end
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
