democracy

The default form of governance on Internet platforms is "implicit feudalism," Nathan Schneider provocatively declares in his new book Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Implicit feudalism is "a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms," in which founders become "benevolent dictators for life," he argues. 

Unfortunately, authoritarian governance is not confined to social media platforms. The same tendencies bleed into the "real world," too, if only because the lines between online and "real life" have become quite blurry these days. Not surprisingly, our acquiescence to autocratic tech CEOs makes us more willing to accept authoritarian politicians as well. The crucibles of democratic practice have atrophied under advanced capitalism.

Schneider invites us to consider a daring idea, that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radical and democratic renaissance."  He suggests we could "learn from governance legacies of the past to [make the Internet] a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before."

Intrigued by this gust of fresh air, I invited Schneider to join me on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #49). Our conversation was a sobering tour through some distasteful zones of online culture, and yet it was oddly encouraging, too. New and emerging platform technologies offer some genuinely exciting possibilities – if progressive activism can find the imagination and resolve to leverage them.

The idea that the Ganges River in India or the Amazon Basin in Brazil should have "legal personhood" – and thus be able to defend its interests in court – was considered zany only ten or fifteen years ago, at least in Europe and North America. Now this once-fringe legal concept is going mainstream. Legislatures or courts in twelve countries have recognized the "rights of nature" at the state, local, and/or national levels in a dozen nations. In the United States alone, some three dozen communities –from Pittsburgh and Toledo to Orange County, Florida (population 1.5 million people) – have enacted such laws, often with overwhelming public support. Ecuador now has a constitutional provision recognizing the rights of nature.

It's somewhat surprising that unorthodox legal concept has taken root and developed so quickly. After all, western jurisprudence generally privileges private property rights over nature, humanity over plants and wildlife, and individual rights over collective rights. So how have conventional systems of law come to accept the daring idea that natural systems are alive and deserving of legal protection?

A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for "community rights" and more recently, "self-owned land." (More about both of those in a moment.)

Linzey, based in Spokane, Washington, is Senior Legal Counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, where he has been a leading champion of community empowerment and the rights of nature for more than twenty years. Previously, at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Linzey had argued for "community rights" as a legal response to corporate abuses such as fracking and water pollution.

In Episode #40 of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, I quizzed Linzey about his legal hacks that attempt to protect ecosystems and communities in novel ways.

Writing recently in Medium, Salvatore Iaconesi -- a designer, engineer and founder of Art is Open Source and Human Ecosystems -- offers an extremely important critique of the blockchain and other data-driven network technologies.

While recognizing that these systems have enormous potential for “radical innovation and transformation,” he astutely warns against their dangerous psychological and cultural effects. They transfer entire dimensions of perception, feeling, relationships, trust-building, and more -- both individually and collectively experienced -- into algorithmic calculations. The System becomes the new repository of such relational epiphenomena. And in the process, our very sense of our shared agency and intentionality, relationships, and a common fate begins to dissolve.

In their current incarnations, the blockchain and related network-based technologies start with the ontological presumption that everything can be broken apart into individual units of feeling and action. Our character, viewpoints, emotions, behaviors, are more are all translated into data-artifacts. This is the essential role of data, after all – to distill the world into manipulable, calculable units of presumably significant information. 

Think that you are a whole human being?  Forget it.  Data systems are abstracting, fragmenting and filleting our identities into profiles that we don’t even control. A simulacrum of our "real identities" is being constructed to suit new business models, laying the foundation for what Iaconsi calls the "transactionalization of life." As he writes:

Everything is turning into a transaction: our relationships, emotions and expressions; our ways of producing, acquiring and transferring knowledge; communication; everything.

As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.

"Everything, including our relations and emotions, progressively becomes transactionalized/financialized, and the blockchain represent an apex of this tendency. This is already becoming a problem for informality, for the possibility of transgression, for the normation and normalization of conflicts and, thus, in prospect, for our liberties and fundamental rights, and for our possibility to perceive them (because we are talking about psychological effects)," according to Iaconsi.

Stacco Troncoso and his colleagues at Guerrilla Translation, in Madrid, have completed an English translation of an important statement from Spain, “The Charter for Democracy,” which should be of great interest to small-d democrats throughout the world. He explains that “the group behind the piece, “Movimiento por la Democracia” (Movement for Democracy) is undoubtedly one of the most important evolutions of Spain’s 15-M movement.  It clearly targets the political arena without desiring to become a political party itself. Their ‘Charter for Democracy’ is an inspiring, thorough text on what politics should be. It proposes a politics for the people: squarely grounded in environmental realities and social justice, based on the Commons, defended from corporate interests and neoliberal dictates.” 

The Movement for Democracy introduces itself this way:

"We emerged during the destruction of an economic and political model that, by its decadence, makes us poorer, excludes us, and exiles us from our own cities and towns...we are here to take democracy into our own hands, to defend against the constant threat of its systematic robbery...we are the Movement for Democracy and we came into being to say, “Yes we can!” a thousand times and more. And as we hold this to be true, that we actually can, we will challenge whoever tells us it’s impossible."

The Charter for Democracy is “a thoroughly detailed plan for the transformation of public policy and democratic representation, open for public challenge and participation,” said Troncoso, whose network of translators acted as “compilers and editors of a volunteer group-produced work” in making the English translation.  A hearty thanks to translators Jaron Rowan, Jaime Palomera, Lucía Lara, Lotta, Diego and Stacco Troncoso, with editing by Jane Loes Lipton. I love that the Charter is illustrated with some beautiful original illustrations by Clismón, one of which I include here.

Here are the opening paragraphs of this inspiring document:

This Charter was born of a deep malaise: lack of prospects, mass unemployment, cuts in social rights and benefits, evictions, political and financial corruption, dismantling of public services. It was drafted in reaction to the social majority’s growing lack of confidence in the promises of a political system devoid of legitimacy and the ability to listen.

The two-party system, widespread corruption, the financial dictatorship imposed by austerity policies and the destruction of public goods have dealt the final blow to a democracy long suffering from its own limits. These limits were already present in the 1978 Constitution. They can be summarized as a political framework that neither protects society from the concentration of power in the hands of the financial groups, nor from the consolidation of a non-representative political class. This political framework has established a system which is hardly open to citizen participation, and unable to construct a new system of collective rights for our protection and common development. This is evident in the fact that, despite some very significant public demonstrations, the demands of the vast majority of the population have repeatedly been ignored.

It is the lazy conceit of the political class that “representative democracy” is the most reliable way of carrying out the public will.  Just as George W. Bush showed how the accountability mechanisms of state power are often more notional than real, the government of Iceland has now exposed its disdain for public opinion on matters of democratic empowerment.  A recent blog post by Thorvaldur Gylfason gets right to the point:  “Putsch:  Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution killed by parliament.”  Gylfason is an economics professor blogging at the German blog Verfassungsblog (“on matters constitutional”).  

Iceland’s constitutional drama got its start following the 2008 crash.  As viewers of the film Inside Job will recall, the financial collapse was devastating to Iceland, which had set itself up as an offshore financial center.  After citizen protesters banged pots and pans in the street, demanding a new government, a new post-crash government eventually chose 950 random citizens to give their thoughts on a new constitution.  An elected constitutional council used social media to solicit the views of the public.

This open, thoughtful process was later invalidated by the country’s Supreme Court, which was dominated by justices belonging to the discredited political party responsible for the financial crash.  In response, the Icelandic parliament established a new constitutional council to draft a constitution.  That four-month process in 2011 yielded some remarkable reform proposals, as Gylfason writes: 

The constitutional bill stipulates, among other things: (a) electoral reform securing ‘one person, one vote’; (b) national ownership of natural resources; (c) direct democracy through national referenda; (d) freedom of information; and (e) environmental protection plus a number of new provisions designed to superimpose a layer of checks and balances on the existing system of semi-presidential parliamentary form of government. The preamble sets the tone: “We, the people of Iceland, wish to create a just society where everyone has a seat at the same table.” The people were invited to contribute to the drafting through the Constitutional Council’s interactive website. Foreign experts on constitutions, e.g. Prof. Jon Elster of Columbia University and Prof. Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, have publicly praised the bill and the democratic way in which it was drafted.

At a time when representative democracy is increasingly revealed as ineffectual, phony or both – a kabuki theater of empty formalisms that disguise the offstage conspiracies of corporate/state elites – many people look to the Internet for salvation.  After all, the Internet is far more open, participatory and meritocratic than the closed, corporate-dominated process of our formal democracy. 

But even with these capacities, the Internet is not a solution because in the end the Internet is only a hosting platform.  A basic question must be answered:  How should a more serious deliberative democracy be structured in online spaces? 

Let the record show that the insurgent Pirate Party in Germany has made some significant progress on this problem.  Its new open source software platform, LiquidFeedback, is credited with helping the Pirates host more open, participatory and serious internal debates about party policies -- and to organize themselves to take action in conventional political arenas. 

The makers of Liquid Feedback characterize their platform in a mission statement as “a bridge between direct and representative democracy.”  They believe the software “has the potential to empower the ordinary members of mainstream political parties, making these parties more attractive to citizens and democracy stronger.”  The software, released in version 2.0 in March 2012, is currently used by several associations and political parties.