Notes from the seminar for the Summer School 2012 of the School of Social and Urban Politics, Government and Public Policy Institute, Barcelona, 3 July 2012.
These are the random notes I took during the #2 Debate on Democracy and Political Community: representation, participation and intermediation, chaired by Fernando Pindado. It started with Quim Brugué, from whom I took many and interesting notes, and then it was my turn to present — you will only find my slides, which, on the other hand, are quite self-explanatory. At the end a very rich debate took place, and I only took some general ideas as I concentrated fully on it.
Between representation and participation: social and political intermediations Quim Brugué (IGOP)
In politics, there usually is an intermediary, a third party that mediates in negotiations, in conflicts. The commons can be thus seen as a “new” way to get rid of intermediaries, and let the public thing to be ruled in an alternative way. But, is this possible? Can we get rid of mediators?
Ben Said, in Elogio de la política profana, says: if politics is the art of mediation, what is left when we have no politics? If we have no politics, we do have to come up with another way of organising democracies. But participation will not just suffice.
Without intermediaries, micro- and local experiences might work perfectly, but is that scalable to the macro level?
What has the past taught us?
Democracy is the exception. Democracy has only been the norm during a few hundred of years: in the Vth century b.C. during the classical democracy in Ancient Greece, and in the last 200 years of the modern democracy since the Constitution of Philadelphia in 1787. The former one is a democracy without intermediators, and the latter a democracy full of intermediators.
Democracy in Athens was fully against representation: no one was elected to represent anyone as this was non-democratic. Only powerful people could ask to be elected as a representative, thus there was a bias towards power. Representatives were merely executive powers that did what the assembly commanded, and were usually chosen by random methods.
There were no political parties, and there was no interpretation of facts or ideological positioning. Democracy was totally direct and opinion shaping happened during assemblies that used to deliberate for hours. They had slaves that worked for them, which made it easier to participate in politics: only citizens could participate. The citizen acted not on selfishness, but thinking on the common benefit. Aristotle said that a citizen was someone that knew how to rule and how to be ruled upon.
Greek democracy was a strong democracy: it believed that there was a better future if people worked together and had common goals or projects.
Modern or liberal democracies, on the contrary, is a highly intermediated democracy. It is based on a strong non-confidence on one’s peers to rule and be ruled. Liberal democracies are built to protect property and the mass is seen with fear and little capable to deal with public issues. The US Constitution builds a dense mesh of intermediators to separate people from power. Citizens can just glance up power in a blurry image.
The concept of citizenship in liberal democracies is a very individualistic one: people look for themselves and not for the common good, the citizen is absolutely selfish, whenever we become dreamers in common, we are becoming the dictators’ of the others’ dreams. The citizen is more a customer of the State rather than a citizen that takes part of it.
Greek democracy ended up as total failure. Assemblies were crowded out by specialists (demagogues, sophists) that mastered the art of dialogue. But they had not any responsibility on what was decided in the Assembly. Thus, dialogue was killed (and Socrates too…), and worst decisions were taken.
And liberal democracies are increasingly being seen as a total failure too. It is becoming unacceptable for the citizen to be totally alienated from power and decision-making.
Conclusions?
We need intermediation, but we need to bring power closer to the citizen. There is a need for politics. But politics must keep a certain distance from the citizen too, to avoid populism, to try and be objective, to be able to provide answers.
Intermediation is also about deception: neither for you nor for me. It is about finding a middle point. And politics also needs authority, enforcement.
We need politics. But, surely, we also need another kind of politics. One that is strongly based in confidence, and confidence that goes both ways: from the State/politician to the citizen and from the citizen to the representative.
And if the citizenry does want to move towards a more direct democracy (like in Athens) is it absolutely necessary that it has to abandon the position of being a customer, and act more like a citizen, an engaged one that participates eagerly in politics.
Do we need political intermediaries in a Network Society? Ismael Peña-López (UOC)
Q: what networks? physical vs. “real” –> the example of stay at home mums, crafting communities, rare diseases, etc. which work online and offline.
Guillermo: what about the commons? –> the processes as part of the common wealth
Óscar Rebollo: less knowledge and more interests –> informed voting.
Óscar Rebollo: engagement vs. slacktivism? –> explicitation of interests, aggregation of interests
Óscar Rebollo: technology is not neutral. Are there hidden interests behind technology?Who controls the technology? What is the price for using that much technology?
Q: do we need a new concept of citizen? –> put more responsibility in the citizen; and we do need a new concept of polititian, from maximizing votes to maximizing wellbeing.
Brugué: we are self-satistied of our own digital experiences, while the world keeps getting worse and we remain indifferent to how rulers perform poorly.
Brugué: there is huge intermediation, and it’s called the Network: it is less transparent, less controlled, less engaging into reflection.
Ana: Pedro Ibarra speaks about democracia relacional, to create spaces of contact, of meeting, so that improbable people meet in improbable places and achieve agreement.
Ismael Peña-López: we have to take the habits of:
Being digital.
Being a citizen, and that an expert can be found anywhere.
Being a politician (and a citizen and digital). To “infect” institutions, to turn politicians into “indignants”.
Presentació Prezi:
Peña-López, I. (2012). Calen els intermediadors polítics en una societat xarxa?. Seminari per l’Escola d’Estiu 2012 a l’Escola de Polítiques Socials i Urbanes, Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques, 3 de juliol de 2012.
Presentació Prezi:
Peña-López, I. (2012). Calen els intermediadors polítics en una societat xarxa?. Seminari per l’Escola d’Estiu 2012 a l’Escola de Polítiques Socials i Urbanes, Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques, 3 de juliol de 2012.
When we speak about politics and social networking sites, we’re used to speak about David vs. Goliath: common people fighting against the powerful.
For the first time in many years, we are not facing a strong political power, but a weak political power. A political power disconcerted by the markets, globalization, a smart society. But, is that society that smart? Is it true that the digital revolution has had an impact on politics (and political parties and governments) and not on common people? Why should be common people be spared from that impact?
It is only natural that the political system and what happens out of it (unions, nonprofits, civil associations, etc.) advance in parallel and, in their confrontation, consensus and solutions emerge. This means that it is interaction what makes society advance, and not that it is society that is right despite the opposition of the political system.
Indeed, we do need an articulated civil society, as articulated as political parties and governments. Not a chaotic or disorganized one. Only an organized civic society can face a disorganized, weak political power. But there is a deep difficulty to articulate a general purpose strategy, especially when populisms leverage the fact that no-one seems to be accountable for their decisions.
The utopia of dis-intermediation
We are witnessing times were intermediation is toughly fought against: there seem to be no need for politicians, journalists, teachers, distributing industries, etc.
While there may be a positive side of dis-intermediation (lesser costs, a more straightforward access, increased availability of knowledge, etc.) there is also a dark side of it. The expert becomes a contested institution while the cult of the amateur becomes the norm.
The huge challenge is how to rebuild new mediators, more flexible, more participative, and not getting rid of them. Democracy is about commitment and engagement, and oftentimes this can only be achieved through representation.
Ballot boxes and dreams
A mature democracy is not about setting highest ideals, but about identifying what is the second best and being able to tell whether it is acceptable. If the second best is too far from ideals, society won’t progress; if the second best is too close to ideals, fanaticism takes place.
Our society is deeply de-politicized: not only technocrats are taking the power, but “tea parties” are stepping in the centre of the political debate. Those are parties or groups of people, without second best options, and that fight within the party for it not to agree with anything with the “enemy”. This breaks party-to-party and party-to-society communication. In many senses, the hardcore of the political blogsphere is made of “tea parties”, extremist partisans that radicalise the debate.
Paradoxes of democratic self-determination
Echo chambers (Sunstein) and the Daily Me (Negroponte) have been side effects of democratic self-determination, with the result that the quality of democracy is impoverished. People that thinks different from us protects us from insanity and fanaticism.
We certainly need to keep a certain distance from reality to see other opinions. And representation is just about this, about seeing the whole picture.
Untangling an illusion
The Internet implies a high degree of empowerment for the citizenry. And, historically, every new technology has come along with a utopia: technology will bring a social change or revolution. But, will it?
There is a common believe that a new technology appears in the void, in no social or economic context. But it does. And that is why the same (new) technology has different effects in different places, or “unexpected” or “undesired” changes instead of what we dreamt of.
There is a common believe that social media decentralizes and democratizes power. But the nature of power is not so: there are gatekeepers and mediators in the Internet. The Internet does not removes the relationships of power, but transforms them. E.g. in the top 40 political blogs in the US, there is also one woman, two hispanics, and no afroamericans. The top 40 political blogs in the US are made up by WASPs… as US politics.
Censorship, for instance, is not any more about governments censoring, but about crowds doing it willingly. Search engines are not really neutral, as they redirect traffic, etc.
We have to acknowledge that democracy is about design: social and power hierarchies have their mirror in the online world. Imperialism is not anymore about culture, but about protocols: we are living the imperialism of protocols.
There is a common believe that criticising (or demanding accountability) and building is the same thing, and it is not. Democracy is not only about winning elections, but about governing; or about reporting injustices, but about coming up with a better social design to avoid/correct them.
Digital revolutions have been more focused on accountability and reporting than on building.
The Internet is based on easiness and trust, and that is, precisely, its weakest point.
Discussion
Q: is it possible that the Internet stops us from a critical thinking? Innerarity: It depends. We sometimes need some things to just happen, without us having to think about how their work; but we sometimes need to stop and think. What we are in need of is to be able to turn the switch on or off, so that we are able to stop and think about a given aspect, and without, in the meantime, being dragged around because of the speed of times. Politics has lost its ability to set up, to propose: it’s reactive and not propositive, thinks short term instead of long term.
Q: are we confusing mobilization with engagement? Innerarity: organization is fundamental to perform deep and lasting changes. What organization? Whatever, but organization.
Q: has the Internet been able to engage more participants in politics? Innerarity: the network has sometimes provided an illusory activism, where the activist believes that they are having a deep impact and the truth they are having not.
Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: so, the Internet is a menace for politicians and they should fight against it? Innerarity: it definitely is not, the Internet can help in doing better politics. The problem with politics and the Internet is usually on the politicians’ side.
Ismael Peña-López: what will be easier: to transform the actual institutions (parliaments, parties, schools and universities, etc.) or to substitute the with brand new ones? Innerarity: renewal is a must, that is out of question. Or parliaments become spaces for reflection, or they will legislate about the past, about past problems. But we’d rather update the institutions we have than try and substitute them with new ones: the cost might be higher and no one says traditional institutions could not be transformed.
Online Entertainment and its implications in fields such as, among others, the legal framework of audiovisual communications, the liability of intermediaries, legal aspects of videogames and online gambling, social networking sites, behavioural advertising, privacy, data protection, defamation, protection of minors, intellectual property, new models of content distribution, user generated contents, illicit and harmful contents, net neutrality, new generation networks, antitrust.
Papers may also focus on:
Legal issues relevant to the current status and future perspectives of the Internet, such as, among others, online privacy, data protection, intellectual property, ISP liability, freedom of expression, cybercrime, e-commerce.
Issues regarding electronic government, such as, among others, open data, reuse of public sector information, political participation online, e-procurement, Internet governance.
Interested participants should first submit an abstract (a 300-word outline) of their paper by 20 December, 2011, indicating clearly its subject and scope, and including a provisional title. There is no need to use a template for submitting the abstract. The abstracts received will be peer-reviewed and authors will be notified of the outcome by 10 January, 2012.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be required to send the full paper by 26 March, 2012. Full papers should not exceed 8,000 words in length, including notes and references. For the full paper authors should use the conference template that will be available to download from the web. The full papers will be peer-reviewed as well. The outcome will be notified by 16 April, 2012. Final version of the paper (camera ready) should be sent by 30 April, 2012. All papers accepted will be included in the electronic proceedings of the Conference, which will hold an ISBN number. Accepted papers may also be selected for oral presentation at the Conference.
Important dates
Abstract submission: please submit a 300-word outline by 20 December, 2011.
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 10 January, 2012.
Full paper submission: please submit the full paper by 26 March, 2012.
Notification of full paper’s acceptance: 16 April, 2012.
Final version (camera ready): 30 April, 2012.
Please send all submissions by electronic mail in a .DOC or .ODT document to: uoc.idp2012@gmail.com
The seed of the model here described was planted in me by Ethan Zuckerman during a dinner, after he spoke about Innovation in the Network Society at a course that I was co-organizing in Barcelona. It was a conversation on how to improve participation with the help of ICTs, and Zuckerman drafted up the original idea. After thinking long about it, I here only tried to figure out what would work, what not, how to solve some issues and, at the end, design the flowchart that is here presented.
In a democracy, we are traditionally faced with two different options: we either can vote a policy or a decision (direct democracy), or we cannot vote and then our representatives (usually selected after an electoral process) vote for us (representative democracy). Indeed, the latter is the most usual, while increasingly more people would rather the former.
Some of the criticisms to representative democracy — and that are usually used to legitimate and claim for more direct democracy — are that:
We sometimes know better than our representatives what it is good for us.
We are almost always forced to vote a “pack” of ideas/policies, of which we only partly agree with. Thus, we are not fully represented by our representatives.
Representative democracy was efficient in an analogue world. In a digital world, that efficiency is, to say the least, questioned, as digital voting comes marginally at zero cost.
Some of the criticisms to direct democracy — and that are usually used to dis-encourage and stop any claim for more direct democracy — are that:
We sometimes do not master the topic that is voted. Thus, we would incur in insurmountable personal costs if wanting to cast an informed vote for each and every collective decision.
There are people that do not care, have no time or have no means to be actively involved in politics/voting. Direct democracy then fosters plutocracy.
So, it would be great to be able to have a way to keep the best of both worlds: when we can vote, we’d do it; when we don’t, we’d delegate our vote on our representatives… or on the ones we trust for a specific subject.
Let us imagine a system where direct and representative democracies can live together. Actually, this is what most democracies do have right now. But let us imagine that each and every decision can be taken both ways simultaneously: if no citizen votes, the process takes the form of pure representative democracy; if each and every citizen votes, the process takes the form of pure direct democracy; is some citizens vote, the elected representatives vote only on behalf of the citizens that did not vote, and the final result is calculated by taking into account the individual citizens’ votes and the votes of the representatives, these weighting us much as the aggregate of votes of the ones they represent and that did not vote.
Technologically speaking, the preceding system is a “simple” one to implement: all citizens decide, first place, what is their preferred party and inform the system with their preferences. Once a consultation is scheduled, citizens log in and vote. If they do not vote, the vote goes to the representative that was initially informed in the system. Blank voting is one of the given options and abstention happens when the voter neither votes nor informs a representative in the initial setup of the system. If needed or desired, territorial weighting, district distribution, etc. can be informed and applied during the final counting of votes.
An intermediate layer can be added to this system: the expert on whom we delegate our vote. A citizen may not want their representative to vote for them: e.g. imagine a right wing, pro-environment and atheist citizen deciding whether their preferred liberal party (known for its bounds with the energy industry) should represent them in a referendum on nuclear power. The citizen has concerns or irresolvable doubts on nuclear power and would like their “green engineer” friend to vote for them (but right now cannot ask for direct advice). Same for a referendum on abortion: that citizen cannot decide, but knows the liberal party will vote against based on religious beliefs that they do not share: they’d rather ask their physicist friend working on genomics.
With a hybrid system, the citizen has now three options: voting directly; not voting and letting the elected representative to vote for them; delegating their vote on an expert or a trusted friend or the leader of the local community.
Note that there are, actually, five options, three of them ending up in the representative democracy as usual. Bear in mind that voting “blank” should be an option of the system. As many others have pointed before, electronic voting systems don’t usually allow for “null” votes (some even include the option in the system, a solution that I do not really fancy):
The citizen votes directly and their vote is counted up individually against all other votes (weighted by district if necessary).
The citizen delegates their vote, and the delegate (friend, expert, etc.) decides to vote directly. In that case, the delegate is voting per two people (or as much as people delegate on them).
The citizen neither votes nor delegates, and their is aggregated to the votes of the elected representative.
The citizen delegates the vote, but the delegate is not voting, so the citizen’s vote “comes back” to them and, by default, to the elected representative.
The citizen delegates their vote, but the delegate just happened to delegate their vote back to the initial voter: the loop is solved by sending both votes “up” to their respective elected representatives.
There is the possibility that a citizen delegates their vote, and the delegate does it too on a third person. In that case, it is just a matter of iterating the system until it gets to a case between the ones listed above.
There are two questions left open and that have to be solved arbitrarily, though solved before the system begins to work, as the results of the system we have just described can vary depending on how those questions are addressed.
The first one is whether a citizen can change in the system their (a) elected representatives and (b) the people on whom they delegate.
Our opinion is that representatives can only be chosen once every political cycle begins (e.g. once every four years and just after the elections — indeed, setting up the system defaults would be the elections), but delegates should be free to choose for each and every consultation scheduled.
The second one is whether (a) elected representatives know how many votes they have and (b) delegates know it too.
In our opinion, elected representatives should be able to know how many people chose them as default. That would gave them an idea of the potential support they more or less have at any given time, though they have to keep in mind that while citizens can vote directly vote or delegate, data from the initial election of representatives is just an approximation. Indeed, there would be huge incentives in being faithful to the original programme and electoral promises to avoid people to “vote for themselves” and trust their vote to them instead.
On the other hand, there are two reasons for which delegates knowing how many voting power they have got is a not very much convincing idea: the first one is a technical one, as the citizen should either be able to vote at the last minute or change their vote many times before the poll closes. The second one is that it would probably be an open gate to corruption and unfair lobbying, vote selling and other similar practices.
I would be very interested in contributing to an actual implementation of this system, maybe within a social networking site, maybe as an open government website being fed by parliamentary data with which compare with the experiment’s citizen decisions. If you have the possibility to make it happen, please drop me a line.
All the debate around Net Neutrality and the right to be forgotten is about a new container — the Internet and all new technologies at large — and a new container — digital content and services.
And what this container is asking us is to feed is for ourselves, for free and providing personal data in exchange.
And not only are these data consciously provided, by uploading content, of befriending people on 3rd parties’ platforms, but also in a hidden form, by means of cookies, scripts or other devices.
There still is an unanswered question and it is whether technology as an ideology. And the Law should deal with this issue explicitly and bravely. This includes code, that in some aspects is becoming a derivative or procedural law.
And not only whether technology conforms an ideology, but also whether it conforms a new 4th generation of human rights.
An interesting question to explore in the future is whether we can proceed with the concept of habeas data.
We are now fighting the inefficacy of Law, that always arrives late at regulating and, when it does, there are hackers and crackers (conceptually very different) that make many laws irrelevant in practice. Thus, we need global solutions, founded on the Philosophy of Law and Law Theory, so to provide solid and long-lasting frameworks.
The new European normative makes it possible that with the addition of 1,000,000 signatures, the political debate on a certain topic can be initiated in the European Parliament. And one of the good things about this new normative is that it has been designed for the XXIst century, as online participation (i.e. signing) is considered in equal terms as offline participation.
The procedure is the usual one, where an initiative is registered and then signatures are collected within the member states. Once the European Commission validates the firms (the person signing is a European citizen, has not signed more than one time, etc.), then a new legislative process can begin.
Another asset is that the European Commission must provide free software platforms for the collection of signatures in any website. These platforms will work with digital signature, whatever its kind: certificates, tokens, smartphones, etc.
The initiative can be started at any member state and, once the platform is validated, the process of gathering support can begin.
The regulation is written as if it was about data protection, as that is the major issue when providing a (electronic) vote supplying personal data, but the regulation to be applied will be the one of any member state.
Daniel Guagnin; Carla Ilten Self-Governed Socio-technical Infrastructures. Autonomy and Cooperation through Free Software and Community Wireless Networks
Net Neutrality is the freedom to use a communication infrastructure in all possible ways without constrains. And free software is a matter of liberty, not price, it is about free as in free speech (not as in free beer).
Technology is society made durable: social “programmes” are inscribed in any technology. In expert systems rules are disembedded from the realm of use, and defined by experts. Free software opens up the experitse to laypeople, why proprietary software stays opaque.
Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work freely available and with the compulsory condition that any other work based on it will also be available in the same way.
Community Wireless Networks are based on free software and DIY hardware. They use wireless peer-to-peer mesh network architecture and have collectively organized and owned communication infrastructures.
An example can be the Chicago Wireless Community Networks [in Spain we have the very interesting initiative Guifi.net.]. Chicago Wireless Community Networks is a non-profit project to serve disadvantaged neighborhoods, in cooperation with CUWIN open source programmers. It’s community building through network set-up and maintenance. The Pico Peering Agreement acts as a constitution for peer networking.
That is certainly a new approach to Net Neutrality, as Net Neutrality is, all in all, a battle about the control over infrastructures.
Mayo Fuster Morell An introductory historical contextualization of online creation communities for the building of digital commons: The emergence of a free culture movement
Online creation communities (OCCs) are a set of individuals that communicate and collaborate mainly via a platform hosted on the Internet with the purpose to create a final outcome of the joint work.
These communities are deeply rooted in the movements of the 1950s like hacking culture, hippies contraculture, action-participation methodologies and popular education, etc.
If the free software projects imply the appearance of OCCs, there is a shift from free software to free culture with the change of millennium with movements like the Creative Commons, the Wikipedia, alternative news media (e.g. Indymedia), peer-to-peer file sharing, open access of scientific research, etc. The explosion of the web 2.0 is greatly powered and fostering at the same time the concept of OCCs.
Infrasctructure conditions:
Level of freedom and autonomy of the content generators in regard to the infrastructure.
Level representation of the interests of the community of creators in the infrastructure provision decision-making and provision transparency.
Two main types:
Autonomy + open = commons logic; they reinforce more collaborative communities.
Close + dependency = corporate logic. Tend to generate larger communities.
The free culture and digital rights movement has 4 main goals: preserve the digital commons, to make important information available to the public, promote creators, remove barriers to distribution of knowledge and goods.
Lately, the movement has been shifting from free culture to meta-politics. This can be seen in the Change Congress initiative in the US (2008) or the #nolesvotes and #15M movements in Spain.
Georgia Foteinou Institutional Trust and e-Government Adoption in the EU: a Cross-National Analysis
Why citizens that are used to e-commerce appear sceptic when it comes to using e-government websites? Normally, it is attributed to the poor quality of services, few available services, insufficient infrastructure… but evidence shows that is none of the above, at least not as a strong determinant not to be using those services. In fact, e-government usage is higher than e-commerce in most European countries, even if it has a decline of -4.5% (of all Internet users) over the period 2005-2010. On the other hand, in aggregate, e-government is growing at 30% (accesses) while e-commerce is growing at 75%.
It seems that the digitally reluctant could not be trusting the government, but not of a specific agent, but in government as a whole. This is what data seem to be telling at statistically significant levels.
Jorge Luis Salcedo Conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property in Internet: comparing the issue networks in UK and Spain
In the issue of the conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property, how is media visibility distributed between the stakeholders in this conflict? What actors have more visibility? This is crucially relevant in mass-mediated democracies.
A first hypothesis is that the regulation supporters (Copyrights coalition and governments) will achieve a greater visibility level on the news channel.
A second hypothesis is that the Digital Rights Activists (DRA) will have a higher visibility on non traditional media (blogs, websites) than the CRC.
3r hypothesis: DRA will have a higher visibility in specific web channels, but not on the entire web.
4th hypothesis: The most visible agents on the news channels are going to get the most visibility as a whole, especially in search engines.
It is very interesting to see how in Spain, DRA have huge coverage in online platforms, in the UK they are even with CRC and both of them having less visibility than the government’s official position. In search engines, though, both UK and Spanish DRA seem to be having the same impact.
The differences may come from different resources from the different stakeholders, a more lax regulation in the UK in downloading matters, the worst reputation that the coalition has in Spain in comparison to the UK’s, including the dynamics of politics in the different countries.
