The Internet Will Revolutionise The Very Meaning of Politics
The Web Could Yet Bypass Government and Existing Political Communities, and Either Expand Democracy In The Process - or Stifle It
So the Washington journalist who warned me 10 years ago that the internet was doomed, that it would collapse under the weight of all those pages, was wrong. The internet is here and changing everything, the way we work, shop, communicate, even fall in love. But what of society itself? The industrial revolution changed politics completely, leading to universal suffrage, as well as modern socialism, communism and fascism. What will the internet revolution do for the politics of our own age?
Last week the revolutionaries were in town, as Google’s high command came to London for a major think-in, led by the CEO, Eric Schmidt. He had to fend off accusations that Google poses a threat to society, storing up information on everyone who uses it. He was hardly reassuring when he said the company’s ambition is to know so much about us all, it will be able to answer the question: “What should I do tomorrow?”
He had yet gloomier news for politicians. First, they will have to be even more guarded than they are already. Thanks to Google-owned YouTube, any careless remark will now be caught on camera (probably built into a phone) and distributed round the world in minutes. That did for Republican senator George Allen last year, when he used a racial slur at a rally and promptly found himself an internet TV star.
Nor is your past any longer the past. David Cameron and George Bush should give thanks they were students before the age of Facebook; otherwise the wild excesses of their youth would have been thoroughly documented, available for all to see years later. Thanks to the internet and easy search, we live in a permanent now, when any mistake, any reckless remark, even some past teenage ramblings on MySpace, are just a click away.
The politician of the internet age has to admit all errors in full and early: they’ll only emerge anyway. Factual slips are forbidden, too. Bloggers will find you out and, if they don’t, Google hopes its own algorithms will soon be sophisticated enough to detect “falsehoods”. No wonder Schmidt says, smiling: “Google’s going to drive these politicians crazy.”
There’s a bright side. Current technology gives politicians campaigning tools they never had before: witness the 62,000 Barack Obama supporters gathered on Facebook without the candidate lifting a finger. Meanwhile, a website offers a way to reach limitless numbers of voters with an unfiltered message at virtually no cost. What’s more, the internet can provide detailed knowledge of the electorate. If Amazon can rank the top-selling books every hour, then why not the five most important issues on voters’ minds, constantly updated?
There is potential for people as well as politicians. Organising is swifter and easier: electronic mobilisation is said to have swung elections in Spain, South Korea and the Philippines. In the US, the Howard Dean presidential campaign of 2004 saw the birth of “netroots” activism, collecting enough donations from individuals to match the megabucks of big corporate givers and lobby groups.
No less important, the internet has facilitated collective action locally - down to the residents’ association able to communicate through a website rather than constant meetings - and globally, with campaigning organisations such as Avaaz or the Genocide Intervention Network, which focuses on Darfur and began with a student site.
It’s noticeable how far ahead the US is in all this, and how much British politics lags behind: WebCameron does not a revolution make. It’s even more striking that much of this activity is about finding new ways of putting pressure on, or getting people elected to, old institutions. The technology is cool and fast, but it still tends to be about sending men to sit in wood-panelled parliaments and marble-floored senates. Does the internet really promise no greater change than that?
Eric Schmidt says no; the old structures of representative democracy will endure. “They survived world war two and they will survive this.” Besides, he says, no one wants mob rule, even if direct democracy was possible - say through regular electronic voting.
I’m not convinced. I can’t quite believe that the internet will transform the mechanics of politics but leave politics itself untouched. Something bigger is afoot here. At this week’s Hay festival, Charles Leadbeater, currently writing a book on the internet’s transformation of creativity, explained how we are moving from the passive consumers of the 20th century to the active participants of the 21st. That had to be good for democracy, he said, because it would give more people a voice, good for equality, because it lowers the barriers that once excluded all but the elite from taking part, and good for freedom because it allows people to express themselves.
The result could be a much more dramatic shift in political culture than most anticipate. Governments speak of consultation, but these are usually top-down exercises whose outcomes are tightly managed. If Wikipedia can assemble nearly 6m entries in 100 languages with just five employees, why would it not be possible to draft “wikipolicy” through a similar process, one that would then be voted on by elected representatives?
Technology could make the bypassing of traditional government institutions look very appealing. Witness the rapid action of MoveOn.org, which put together 30,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina and 10,000 volunteers ready to give them a bed. Or check out Kiva.org, which matches people with cash in the rich world to entrepreneurs in developing countries who need a loan. What these groups illustrate is not only a frustration with traditional government, but a way the internet can bypass government altogether.
I wonder too about the very units in which we now participate. Currently, geography matters a lot: we vote in the areas we physically inhabit. But if millions of people are linked by MySpace, why is that not a political community? I can foresee a future in which national diasporas, for example, operate the way territorial societies do now. If ever there is a peace agreement to ratify, perhaps the entire Palestinian people, dispersed across the world, would take part in a referendum. The current iron link between democracy and territoriality might grow weaker.
Put pessimistically, the internet could be reducing the very idea of a collective society. The web connects people with shared interests, even very narrow ones. So those with an enthusiasm for, say, caravanning in Finland can now find kindred spirits. But that risks shattering what was once a collective mass into a thousand shards, not a society at all but a bunch of niches. That could undermine a crucial aspect of politics, the power of people to act as a counterweight to governments and big corporations. If we’re all broken into small units - “parties of one,” as a web guru puts it - we will lose that combined strength.
In other words, the changes now in train could go either way, expanding democracy or contracting it. The same is true of the impact the internet is having on capitalism, handing mega-billion profits to the likes of Google and Microsoft even as open-source technology encourages highly un-capitalistic behaviour such as collaboration and the sharing of knowledge for free. Such a mixed blessing is hardly new either. Lest we forget, the industrial revolution gave us the steam engine - but also the dark satanic mill.
© 2007 The Guardian
The CEO of Google as a revolutionary? You Tube or the Face thing changing politics? Most political analysis on the internet is worse than junk: most of it is wrong and wrong headed and does more harm than good. Although I am not an elitist, I am a college professor, and I can say that I have never learned a single thing from bloggers. Information that I could not get otherwise such as Venezuelan or Spanish Newspapers etc., the internet is great but the rest is junk. Wikipedia? Only an idiot would use it. There are good reference books and there are the pseudo things such as Wi. If you want an easy test of the stupidity of Americans, simply look at Amazon.com. The company employs a “professional” reviewer whose review cannot be removed. That is because Amazon tries to create best sellers by employing people who tout some books at the expense of others. And then look at the readers reviews and I dare you to find one out of a thousand that has any idea what the book actually says that is based on fact, not fiction. The internet has already gone the way of television and it was probably inevitable: the purpose is to sell things and the result is, and it will get worse, a nightmare.I hope Al gore included the adverse things of the Internet and not just T.V as misleading rather than enlightening. Google? Do not be funny. It is a money making machine and will do the same money making and pandering things as the companies we are subjected to.
The New York Times,( an absolutely absurd newspaper on many things, for example, try to read a fair assessment of Hugo Chavez and you get the same tripe as is in the Cincinnati Enquirer) GE, or Grace Chemical, or WalMart or CBS; promote what makes money and eliminate that which does not.It is a dismalmedia world, and is creating more brain dead Americans who prefer to take the lazy way out. Good analysis is a hard and difficul task, and it is so rare in the U.S. today that it is on the very of extinction. I am most disturbed that this piece came from the Guardian.
Matt donuts,
Thanks, I agree with your comment.
The whole article reads like the hype dredged up from the early-mid 90’s. I’ve got an image of an animal sock puppet in my mind - and it won’t leave.
The internet is the biggest scam going. Know why porn and propaganda are permitted on the net? Because every one of us who goes online is entering themselves into a database so that the Powers That Be can know who their potential enemies are. When they decide to make their move the “enemies list” will be easily downloadable. A much ignored book www.netbomb.net goes into this in detail.
It seems like the net should be a medium that progressives could use to enact their agenda — after all, the Shah if Iran was overthrown with audio cassettes. But it isn’t happening. The greatest communication device-system ever created and most of what it puts out there is digital sales b.s.
Hyperbole aside, the net is a useful tool for those who use it usefully. I can access news from around the world. BBC in Britain, CBC in Canada, ABC in Australia, and even New Zealand’s national radio service are much less ideologically driven than American networks.
I can quickly research votes by various members of various legislative bodies without having to wait for printed records to surface weeks or months later (if at all).
The same blogosphere that offends your sensibilities also has places like Informed Comment (Juan Cole professor at the University Of Michigan),or Chomsky info (Noam Chomsky, professor at MIT). Now if they are not high falutin’ enough for Matt then Matt can start his own site–perhaps you could call it “The House of Donuts” :o)). Best of all it won’t take a gazillion dollars to start or require a vast army helpers to keep up.
Sorry Matt, but you sound like an elitist to me. Yeah, the article was hyperbole, and there is a lot of crap on the internet. But it’s a quite useful tool for the reasons Poet has given. And not all blogs are bad. Sorry you haven’t found anything that reaches your high standards.
you got to be really careful when you punctuate your remarks by writing something like, “I’m a college professor.” that’s just setting yourself up for a fall. from that stature it might also be wise not to throw out aspersions on this and that, lest of course you wish to find yourself judged. or that you have not done sufficient research.
and a college professor really ought to know that you can learn from anything even seemingly simple material provided you engage it with prudence and an open mind. Even the NY Times can be a fascinating study in truth and untruth. You could write endless papers on it I’m sure, and find yourself enlightened!
Most bureaucratic institutions and their proponents will not be able to comprehend the egalitarianism that exists on the internet. For example, if you make a bit of an effort, you no longer need to pay for advice from a college professor. Think of that!
I’m convinced you can find courses for free on just about any subject. Astronomy, literature, philosophy, nature. If you have the self discipline and mental acuity and a discerning mind with which I believe most human beings seem innately endowed when forced by events and otherwise encouraged to apply themselves - judging from the posts you might find here, for example. And this knowledge is free, think what that means to the class structure.
I know that our president speaks for the opposite cause, but that’s just sad. I mean, research the historical outcome of such behavior.
“If we’re all broken into small units - “parties of one,” as a web guru puts it - we will lose that combined strength.”
Great article. But it’s not all or nothing. We will be many small units, but we can form a large unit when it concerns us and the situtation requires it. The decentralizing effect of the Internet and the opening up of competing alternatives will have an impact on corporate monopolies and empires which require uniformity to concentrate wealth and centralize power. This diversity will by itself be an instrument of redistributing wealth and power. An instrument of direct democracy. To call direct democracy mob rule is to deny the meaning of democracy itself.
Internet is the best thing that has ever happened for those of us who know how to read, and want to know the truth. Unfortunately, the powers that be will control it, just as the central banl cabal controls the money supply. I fear for the internet.
Freedland is an idiot. He wiffles cluelessly about whatever gets his attention. There is a discussion to be had about the internet, but don’t let’s invite boring twerps like Freedland to it for gawd’s sake. This article is typically all over the place. Yes, you can find kindred spirits on the web; yes, it can be a force for good. Blah blah. It can also be like a trip to the monkeyhouse. The problem is that, yes, probably it will be the forum for politics in future, but the monkeys will drown out everyone else. What Freedland does not note, when writing that America is miles ahead, is that that is largely because the right has seized on it because, as he also hints at realising, it’s a far better tool for hating than it is for loving.
The myth is, in fact, that “most” people use the Internet for whatever. Nearly half of America doesn’t even have access (not to mention 60% of the world,) and most who do are nonpolitical sheep. “We” who use the WWW regularly tend to forget that barely half of the “people” even bother to vote; less that 40 percent read a newspaper daily; and, given the choice, most would pick “Idol” over “Bill Moyers Journal” any day of the week.
Anyone who believes our gov-mil-media complex will allow “Net” freedom to continue indefinitely is even more naive than those who believe the revolution will be emailed. The truth is, if “we the people” truly want change, then we need to start doing more than typing hopeful essays.
I agree with POET, a tool when used properly and for it’s designed purpose is both effective and efficient. It’s when a tool is utilized for activities outside its intended purpose that problems arise. Rather like trying to drive a nail with the handle of a screwdriver instead of a hammer, or using the same screwdriver as a pry bar.
“Gee doc, I can’t imagine why the screwdriver busted and flung this piece of jagged metal into my eye.”
I agree with Matt Donut. More over how can you have a serious discussion about the Internet without mentioning porn. Jay is Leno is right for the most part the Internet is good for downloading porn. And yes your every key stroke is being watched and recorded.
An uncensored and unfiltered search capability means freedom. (if we can hold on to it)
Elected officials need to post their issues on their web sites so the public can give their input. Each E-mail address can rate responses and the highest ratings are displayed at the top. The elected official can maintain their ongoing response to the people at the very top of the thread.
It’s the only way we can have a voice; make it work!
I know I’m a little late on this (laptop power charger broke, glad my wife sent in the warranty card), but I have personal feelings about the topic so I want to toss in my $0.16. (inflation you know)
The internet will be seen through the lens of history (assuming we avoid Armageddon) as an invention akin to masonry, irrigation, assembly line and the like, a foundation with which to build the next version of our society.
Let me clarify the utility of the internet for you.
It can be used as a remote viewing device the equal to all but the most omniscient crystal balls of mystical legend.
It can be used to communicate like they do in Star Trek, Star Wars, whatever (and with the new 3D displays that don’t require any special glasses, we’re getting closer to holograms too).
It can be used as an extremely adaptable printing press, both physically and virtually (though still effectively, as information itself is the (only?) thing that can be virutalized without quality loss).
It can be used as a safehouse meeting place, safe from all but the most ‘inquisitive’ investigative agencies (and they’d be at your real world meeting house too if you were dangerous enough).
It can be used as a library beyond your wildest dreams and can be used to STORE A COPY of any material you’re willing to digitize, a copy that can be accessed from ANYWHERE with the right hardware (2.howevermany gigs for each gmail account, amongst the sea of online storage options).
It is a grand meeting hall with every type of specialized room (like this one) you could imagine.
It can be made to only talk in an unknown-to-anyone-else language with another endpoint, making it VERY hard for even THE most ‘inquisitive’ investigators.
Do you see a theme? Every human interaction involves some type of person to person connection, by definition. The internet is similar to the road system (starting probably with Rome, but I’m no historian), the postal system, the TV network and the telephone system, but in many (not all of course) situations the clear supreme method (so far) at facilitating person to person connections. It’s just so customizable and adaptable…
To the people that grip about the crap out there, or at least the amount of it, I say that the sheer amount of crap ON the internet shows that it’s working as I describe. If you really need to be spoonfed, go back to network TV, but for many of you we both know that that’s not the option you’re going to take (if you take it at all). About the newspapers, I read foreign papers too… over the internet.
I think it’s another case of people being frightened by something that they don’t understand but instinctively know is BIGGER than them, more able to shape the world than they are. Don’t fear it, see it, use it, it’s a tool, not a being (I don’t think). Don’t give up because blogs are full of shit, or because people don’t read a blog that ISN’T full of shit… Don’t let it try to spoon feed you, find the troughs, not the spoons (common dreams, with it’s various sources, is a trough) and find VARIETY in your troughs… Take what you need, and a little you don’t think you want lest you find a truth you would have otherwise missed… I digress.
The capability existed before the internet, but it took more work. Sending a letter took a little (very little) more work, and a significant (by comparison) amount of time longer, but worked fine. Distributing a video of police brutality took much, MUCH effort (often TOO much effort) if the TV people decided that they didn’t want to show it. Talking to a buddy 5 states away about politics with near certainty that if someone wanted to eavesdrop it would be really REALLY hard to do so, even for a TLA (three letter agency for all you non-paranoids out there) used to be something quite difficult to pull off, now you would just have to be creative.
So SO much less effort to perform these societal functions necessary to our growth because of this new information infrastructure, and it’s fully open to the public… Wow.