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An earlier post, Situation Normal, pointed out the predatory behavior of activists seeking to dominate society.
Most herd effects in society are of small importance. They result in fads that reward products and there is a thriving industry seeking to trigger cascades for commercial gain. Viral marketing, stealth viral marketing, and advertising in general are less concerned with good decision making based on product qualities than they are in achieving the tipping point where their product becomes dominant whether it is good or not.But these are the same tactics and objectives used by activists seeking to dominate governance, and that is of much greater significance to society. Many see increases in the speed and scale of networks due to technological advance as a golden opportunity to trick societies into making bad decisions and are working feverishly to develop mechanisms to do so.
A collection of rants by this sort of authoritarian activist has conveniently been assembled, EXtreme Democracy. As usual, it's a book, a blog, a forum etc. Several chapters of the book are up and more are promised. They try to market themselves as hip, now, wow thought leaders for the new world of networked information and communication technologies (ICT) with a bold vision for leveraging ICT to achieve a breakthrough in self governance.
They aren't. They are tired old reactionaries proposing day-before-yesterday solutions to yesterday's issues. They don't understand human behavior, self rule or ICT. Though they try to wrap themselves in the language of more modern thought, referring to concepts from complex adaptive systems, they still promote old fashioned cybernetic ideas to achieve old fashioned socio-economic control.
This isn't the first effort by this crew. Several have been around for a long time seeking to blunt each technological and socio-economic advance by promoting an interpretation of those advances that preserves their old fashioned views. They dress up the old ideas in new togs and present them to those less informed, especially youths, as being as new as the technologies. They make a living doing this so they aren't dismayed by critical dismissal. There's a market for their work and they will continue to exploit it.
The first chapter, Emergent Democracy, is a selective and flawed overview of the concept of democracy by Joi Ito designed to sell the idea of replacing representative government by direct democracy at the largest possible scale. It isn't just that Ito seeks to replace democracy with mob rule - and call that democracy - he wants to enlarge the scale to swallow local governments and totally eliminate self rule.
The dictionary defines democracy as “government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”...Notice the assumption of a single level government. That is Ito's objective so he simply assumes it rather than making an argument for why this should be tolerated. This contrasts sharply with the concept of democracy where power resides with the people, the diverse and distributed people. Ito seeks to concentrate power centrally, using mob rule and majoritarian tactics, to disenfranchise the greatest number of people possible by lumping them all into an outgroup - THE minority. However, if democracy and self rule are truly the objective then for any group larger than a village we should refer to the plural, democracies, and learn to think in those terms.A functional democracy is governed by the majority while protecting the rights of minorities. To achieve this balance, a democracy relies on a competition of ideas, which, in turn, requires freedom of speech and the ability to criticize those in power without fear of retribution. In an effective representative democracy power must also be distributed to several points of authority to enable checks and balances and reconcile competing interests.
A functional democracy is thus governed by majorities - the majority of each coherent community, village if you will, speaks for that village. But villages may well be very different from one another, as we would expect if they have cultural or occupational differences or simply different world views. In real democracy it isn't that the majority rules while minority rights are protected, it is that minority views temper majority rule and prevent it from being overbearing even when minority rights are not violated. Failure to include minority views in decision making leads to oppression, discontent, disobedience, sabotage and eventually rebellion. To endure society must not just respect minority rights but also listen to minority views, and include them in decision making. In many, many cases this means that decisions must only be made at the village level and apply only to that village.
This may seem to be a subtle difference but it isn't, it's huge. When Ito says "power must also be distributed to several points of authority" he rejects the concept of subsidarity, his earlier claim that "the supreme power is vested in the people". Power isn't distributed to points of authority, power exists at those points of authority and some small amount is granted to central organizations on a pragmatic and provisional basis for limited purposes.
The failure of democracy to scale is easy to understand. The founding fathers of the United States, the “égalité, fraternité and liberté” of France, and most other liberals who moved society toward freedom and liberty in the 1700's, could not foresee the accelerated population growth over the following two centuries. The couldn’t predict the radical evolution of science, the rapid development of technology and the pronounced increases in mobility of information, money, goods, services and people. Nor could they know or visualize the topography of countries such as the United States, Canada, and China, or continents such as Africa, Northern Europe, Russia, or Latin America. Evolving nations were laid out on maps that bore little resemblance to the reality of the environment, and were not predictive of the huge increases in scale of population, commerce, and government. In the main, no one foresaw a need for the right to self-organize—to adjust scale and degrees of separation as such increases occurred.13Democracy doesn't fail to scale. The whole world can have democratic governance. The designers of US democracy considered scale. The original 13 US colonies were far too large for direct democracy as is apparent to anyone who looks even casually at the subject. Some of those states were the size of European nations and were expected to become at least as populous in a short time. Their populations were diverse and free thinking. The form of government they chose was designed to secure and increase the liberty of those diverse communities by retaining as much self rule as possible at the lowest level possible, i.e. democracy.
Europeans are now struggling to implement this type of subsidarity after seeing the failures of large scale governance, what those who cling to central control call devolution and what Ito calls distribution, still falling short of true subsidarity. But the framers of US democracy anticipated this and wove it into the structure of government. Each higher aggregation was severely limited, restricted to managing only tasks that could go no lower, often because they dealt with relations between and among lower level units. Power resided at the individual level and was conditionally granted to higher levels in severely limited ways. They weren't sure that this solution would endure, they were pioneering and compromising like mad, but it did endure and in retrospect seems brilliant.
To further reduce and constrain the power of central government its powers were further restricted by separation into multiple domains, with staggered and limited terms of office, representing both population and geography, to prevent overpopulated areas from dominating sparsely populated areas, a necessary concept since population density is a self governance decision. No region should be able to pack itself, to breed its way to power over less fecund areas. The main objective was to avoid what Ito seeks to impose now, which has failed everywhere it was attempted and could not work even in theory without severe oppression and eventual rebellion. Tribalism only works for tribes... small tribes.
As the issues facing government have become more complex, social technologies have emerged that enable citizens to self-organize more easily. These technologies may eventually enable democracies to scale and become more adaptable and direct.The issues facing government now are no more complex than they have ever been. The technologies are more advanced, but people are still people. It is the arrogance of youth - every generation thinks it invented sex - to think that this generation faces more complexity. It's simply a lack of knowledge about past realities and the inability to project into an earlier, and so alien, social view. Citizen self organization is no easier now than it ever has been - it has always been exceedingly easy. Ito isn't concerned with self-organization, he is concerned with totalitarian control, mob rule and disenfranchisement of minorities.
Due to advancement of communication and transportation technology people who were once separated by distance, and so time and wealth, are now able to interact more closely. But humans have not become more vast, able to fruitfully interact with a larger group, think more clearly or manage more information. The joke is that each person knows a great deal about very little.
People now manage different information than in the past, and have lost as much as they have gained since capacity has remained unchanged. Better information storage and retrieval allows quicker location of information, abstraction and symbolic manipulation allow larger categories to be processed, but each human is still limited in what they can know. People are still just people. And, like isolated bumpkins, they are still often provincial, unable to comprehend and unwilling to accommodate other social realities and aspirations. Though ICT allows geographically distant pseudo-communities to form, they are still provincial. Virtual communities of virtual provincials with narrow views, suspicious of strangers. As ever.
As the voting mechanism becomes more organized and the difficulty of participating in critical debate increases, forms of influence are increasingly relevant and detrimental to the balance of power. Elected representatives attend more readily to those who have the power to influence the voting mechanism and the public debate; these are often minorities who have more financial influence or the ability to mobilize large numbers of motivated people through ideological or religious channels. Extremists and corporate interests can become dominant, and a “silent majority” may have little input into the selection of representatives or the critical debate.14This is only true for the higher levels of government. At increasingly local levels it becomes impossible for machine politicians to have broad influence. Instead there is diversity, many machines, and they often compete with one another. To prevent oppression the higher levels are not given the power to affect localities.
Generally, polling, as a form of direct democracy is effective for issues which are relatively simple. and about which the silent majority have an opinion that is under-represented. For more complex issues, such direct democracy is criticized as populist and irresponsible.It is not simply that polling is populist, it is that it triggers the information cascades discussed in previous posts. In practice these structural defects are exacerbated by poor polling methods including poor question selection and various biases induced by selection. There are theoretical and statistical methods to compensate for poor polling methods, but that assumes good faith by polling organizations, an assumption repeatedly proven to be false, and still doesn't address the problem of information cascades and resultant poor decision making.
To address this issue, Professor James S. Fishkin, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy, has developed a method called deliberative polling. Deliberative polling combines deliberation in small group discussions with scientific random sampling to increase the quality and depth of the understanding of the participants, while maintaining a sampling that reflects the actual distribution of opinion in the population, rather than the distribution of political power.This is also known as propagandizing and "push polling" and is designed to shape, rather than measure, public opinion. It is far worse than even information cascade since it completley eliminates independence. Decisions made in this way are the least intelligent of all, drawing from the smallest information base and the smallest analytic base, and subjecting each member to persuasion - dumbing down the group.
This exposes the key failing of Ito's thinking and the EXtreme Democracy group: they aren't even thinking about good or wise governance, they are only seeking ways to seize power and imagine that a populist mob can carry them. Dumb decisions made by docile groups of conformists won't result in good governance and over time will degrade society further and further.
When you read their justifications for seeking to seize power they always refer to enemies, mainly capitalism, and never speak of how their ideas will lead to improved governance. They assume that the elimination or diminishment of capitalism and capitalists will automatically result in an improved society and we will live happily ever after. This is a fairy tale, magical thinking based on cartoon versions of human behavior, uninformed by scholarship or analysis. With real humans such a society would be degraded and would degrade monotonically over time until the system was reformed or abandoned. Ito evades examination of his assumptions and simply cites the flaws introduced by those assumptions as impediments to implementation that justify ever more draconian control of society.
Effective debate requires a shared set of references and metaphors. The expansion of culture and knowledge depends on linguistic and conceptual shorthand based on shared knowledge and experience. Collaborative, innovative discussion is impossible if every item must be expanded and reduced to so-called first principles. This body of knowledge, experience and ideas has come to be known as a commons.Expansion of culture? Which culture? Which set of references and metaphors will be selected for Ito's homogenized world? It isn't just that Ito's world view fails aesthetic tests, failing to appreciate the diverse virtues of varied cultural norms, or that it fails intellectual tests, failing to appreciate the insights of diverse perspectives. It also reveals that he is mired in an old fashioned cybernetic view of society despite his curtsies to complex systems and the occasional use of the language of complex adaptive systems. His objective is control of the system by an external power, as if it was a machine, failing to comprehend that changing the field of adaptation changes the ways that agents will behave too.
Ito's article continues in like vein, failing to understand his subjects and so misapplying them to his heart's desire - total control of the world. Perhaps his central blunder is the ant colony trope, a tediously overworked idea based on a failure to grasp the rudiments of entomology. The 10,000 meter view of an ant colony leads naive totalitarians like Ito to see a collective society marching lockstep in a grand plan. This is the steam age cybernetic view but now justified by a bit of magical thinking using the language of emergence and complex adaptive systems. The discredited command and control of great leaders and their plans is replaced by emergent order.
Things don't work that way. The best way to grasp this is to extricate your view from the ant colony and notice that there are ant colonies, many ant colonies, who are competitors and sometimes enemies. There's a reason for this evolved arrangement: it works. The problems change and so do the solutions over distance and time. Different colonies have different behaviors appropriate to different fields of adaptation. Over deep time they evolve, becoming different species.
A similar confusion comes from attempts to apply insights about the way a human brain works - a group of quasi-independent cells contained within a single skull and dependent on one another - to societies, as if each member of a society was like a cell in a brain. The analogy fails for the same reason as the ant colony trope; individual humans are not trapped inside a single skull. Their dependence on one another is severely limited and differentiation is rewarded more than integration.
Another of the old crew is paleo-activist Bruce Sterling who recently composed this confused rant.
Imagine that the United Nations married the Internet. Any matchmaking program would consider them a dream date. After all, they're both (a) supposedly global in scale and (b) fearsomely crippled.It's kind of funny except that it's utterly insane to call the Internet crippled. Unlike the UN which accomplishes little or nothing the Internet is hugely useful, increasingly so. What's Sterling's complaint?
The Internet unites people, but it's politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud.Someone concerned with self rule and good governance would be heartened rather than disappointed that the Internet is apolitical since that allows every sort of minority to thrive without repression or exploitation. Of course it isn't quite true since nations are still able to censor and restrict Internet access and usage. This doesn't bother Sterling since he heartily endorses Net law and order... he just wants to be the Pope that makes the rules.
Like self rule of societies in "meat space", geographic reality, self rule in cyber space squicks out priggish martinets longing for rigid rules and total control. In both cases stunning beauty and freedom exist side by side with ugliness and failure. They are offended by the ugliness and fail to see that it is necessary to beauty. They seek methods to homogenize systems so that ugliness is eliminated, but fail to grasp that beauty would also be a casualty of their coarse control efforts, and that this leads monotonically to degradation and eventual collapse.
The rest of Sterling's essay is descriptive and prescriptive activism for those who buy into this vision of uniformity and conformity.
Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations. Then bride and groom would unite their virtues and overcome those gloomy vices gnawing at their vitals. The global worldchanging multitudes could beat back the darkness of the gathering New World Disorder while swiftly improving the cramped lives of the planet's majority in a beneficent orgy of networked interdependence! Wow!Like every populist demagogue in history Sterling seeks to rouse the rabble to launch a pogrom on those evil minorities, those bankers and dissidents with their weird ideas, religions, and nasty habits.
Like Ito Sterling is lost in the past, unable to grasp more modern concepts of social organization and governance. Having never understood how small social groups work he is unable to even think usefully about the implications of a global network. He only thinks in terms of conquest and empire, the imposition of a single system on all people since he can't understand how multiple systems, a system of systems, works. Like Ito and his confusions about ants, seeking to scale up a single ant colony to be the ant colony, Sterling wants to scale up a single society to be the society. This can't be done and so won't be done but the attempt degrades all societies since resources that could be usefully employed are squandered on tired old steam age ideas.
In addition to Situation Normal see these previous post which discuss aspects of why the ideas of Ito and Sterling fail. It isn't just that they are old and repulsive, it's that they don't work, don't lead to improved governance or better decision making.
Unanimous Fallacies
Natural Coopetition
Prosociality
So Excited!
All The Way
Mental Tools
In Plain Sight
Extended Senses
Road Rash
The We Problem
Whitmanesque Multitudes