I’ve been puzzling over what it means to live in a country of millions and, as a citizen, be able to exercise democratic rights.  I started this rambling enquiry by checking in the dictionary: it appears the word ‘citizen’ was originally used to describe the inhabitant of a city.  This changed in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, as people moved from being divided into (few) rulers and (many) subjects, (and most people lived outside of cities), to a world in which every member of a state, as a citizen, had certain equal rights.[i]  Those rights have changed over time, which led me on to ask a second question, what does it mean to be a citizen today?

If we go to the information provided by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, it appears we have both rights and responsibilities. [ii]

The rights of a citizen:

• Freedom to express yourself.
• Freedom to worship as you wish.
• Right to a prompt, fair trial by jury.
• Right to vote in elections for public officials.
• Right to apply for federal employment requiring U.S. citizenship.
• Right to run for elected office.
• Freedom to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The responsibilities:

• Support and defend the Constitution.
• Stay informed of the issues affecting your community.
• Participate in the democratic process.
• Respect and obey federal, state, and local laws.
• Respect the rights, beliefs, and opinions of others.
• Participate in your local community.
• Pay income and other taxes honestly, and on time, to federal, state, and local authorities.
• Serve on a jury when called upon.
• Defend the country if the need should arise.

Sounds familiar?  I think the list is likely to be fairly similar in most modern western democracies.  While there is much to explore, this time around I’d like to focus on two items in that long list:  the right to vote, and the responsibility to participate in the democratic process.

Actually, I’m going to gloss over the first of these two.  In Australia, it is not just that citizens have the right to vote, but they are required to vote: voting is compulsory.  In the US, the situation is different, and, once again the country is finding the right to vote is under scrutiny. At present, arguments are raging over gerrymandering; the exclusion of prisoners from the voting role; and various attempts to restrict voting to people to only those who can document their eligibility (by a driving licence or similar).  I’m sure there are other issues, and all of this is part of a systematic process to exclude some citizens from voting, including students, the poor, and minority groups (the majority of these tending to prefer Democrat candidates, of course!).

It’s a topic to which I might return another week.

This time around, I am more focussed on the phrase “participate in the democratic process”.  That caught my attention because I had recently come across this nice little quote from Robert H Jackson, who observed: “It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling in to error.  It is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling in to error.” [iii]

How do we do that?  In theory, we do it by voting in elections, making our choices between the would-be representative(s) on the basis of preferring those who espouse policies and views that fit with our own values and expectations.  But we live in a polyarchy, and an oligopoly; and, yes, I’ve been itching to use those two terms for a while!!

So, what is getting me so excited?  A polyarchy is a form of government where power is in the hands of many people (as opposed to a dictatorship – power in the hands of one person, or a democracy, where power is in the hands of all the people).  In the case of the US, UK and Australia, those many people with power in a polyarchy include members of the government (both elected and unelected officials), the members of the legislative body (or bodies), and the judiciary.  A political oligopoly is one where the political system is controlled by a small number of players – political parties, large corporations, and wealthy individuals – and as a result where choice and influence is restricted for most citizens (you can choose between A, B and C, but don’t expect us to be interested in what you would like to see done: choose between the options ‘we’ offer, or don’t bother to vote).

That’s not news.  What is more interesting is the question as to who else could be, or should be, included in this list of people have influence and control over the system.  Those listed above represent the major part of those to be considered, but there are others who hold power or exercise influence.  Robert Dahl, who first introduced the term polyarchy, provided many insights into the state of democracy in his book written nearly 30 years ago, a book that is still highly relevant today.  He suggested one intriguing group we might want to add to the list:

Inequality among citizens is a persistent and serious problem in all democratic countries. Inequalities in their political resources, in their strategic positions. and in their overt and implicit bargaining power are sufficiently great even in democratic orders to lend considerable plausibility to theories of minority domination …

Difficult as that problem is, I want to turn instead to a problem that seems to me even more formidable. For I am inclined to think that the long-run prospects for democracy are more seriously endangered by inequalities in resources, strategic positions, and bargaining strength that are derived not from wealth or economic position but from special knowledge … Because intellectuals rely on persuasion rather than command or coercion and the effects of their persuasion are often indirect, delayed, and difficult to observe, their influence in public life, while easy to detect in a general way, is not easy to verify in a systematic way. Moreover, intellectuals seem loath to give to their own influence the same severe and critical scrutiny they so readily give to that of others. I believe nonetheless that a contemporary observer would find strong evidence for the importance of intellectuals in shaping attitudes, beliefs, and values. Through their influence over educational institutions and the media, the content of the public’s agenda and its sense of priorities, the policies and programs supplied to governments and oppositions, the ideas that are thought to be intellectually respectable and need to be taken seriously, whether in support of or opposition to the status quo, and in many other ways, intellectuals play a preeminent role in modern democratic countries. To take only one example. in the United States the relative importance that viewers of television news broadcasts assign to a public issue is strongly influenced by the amount of attention the news commentators themselves give to that particular issue. [iv]

Ah, but that was thirty years ago.  Since that time, it seems intellectuals have almost left the stage, and we are faced with a bewildering variety of ‘thought leaders’: we see them jumping around the podium at TED talks; talking heads offering their opinions on media ranging from television and newspapers to a profusion of on-line sources; prolific (prolix?) authors of books and articles to hammer home their one or two ideas.  I’d argue they offer a thin gruel of narrow thoughts and insights, compared to the rich feast provided when intellectuals were the focus.

Don’t despair: help is at hand!  I should have said “almost at hand”.  To understand what we might be able to do in the future, it is helpful to briefly look back.

Once upon a time … there were newspapers, radio, television, and books and magazines.  In the case of the first three, the alternatives were limited, the political persuasions of each member of the media were well-known, and there was an old-fashioned belief, respected by all parties, in the existence of facts (although their interpretation could, and did, vary widely).  By the beginning of the 1990s, all that began to change.

The first step into our current world came with the launch of the ‘World Wide Web’ (WWW) in 1992, supported by both technical measures (URL, the unique addressing system on the Web; HTML, the formatting language, and HTTP, the protocol to transfer information), and principles, of which the most important were net neutrality, universality, decentralisation and consensus, all of which were underpinned by the oversight of the Worldwide Web Consortium.  This created a digital ‘commons’, a resource available to everyone, searchable using web browsers.  It was exhilarating then, although it might seem rather prosaic now.

However, while it seemed like a new age of free information for all had dawned, it wasn’t quite so easy.  If nature abhors a vacuum, business abhors free resources.  To begin with, the principle of net neutrality restricted the resources business could control, so they started with the cost to get online.  Telecom companies quickly developed business models charging for access to the internet through using their infrastructure.  Fortunately, in those countries where there was adequate competition, services improved, and prices were held down (obviously not the case in the US, where telecoms operators operate more like a cartel!).  Before long, the telecom companies realised they could increase income by offering varying speeds of access (which became more important as data downloads moved from text to music to video.  Despite this, until recently net neutrality was sustained.  Now, all that is starting to fall apart: Ajit Pai as Chairman and two Republican colleagues on the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow Internet providers to speed up service for websites they favour, block or slow down others, and deregulate the telecoms industry (the two Democrats on the FCC voted against this measure).

Much as I would like to write more about this, I won’t.  First, the battle is not yet over, with the US Senate and various States contemplating moves to stop deregulation and preserve net neutrality; and second, it might be a topic for yet another blog!!

I’ve jumped ahead of myself.  The Web has seen, over twenty years, a transformation of access to information.  Current estimates suggest there are around 4.5bn pages on the Web, and each web page contains, on average, enough information to fill up 30 sheets of paper!!  That’s a lot of information.  However, while access to web sites is not limited, accessing the products and services many offer is.  To obtain copyrighted material, we have to pay.  To download various kinds of software, we have to pay.  In that sense, the Web is like a shopping mall:  you can go anywhere, but if you want to acquire something, you will almost certainly be required to meet the cost of supply.

It is the size of the Web that is the bigger issue.  All that information, and how do you find what you want, or would like?  Big numbers create big problems.  It would be like deciding that in a true democracy, every citizen’s voice should be heard: there are 323m people living in the US wanting to be heard!  How could we possibly listen to each and every one of them (well, the adults at least): the articulate and the less articulate, the poorly educated and the better educated, those whose first language in English (American) and those for whom this is not the case.

Given its size, does the way the Web works today give us some insights into how a democracy could work more effectively?

Right now, the situation is less than promising:  finding things that appeal to you is being taken out of your hands.  Analytics, examining data about you and the preferences you have shown in browsing, allows advertisers and others to target you – quite well, it turns out.  Invisibly you are nudged and encouraged to find people and places that suit your apparent interests and biases:  similarly, you are unlikely to end up reading web pages that are offering views very different to your own, unless you work hard to seek them out.

I’d like to suggest the state of access we are witnessing today is a function of an ongoing and incomplete change, where the way to live and manage in the online world is still under development.  Today smart companies offer you choices, just as Sears Roebuck did a century ago when it introduced mass retailing through its catalogue, offering goods tailored to the recipients; the only difference, the online offerings we see today are even more carefully curated.

In the physical world, we choose the shops we want to enter, and we are able to make our choices from the products we see.  The digital world we experience appears to be slipping into gated communities, virtually supported and fenced off, where retailers offer what we ‘want’, and we interact with people like ourselves, possibly hostile to or even unaware of others with different preferences.  The Web today supports a fractured world, with consensus on the decline, ‘fake news’ the warning banner to save you from ideas and alternatives that are not for your segment of the community.  On top of that, we have our opinion leaders, their thought leadership keeping us heading in the right direction.  How can we keep the virtual mall of ideas open, and yet easy to traverse?

We have to start by recognising the problem.  Free market beliefs have allowed companies to take over much of the internet.  Algorithms, the word of the decade, select and choose, and they do so to increase income to private corporations.  Careful profiling while counting ‘clicks’ shape the virtual world, almost without our noticing: “neutrality, universality, decentralisation and consensus” are being eroded.  Digital information systems and artificial intelligence are transforming our world, but also constraining it.  That’s the problem.

If we understand the problem, then we should be able to find a way to bring about change.  As the digitisation of our world continues, we have to find new and alternative ways to sustain public digital infrastructures which are owned in common.  There are examples.  Wikis like Wikipedia are open and shared; open-source software allows everyone to improve digital systems and processes to the benefit of us all; and the Creative Commons copyright licenses, that more and more of us use, help to create and sustain the digital commons.  I recently read about Turkopticon, “which ‘hacks’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace for crowdsourced labour to provide workers with better information and more power when navigating potential employers” and the article went on to add “at the local level too, examples abound: the Beijing residents collecting air-quality data from the ground up, the tax-justice campaigners crowdsourcing their investigations into high-end financial improprieties, the reporters who use digital tools to collaborate on maps of migrant routes across the Mediterranean so that more stories can be told, and more lives, sometimes, can be saved.”[v]

We are still working our way through the internet revolution.  Revolutions of this kind take time and change continues.  The advent of electronic communications with the telegraph eventually led to the universal telephone system.  The slow and expensive first examples of the internal combustion engine put in carriage bodies 140 years ago eventually led to motor transport, the automobile, and transformed cities, shopping and leisure.  Today, the winners in the internet revolution seem to be business, especially with the outrageous recent behaviour of the FCC:  but there is no reason why this should be the final outcome.  Our digital world is capable of supporting communities, sharing knowledge without boundaries, and starting to rebuild democracy.

As citizens, we should aspire to “participate in the democratic process”.  We can share ideas and examine issues with the immediate community where we live, with the people in our county, and with the citizens in our state.  We don’t have to live in an oligarchy, we don’t have to be controlled by today’s polyarchy.  The technology is there for us to use, rather than for us to be used; it just requires we take the challenge seriously, rather than unwittingly succumbing to corporate supplied anesthesia.

My weekly calendar reminder is from Havel: “live in truth”.  Perhaps it should be from Aquinas: he saw the purpose of law and government to “achieve the common good”.  Let’s support and develop online resources that are for the benefit of everyone, and slowly but surely, recreate a democratic world through the digital commons.

 

[i]  Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1993, page 407, Oxford University Press.

[ii] <https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learners/citizenship-rights-and-responsibilities.

[iii]  American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442-43 (1950).  Robert H. Jackson was United States Attorney General and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

[iv]  Robert A Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, Yale University Press, 1989, Chapter 23, pp. 332-334

[v]  < https://aeon.co/essays/digital-technologies-play-politics-lets-use-them-for-democracy>