Open Source Democracy
Okay, so one area I've been looking at for a while as ripe for open-source intervention is Democracy.
Back when everyone was thinking about digital democracy as some sort of voting scheme or mass feedback polling operation, I wrote a short book called Open Source Democracy in an effort to extend people's thinking beyond elections to include participation in civics. Yes, we have representatives, but they're only good as their ability to respond to the needs that come from the bottom up.
Then, just this summer, I was invited to deliver an "opening invocation" at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. And I took it as something of a challenge: how do we get people past the notion that blogging about a problem is the same as actually doing something about it?
Here's an excerpt from my notes:
To me, “Personal Democracy” is an oxymoron. Democracy may be a lot of things, but the last thing it should be is “personal.” I understand “personal responsibility,” such as a family having a recycling bin in which they put their glass and metal every week. But even then, a single recycling bin for a whole building or block would be more efficient and appropriate.
Democracy is not personal, because if it’s about anything, it’s not about the individual. Democracy is about others. It’s about transcending the self and acting collectively. Democracy is people, participating together to make the world a better place.
One of the essays in this conference’s proceedings – the book “Rebooting Democracy”- remarks snarkily, “It’s the network, stupid.” That may go over well with all of us digital folks, but it’s not true. It’s not the network at all; it’s the people. The network is the tool – the new medium that might help us get over the bias of our broadcasting technologies. All those technologies that keep us focused on ourselves as individuals, and away from our reality as a collective.
This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.
The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle – independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.
It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.
The Enlightenment – for all its greatness – was still oh, so personal in its conception. The reader alone in his study, contemplating how his vote matters. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms....
You can find the rest here. Or now in German, here.
(Douglas Rushkoff is a guestblogger)
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If someone could put some paragraph breaks in here, that would really make this easier to read.
Paragraphs, please!
Also, Vetruvian Man.
Viva la paragraph! Seriously. Please.
Welcome, and glad to see you here at BB!
It's almost as if we crave removing ourselves from any given situation just as much as we crave feeling like we have some control over it. Blogging about a problem without doing something about it, for example, accomplishes both -- it allows us to control the problem by defining it in our own words, and uses the cathartic experience of authorship to get the problem out of our head. And even knowing that, I still find myself falling into that hole in my own blogging.
I'm going to be mulling this post over for the rest of the day, I can tell. Good food for thought.
Try living in Japan. "Democracy" has a different take there.
The Vitruvian Man was meant to act as an average, summarization, of a man..and to show that all men have the same proportions relative to their bodies..not sure how that translates to individuality and self sufficiency
The first step to open-source democracy is open-source data right?
The model of making data available freely and feeding it into a whole host of competing entities interested in trying to figure out how to make it work better is an important step.
A government is never going to have the capability of doing with this data as much as the rest of the net and the rest of the interested public...of course with the Bush administration the necessary information has been, sometimes illegally, withheld
I encourage everyone to look into "Give Me Liberty" by Naomi Wolf. I'm not far into it but it's a powerful reminder that the Declaration of Independence didn't stop at "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
@Nelson C. #3
Kudos for the snipe; first thing I noticed as well.
Also, isn't it with an 'i': Vitruvian Man
Anyway, great read.
Democracy is the tyranny of the masses, deciding how you should live your life for the sake of the Other. It's usually less horrific than all the other forms of tyranny humans have come up throughout history, but no less a tyranny for trampling on individual rights - and if you don't own your body, your life is forfeit to the whims of the Other.
Of course, what's so fascinating about your ideas (and, for me, about your books starting with Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say) is your application of digital/cyber-age concepts, neologisms, diction, processes, and methods to the deep structures within citizens' lives today--and by deep structures I mean governance; security and control; social policy; and jurisprudence (and you'll probably get to health systems soon too).
In your earlier post you made a clarion call that might be the thesis of this particular line of posts: that government can be hacked. Hacking, as it were, interrogates the deep structures--not just to corrupt, subvert, expose and vex them but to re-imagine them according to hitherto un-considered possibilities.
DR, this is what the governments of English-language countries lack (be these countries the USA, Canada, the UK, and on): we are afraid to interrogate the deepest paradigms operative in our lives and just throw some shit out and reinvent code. Like a Microsoft OS, we keep layering supposed fixes over thickets of weak foundations (and, obviously, I am far less savvy in my digital metaphors, forgive me).
I get what you're saying (and boy do you say it elegantly). You've got me glued to boingboing even more than usual now.
Seriously, democracy fails it. Without guaranteed liberties, democracy is no better than a dictatorship.
All due respect for civic participation and your support of it. But you go too far when you condemn, of all things, individuality. What is the use of those freedoms for which this blog fights every day, if not for each of us to express ourselves however we see fit, that is to say, uniquely? Individuality is not the same thing as selfishness (materialism).
Here is another idea about democracy: Democracy is about people staying off of each others' backs and out of each others' personal lives, people letting each other have the freedom to be different, people being free to make themselves into examples for others, to create new and wonderful ways of life, perhaps to be imitated, or perhaps not, above all to be imitated or not freely, with variation, transplantation, improvisation, ad infinitum.
By demonizing individuality, you take the first steps down that infamous road, the one paved with good intentions.
Kudos for realizing that democracy, no different from all other forms of government, is tyrannical and abuses the rights of the people, whether as individuals or freely assembled groups.
Massive negative karma, however, for thinking that it's a good thing.
#7
Not everyone is perfectly proportional. The Virtruvian man was supposed to exhibit the Golden Ratio (1:1.6) of ideal human aesthetic. Most people's height/wingspan is not 1:1 like the V-man.
I suppose that is the error in logic; assuming that the average person is *the* ideal person. The average American is overweight, ignorant, and in debt. Start your foundation of government assuming that, and it's easy to justify almost anything in politics.
Also, the Virtruvian man was drawn by DaVinci, but Virtrvius himself was a Roman engineer 1,500 years before Da Vinci was alive. So, I suppose the modern ideal being was born in Classical times, no the Renaissance.
Intresting read anyway.
Actually, I don't think DR condemned individuality. Rather, he provided a working definition for democracy as being more about collective identity and standards than about about individual identity. This is a rather dry and unemotional assertion, really.
DR put forth some bold, simple, definitional subject-predicates: "Democracy is not personal, because if it’s about anything, it’s not about the individual. Democracy is about others. It’s about transcending the self and acting collectively. Democracy is people, participating together to make the world a better place."
My problem with your keynote address at that conference, DR, is how you fail to point out how much the most vicious instincts to capitalist power and control were entangled within all those vaunted ideals in the Enlightenment. After all, many thinkers in the Enlightenment era promulgated the mass murder and systematic enslavement of Africans and some of the most seering and destructive pogroms of European (Western & Eastern) Jews at the same time that they constructed enticing seemingly egalitarian notions (egalitarian for some, always only for some).
Right up to the major inventions of the 19th century during the Victorian era (the light-bulb's harnessing of electricity, the steam engine and the train, the telegraph (telephone)) there was this schizophrenia of purposes--new faith in different forms of governance and a rising middle class right alongside incredible repression, murder, and colonialization.
This, then, to me is the problem with blogging about ideas that shadows your conference talk: it's not the divide between actual change and talking about change; rather, it's the great difficulty inherent in even talking about fundamental problems whose causes, experiences, and effects are so entangled.
"Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought."
ya, but isn't the real power of the scientific method that it allows the community to pool and confirm observations of individuals? isn't that sort of like the first and biggest wiki ever? seems like democracy at its best.
I'm not so starry eyed over Obama- but the whole web based campaign thing he did has been amazing. I went to see him last year with a few thousand of my closest friends and had to register my email to get a ticket. From then on they sent me nice little updates all the time. The tone is consistently steady, confident, compassionate and intelligent.
His main mantra is, "This campaign is not about me, its about you." Its a little cheesey, but it gets the point across. I think Obama is directly referring to the sort of open source democracy Douglas has illuminated.
Like I mentioned before, the neighbor to neighbor campaign on the Obama website connects you very directly to other people around the country. Ultimately, I did feel a little like a telemarketer and sort of let it go. But, it has been very motivating for me to get more involved in civic affairs.
I think the future of democracy is going to be neighbors working together to make the area they live in a better place to be. Online discussion forums are KEY to that sort of thing. I'm on several yahoo groups relating to local matters. I bet (most) neighborhoods and cities have a yahoo group.
One thing about democracy that ain't working is the back and forth campaigning, throwing those cultural trump cards out there again and again. The abortion issue is just notorious in this regard. I can't believe such a private, painful experience could be the fodder upon which a public war is waged. Please! Separation of church and state. I thought THAT was the founding principle of democracy.
I like the idea of distributed, "open source", participatory Democracy. I particularly like the idea at the local level and I think that our governments need to do more experimentation with alternate methods of voting, communication, representation, and incorporation of technology. The best place to do this is at the local level because you can essentially run controlled experiments without risking screwing up the country even worse :-)
Full-blown participatory Democracy scares me for two reasons.
1) I respect and believe in Benjamin Franklin's quote: "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Obviously it already demonstrably true for politicians themselves (on both sides of the aisle).
2) Digg. Do we want the country run that way? I'm only being a little facetious.
@14 who said: "Democracy is about people staying off of each others' backs and out of each others' personal lives, people letting each other have the freedom to be different..." etc.
That's good stuff and I'm all for it, but it's not democracy. It's closer to republicanism. Which is OK, since the US isn't a pure democracy, but a representative democratic republic with socialist tendencies.
A pure democracy need not celebrate, nor even acknowledge, the rights of the individual. Doug is right; democracy is the part of the equation where we all get together and decide which way the bus is going, not where each of us is going to sit. A pure democracy can vote away the rights of individuals or groups.
A republic incorporates laws that govern the government; that circumscribe what the democratic decisions of the government can do. We can't, in the US (for example) vote to give various rights to some citizens but not others. Much civil rights law is based on that idea followed backwards; that is, if it's wrong to deny rights to some people foundationally (based on the Constitution), then other rights that flow from laws that come from the Constitution must also not discriminate. That is why, in some cases, the ultimate threat is to "amend the Constitution," because that would change the law of the republic in a way that puts democracy above it.
Checks and balances, man. Checks and balances.
Democracy is a tough and loaded word (in the same way that "cosmopolitan" is): it has a lot of baggage, weight. By far, the best discussion of democracy -- as a political practice as well as a social value -- is John Dunn's "Democracy: a History". It's at Amazon, here: http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-History-John-Dunn/dp/0871139316/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222125785&sr=8-3
Aside from the merit of the information and its presentation, it also crams the most information (it's only a few hundred pages) in a relatively small volume, for what it attempts to do. It's a worthy read -- and for some, in the context of this conversation -- a necessary one.
Second, I'm not sure I can prove it at the moment, because I don't have the pages or texts at hand, but it seems like what DR's describing as "Hacking" is to some degree also defined as, or synonymous with, contemporary concepts of "humanism" (I'm thinking Edward Said, so its not just someone shouting about humanism -- also a loaded term -- without a narrowing/specific reference). I would be interested to see where, and to what extent the parallels diverge.
http://troublogtown.blogspot.com/2008/09/heres-this-weeks-cartoon.html
I would submit that Democracy and liberty do not exactly go hand in hand. The individualism propagated through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment could largely be seen as reactionary- a demand for a vindication of the self.
However, I would have to say that, in my opinion, individualism has become a problem in America. We champion it like a coat of armor that affirms our civil liberties, yet we often neglect to acknowledge the responsibility that is a working part of individuality. All too often, I think many choose to lay blame on the government, or a faction of society rather then themselves when considering the merit of their lives.
At the same time, we are individuals that choose to live within the boundaries of society. As a consequence, we enter into an unspoken agreement with our fellow man to act in the best interest of the country as a whole. This gets back to why I say that Democracy and Liberty don't always go hand in hand. In order for Democracy to succeed, citizens must be willing to sacrifice some of their individual rights for the greater good of the whole (or the "Other"). Ergo, individualism and Democracy are in many ways at odds.
Derek Bledsoe
Segment Producer, BBtv
Democracy is not about "transcending the self and acting collectively." Democracy is a protocol for enabling people to get along with one another in society even when they vehemently disagree.
I got here late, but I expected a thundering horde of young libertarians to have gone through here laying waste to all the "socialists" and "fascists" who embrace hive-mind collectivism.
Where are those guys?
Ywn.. thnks Jckkff, y crd my nsmn.
That was the most pointless, rambling episode of utopian blather I have ever seen on the Internet, which is saying something. Is this a parody? No one will change her life after reading this, except perhaps to swear off reading anything by Doug Rushkoff ever again.
I'm with Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Comment 25.
Rushkoff, Voltaire would have wiped the floor with you.
I always thought the perfect example of Democracy is 3 foxes and a rabbit voting about what they were going to have for dinner.
Open Source Democracy is great, but it's a bit redundant.
The founders established a country "of, by, and for the people". The government is us, collectively. Our actions make it. But because our individual actions don't make it, those of us who bridle against authority long ago stopped thinking of our government as 'us' and started thinking of it as 'them' or worse, 'it'.
This is the opening the anti-government and anti-democracy forces were looking for...
All of society is a set of opposing forces. The action of voting is one force, the 'empire building' of established government powers is a force, each branch of government is a force, each religious group, each corporation, each interest group is a force.
Each is vying for advantage. Negotiating that advantage is what constitutes what we call 'politics'. Balanced forces cause frustration of those seeking advantage.
Government is a large, expensive force. But it works for us collectively, it is us collectively. It offsets other large power groups. It keeps religion in check, it keeps corporations in check. Both those forces are bigger than the individual, and if you want individual rights, you must have a balancing force representing the individual.
Those who have felt abused by powerful government 'restricting their rights' often are people who feel their 'rights' trump the rights of others to not be victimized. Conservative men sometimes feel the bible allows them to own their wives and their children, and treat them as they choose. When the government extended rights to women, it infringed on their 'rights'. That is just an extreme example, but a real one (look at Iran). The same principle applies to cigarettes, motorcycle helmets, air and water quality... you name it.
Libertarians seek to eliminate government to reduce infringement of the government on their rights, but in doing so, they will also eliminate the force that protects their rights. Leaving a vacuum.
Put simply: there are two kinds of governance/government... Democracy and "Biggest Bully Wins". The latter describes every other form of government, because only democracy allows government to respond to the people.
But that's almost over in the US. The corporations own all the influence, and have the ear - 100% of the time - of our representatives in Washington. All we have left is the vote, and that's being corrupted as well.
Obama's calling for us all to get involved again. That's awesome.
more culture hacking on boing boing, please. i'm really into the ideas being presented here. there *should* be a discussion about the mechanics of how we run our culture.
i'm not sure if open source democracy is the best place to start; i think we can modify our culture much more fluidly outside of democracy, and let the democracy catch up, as it were.
the sexual revolution of the late 60s was one such culture hack; a large group of people hacked their own cultural norms, flipping the acceptable-bit from "forbidden" to "allowed" on several issues, including casual sex, gay sex, unmarried co-habitation, freely available birth control, viable single-parenting, psychoactive drug use, and a host of other cultural norms.
democracy is still catching up with many of those hacks. for instance, while some huge percentage of the population has or continues to smoke pot, it continues to be illegal. but mere law doesn't stop pot from being a cultural norm.
there are a few processes that have been harder to control from a cultural norm standpoint. the peace movement seems to have had little effect on ending war, perhaps because the military is a huge centralized organization controlled from the top down. nor has cultural influences been able to stop the massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich, as has been ongoing since the 1960s. this is where democracy hacking might be of benefit.
Take Democracy to the next level: Demarchy
Rushkoff is to be congratulated for "Vesuvian Man", easily the funniest malapropism since "Pluto's Republic". His hand-wringing maunderings have the flavor of pre-fascist 'thirties nonsense. To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli: "not even fraudulent".
@#21 AndyHavens: Democracy, as rule by the people, presupposes a) the ability of the people to participate in a free and informed manner in governing, and b) the full enfranchisement of every person subject to the jurisdiction of the state. To elaborate:
a) For a government to work by exercising power according to the summation of the wills of the people, it cannot inhibit the free exercise of political will by those who have an a priori right to do so - every one of the people. Any reduction of the information or rights available to one subset of the people by another subset inhibits the ability of the people as a whole to freely exercise and sum their political wills to achieve accurately representative democratic action.
b) Since we define "the people" as "everyone who lives here and subject to the power of the government we're setting up" it's contradictory to remove a subset of those people from suffrage - vote away their rights - and still call yourself a democracy. An aristocracy doesn't have to have an upper class that exceeds the size of its lower class.
So, in order to avoid contradiction, the definition of democracy implies those two additional corollaries.
#25 Patrick Nielsen Hayden: okay you said it much more succinctly than I could.
Why do people so want to idealize democracy? There's a polarized worldview of The People trying to take back The Power from The Elites. There isn't enough appreciation of the middle ground where the real stuff actually already gets done.
The word Democracy has that power- to- the- people connotation, but unfortunate specific denotations, which idealists paint over with their various stripes.
Then there's the instinct to form 100-person tribes. People want to get together as a group, form a consensus, and do the right thing together. The modern world plays havoc with that, and it just rankles.
We do have a problem of parasitic centralized power. We could certainly use more forms of decentralized organization. I think the kinds of changes that computer programmers can make (e.g. bittorrent, TOR) and the technologies that are good enough for organizing people with (e.g. wikis, blogs, mailing lists) are fairly distinct. If your genius is people, or some issue, stick with that.
But, if you were just hoping technology would supply some fresh untried ideas, most of us programmers are going to suggest libertarianism, that whole Enlightenment individualism- as- the- protocol- of- cooperation thing.
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I'm surprised no one's mentioned R.U. Sirius's two proposals/organizations: The Question Authority Proposal and the Open Source Party Proposal.