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Copyright (C) 2003 by Douglas Rushkoff.

Title: Open Source Democracy

Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Release Date: January 20, 2004 [eBook #10753]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPEN SOURCE DEMOCRACY***

Copyright (C) 2003 by Douglas Rushkoff. This Project Gutenberg is also available online at: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page292.aspx

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Open Source Democracy
How online communication is changing offline politics

by Douglas Rushkoff

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tom Bentley and everyone at Demos for the opportunity to extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. Thanks also to my editorial assistant, Brooke Belisle, and to colleagues including Andrew Shapiro, Steven Johnson, Ted Byfield, Richard Barbrook, David Bennahum, Red Burns, Eugenie Furniss and Lance Strate.

Introduction

The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better, have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the broader challenges of our time.

As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism, ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised so much of late 20th century thinking and culture.

The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. Thanks to the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social and political constructs in very new contexts. We may now be able to launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the world at large. These interactive communication technologies could even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual self-interest.

The emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study in the politics of renaissance. The battle for control over new and little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives. Meanwhile, the technologies themselves empower individuals to take part in the creation of new narratives. Thus, in an era when crass perversions of populism, and exaggerated calls for national security, threaten the very premises of representational democracy and free discourse, interactive technologies offer us a ray of hope for a renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement.

The very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. And we may get our best rehearsal for these roles online.

In short, the interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with cooperative behaviour. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. While such strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they imperil what is left of civil society. They threaten the last small hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of faith-justified oil wars.

As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States, becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance is diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time the war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found half of Americans believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 9 September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred to the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions', bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as the now-laughable 'collateral damage'. This was the propagandist motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists' lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are travelling, their coverage becomes skewed.

But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war. Journalists' personal entries provided a much broader range of opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the conflict than were available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast and cable television.

For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard as a real person living in Baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war. This daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in Baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and opinion about the war on the web.

Clearly, the success of sites like Dear Raed stem from our increasingly complex society's need for a multiplicity of points of view on our most pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a mainstream mediaspace that appears to be converging on single, corporate and government approved agenda. These alternative information sources are being given more attention and credence than they might actually deserve, but this is only because they are the only ready source of oppositional, or even independent thinking available. Those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative value systems may be working against the current and increasingly concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in an entirely new context.

The communications revolution may not have brought with it either salvation for the world's stock exchanges or the technological infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again. While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.

From Moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking control

We are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. The people were actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature.

As different people and groups competed for authority, narratives began to be used to gain advantage. Stories were no longer being used simply to predict the patterns of nature, but to describe and influence the courses of politics, economics and power. In such a world, stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win believers; to be understood as real. When the Pharaoh or King is treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating in the conceit. But he still needed to prove his potency in real ways, and at regular intervals, in order to ensure their continued participation. However, if the ruler could somehow get his followers to accept the story of his divine authority as historical fact, then he need prove nothing. The story justifies itself and is accepted as a reality.

In a sense, early civilisation was really just the process through which older, weaker people used stories to keep younger, stronger people from vying for their power. By the time the young were old enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk exposing the stories as myths. More positively, these stories provided enough societal continuity for some developments that spanned generations to take root.

The Old Testament, for example, is basically the repeated story of how younger sons attempt to outwit their fathers for an inherited birth right. Of course, this is simply allegory for the Israelites' supplanting of the first-born civilisation, Egypt. But even those who understood the story as metaphor rather than historical fact continued to pass it on for the ethical tradition it contained: one of a people attempting to enact social justice rather than simply receive it.

Storytelling: communication and media

Since Biblical times we have been living in a world where the stories we use to describe and predict our reality have been presented as truth and mistaken for fact. These narratives, and their tellers, compete for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told. The content of a story might be considered the what, where the technology through which the story is transmitted can be considered the how. In moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value of the message.

Exclusive access to the how of storytelling lets a storyteller monopolise the what. In ancient times, people were captivated by the epic storyteller as much for his ability to remember thousands of lines of text as for the actual content of the Iliad or Odyssey. Likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as much through the magic of broadcasting technology as its script. Whoever has power to get inside that magic box has the power to write the story we end up believing.

We don't call the stuff on television 'programming' for nothing. The people making television are not programming our TV sets or their evening schedules; they are programming us. We use the dial to select which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. This is not so dangerous in