Profound Heterogeneity

0 So, I want to advance a few possible theses with regard to democracy (politics) in the age of the digital network. Not all of these might be true—some may turn out to be patently false—but I think all of the propositions are worth exploring as we attempt to understand the cultural and political changes brought about by the profound heterogeneity of our current moment.

0 1. Networks are heterogeneous to democracy, or at least heterogenous to the way we currently think about democracy. This is my most substantial, and thus perhaps most controversial, suggestion, and needless to say it will necessarily require careful explication. But to sketch the idea briefly, representative democracy as we know it, currently conceive of it, is only one particular form of democracy, and this particular form relies on many structural supports which are undermined by the transformation from the analog to the digital.

0 2. The internet requires a new kind of thinking about democratic subjectivity. The internet calls into question notions of subjectivity that trace their history to printing press and enlightenment culture, forming the foundation of how we think about democracy. As Habermas argues, the rise of the public sphere was predicated on, and subsequently re-enforced by, a very specific notion of subjectivity. If the internet yields a reformed or transformed notion of subjectivity, it will undoubtedly alter the way we conceive of the individuals’ relationship to politics.

0 3. “Network Theory” forces us to rethink our notions of individuation. This new form of subjectivity is in part driven by, although not reducible to, a paradigm shift produced by what I will broadly call “network theory.” Work in a range of disciplinary fields analyzing network structures are changing the way we think about a wide range of phenomena, from natural occurrences to human social behavior. In particular, the work of theorists such as Barbasi, Watts, Christakis, and Fowler points to a way of understanding human behavior that is not based on the rational, individual, free will actor upon which are current political ideologies are based. Given new approaches to understanding these various phenomena produced by network theory, we will need to substantially rethink how we understand individual political action. And in this sense it is not just about the internet, but the rise of network theory, a paradigm linked which has certainly been influenced by the existence and continued growth of the digital network.

0 4. The Democratic balance may be impossible. Democracy, indeed community formation, is about striking a balance between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Democracy has been informed by the fiction that underlying all human interaction is a certain homogeneity, that despite differences in culture, certain common interests, often framed in terms of human rights or natural rights, ground all pursuits and serve as the basis for political action. But the internet, through increasing the range and speed of expression, has exposed this fiction. Interests often conflict, and the more people who are invited to the conversation, the more it appears that there is no basis for common agreement on which to ground a political discussion. Rather than creating a global discussion, the internet demonstrates the impossibility of generating this discussion.

0 5. The internet changes our relationship to space. Our current conception of the political is intimately intertwined with our conception of space and place. Nation-states rely on the ability to control borders and define what happens within their own territories. This proposition is becoming increasingly less tenable. The internet does not know political boundaries, and while nation-states continuously fight to regulate networked space, no individual actor, no matter how powerful, will be able to regulate its communication. This means that political borders become less significant as non-nation state actors, corporations for instance, gain political power. There is no sovereign to which one can appeal for rights on the internet. What is more, the old adage that all politics is local seems to be upset by the network structure. I often know more about the political concerns of friends in foreign countries than I do about my geographical neighbors. Political action is no longer limited governed by spatial proximity. One no longer has to be part of a physical community to be involved politically.

0 6. Digital citizenship is not analog citizenship 2.0. All of the above means that the network structure will necessarily yield the need for a new kind of citizenship and a new kind of political space.

0 7. In the beginning it is difficult to see the endgame. The future is radically contingent, and mostly unknowable. In one sense, this places the critic in a bind; analyzing small, local changes certainly yields a more rigorous form of scholarship, but failure to pay attention to broad changes or an overall trajectory produces a scholarship which remains unfortunately wedded to and derived from the past, and which fails to recognize the rather significant changes brought about by our new modes of communicating, organizing, storing and producing information and knowledge. Locally the printing press might have looked to be a gradual transformation, but taking the long view we can now realize what a substantial transformation it had on the political space, and outcome which was by no means fully predictable from the outset.