A Bridge Too Far

The development of writing made vast tracts of human culture available to anyone who could read, had the leisure and had the means to gain access to the available documents. Printing based on moveable metal type raised this to another degree leading to documentation that was within the reach (by one means or another) of every literate person.

And then what? Did we see a corresponding ‘flat world’ resulting from the fact that every literate person could get hold of key materials? Of course we didn’t. Gutenberg’s technology certainly had a dramatic impact on the way the ruling classes did their business. Its implications were potentially democratic. But it was not long before the printed word was used to fill people’s time with pulp novels and newspapers aligned to the rich and powerful.

Is it so different with the Internet?

People now talk peer-to-peer and many-to-many, they don’t receive top to bottom. The earth is becoming flat and nothing, and we mean nothing, will be the same again.

A little knowledge of the history of communications would surely lead to caution before making such a claim. It is instructive to find people saying very similar things about the telegraph and then about the telephone. What do most people do on the Internet? I don’t know the latest statics but porn and celebrity information are certainly high up on the list (probably top). Only a vanishingly small minority of Internet users are using the Internet to challenge their own pre-conceptions. Activists overwhelmingly use it to find material to support their preconceptions. This can work quite well so long as those preconceptions are in tune with realisable and worthwhile objectives. When they are not …

The problem is that throughout this booklet Uffe Elbæk & Neal Lawson confuse theoretical potential with reality.

Claiming that “nothing … will be the same again” is, of course safe, if not very informative. We are always in new situations. So nothing is ever quite the same as what went before. The question is, however,  just what is the difference and whether that difference marks a qualitatively new phase of development.

The booklet opens with the claims that “Marx may have been overly determinist” and that profound social paradigm shifts are, as ever, “driven by technology”. This manages to confuse several issues. For Marx technology was not socially neutral (that was Stalin, not Marx) and he was not therefore a technological determinist (“overly” or otherwise). But is it just such a determinist approach that seems to attract Uffe Elbæk & Neal Lawson. There are too many instances of social upheaval in circumstances of backward technology (technology that had been introduced elsewhere without producing social upheaval) for the claims of technologically driven social change to be taken seriously.

UE and NL claim that the development of Internet technology and social media “gives us informed, enabled and empowered citizens”. I don’t know where they live but it is clearly not where I live (West London). Most of the people I know use the Internet and many (maybe most) use social media too. This has not in any discernible way, led to a significant transformation in their awareness or their feeling of empowerment.

I value modern technology. It enables me to do easily many things that would otherwise require a lot of effort. I helped to lead a successful campaign against the plans of a major developer in my area and for that the ability to get central government and local government information online was critical. Not only that but we used the Internet to keep one step ahead of the developer in ways that the people who acted on its behalf clearly did not understand. So I am not a digital slouch. I am just against digi-babble (by which I mean grandiose claims for the transformative power of new technology supported only by anecdote and unsupported by any attempt at evaluation of these same claims).

UE and NL say

Today the world and our ability to influence it is literally in our hands. We can criticise, disrupt and dispute at the touch of a few buttons. A Twitter storm is instantaneous and costs nothing. State and corporate secrets become impossible to keep. Sharing and collaboration become feasible and desirable in huge numbers via geographic and virtual communities. Transparency rules. We rule. But only if we change the way we do politics.

Is this not hard-core digi-nonsense? Yes, we can get hold of vast quantities of information. But what can we do with it and how can we make it known to those who need to know? This existence of a communication possibility does not, by itself, create a communication actuality. One might take a voluntarist approach and say if only we have the will to do it we can. As so often in social theory, technological determinism has to be supplemented with its opposite: voluntarism (“the optimism of the will”).

My activist experience bears no relation to the picture painted by UE and NL. In a five-year campaign over a major development I was misinformed and directly lied to by local government officers. The developer made claims that were demonstrably false. Councillors generally were seriously under-informed and relied far too much on the advice and recommendations of council officers. We conducted a campaign based on a high level of information. Certainly much of that was obtained from the Internet but had it not been we would have got it by other means. And do know what? Our most important activity was keeping local residents well informed by means of, guess what, a printed Newsletter! We had a website but that wasn’t the key. (It was there largely to demonstrate to council offices and the developer that we knew what we were talking about – and Internet tracking showed that they looked at the site frequently, very satisfying).

What the above quotation ignores is that electronic media, like the printed word, are also a source for misinformation, disinformation, diversion from reality and pandering to the lowest common denominator in politics and culture. Recent revelations have also emphasised what was clear anyway, namely, that electronic media also make the tasks of surveillance and control easier and more powerful.

So yes, what is new in electronic media is that, unlike the printed word, it is easy for everyone to chip in their 142 characters or even set up their own blog (not quite so easy), or website (a bit more difficult still). This is true but it needs to be evaluated in a sober way and not with the breathy excitement of this booklet. In addition to Paul Mason (Why It’s STILL Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions) we need to read Evgeny Mozorov. (The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World).

The old vertical institutions, where knowledge was power, are corroded from within and without. No one takes orders any more. No one can command because no one is in control. Power is dispersed.

And yet,  just look at the Compass website. The discussions on the site are essentially vertical. Compass posts a discussion document and the world is invited to comment. The writers of the documents rarely, if ever, condescend to respond to points made. Even a direct challenge to basic matters of fact pass without response. This is surely the essence of verticality. Everyone can say what they want – but no one is listening. The small number of comments to the site’s discussion papers should also cause the talk of universal peer-to-peer communication toppling the mighty to be modified just a tad.

Not only that but when I took part in a working group for the Compass Education Inquiry I was struck by the technological backwardness of the exercise. People did or did not hear about meetings and did or did not receive the papers circulated. I suggested that all these problems could easily be dealt with by setting up a website (with password access if necessary) so that all papers, comments and meeting notices could be there for participants to see at any time. Yes, it was agreed that would be a good idea. Nothing happened. This is an education problem. Have the organisers of the Education work groups, to stay with that example, sufficiently understood the possibilities of using the Compass website? I suspect not. Certainly the group I attended was never given the slightest hint of such website possibilities. This is a missed opportunity. The Compass website, or another, could easily handle such things without great expense. There are sufficient people within Compass able and willing to help with such an exercise.

To be fair to UE and NL, as well as the heady assessments of our ‘new times’, they note a possible downside:

The big corporations will try to commercialise these flat planes. The state will push surveillance. And it’s hard to start a protest through Tumblr if you can’t afford to top up your phone credit or co-produce a public service when you’re hungry. Social media can isolate as well as connect. And as the old top-down certainties evaporate a new authoritarian populism swaggers into town whipping up fear of ‘the other’.

The problem is that there is no attempt in this discussion to evaluate the relative strengths of these different trends and different possibilities.

1989                                 

We are told that the great events of 1989 were the creation of the world wide web protocols (HTTP and the fall of the Berlin Wall. No connection is made between these events and rightly so. On the other hand we are told that it was the forces of “individualistic consumer capitalism” that brought down the Berlin wall. I am more inclined to say that it was the failure of the Stalinist model that caused the East German model to implode, but that is another debate.

But with “now smart phone technology has rewritten the rules of how we think and behave” we get straight back to digi-babble.

For a start, smart phone usage as a share of mobile phone usage is currently around 50% in the UK. Does this not raise issues of exclusion. If we worry about discrimination against women and against various minorities (as we should) then perhaps the undoubted power of these little devices should not induce such wild talk of a new world and new people without reflecting on who is in the club. And just how has the smart phone transformed the thinking of the 50% that own them compared to the 50% that don’t. What on earth does this claim mean?

I agree that new media is an important tool for bringing about political change, I am less persuaded that they have brought about a qualitative change in people power. The small minority of people that do these things (I am one) can comment on line and can, on occasion even conduct informed discussion but does this imply a step change in the organisation and psychology of politics has taken place?

The revolution has started

The answer of UE and NL is again delivered in a tone of great excitement:

This paradigm shift is not a prediction, it’s not a vision. It’s real and it’s happening now – and it will go on happening. Kickstarter, Wikipedia, Open Source, Mumsnet, the People Who Share and Thoughtworks are some of the first movers in a future that is being co-produced. And it means our singular identities as either consumers or producers are merging. We are becoming fully rounded citizens.

Are we? Perhaps we need a little discussion about what a “fully-rounded citizen” might be before making such a claim. My suspicion is that it will involve a lot more than accessing Wikipedia and tweeting 140 character messages to state one’s opinion.

Smartphones and social media are said to displace traditional hierarchies. Do they? Will the organisation of steel production, or the design and production of smart phones become matters of a continual electronic mass plebiscite? Or will large-scale operations, which have to be planned often many years ahead, continue to be carried out, under any plausible social arrangements, by a small minority of people charged with those functions (albeit that one could wish for them to be under democratic mandate and to work in an open and transparent way – unlike the present situation).

The example given of the Danish sell-off of national power resources seems to me to prove nothing. It sounds like an account of mass protest, government intransigence and temporarily embarrassed politicians. In other words it sounds like the politics that activists have experienced for a very long time.

Liquid democracy

In this everything-everywhere world direct democracy will become more potent and more popular …

Just how this is to happen is unclear. It is equally unclear if it is desirable in all circumstances. I recall a US state governor answering how he justified sanctioning the death penalty by saying that it is what the people want. Surely the advocacy of direct democracy needs to go beyond a simple assumption that it is a good thing. Should we decide on the virtues of river-dredging as opposed to the alternatives by Tweets?

… as will deliberative styles of democracy in which smaller but representative groups of people build a consensus on key issues. Then we will get to mash up different types of democracy – representative, direct and deliberative – in what is being called ‘liquid democracy’. Here you have a vote that you can keep and cast yourself directly, or lend it to a representative and take it back whenever you want or you can join up and collaborate with others on an issue-by-issue basis.

But hold on a moment! That sounds remarkably like the sort of democracy that I experienced over decades of trade union and other activity. At branch level there would be well-informed meetings (we worked hard at that) as the basis for both deliberative (positions often taken from discussion and without even the need for a vote) and direct democracy (all members were able to attend and large numbers did). Finally representatives would be sent to regional and national meetings. And all that without a smartphone in sight!

Technology and the death of deference allows all this and more. People will stop being the occasional consumers of politics and instead its permanent producers.

Mmmm. “The death of deference’. My recent experience working in a state school over a period of years was that the younger teachers, nearly all of whom had smartphones were incredibly deferential, far more than had been the case in my years as a young teacher. The “permanent producers” of politics. What does this actually mean? Does it mean that owning a smartphone will somehow equip people with a feel for political philosophy, history, social analysis and all the ancillary matters required to make an informed decisions?

Behind all these claims is a reduction of politics to the sum of separate issues – all of which then go into the “mash-up”. But politics is not the sum of the separate issues. Each issue is conditioned by the whole. What can be a desirable and realistic outcome in a particular case will depend the whole picture.

Of course people who are not political philosophers can and do conduct successful campaigns through which they not only achieve their objectives but through which they get a view onto the broader picture and learn a great deal. There are many different ways of coming to a political understanding but everyone tweeting their opinions from a smartphone is probably one of the least effective ways of doing so. What counts is thought geared to actions, where possible, and to policies where no immediate actions are available. Politics is a complicated business. Everyone agrees that a real effort has to be made to understand maths or biology. It is no less so for politics and to pretend otherwise is to cast oneself in the position of a snake-oil salesperson.

Importantly, in a world where what matters is not what you own but what you do and create …

Which world is that? It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the one I live in. It is apparently a world in which we can all feel

… the wind of the deep democratic revolution starting to sweep through us.

And then after all this  UE and NL seem to be aware that they might have been carried away a little on the grand sweep of their own discourse:

But in this rush to celebrate the potential of the new we would do well to remember the importance of some elements of the old. Given the rampant levels of inequality and the blackmailing might of global corporations, not to mention runaway climate change – the state and the interlinking of states across regions and the globe will become ever more important.

It is quite unclear in this how the state is envisaged. It appears to be the traditional social democratic view of third-party, neutral honest broker between contending social forces rather than an agent acting on behalf of the dominant class. On that basis, I suppose, what is deemed necessary is a general change of attitude i.e. a pulling up of socks. Change will happen

… only if those states and those who inhabit them, learn to let go and see their job as equalising resources and power so that what is already happening in the flat earth revolution can be scaled up and joined up.

Parties as open tribes

In the view of UE and NL political parties will remain necessary. And, as they say, “someone has to stand”, manifestos must be written and budgets must still be set. Without seeing that, serious reflection on these facts undermines many of their claims about our “new world”. They go on to suggest that political parties must become a bridge between the horizontal and the vertical without commenting on the fact this is exactly what political parties have always claimed that they do.

As UE and NL say, digital communication “is also ripe for a different future – one based on authoritarian populism”. But they seem to think that this can be averted if we “get it right fast”. Also, in their view, it is not from an effort at clarity of views about politics and society that we need to start. Rather “We start with human beings and our infinite capacity for love, empathy and connection.”

And then, finally Marx makes another appearance, but again as a technological determinist and again with the banal claim that “the context of our actions strongly influences the effects of those actions”. Marx had something rather different in mind with his view that “the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class”. Reflecting on that might have made UE and NL rather more hesitant about drawing on currently fashionable talk about the “digital revolution” – even if it was drawn from the “digital cloud”.

Final Comment: just what can digital technology do for us?

If we take a calm view of digital technology we will soon see that it is what it says on the tin: it is a technology. It is not a solution to the problems of society. As with any other technology it can be implemented in different ways according to the social aims of those using it. Technology per se never provides social solutions. It provides the means for implementing different social solutions. Even such a simple technology as a road will mean something different if it is publicly owned to provide free passage from A to B than if it is privately owned and dotted with toll-gates.

It should be clear that digital communication in its turn can be used for both progressive and reactionary purposes. In the lines remaining I want to make a few simple suggestions as to how we on the left might harness it for our purposes.

(a) Making information available

Although it is endlessly repeated that all information is now available with a few mouse movements and a few key strokes this is actually very far from the truth. The problem of getting hold of even very basic information can be immense. These include (i) straightforward non-availability, (ii) multiple variations of the same information (often undated), (iii) badly organised websites, (iv) defunct links, (v) dodgy archiving (vi) lack of authentication.

The first edition of Vince Cable’s book The Storm had an alleged quotation from Marx’s Capital. I wrote to Cable to say that the book contained no such passage. He replied that it had been turned up by his researchers. I found that there were indeed many websites giving this alleged quotation from Capital and it was clear that his “researchers” had gone no further than that. I sent Cable a link to an electronic version of Capital and invited him to search the text. He removed the quotation from the second edition of the book. All of which illustrates that the Internet is a source of great confusion and misinformation as well as providing genuine access to materials. To find materials one needs to know something about what one is looking for and to be aware of the pitfalls in the way of finding it.

My conclusion is that we need to develop websites that give a guarantee of authentic information for political purposes. Thus, for example, Labour’s Internet presence is a mess. Whether you look at the main website, at Membersnet or Your Britain you will find navigation inefficient and the search for materials frustrating. My suggestion is that if Labour can’t sort its Internet act out – and the signs are that so far it can’t (its RSS news feed is months out of date!) the materials have to be sorted out more locally. I am, for example, setting up a Labour branch website which will give easy access to all Labour policy documents with one page of links.

So, that’s the first task: how can we provide sources of authentic and easy to access information?

A major problem is that such material must be managed and constantly updated. There is nothing more annoying than websites that purport to give important political materials which turn out to be hopelessly out of date. The management of such information sources should now be regarded as a key political task. It will not happen by itself. (The Labour Party doesn’t even put a date on most of its documents. These need to be supplied by a conscience provider of documents and links to documents.)

(b) Making meetings more interesting

Like most political activists my patience is exhausted by listening to boring reports delivered at meetings. Such meetings are death to politics and would drive any newcomer with more than two brain cells functioning at the same time away instantly.

All the boring stuff (boring to some but not to those to whom it is immediately relevant) should be made available on a website where it can be accessed at one’s own convenience. If it is not for public consumption then if should be on a private (login access) area of the site.

In this way the boring grind of politics could be greatly alleviated making space for discussion and a genuine sense of exploration of often difficult and uncharted waters.

(c) The digital chairperson

Every meeting attendee knows how important the role of a chairperson. It is noteworthy that this role is so absent on the Internet where exchanges so frequently turn to abuse. Some sites are moderated to deal with this but then the reasons for moderator’s actions are often unclear and the moderator may be inaccessible. It is also striking how often Internet discussions have no response from the person whose paper/article is being discussed. That wouldn’t be regarded as normal in a town hall debate. Why should it be accepted in Internet exchanges? The etiquette (netiquette?) of Internet discussion is not yet established and the left needs to think about that.

(d) Implementation is not a push-over

Internet and mobile communication will not work political miracles for us. Even the talk of the role of social media in political uprisings such as the “Arab spring” should be looked at with a degree of scepticism. Technology changes the means by which we do things but what we do with it and what is done to us via it is still a social battle ground. If we want to make the most of modern technology for the purpose of radical left politics then we need to study it and learn to use it effectively. It will not happen by itself. The social use of technology depends on what we decide to make of it.

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