November 18, 2004

Collective attraction  

Venkat links to this business about bloggers (or what the faint of heart are calling citizen journalists) as Time Magazine's person(s?) of the year, and there seems to be lots of support for the idea, calls for folks to write to Time, etc. Personally, I think it's a bit premature. Blogs are getting bigger, and they've certainly changed how and what stories are reported; but they're not by a long shot the biggest thing that happened this year. How about Karl Rove, or Zarqawi, or even better: Lynndie England... but Time doesn't have balls like that.

In some alternate reality, the Deaniacs could have made that cover. Zephyr Teachout, one of Dean's online organizers, has a fascinating article about the as yet unfulfilled promise of the internet for democracy. She touches briefly on blogs, but they don't figure so centrally because they're not that useful as an organizing mechanism. They're great for passing along information quickly -- almost always what's been said already elsewhere -- but they don't really do much. Occasional experts, maverick journalists -- these people may be having an effect -- but they (or their ilk) would be having an effect anyway. I wrote in a recent post that the networks between blogs (rather than the blogs themselves) are the really new part of the phenomenon, but I'm not sure what even those networks have accomplished from the standpoint of democracy, what they've accomplished from the standpoint of political organization.

For now at least, political organization really can't take place without some kind of physical, personal manifestation of what's happening in cyberspace. Teachout talks about meetups and other repeating events that can be used to "shift the locus of political thought and power." The idea is to build political discourse from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and to use the internet, which represents near-perfect communication for any large scale movement, as a mechanism.

This is an attractive model, but the internet is not the silver bullet that will solve all collective action problems, at least not in the way Teachout suggests. Yes, the internet can eliminate a lot of the transaction costs associated with organizing. But collective action problems are not just about transaction costs; there's also the freerider problem, which cuts right to the heart of organizing and activism. So our failure to act isn't about the fear that others won't join us, but about our assumption that someone else will act and therefore we won't have to. This distinction is a serious problem for Teachout's argument, because it works against this notion that somehow most people will act on their "strong streak of political love and life" within the right cyberconfiguration.

Still, I see a couple other ways around the collective action problem. Anybody who's been to an actual MeetUp knows that there's a tremendous power in these things even beyond the day of. There's a sort of groupthink -- even a cultishness -- where you leave more excited than you were before, and by following up the Dean folks were able to build on that. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of how to get people there in the first place, but once people have arrived the MeetUp becomes more of a cultural and social enterprise. Politics isn't subordinated so much as subsumed -- it's still the organizational premise, but cultural identification (which plays a crucial role in political affiliation anyway) takes over and suddenly you have a phenomenon.

More provocative, I think, is the idea is that there's simply something magical about internet communities. When I wrote the other day about Wikipedia as an interface between knowledge and social consciousness, I neglected to mention the huge collective action problem that poses: economic models simply don't predict that people will engage in this sort of collective behavior with (apparently) little direct reward. But somehow, Wikipedia exists, and dynamically so. Open source projects -- whether they're about software or politics -- have a way of getting around collective action problems. And while sometimes new systems of incentives are created that could easily fit into an economic model (bloggers who track their traffic and long for links), there are plenty of cases where there just isn't any rational explanation (bloggers who don't). I'm sure there have been attempts to explain this -- my own instinctive reaction (maybe because it works this way for me) is to talk about the refining of those American ideals, individuality and creativity, and how the internet is the great equalizing medium that allows creators to act. But that's not the whole story, because there are communitarian overtones to all of it -- yes, it emphasizes expression and personal freedom, but it's clearly not liberal. Neither is it capitalist -- within this sphere, the logic of markets and property is being completely redefined. And that other key feature of American democracy, majority rules, is confounded by the quantity and complexity of information out there and the resulting power of the pundit class. Frankly, I'm ready to call it a new underlying (and still underground) politic that we've never seen before in the history of the world. Whether it can have political relevance beyond cyberspace I don't know.

Back to Teachout for a second, let's assume for now these forces can be harnessed as part of the political process, and we can (for instance) bring a Democrat to the White House. How does a candidate who's campaigned from the bottom up actually govern? When I wrote about this problem a few months ago, I felt that it would have to mean a major transformation of the executive. This was quite possibly an understatement. Teachout is right to see tremendous untapped potential in the internet for political organization and activism, albeit not for the reasons she stated. But the bigger problem will be figuring out how to convert that activism into a governing majority, in the event (inevitable in the long term, I think) of a win. Because the motivating power structures of the internet may simply be incompatible with American democracy.

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