Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

SOPA on a Rope - Has the internet actually saved democracy?

The internet has saved democracy! Or at least that’s how it felt recently. When SOPA, the U.S. Congress' Stop Online Piracy Act, was postponed after a very public outcry, the whole episode seemed to display the best of the web. The mass outpouring of dissent and the blackout of sites like Reddit and Wikipedia forced American lawmakers to retreat on what was inarguably a terrible bill. Score one for the democratic potential of the internet.

But with news of terrible working conditions in Apple’s supply chain and Twitter's new realpolitik policy on censorship, the techno-utopian triumphalism was short-lived. Beneath the high-tech sheen was some dark, complicated stuff. What’s more, given that the roots of Apple and Twitter's controversies lie in complex global issues, the very conspicuous activism behind SOPA suddenly started to look more like self-interest and Western insularity than a shining example of online democracy. It was, if not quite “evil,” then at least a little unsettling. And the eerie symmetry between the interests of web users and those of large corporations demands the question: is the web the beacon of democracy we keep saying it is?

In one sense, the answer to that question is a clear “yes,” and in a way the widespread mobilization against SOPA was democracy at its amoral purest. A populace had particular interests and it used the platform the web provides to express them. Those concerns got magnified in turn and taken up by larger entities like Google, Wikipedia et al, and together it raised enough clamour to catch the attention of those with real power. What more could a democracy-loving citizen of the 21st century ask for? It may not be an ideal solution for issues like global poverty, but at least it lives up to certain ideals of how change should be enacted.

That's definitely a popular belief when it comes to the web. The vision of the internet as a medium that affords ordinary citizens a voice has dominated conversations about online politics for years. It saturates perceptions of the web, especially those around curation and filtering. If people can vote on which news stories get promoted, then it’s an inherent good because people are choosing what they want to see. Such libertarian notions even infect the very technology of the web itself. Google’s algorithm decides the search results it shows you in part by the number of other people who have linked to them. The web is democratic, the thinking goes, because it lets us express our interests immediately, far more so than was possible in the past.

The trouble with the resistance to SOPA, though, was that circular relationship at work. The conduits of information themselves—Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, et al—shaped which issues they presented to the world based on their own needs. Google does not, after all, tweak its homepage to protest femicide or draw attention to famine in Somalia. How could it? It’s supposed to be neutral. But as the SOPA example showed, when companies whose product is the monetization of information are threatened, they will use their platforms to spread their message. It barely warrants mention that this phenomenon is widespread and extends far beyond the internet.

To believe in the democratic ideals of the web, and democracy itself, you have to believe that people's interests are their own. But what we consider important is shaped and swayed by the unending flood of images and chatter in the public sphere. It’s shaped by what we are shown and what we aren’t shown. It isn’t either too naive or too cliché to cynically remark that we “care about Lana Del Rey and not sub-Saharan Africa”, in part because it isn’t simply apathy or selfishness that’s the cause. Rather, it’s because entire cultural networks exist to keep it that way. What we see and what we know are functions of what we are exposed to, and the democratic ideal of simply “expressing our interests” in no way encourages us to question why we ended up caring about something in the first place.

Sure, at a certain point it starts to sound a bit conspiratorial and paranoid. But ponder this. Responding to the recent outrage over the Chinese factories where Apple products are made, Peter Nowak provided some much-needed perspective. Nowak, one of the country's most reliable and respected tech reporters, pointed out that although conditions and wages in Foxconn factories are bad by Western standards, they are also better than most workplaces in China. Heythis is just how shit works, Nowak implied, and in one way it was both refreshing and true.

But that need to assuage our guilt also suggests something else: that our definition of what is acceptable and what is possible is a result of the material conditions of our lives. Stuff happens a certain way, and even anomalies—like, say, companies with $97 billion in cash—should still operate within established rules of what is okay and what is not. This modern life has certain costs, and the downsides of “development” are but some of them.

What we cannot ask is how things ever got this way; they simply are, and we should accept that this is how growth and change happen. It’s as if the structure of modern life persuades us to justify the status quo. And the overlap of technology as a product and technology as a medium means that we are caught in a loop of our investments, taking to the web to justify the incredibly importance of the web, reading that New York Times Apple story on our iPhones with a sickening but futile sense of culpability. As if we’ve become oblivious to the idea that there may be other ways of doing things. As if, banging out words about alternatives and the ills of capitalism on an iPad, we’ve become irrevocably bound up in things that, with perspective, we’d have the good sense to resist.

Original Article
Source: toronto standard 
Author: Navneet Alang  

No comments:

Post a Comment