Is there a new politics emerging in the Net/cyberspace/digital culture?
Confusion reigns in the political arena. Old labels no longer fit, and the citizenry seems torn between competing desires for saviors and scapegoats. While society at large seems bogged down in a bewildering swamp of regulation, litigation, legislative gridlock, and intrusive social engineering, the relatively blank canvas of the Net has encouraged visionaries and gadflies to project their dreams of a new political order onto the emerging technological culture. Are these dreams worth sharing, or is it time to wake up and smell the coffee?
Let's review the facts. About the time that CNN viewers got to witness ecstatic Germans capering around on top of the Berlin Wall, it became clear to everyone that politics as usual was hemorrhaging severely. The poor performance of the socialists in power in France and Italy in the '80s combined with the collapse of Soviet communism and its satellites delivered a swift kick to the nuts of leftists everywhere. The sheer exuberance of the citizens of the Eastern bloc as they broke free from their ideological chains was contagious, and it nearly ruined the Left as a credible player in the political arena.
Yet, ironically, the apparent demise of communism as a galvanizing enemy rendered a delayed body blow to the Right as well. In the former Soviet Union, free-market visionaries and investors who had been talking a good game in Gorbachev's final days plowed headfirst into the dung heap of Russia's chaotic economy under Yeltsin. In the US, splits emerged in conservative ranks over the Persian Gulf War, and President George Bush, who proclaimed the arrival of the new world order, was unable to sustain the afterglow from Reagan's revolution for more than one term.
Fast forward to the present standoff in the US with a Democratic president, a Republican Congress, and a slew of voters registering as "Independent." Momentary crowing among the Republicans over the '94 elections aside, one gets the sense that, given half a chance, the electorate would love to ditch the old left/right horseshoe match and take on some new paradigms altogether.
Swell. But where are such fresh ideological offerings likely to come from? Some techno-optimists, entranced with the rapid expansion of cyberspace, are convinced that the rough contours of the future can be spotted in the shadowy forms dancing across their computer screens. The pounding drums of cypherpunks, Usenet orators, civil-liberties activists, and venture capitalists, all undulating together in the flickering RGB glow, seem to whisper alluring promises of power, privacy, and pluralism in the politics to come.
A couple of years back, Ross Perot addressed to this craving, emulating a kind of pure American pragmatism beyond ideology, with paeans to electronic democracy thrown in for good measure. However, the plucky little billionaire made an awkward populist and had too much baggage - most notably a bad haircut and a bad temper - to serve as anything other than a spoiler. Still, the frustration with politics-as-usual lives on, translated into a generalized "anti-government mood," as it has been dubbed by the media. Not surprisingly, there's been an upsurge of pundit-chat about the possible rise of a major third party in the next election.
As it happens, the Libertarian Party is the most explicitly anti-government electoral vehicle around and the main political entity claiming to be neither left nor right. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on libertarians, pointing out their sizeable presence on the Net. Still, Net or no Net, the odds are against the Libertarian Party, or any other third party being the vehicle for a new politics. Hostile state electoral rules and pervasive media skepticism almost assure defeat. Besides, even if elected, a third-party president, unaccompanied by a supporting wave of third-party congressmembers, would be even more thwarted than Bill Clinton.
Minus a breakthrough in grass-roots organizing, the Libertarian Party - like other third parties - limps along; its most palatable rhetoric co-opted by politicians outside its ranks. By default, the disgruntled crowd ends up voting against whoever is in power - or not voting at all. And so the game staggers on, zombie-like, sapped of real will or credibility.
Meanwhile, in cyberspace the political pot is boiling, though it is hard to find any statistics that everyone can agree on. A mid-1994 survey of Internet users by three academic researchers presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association found that political party affiliations of Net surfers roughly matched those of the general population: 36 percent Democrat, 32 percent Independent, and 23 percent Republican. Yet a February 1995 Newsweek poll came up with rather different tallies. It counted the general population as 33 percent Republican, 31 percent Democrat, and 36 percent Independent or other. Online participants, it calculated, were 48 percent Republican, 24 percent Democrat, and 28 percent Independent or other. That's a 25 percent spread between the academic survey and the Newsweek poll on the presence of Republicans in cyberspace!
When Wired informally e-mailed a cross section of participants in the budding digital culture, no clear-cut political identity emerged. "Liberal," "progressive," "libertarian," "anarchist," and "conservative" all scored between 10 percent and 17 percent as self-applied labels. And a sizable chunk came up with intriguing if indecipherable oxymorons: "progressive conservative"; "virtual populist"; "market-oriented progressive"; and the ever-popular "anarcho-emergentist republican."
The same study presented before the political-science association pegged Internet users as highly educated, 80 percent male, and 80 percent white. Yet another survey identified World Wide Web users as 90 percent male and 87 percent white. If there is any truth to the popular claim that the upheaval of the '94 elections reflected the frustration of white males feeling ideologically adrift, it stands to reason that the same groping for redefinition would manifest online.
Polls aside, the most common perception of the brand of politics dominating the Net is one of radical libertarianism. Both The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone have made this claim, and pugnacious libertarians are among the most visible regulars in Usenet discussions.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, a senior editor at Time magazine, suggests that "the people most attracted to the new media are folks from the fringes, who for one reason or another feel their message is not well represented by mainstream media." He says these online activists are sometimes referred to as "bandwidth hogs, because they tend to use the medium like a megaphone to broadcast their off-center views." This electronically amplified grousing correlates with the popularity of, say, Rush Limbaugh: a lot of mid-Americans are royally pissed off, and digital culture is one arena for that discontent. The politics of frustration and distrust, as elsewhere, is a notable part of what we see happening in the new digital politics.
Cyberspace is often characterized by observers as a new frontier with the "Don't Tread on Me" vigor of both the Green Mountain Boys and the Wild West. While international in scope, the Net has been dominated so far by American voices and sites. Accordingly, perhaps its volatile politics is not so new after all but rather the resurfacing of a doughty American anarchism - a pioneer/settler philosophy of self-reliance, direct action, and small-scale decentralism translated into pixels. When you consider it, the relatively wide-open nature of the Net during its early years meant you could stake a claim in an obscure corner of the new territory and be the ruler of your own virtual realm.
Although originally funded by government sources, the Internet's decentralized, cooperative structure has been, ironically, the closest thing to a functioning large-scale anarchist society that human culture has yet seen. Not surprisingly, having tasted such virtual freedom, many participants are reluctant to surrender their elbow room. But that seems to be the direction things are going, with global forces at work that dwarf the self-conceptions or ideological intentions of any one group of individuals. This is the politics of historical currents and technological momentum, not of net-surfing soapboxes.
Futurists make much of the collapse of time and space that is being ushered in by world telecommunications and the microchip. As anyone sticking a finger in the socket of the Internet can testify, the heady sense of personal power that results from zipping back and forth from ftp sites in Europe to Web pages in Vancouver is dazzling - at least initially. However, the power of virtual mobility is not quite the same as the power of accumulated capital. At the same time that you may be downloading an enormous videoclip of Tonya Harding's wedding night courtesy of some Net server five states away, multinational corporations are busy conducting transactions worth millions of dollars in the blink of an eye.
The new political infrastructure of the Net is as handy to Shell Oil as it is to a bedroom publisher of politically incorrect zines. Cyberspace is full of armchair mavericks and eccentric ideologues. But despite originality and political diversity gyrating on the Net, the onrushing logic of the integration of the world economy and world politics into a single unified whole may overshadow these distinctions, just as the boundaries between nations are becoming anachronistic in the face of the "global marketplace."
When questioned about the future status of nationalism, Lawrence Wilkinson, co-founder of the Net-wise Global Business Network, offers this encapsulation: "Just as during the Enlightenment 'the nation-state' took over from 'the church' to become the dominant seat of action, so the nation-state is now receding, yielding center stage to 'the marketplace'; the action in the marketplace is, interestingly, everywhere: local, global, wherever. And 'wherever' is increasingly dictated by 'pure' economics and interests, not by national borders (nor the tariffs, national practices, and customs houses that define them)."
Is this the end of nationalism? Wilkinson observes: "I believe that we're in for some nationalist noise and some nationalist violence before the transition is done, but I do believe that it will finish, to be replaced by kinds of tribal and commercial conflicts. What will remain of nationalism? My bet is that it will have the character - the strength and relative weight - of brand loyalty; perhaps in some cases, that charged variety of brand loyalty, a fan's relationship to a sports team."
When political minds of a certain turn catch a whiff of this creeping globalization in the wake of the Cold War's demise and the ascendancy of international networking, they start shouting about nefarious conspiracies. True, the Illuminati may not exist, and the thought of some hidden directorate craftily coordinating everything from the S&L debacle to the spread of AIDS is a mite hard to swallow. Yet, like the Internet itself, the process of global integration may have no directing center on which to pin the blame, but merely its own internal logic and the confluence of self-interested economic and political entities. In ad hoc fashion, the big players end up with an unseen agenda that may be quite sufficient to overturn the old order of politics.
Consider the following projections and spin your own scenario. Let's assume:
- both co-ax and wireless grids fully spread to quasi-universal access (already in motion);
- bandwidth widens to allow the equivalent of HDTV on your desktop (only a matter of time);
- your desktop decentralizes and mobilizes through miniaturization, voice recognition, and "smart" interfaces to usher in personal digital assistants done right (i.e., Alan Kay's vision finally comes true);
- television, with its schedule-based programming and distinct commercials at measured intervals, mutates into a selection of interactive 24-hour lifestyle choices sponsored by enormous competing corporate alliances that help you to literally "get a life" (foreshadowed in the TCI-Sprint or The Microsoft Network ventures now coming into view);
- electronic money, smart cards, and various tax agencies collaborate to marginalize cash while assuring that the city/state/federal/(and in due course) world tax authorities get their cut of every financial or commodity transaction (still working the bugs out of this one);
- one way or the other, nothing is free - i.e., the meter is running on all services rendered all the time, although we may toggle between productive "billable" time (when we build up our credit reservoir) and leisure "consumption" time (when our reservoir is drawn upon).
Now, when
- IRC, phone sex, CB radio, TV talk shows, and talk radio coalesce into an array of 24-hour pick-a-peer channels you can patch into anywhere with your wireless headset, and the dividing line between virtual reality and real life becomes mostly academic;
and, on top of that,
- when the whole hassle over sampling, copying, digitizing, licensing, and assuring intellectual property rights gets ironed out in some grand ASCAP-like registry scheme where consumers subscribe to licensing banks that grant them their own usage rights over all media with that bank's logo-stamp (Bill Gates is already heading in this direction).... Where, then, does that leave us?
Where is the place for politics in this brave new world, when leaving the Net becomes as unthinkable as giving up breathing? The whole thrust of the major-player, video-on-demand, totally Wired, multimedia, content-provider blitzkrieg is an entertainment-saturated environment that leaves little time or space for debate and studied thought about "issues." The increasingly complex decisions required by a global civilization will likely be left to the policy wonks, CEOs, and the institutional minions who keep the whole ball rolling anyway.
Choices like "more" or "less" government could become obsolete if the technocratic, quasi-parental, service-marked colossus reduces your decision-making capacity to the level of "Would you like milk or sugar with your Prozac?" As the warp and the woof draw ever tighter, the feelings of claustrophobia and manipulation that result may indeed trigger a new politics in the midst of digital culture: the networked equivalent of the Branch Davidians, where the ultimate political gesture is one of withdrawal and self-marginalization.
But even self-exile to a private MUD counts for little when the Feds come knocking, as the ghost of David Koresh reminds us.
In such a universe, the only political opposition not vulnerable to having its electricity shut off may be quirky Third World despots like Muammar al-Qaddafi who stand and heckle the advancing new world order from the side of the road. Not a comforting thought.
The question remains: When all is said and done, is there a new politics emerging in the Net/cyberspace/digital culture?
Short answer: Yes, if by "new politics" one means an increased visibility for certain strains of ideology, like libertarianism, that have not generally made it through the mass media's bozo-filters. Libertarianism - with its zealous advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation, and privatization - is a ready-made "killer app" for high-tech start-ups, would-be millionaires, and the rest of the "don't tread on me" cybercrew. Mix this in with the current impatience toward half-failed liberal solutions and mammoth government and we may see some unusually radical proposals enacted in Washington.
Ironically, it is not at all certain that the civil-liberties part of the libertarian agenda will survive in the process. If the price to be paid for efficient and secure Web commerce and e-mail is an online ID registry and the abolition of anonymous messages - or if opponents of digitized porn, inflammatory postings, or other messy side effects of the First Amendment manage to "clean up cyberspace" - we may find the Net's much-vaunted freedom jettisoned in the rush to stake claims on virtual gold mines.
And that's merely in the short term. Looking at things with a somewhat longer view, even if we presume the mass acquisition of PCs or set-top boxes enabling easy access to the wording of legislation or actual voting, it seems unlikely that citizen engagement will increase and that the venerable dream of a living democracy will simply be revivified by more bandwidth. If info and access were the magical formulas for a greater democracy, then
C-SPAN would have already wrought major changes in the political landscape.
In actuality, it seems, most people are not hankering for greater involvement in political debates and decisions; they'd just like the whole mess to go away while they scramble to make the rent or the mortgage. With the exception of a few issues (such as abortion and gay rights) that have passionately polarized the populace and tend to command visceral responses, it appears most people would be happy to elect one or two representatives they could believe in and let them worry about the fine points of trade deficits and everything else.
Someone, probably Marx, made the observation that emerging classes tend to envision utopia in their own image. Small wonder then that here in the heart of the information economy the dream that seizes the imagination of our rising cyber class of entrepreneurs and code-warriors is one of empowerment and autonomy through greater information and technology. It's not a bad dream, really, although like most utopian visions it hinges on a certain mode of behavior becoming universalized - in this case computer literacy, gadget acquisition, and a voracious appetite for ersatz reality. If the Net truly does become the cultural glue holding the emerging global village together, the pressure toward such behavior will become relentless. Perhaps it will be fitting justice if the catalysts of the new digital politics are ultimately forced by the logic of their political ideals to become online Dr. Frankensteins battling their own creation run amuck. n
