Three ways the Internet will Improve Democracy
In this week’s installment of How to Change the World, I’m going to share the way I think about the stages of development the internet will go through as it becomes a tool for democracy. We take a look at the Arab Spring and Occupy. In the former tools first enabled a population to overthrow their government, but fell short when it was time to rebuild. In the latter, it enabled people to coordinate actions nationwide but still failed to coordinate real change. Why is this? What kinds of tools will we need to create lasting change, or to help our governments to become truly democratic?
We live in a democracy with the internet, but we don’t yet have a democracy powered by the internet. So what would a democracy powered by the internet look like?
The Egyptian Revolution
January 25, 2011, is known in Egypt as the Day of Revolt. Thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to call for the overthrow of their president, Hosni Mubarak, citing police brutality and a lack of political freedom among other grievances. The protests were bigger than expected and after beginning in front of the High Court in downtown Cairo, they broke through a security cordon and moved into Tahrir Square. The square would become the home base for the Egyptian Revolution, which in just 18 days, achieved Mubarak’s resignation.
Facebook and Twitter were widely given credit for allowing protestors to jumpstart the Arab Spring and keep communication throughout. Nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians responded to a poll that they used Facebook to organize protests and spread awareness.
But as effective as those communication technologies were at bringing people together, they failed to enable the public to coordinate for the next pivotal step, addressing the power vacuum that emerged after Mubarak.
There were no tools in place to help citizens navigate the complex decisions that needed to be made for true and lasting reform. What proceeded was a complete and total disaster for the Egyptian people.
There were further protests, a coup, and the killing of over 800 protestors in Cairo. Today their president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is even more brutal than Mubarak, and his power is threatened, hundreds can receive death sentences in a single verdict. Tens of thousands of political dissidents have been sent to prison and many of the youth that gave so much for the movement are now simply trying to leave the country.
To say that what happened in Egypt is a cautionary tale is an understatement. It shows how democratic tools of coordination like social media can be used as a weapon and destabilize but when more precise, critical decisions need to be made, when the wisdom of the crowd cannot be gathered and voiced, that crowd is as intelligent as a herd.
Three stages of democratic online coordination
There is a basic model I use to think through what mature tools for democratic participation might look like.
My appeal is that we should be focusing many more resources and attention on solving these problems as a means of updating our system of democracy, and reversing the slide of mistrust in the population against our governing systems.
The gold standard of online democratic tools should allow the people to initiate communication and group formation, then solicit priorities and apply algorithms to find plurality support, and finally collect results and reflect objectively on the quality of the execution by representatives.
I use protest examples in the paper but its even better if these tools are formally integrated with the existing government. If so they would help the government be more responsive and focused and therefore maintain the support of the population.
1) Online Simple Coordination:
What was done in Egypt is an example of simple online coordination. Activists expressed their grievances on social media, groups formed around them, and then developed plans to meet up and protest.
Simple online coordination doesn’t require much information transfer and can often boil down to “Are you pissed off? Go here!” Occupy Wall Street functioned in much the same way.
This kind of coordination can also remain online and take a form called “brigading.” This is when groups form to swing their weight around the digital sphere like Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook. They can show up and mass-downvote a thing to try to prevent it from being recommended, or heap comments on it, either positive or negative, making a thing seem loved or hated.
My introduction to brigading was a formative one. I was part of a Reddit group that supported Ron Paul for president in 2012. We organized a letter writing campaign against the NYT and I actually got quoted in the NYT politics and government blog. It was an early lesson to me that a small group of people acting in a coordinated way can have an outsized effect.
Simple online coordination can be very powerful as shown by the examples at the beginning of the paper. But it has limitations. The group may move as a unit, but it tends to be top-down still since no tools are used to derive the preferences of the population.
It also must be mentioned that unfortunately the Web2 tools that this kind of action relied upon have largely been put under the control of the government. I could point to many examples, but the Twitter Files make the strongest case currently that the US government can and does stop people, messages, and issues from trending. This means that in the future, disruptive movements like Occupy will almost definitely be censored.
The silver lining of those systems being captured is it will incentivize us to use decentralized messaging apps that are truly uncensorable like Nostr or Mastadon which will give us a level of censorship resistance Web 2 could never offer.
2) Online idea-gathering and prioritization
When I was in New York for Occupy, shortly after the encampment in Zucotti Park had been torn down, I met a man who was trying to identify Occupy’s “first demand.” I spent an evening following him around the open ground floor of a FiDi skyscraper where over a hundred of us would meet in the evenings. I watched him pitch to several large groups that our one demand should be to overturn “Citizens United,” a supreme court ruling that claimed corporations were people and so were entitled to unlimited campaign contributions. It was extremely unpopular at the time and something like 82% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans were against it.
He easily won the consent of everyone he spoke with. But then finally, at the end of the evening a self-styled communist type with 1920s garb and round spectacles rejected the proposal, which prevented it from going any further. After the poor man walked away defeated I approached the cosplayer and asked why on earth he would deny a demand so on brand for us and already so popular in the eyes of the American people. His response was half-witted and paranoid, and I walked away disgusted and half sure he was a spook.
This experience is burned into my brain as one of the biggest wastes of potential energy I’ve ever observed and has given me a serious urgency around the necessity of decision-making technology.
To imagine an alternative history to the Occupy example, what if the movement asked people to list their top priorities in a system that would easily reveal pluralities among members: for example End Citizens United (98% approval), No wall-street bonuses from firms that took bailout money (97% approval), Reinstate certain campaign contribution caps (95% approval). More fringe issues like “free government housing” might only get 60% approval and get rejected. Once you know what you all agree on you can start to work with policymakers and start to try to make reforms. But since Occupy didn’t even know what it stood for, they arguably just marched around until they ran out of steam.
Protests aside, these technologies can be just as much about empowering valid sitting governments to hear from their citizens and prioritize accordingly.
To give an example: What are the top five priorities of the population of your town? You probably don’t know. Because we don’t have ask and publish results it even though it would be technically trivial. How powerful would it be to have an official prioritization each year for our elected representatives to respond to? And on issues where there is high citizen agreement, the representative has their mandate.
Good decision-makers will embrace this technology because they aren’t afraid of demanding challenges, they perceive that they will only be more popular in the eyes of their constituents for asking and delivering on key issues. They also aren’t afraid to treat their population like adults and tell them when something is simply not possible.
Citizen engagement tools like Bang the Table and Zen City exist to involve populations in collective decision-making and are used in hundreds of cities. But the ones I’ve browsed have few opportunities for engagement and subsequent small participation numbers. To my knowledge, they also aren’t open source so the decision-making mechanism may not be well understood by the public.
Months after I left New York’s Occupy I read in the paper that they had put forward their first demand, and it was to end Citizens United. I hoped it was my man from that night long ago that finally gained enough support. But the hard truth was that it was too little too late. The American public had moved on. If Occupy was going to make demands, they needed to generate them right from the start.
3) Online Accountability and Consequences
It’s an unfortunate reality of modern politics that we tend to elect people based on promises that are later broken. When it’s time for re-election, many of the things we elected them to do stand undone and we don’t even talk about why. We need a means of storing what representatives say they’re going to do and use it as the primary source of information for if they are or are not competent executors.
Congress regularly has a ~20% approval rating, yet incumbent reelection rates stand at 95%. Can you believe that we give congress an F minus minus but then keep electing the same people to populate it? Yet representatives know they can get away with this.
If instead our representatives knew that at the end of their term they were going to be judged by their ability to complete either the priorities we as a population set or the promises they made for themselves, we would be much more likely to see progress on those areas. The incentives are clear and transparent.
This is technologically trivial. The hard part is persuading representatives to be accountable for their promises when they could just as well let them be forgotten.
Getting momentum on this kind of technology is a chicken or egg problem. Once politicians are using it, most citizens would begin to require a politician’s track record to be open and transparent before reelection.
Conclusion:
There’s a concept in technology that certain forms were guaranteed to happen. Like there was always going to be a thing that you stuck to your ear and you could hear someone’s voice a hundred miles away, or a flat screen that could project any kind of image for you to watch. These are fundamental technological forms.
These same rules apply for the internet and democracy. As an infinitely scalable communications medium, the internet is guaranteed to one day hear from everyone, process that data, and present it so that we better understand our priorities and can act on them. It’s a question of when. As our present systems are breaking down under the pressure of unadaptable institutions and cratering public trust, we should be dedicating time and resources to figuring out how to use the best tool of the age, the internet, to make our systems more engaging, more intelligent, and representative.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.
