Citizens Equipped
This is an excerpt from my book CITIZENS (written with the brilliant Ariane Conrad), published here on the 35th anniversary of the birth of the internet and in response to Tim Berners-Lee’s open letter on the occasion.
Today we are better equipped for the practice of Citizenship than in any previous period of history, because we have the internet.
The promise of the digital age was visible very early on. In its chaotic, open, and intensely creative origins, the internet offered individual empowerment and access, cross-pollination, almost limitless connection among and between Citizens everywhere. As a many-to-many medium, it asks more of us than television or radio or the printing press, equipping us to be active in the world, capable of representing our beliefs and values through our actions, not resigning ourselves to be acted on.
As the Canadian philosopher Marshall Mcluhan articulated with the aphorism ‘the medium is the message,’ the medium of communication itself — books, radio, television, the internet — affects who we are and how we interact in a way that goes beyond the content communicated. The media we use shape not just what we communicate but how we communicate, and therefore how we think and function, individually and collectively, right up to the scale of a whole society. When a new medium arrives, we should think of it as an ‘extension’ of human capacity, and as such something that affects, well, everything. Since it is a medium which in principle allows everyone to create, not just consume, we could say that the internet asks us — enables us — to be Citizens.
In the early days, the internet seemed set to deliver on that promise all by itself. This was still the case in the early 2000s, with the emergence of ‘Web 2.0,’ characterised by one media theorist as a ‘move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging (folksonomy).’ First we had Wordpress, then we had Napster, then we had Meetup; we could create and share words and music and find community. The tools were being built, and the new society would come.
To some extent, the promise was fulfilled. Digital technology has opened up an astonishing number of new modes of participation, as well as reinvigorating many of the old — open innovation challenge prizes, volunteering programmes, participatory budgeting, crowdfunding, to name but a few. Political entrepreneurs are harnessing the deliberative, creative potential of this medium to experiment with many-to-many, participatory models of politics: the Open Ministry in Finland, Better Reykjavik in Iceland, secondgov in the United States, and Loomio from New Zealand are all excellent examples of this. They’re all about enabling deliberation and co-creation of policy. They’re harnessing the potential of the internet to bring politics into the Citizen Story.
But on a broader view, something has gone very wrong. The internet has become increasingly abused as a tool to undermine Citizenship, not unleash it. One grave disappointment came with what was once called the ‘Sharing Economy,’ now better known as the ‘Gig Economy.’ At the outset, it presented not just an economic hack (getting more utility and value out of under-used resources), but a social and environmental win, empowering the underemployed, connecting strangers and reducing consumption. But soon the gravitational pull of business-as-usual pulled the new models in and down. Airbnb, Uber and the like started out as beautiful dreams. But rather than transforming transactions into human relationships, they’ve done the opposite. Mediated by these platforms, human interactions come to feel more like transactions. Ultimately, they have reduced us to mere Consumers again, in this case not just of online content or the products of corporations, but of each other.
Nowhere is the perversion of the internet’s Citizen potential clearer than in the case of Cambridge Analytica. The data analytics company successfully manipulated undecided voters, particularly in contested regions, during a number of political campaigns, culminating in LeaveEU (Brexit) and Trump. As the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr explains, Cambridge Analytica ‘profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads, and it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.’ The earth-shattering implications of the company’s ‘Great Hack’ is, in Cadwalladr’s words: ‘whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again.’
We give our data away for free in return for treats, and restrict the participatory potential of this moment to choosing the colour of our trainers. Meanwhile, the nefarious actors use that data to shape our societies.
Despite its disappointments and dangers, though, the internet remains a key reason why all this Citizen activity is happening now, to an extent never seen before, and a key reason why the opportunity we have now is greater and more global than at any previous moment of Citizen emergence in our history. It still has the potential to drive and sustain a many-to-many society, where we can all shape and produce society itself, where we can all be Citizens.
It is not, however, going to do it for us automatically. We will have to make sure we have a truly Citizen Internet: everyone must have affordable access, free from the control of corporations or governments, and the right to both privacy and security. Even with that in place, the Citizenship we need won’t exclusively be happening online.
Yes, we have the internet. Now we need to bring ourselves.
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