Open Source Democracy - Douglas Rushkoff
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Open Source Democracy
How online communication is changing offline politics
by Douglas Rushkoff
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tom Bentley and everyone at Demos for the opportunity to
extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. Thanks also to my
editorial assistant, Brooke Belisle, and to colleagues including
Andrew Shapiro, Steven Johnson, Ted Byfield, Richard Barbrook, David
Bennahum, Red Burns, Eugenie Furniss and Lance Strate.
Introduction
The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for
cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology
industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium,
the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious
camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media
through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better,
have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace
have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are
developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by
allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the
broader challenges of our time.
As the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised
threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly
irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a
new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only
possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism,
ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised
so much of late 20th century thinking and culture.
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact,
help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of
fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. Thanks to
the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our
work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social
and political constructs in very new contexts. We may now be able to
launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of
individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the
world at large. These interactive communication technologies could
even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a
shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when
people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual
self-interest.
The emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its
subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of
the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of
interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study
in the politics of renaissance. The battle for control over new and
little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent
many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives.
Meanwhile, the technologies themselves empower individuals to take
part in the creation of new narratives. Thus, in an era when crass
perversions of populism, and exaggerated calls for national security,
threaten the very premises of representational democracy and free
discourse, interactive technologies offer us a ray of hope for a
renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement.
The very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be
dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in
conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. And we
may get our best rehearsal for these roles online.
In short, the interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding
civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with
civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or
taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with
cooperative behaviour. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of
traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and
politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against
neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. While such
strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of
exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid
collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they
imperil what is left of civil society. They threaten the last small
hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of
faith-justified oil wars.
As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States,
becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to
offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance
is diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the
Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American
regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time
the war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found half of Americans
believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 9
September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that
mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and
priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred
to the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions',
bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as
the now-laughable 'collateral damage'. This was the propagandist
motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists'
lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are
travelling, their coverage becomes skewed.
But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own
weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share
their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war.
Journalists' personal entries provided a much broader range of
opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the
conflict than were available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast
and cable television.
For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free
to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog
called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard
as a real person living in Baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war.
This daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in
Baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and opinion
about the war on the web.
Clearly, the success of sites like Dear Raed stem from our
increasingly complex society's need for a multiplicity of points of
view on our most pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a
mainstream mediaspace that appears to be converging on single,
corporate and government approved agenda. These alternative
information sources are being given more attention and credence than
they might actually deserve, but this is only because they are the
only ready source of oppositional, or even independent thinking
available. Those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative
value systems may be working against the current and increasingly
concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they
ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in
an entirely new context.
The communications revolution may not have brought with it either
salvation for the world's stock exchanges or the technological
infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. Though
one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology
may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again.
While it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and
marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us
with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the
power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to
participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.
Chapter 1
From Moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking control
We are living in a world of stories. We can't help but use narratives
to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of
nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led
human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that
described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces.
Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed
the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the
afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that
early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we
understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of
God1, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from
Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't
believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters
whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The
characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that
it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as
genuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. The people were
actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of
nature.
As different people and groups competed for authority, narratives
began to be used to gain advantage. Stories were no longer being used
simply to predict the patterns of nature, but to describe and
influence the courses of politics, economics and power. In such a
world, stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win
believers; to be understood as real. When the Pharaoh or King is
treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating
in the conceit. But he still needed to prove his potency in real ways,
and at regular intervals, in order to ensure their continued
participation. However, if the ruler could somehow get his followers
to accept the story of his divine authority as historical fact, then
he need prove nothing. The story justifies itself and is accepted as a
reality.
In a sense, early civilisation was really just the process through
which older, weaker people used stories to keep younger, stronger
people from vying for their power. By the time the young were old
enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the
system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk exposing the
stories as myths. More positively, these stories provided enough
societal continuity for some developments that spanned generations to
take root.
The Old Testament, for example, is basically the repeated story of how
younger sons attempt to outwit their fathers for an inherited birth
right. Of course, this is simply allegory for the Israelites'
supplanting of the first-born civilisation, Egypt. But even those who
understood the story as metaphor rather than historical fact continued
to pass it on for the ethical tradition it contained: one of a people
attempting to enact social justice rather than simply receive it.
Storytelling: communication and media
Since Biblical times we have been living in a world where the stories
we use to describe and predict our reality have been presented as
truth and mistaken for fact. These narratives, and their tellers,
compete for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories
and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told.
The content of a story might be considered the what, where the
technology through which the story is transmitted can be considered
the how. In moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the
competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value
of the message.
Exclusive access to the how of storytelling lets a storyteller
monopolise the what. In ancient times, people were captivated by the
epic storyteller as much for his ability to remember thousands of
lines of text as for the actual content of the Iliad or Odyssey.
Likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as
much through the magic of broadcasting technology as its script.
Whoever has power to get inside that magic box has the power to write
the story we end up believing.
We don't call the stuff on television 'programming' for nothing. The
people making television are not programming our TV sets or their
evening schedules; they are programming us. We use the dial to select
which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. This
is not so dangerous in itself; but the less understanding and control
we have over exactly what is fed to us through the tube, the more
vulnerable we are to the whims of our programmers.
For most of us, what goes on in the television set is magic. Before
the age of VCRs and camcorders it was even more so. The creation and
broadcast of a television program was a magic act. Whoever has his
image in that box must be special. Back in the 1960s, Walter Cronkite
used to end his newscast with the assertion: "and that's the way it
is". It was his ability to appear in the magic box that gave him the
tremendous authority necessary to lay claim to the absolute truth.
I have always recoiled when this rhetorical advantage is exploited by
those who have the power to monopolise a medium. Consider, for
example, a scene in the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi.
Luke and Hans Solo have landed on an alien moon and are taken prisoner
by a tribe of little furry creatures called Ewoks. In an effort to win
their liberation, Luke's two robots tell the Ewoks the story of their
heroes' struggle against the dark forces of the Empire. C3PO, the
golden android, relates the tale while little R2D2 projects
holographic images of battling spaceships. The Ewoks are dazzled by
R2's special effects and engrossed in C3PO's tale: the how and the
what. They are so moved by the story that they not only release their
prisoners but fight a violent war on their behalf! What if the
Empire's villainous protector, Darth Vader, had arrived on the alien
moon first and told his side of the story, complete with his own
special effects?
Television programming communicates through stories and it influences
us through its seemingly magical capabilities. The programmer creates
a character we like and with whom we can identify. As a series of plot
developments bring that character into some kind of danger, we follow
him and within us a sense of tension arises.
This is what Aristotle called the rising arc of dramatic action. The
storyteller brings the character, and his audience, into as much
danger as we can tolerate before inventing a solution, the rescue,
allowing us all to breathe a big sigh of relief. Back in Aristotle's
day, this solution was called Deus ex machina (God from the machine).
One of the Greek gods would literally descend on a mechanism from the
rafters and save the day. In an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the
miraculous solution might take the form of a new, super-powered laser
gun. In a commercial, the solution is, of course, the product being
advertised.
TV commercials have honed this storytelling technique into the perfect
30-second package. A man is at work when his wife calls to tell him
she's crashed the car. The boss comes in to tell him he just lost a
big account, his bank statement shows he's in the red and his
secretary quits. Now his head hurts. We've followed the poor guy all
the way up Aristotle's arc of rising tension. We can feel the
character's pain. What can he do? He opens the top desk drawer and
finds his bottle of Brand A Pain Reliever and swallows the pills He
swallows the pills while an awe-inspiring hi-tech animation
demonstrates the way the pill passes through his body. He, and us, are
released from our torture.
In this passive and mysterious medium, when we are brought into a
state of vicarious tension, we are more likely to swallow whichever
pill and accept whatever solution that the storyteller offers.
Interactivity: the birth of resistance
Interactive media changed this equation. Imagine if your father were
watching that aspirin commercial back in 1955 on his old console
television. Even if he suspected that he was watching a commercial
designed to put him in a state of anxiety, in order to change the
channel and remove himself from the externally imposed tension, he
would have to move the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lever on his
recliner, walk up to the television set and manually turn the dial.
All that amounts to a somewhat rebellious action for a bleary-eyed
television viewer. To sit through the rest of the commercial, however
harrowing, might cost him only a tiny quantity of human energy until
the pills come out of the drawer. The brain, being lazy, chooses the
path of least resistance and Dad sits through the whole commercial.
Flash forward to 1990. A kid with a remote control in his hand makes
the same mental calculation: an ounce of stress, or an infinitesimally
small quantity of human effort to move his finger an eighth of an inch
and he's free! The remote control gives viewers the power to remove
themselves from the storyteller's spell with almost no effort. Watch a
kid (or observe yourself) next time he channel surfs from program to
program. He's not changing the channel because he's bored, but he
surfs away when he senses that he's being put into an imposed state of
tension.
The remote control breaks down the what. It allows a viewer to
deconstruct the content of television media, and avoid falling under
the programmer's spell. If a viewer does get back around the dial to
watch the end of a program, he no longer has the same captivated
orientation. Kids with remotes aren't watching television, they are
watching the television (the physical machine) playing 'television',
putting it through its paces.
Just as the remote control allowed a generation to deconstruct the
content of television, the video game joystick demystified its
technology. Think back to the first time you ever saw a video game. It
was probably Pong, that primitive black and white depiction of a
ping-pong table, with a square on either side of the screen
representing the bat and a tiny white dot representing the ball. Now,
remember the exhilaration you felt at playing that game for the very
first time. Was it because you had always wanted an effective
simulation of ping-pong? Did you celebrate because you could practice
without purchasing an entire table and installing it in the basement?
Of course not. You were celebrating the simple ability to move the
pixels on the screen for the first time. It was a moment of
revolution! The screen was no longer the exclusive turf of the
television broadcasters.
Thanks to the joystick, as well as the subsequent introduction of the
VCR and camcorder, we were empowered to move the pixels ourselves. The
TV was no longer magical. Its functioning had become transparent. Just
as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct the content of
storytelling, the joystick allowed the audience to demystify the
technology through which these stories were being told.
Finally, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed a receive-only
monitor into a portal. Packaged programming was no longer any more
valuable, or valid, than the words we could type ourselves. The
addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. We
were no longer dependent on the content of Rupert Murdoch or corporate
TV stations, but could create and disseminate our own content. The
internet revolution was a do-it-yourself revolution. We had
deconstructed the content of media's stories, demystified its modes of
transmission and learned to do it all for ourselves.
These three stages of development: deconstruction of content,
demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or
participatory authorship are the three steps through which a
programmed populace returns to autonomous thinking, action and
collective self-determination.
Chapter 2
The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash
New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual
contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged
content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took
the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.
The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2).
People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of
financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email
program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users.
The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP
email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this
shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois
at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was
first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was
Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker
groups around the world.
Invariably, the software applications developed by this community
stressed communication over mere data retrieval. They were egalitarian
in design. IRC chats and USENET groups, for example, present every
contributor's postings in the same universal ASCII text. The internet
was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into
the keyboard as reading what was on screen. It is as if the internet's
early developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting
by a few but for the expression of the many.
People became the content, a shift that had implications not just for
the online community but for society as a whole. The notion of a group
of people working together for a shared goal rather than financial
self-interest was quite startling to Westerners whose lives had been
organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving
personal security. The internet was considered sexy simply because
young people took an interest in it. People who developed internet
applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their
antics were often equated with those of Wild West outlaws, hippies,
Situationists and even communists.
But their organisation model was much more complex and potentially
far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. Many of
these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered
themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. Indeed, many new
models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were
developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of
military technology. A US government policy requiring all firms
working under Defense Department contracts to test their employees'
blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection
between most Silicon Valley firms and the majority of the fledgling
computer counterculture. (In fact, of all the Silicon Valley firms,
only Sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on
its employees.)
Whatever the applications envisioned for the communication technology
being developed, the operating principles of the finished networking
solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to create
them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective
self-determination.
Online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. On the West Coast
in the late 1980s one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Stewart Brand
(now co-founder of the prestigious Global Business Network), conceived
and implemented an online bulletin board called The Well (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link). Within two years thousands of users had joined the
dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing their deepest
hopes and fears with one another. Famous scientists, authors,
philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in order to
develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone. Meanwhile as
the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a distributed
system called USENET began to proliferate. These were absolutely
self-organising discussions about thousands of different topics. They
themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and
patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in
collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural
divides.
The Backlash
These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote,
joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as
usual. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that families with
internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less
television per week. Even more frightening to those who depended on
the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were
sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free!
Software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift
economy based on community and mutual self-interest. People were
turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they
didn't have to pay for. Worse, they were watching fewer commercials.
Something had to be done. And it was.