Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics · Chapter 1Part 1
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Copyright (C) 2003 by Douglas Rushkoff. This Project Gutenberg
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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.
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.
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.
It is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet and the culture it spawned. Certainly, the many executives of media conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and I for advice throughout the 1990s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of interactive culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments. They were chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television programming, but they hoped this shift could be managed and ultimately exploited. While many existing content industries, such as the music recording industry, sought to put both individual companies and entire new categories out of business (such as Napster and other peer-to-peer networks), the great majority of executives did not want to see the internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government, concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the early internet's new model of open collaboration.
Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner, Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.
The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects of the remote, the joystick and the mouse.
Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many hours in a day during which potential audience members might be viewing a program. These units of human time became known as eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites 'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an advertisement.
Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were (much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages were even considered.
The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored information and launched programs, later operating systems such as Windows 95 put more barriers in place. Although these operating systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes. Now, to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. What better metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer? Computer literacy no longer means being able to program a computer, but merely knowing how to use software such as Microsoft Office.
Finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was replaced by the new value of commerce. The communications age was rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating with other people. The difference was that information, or content, unlike real human interaction, could be bought and sold. It was a commodity. People would pay, it was thought, for horoscopes, stock prices and magazine articles. When selling information online didn't work, businesspeople instead turned to selling real products online. Horoscope.com and online literary journals gave way to Pets.com and online bookstores. The e-commerce boom was ignited. Soon the internet became the World Wide Web. Its opaque and image-heavy interfaces made it increasingly one-way and read-only, more conducive to commerce than communication. The internet was reduced to a direct marketing platform.
The burst of the bubble and the re-emergence of community
Few e-commerce companies made any money selling goods, but the idea that they could was all that mattered. When actual e-commerce didn't work, the internet was rebranded yet again as an investment platform. The Web was to be the new portal through which the middle class could invest in the stock market. And which stocks were they to invest in? Internet stocks, of course! Like any good pyramid scheme, everyone was in on it. Or at least they thought they were.
News stories about online communities such as The Well, or even discussion groups for breast cancer survivors were soon overshadowed by those about daring young entrepreneurs launching multi-million-dollar IPOs (Initial Price Offerings of formerly private stock on public exchanges such as the NYSE or NASDAQ.) Internet journalism, written by option-holding employees of media conglomerates, moved from the culture section to the business pages and the dot.com pyramid scheme became the dominant new media story.
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