Essay by Antón Barba-Kay: “Most discussions of digital democracy presume, as I’ve mentioned, a confrontation between the vertical boss-man and the horizontal people. What this dichotomy misses is that the character of these figures, as well as of their relationships, has qualitatively changed. Like all legitimate regimes, democracies live by norms—by shared expectations that go unsaid in order to make communication possible. This includes threads of social tapestry like what people feel they can get away with, how far is too far, and where we draw the lines. Norms are forms of communal responsiveness. Yet the deterioration of democratic practices and institutions during the past twenty years has revealed the degree to which democracy relies on a moral infrastructure of habits, rapports, and dispositions toward the word in particular. And whereas our trajectory so far has largely been one in which democratic norms have been gradually burned out by our information environment, the fate of democracy actually requires (pace TikTok) that we try to articulate what the moral infrastructure of this democracy is, how digital practices bear on it, and whether these practices can be harmonized with it.
To bring these lines of thought into focus, I will describe three digital pressures that seem to abrade democratic norms, three ways in which digital technology has been justified, and is even justified as a democratic force, but that are in fact anti-democratic by virtue of reforming our understanding of what we are and how we communicate: Those three are choice, optimization, and neutrality. I pick these because the digital temptation to conflate choice with agency, optimization with judgment, and neutrality with truth especially illuminates the difference between digital and literate democratic norms. But these conflations work only to the extent that we equate what is democratic with what is egalitarian—it is an article of digital faith that these are synonymous. Yet egalitarianism is a property both of democracy and of certain kinds of autocracy. Everything depends on our resisting this equation….
The most successful digital tool for democratic deliberation has been Polis—a platform that has been used in Taiwan to consult a wide public and to help legitimize government policy goals. Polis’s key innovation is that it allows citizens to post comments and to vote on those of others in order to approach consensus, but it does not allow them to reply to each other. One can only “engage” with others’ posts by agreeing, disagreeing, or passing. This eliminates the possibility of trolling and flame wars. It is nonetheless telling that its success as a digital democratic process is predicated on bracketing the exchange of reasons as disruptive. By incentivizing fewer siloed, less complex statements, it solves for a political product at the expense of the process of deliberative speech….(More)”.
