Paper by James Pow: “There are two important dimensions to the membership of mini-publics that are distinct from the membership of conventional representative institutions: the selection mechanism (sortition) and the profile of the body’s eligible membership (‘ordinary’ citizens). This article examines the effects of these design features on perceived legitimacy. A survey experiment in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland finds no evidence that variation in mini-public selection features has an overall effect on perceived legitimacy, but there are important individual-level differences….(More)”.
The Legal Limits of Direct Democracy
Book edited by Daniel Moeckli, Anna Forgács, and Henri Ibi: “With the rise of direct-democratic instruments, the relationship between popular sovereignty and the rule of law is set to become one of the defining political issues of our time. This important and timely book provides an in-depth analysis of the limits imposed on referendums and citizens’ initiatives, as well as of systems of reviewing compliance with these limits, in 11 European states.
Chapters explore and lay the scientific basis for answering crucial questions such as ‘Where should the legal limits of direct democracy be drawn?’ and ‘Who should review compliance with these limits?’ Providing a comparative analysis of the different issues in the selected countries, the book draws out key similarities and differences, as well as an assessment of the law and the practice at national levels when judged against the international standards contained in the Venice Commission’s Guidelines on the Holding of Referendums.
Presenting an up-to-date analysis of the relationship between popular sovereignty and the rule of law, The Legal Limits of Direct Democracy will be a key resource for scholars and students in comparative and constitutional law and political science. It will also be beneficial to policy-makers and practitioners in parliaments, governments and election commissions, and experts working for international organisations….(More)”.
Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data
Paper by David Van Dijcke and Austin L. Wright: “We develop a novel approach for estimating spatially dispersed community-level participation in mass protest. This methodology is used to investigate factors associated with participation in the ‘March to Save America’ event in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. This study combines granular location data from more than 40 million mobile devices with novel measures of community-level voting patterns, the location of organized hate groups, and the entire georeferenced digital archive of the social media platform Parler. We find evidence that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and the local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation. Our research fills a prominent gap in the study of collective action: identifying and studying communities involved in mass-scale events that escalate into violent insurrection….(More)”.
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living
Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis: “Neil Postman was right. So what? In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.
The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).
The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.
The Standard Critique of Technology as thus described is cogent and correct. I have referred to it many times and applied it to many different situations. For instance, I have used the logic of the SCT to make a case for rejecting the “walled gardens” of the massive social media companies, and for replacing them with a cultivation of the “digital commons” of the open web.
But the number of people who are even open to following this logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive, manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?…(More)”.
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
Shoshana Zuboff in the New York Times: “Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.
I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coupmarked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.
In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures….(More)”.
Digital Age Samaritans
Paper by Zachary D. Kaufman: “Modern technology enables people to view, document, and share evidence of crimes contemporaneously or soon after commission. Electronic transmission of this material — including through social media and mobile devices — raises legal, moral, and practical questions about spectators’ responsibilities. In the digital age, will these actors be bystanders or upstanders? What role can and should the law play in shaping their behavior?
This Article argues that certain witnesses who are not physically present at the scene of a crime should be held criminally accountable for failing to report specified violent offenses. Focusing on rape, police brutality, and other misconduct, this Article demonstrates that recent technological innovations create new opportunities and challenges to pursue justice and accountability. Such culpability centers on “Bad Samaritan laws”: statutes that impose a legal duty to assist others in peril through intervening directly (also known as “the duty to rescue”) or notifying authorities (also known as “the duty to report”). However, many of these antiquated laws arguably apply only to witnesses who are physically present, which limits their potential effectiveness today.
Not all virtual witnesses should be subject to liability. To consider which categories of actors may warrant criminal punishment, this Article introduces a novel typology of bystanders and upstanders in the digital age. This typology draws on an original case study of the first known sexual crime livestreamed in the United States by a third party, which more than 700 people viewed. Harnessing insights from that case study and other episodes, the Article recommends that legislators should modernize, refine, and proliferate Bad Samaritan laws and that law enforcement should enforce these statutes or leverage them to obtain witness testimony. To that end, the Article proposes a model duty-to-report statute that includes features such as applicability to virtual presence and reasoned exemptions for noncompliance….(More)”.
Digital contention in a divided society
Book by Paul Reilly: “How are platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland? What do these contentious episodes tell us about the potential of information and communication technologies to promote positive intergroup contact in the deeply divided society?
These issues are addressed in what is the first in-depth qualitative exploration of how social media were used during the union flag protests (December 2012-March 2013) and the Ardoyne parade disputes (July 2014 and 2015). The book focuses on the extent to which affective publics, mobilised and connected via expressions of solidarity on social media, appear to escalate or de-escalate sectarian tensions caused by these hybrid media events. It also explores whether citizen activity on these online platforms has the potential to contribute to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland….(More)”.
Digital Technology and Democratic Theory
Book edited by Lucy Bernholz, Helene Landemore, and Rob Reich: “One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.
To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution….(More)”.
The High Price of Mistrust
fs.blog: “There are costs to falling community participation. Rather than simply lamenting the loss of a past golden era (as people have done in every era), Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam explains these costs, as well as how we might bring community participation back.
First published twenty years ago, Bowling Alone is an exhaustive, hefty work. In its 544 pages, Putnam negotiated mountains of data to support his thesis that the previous few decades had seen Americans retreat en masse from public life. Putnam argued Americans had become disconnected from their wider communities, as evidenced by changes such as a decline in civic engagement and dwindling membership rates for groups such as bowling leagues and PTAs.
Though aspects of Bowling Alone are a little dated today (“computer-mediated communication” isn’t a phrase you’re likely to have heard recently), a quick glance at 2021’s social landscape would suggest many of the trends Putnam described have only continued and apply in other parts of the world too.
Right now, polarization and social distancing have forced us apart from any sense of community to a degree that can seem irresolvable.
Will we ever bowl in leagues alongside near strangers and turn them into friends again? Will we ever bowl again at all, even if alone, or will those gleaming aisles, too-tight shoes, and overpriced sodas fade into a distant memory we recount to our children?
The idea of going into a public space for a non-essential reason can feel incredibly out of reach for many of us right now. And who knows how spaces like bowling alleys will survive in the long run without the social scenes that fuelled them. Now is a perfect time to revisit Bowling Alone to see what it can still teach us, because many of its warnings and lessons are perhaps more relevant now than at its time of publication.
One key lesson we can derive from Bowling Alone is that the less we trust each other—something which is both a cause and consequence of declining community engagement—the more it costs us. Mistrust is expensive.…(More)”
Inaccurate Data, Half-Truths, Disinformation, and Mob Violence
Image credit: Kayla Velasquez/Unsplash.
Selected Readings by Fiona Cece, Uma Kalkar, and Stefaan Verhulst: “The mob attack on the US Congress was alarming and the result of various efforts to undermine the trust in and legitimacy of longstanding democratic processes and institutions. In particular, the use of inaccurate data, half-truths, and disinformation to spread hate and division is considered a key driver behind last week’s attack. Altering data to support conspiracy theories or challenging and undermining the credibility of trusted data sources to allow for alternative narratives to flourish, if left unchallenged, has consequences — including the increased acceptance and use of violence both off-line and on-line.
Everyone working on data and information needs to be aware of the implications of altering or misusing data (including election results) to support malicious objectives. The January 6th riot is unfortunately not a unique event, nor is it contained to the US. Below, we provide a curation of findings and readings that illustrate the global danger of inaccurate data, half-truths, and willful disinformation….(Readings)”.