Politwoops: “An archive of public tweets, deleted by politicians. Explore the tweets they would prefer you couldn’t see.”
The Emergence of a Post-Fact World
Francis Fukuyama in Project Syndicate: “One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.
The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.
The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.
While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics….
The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information….
The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.
And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life….(More)”
Rule by the lowest common denominator? It’s baked into democracy’s design
The Trump victory, and the general disaster for Democrats this year, was the victory of ignorance, critics moan.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Georgetown’s Jason Brennan called it “the dance of the dunces” and wrote that “Trump owes his victory to the uninformed.”…
For liberals, Trump’s victory was the triumph of prejudice, bigotry and forces allied against truth and expertise in politics, science and culture at large. Trump brandishes unconcern for traditional political wisdom and protocol – much less facts – like a badge of honor, and his admirers roar with glee. His now famous rallies, the chastened media report, are often scary, sometimes giving way to violence, sometimes threatening to spark broader recriminations and social mayhem. This is a glimpse of how tyrants rise to power, some political minds worry; this is how tyrants enlist the support of rabid masses, and get them to do their bidding.
For the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however, the Trump victory provides a useful reminder of the essential nature of democracy – a reminder of what precisely makes it vibrant. And liable to lapse into tyranny at once….
Democracy is rule by the rabble, in Plato’s view. It is the rule by the lowest common denominator. In a democracy, passions are inflamed and proliferate. Certain individuals may take advantage of and channel the storm of ignorance, Plato feared, and consolidate power out of a desire to serve their own interests.
As Rancière explains, there is a “scandal of democracy” for Plato: The best and the high born “must bow before the law of chance” and submit to the rule of the inexpert, the commoner, who knows little about politics or much else.
Merit ought to decide who rules, in Plato’s account. But democracy consigns such logic to the dustbin. The rabble may decide they want to be ruled by one of their own – and electoral conditions may favor them. Democracy makes it possible that someone who has no business ruling lands at the top. His rule may prove treacherous, and risk dooming the state. But, Rancière argues, this is a risk democracies must take. Without it, they lack legitimacy….
Rancière maintains people more happily suffer authority ascribed by chance than authority consigned by birth, merit or expertise. Liberals may be surprised about this last point. According to Rancière, expertise is no reliable, lasting or secure basis for authority. In fact, expertise soon loses authority, and with it, the legitimacy of the state. Why?…(More)”
Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?
Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?
Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.
The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.
Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.
The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..
….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…
…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….
…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”
Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy
Ariel Procaccia in Wired: “…Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one….. Maine recently became the first US state to adopt instant-runoff voting; the approach will be used for choosing the governor and members of Congress and the state legislature….
So why aren’t we already using cutting-edge voting systems in national elections? Perhaps because changing election systems usually itself requires an election, where short-term political considerations may trump long-term, scientifically grounded reasoning….Despite these difficulties, in the last few years state-of-the-art voting systems have made the transition from theory to practice, through not-for-profit online platforms that focus on facilitating elections in cities and organizations, or even just on helping a group of friends decide where to go to dinner. For example, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team has created an online tool whereby residents of a city can vote on how to allocate the city’s budget for public projects such as parks and roads. This tool has been used by New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle to allocate millions of dollars. Building on this success, the Stanford team is experimenting with groundbreaking methods, inspired by computational thinking, to elicit and aggregate the preferences of residents.
The Princeton-based project All Our Ideas asks voters to compare pairs of ideas, and then aggregates these comparisons via statistical methods, ultimately providing a ranking of all the ideas. To date, roughly 14 million votes have been cast using this system, and it has been employed by major cities and organizations. Among its more whimsical use cases is the Washington Post’s 2010 holiday gift guide, where the question was “what gift would you like to receive this holiday season”; the disappointingly uncreative top idea, based on tens of thousands of votes, was “money”.
Finally, the recently launched website RoboVote (which I created with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard) offers AI-driven voting methods to help groups of people make smart collective decisions. Applications range from selecting a spot for a family vacation or a class president, to potentially high-stakes choices such as which product prototype to develop or which movie script to produce.
These examples show that centuries of research on voting can, at long last, make a societal impact in the internet age. They demonstrate what science can do for democracy, albeit on a relatively small scale, for now….(More)’
The Econocracy: The perils of leaving economics to the experts
Book by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, Zach Ward-Perkins, and Series edited by Mick Moran: “One hundred years ago the idea of ‘the economy’ didn’t exist. Now, improving the economy has come to be seen as perhaps the most important task facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are conducted in the language of economics and economic logic shapes how political issues are thought about and addressed. The result is that the majority of citizens, who cannot speak this language, are locked out of politics while political decisions are increasingly devolved to experts. The econocracy explains how economics came to be seen this way – and the damaging consequences. It opens up the discipline and demonstrates its inner workings to the wider public so that the task of reclaiming democracy can begin….(More)”
‘Slacktivism’ that works: ‘Small changes’ matter
In 2013, an online petition persuaded a national organization representing high school coaches to develop materials to educate coaches about sexual assault and how they could help reduce assaults by their athletes. Online petitions have changed decisions by major corporations (ask Bank of America about its debit card fees) and affected decisions on policies as diverse as those related to survivors of sexual assault and local photography permitting requirements. Organizing and participating in these campaigns has also been personally meaningful to many.
But, a nostalgia for 1960s activism leads many to assume that “real” protest only happens on the street. Critics assume that classic social movement tactics such as rallies and demonstrations represent the only effective model for collectively pressing for change. Putting your body on the line and doing that collectively for decades is viewed as the only way “people power” works. Engaging online in “slacktivism” is a waste, making what cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell has called “small change.”
This amounts to a debate over the “right way” to protest. And it’s bound to heat up: The election of Donald Trump is pushing many people who have not previously engaged in activism to look for ways to get involved; others are redoubling their efforts. People have a range of possible responses, including doing nothing, using online connections to mobilize and publicize support and protesting in the streets – or some combination of tactics.
As a social movement scholar and someone who believes we should leverage all assets in a challenge, I know that much social good can come from mass involvement – and research shows that includes online activism. The key to understanding the promise of what I prefer to call “flash activism” is considering the bigger picture, which includes all those people who care but are at risk of doing nothing….(More)”
Tech is moving beyond cities to focus on civic engagement in every U.S. county
Hollie Russon Gilman at TechCrunch: “While gridlock has taken hold in a paralyzed Washington, D.C. mayors across the country are taking a pragmatic approach to solving local problems and its time for tech to reach out to them….
The United States has 3,0007 counties. And all of them have an appetite to shift the momentum from the federal government to the communities where people live and work. This can’t just involve coastal cities or urban areas within states. Rather, after Trump’s election, now is the moment to redouble policy efforts in communities across the country from states to rural counties.
Cities from Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, to New York have been leading the way to think about how to provide better services and engagement opportunities. They’ve been exciting places where rich networks of talent from academia to philanthropy have been helping foster ecosystems to catalyze new policy solutions….
There are a host of illustrative experiments occurring across communities that are leveraging policy innovation, data, and technology for more responsive and inclusive governance. The engagements that work focus on process to ensure that diverse stakeholders are a part of decision making….
Wisconsin:
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin a local organization called Clear Vision is teaming up with stakeholders on a poverty summit to reduce the number of people living poverty in income insecurity and build more resilient and inclusive communities. Citizen action groups will work on key issues they identify as part of the engagement process.
A key component of this poverty summit is to bring in traditionally marginalized communities into the process including low-income households, rural poor, youth and black and Hispanic communities. There is even a community-supported, nonprofit journalism site to support the local work in Eau Claire, Chippewa, and Dunn counties….
Oregon:
In Oregon, a “Kitchen Table” is enabling residents from across the state to contribute ideas, resources, and feedback to inform public policy. The Kitchen Table enables public officials to consult with representatives about key policy areas, crowdfund, and micro-lend for local startups and community businesses….
Another practice in Oregon is the Citizens Initiative Review, where a representative sampling of citizens convenes for deliberations over several days to discuss state ballot measures. After being established by the state’s bipartisan legislature in 2009, there have been six random representative samples of citizens for multi-day deliberations to draft voting guides written for the people, by their neighbors….
This requires tapping into existing networks and civic organizations, leveraging data, technology and policy innovations, and re-shifting our focus from federal policy towards building an infrastructure of governance that is durable through collective development and buy-in from people…(More)”
Fighting Exclusion, Inequality and Distrust: The Open Government Challenge
Remarks by Manish Bapna delivered at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit: “To the many heads of state, ministers, mayors, civil society colleagues gathered in this great hall, this is an important moment to reflect on the remarkable challenges of the past year.
We have seen the rise of various forms of populism and nationalism in the United States, Britain, the Philippines, Italy, and many other countries. This has led to surprise election results and an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-government movements.
We have seen the tragic results of conflict-driven migration, as captured in the iconic image of a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on the Turkish shore.
We have seen governments struggle to respond to the refugee crisis. Some open their arms while others close their doors.
We have seen deadly terrorist attacks in cities around the world – including this one — that have forced governments to walk a fine line between the need to protect their people and the risk of infringing on their civil liberties.
And we continue to confront two inter-linked challenges: the moral challenge of 700 million people in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day, and the existential challenge of a changing climate.
All of these point to a failure of governance and, if we are honest, to a lack of open government that truly connects, engages and meets the needs of all people.
World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Open Government
The crux of the matter is this: While open government alone can’t fix the world’s problems, they can’t be solved without it.
Too many people feel excluded and marginalized. They believe that only elites reap the benefits of growth and globalization. They feel left out of decision-making. They distrust public institutions.
How we collectively confront these challenges will be OGP’s most important test….
Here are five essential steps we can take – we, the people here today – to help accelerate the shift toward open government.
The first step: We must protect civic space – the rights to free speech, assembly and association – because these bedrock rights are at the heart of a functioning society. Serious violations of these rights have been recently reported by CIVICUS in over 100 countries. In 25 active OGP countries, these rights are repressed or obstructed….
The second step: We must foster citizen-centered governance.
We cherish OGP as a unique platform where government and civil society are equal partners in a way that amplifies the concerns of ordinary citizens.
We commend the many OGP countries that have made significant strides. But we recognize that for others, this remains a major struggle.
As heads of state and ministers, we need you to embrace the concept of co-creation. …
The third step: We must make changes that are transformational, not incremental.
Drawing on our commitment to open government and the urgency of this moment, we must be willing to go further, faster…..
Transforming government brings us to the fourth step.
We need to make a real difference in people’s lives.
This is our Partnership’s ultimate aim. Because when open government works, it improves every facet of people’s lives.
• This means giving all people safe drinking water and clean air.
• It means reliable electricity so children can have light to do homework and play.
• It means health clinics where the sick can go to get quality care, where medicines are available
• And it means building trust in public officials who are untainted by corruption….
The fifth and final step: We need to reinvigorate the Partnership’s political leadership….(More)”
Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All
Max Read in NewYork Magazine: “My favorite story about the internet is the one about the anonymous Japanese guy who liberated Czechoslovakia. In 1989, as open dissent was spreading across the country, dissidents were attempting to coordinate efforts outside the watchful eye of Czechoslovak state security. The internet was a nascent technology, and the cops didn’t use it; modems were banned, and activists were able to use only those they could smuggle over the border, one at a time. Enter our Japanese guy. Bruce Sterling, who first told the story of the Japanese guy in a 1995 Wired article, says he talked to four different people who’d met the quiet stranger, but no one knew his name. What really mattered, anyway, is what he brought with him: “a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems,” which he handed over to a group of engineering students in Prague before walking away. “The students,” Sterling would later write, “immediately used these red-hot 2400-baud scorcher modems to circulate manifestos, declarations of solidarity, rumors, and riot news.” Unrest expanded, the opposition grew, and within months, the Communist regime collapsed.
Is it true? Were free modems the catalyst for the Velvet Revolution? Probably not. But it’s a good story, the kind whose logic and lesson have become so widely understood — and so foundational to the worldview of Silicon Valley — as to make its truth irrelevant. Isn’t the best way to fortify the town square by giving more people access to it? And isn’t it nice to know, as one storied institution and industry after another falls to the internet’s disrupting sword, that everything will be okay in the end — that there might be some growing pains, but connecting billions of people to one another is both inevitable and good? Free speech will expand, democracy will flower, and we’ll all be rich enough to own MacBooks. The new princes of Silicon Valley will lead us into the rational, algorithmically enhanced, globally free future.
Or, they were going to, until earlier this month. The question we face now is: What happens when the industry destroyed is professional politics, the institutions leveled are the same few that prop up liberal democracy, and the values the internet disseminates are racism, nationalism, and demagoguery?
Powerful undemocratic states like China and Russia have for a while now put the internet to use to mislead the public, create the illusion of mass support, and either render opposition invisible or expose it to targeting…(More)”