The Democratization of Democracy?

"Information is the currency of democracy" - Thomas Jefferson

Well if information is the currency of democracy, you'd think we'd keep track of the handlers.

Information has become big business. Duh right? But no I'm not here to talk about Facebook privacy or.. how Apple is trying to establish a content empire.. or how your boss is watching your 4square checkins to track how long you're at lunch.

No I'm here to talk about the more traditional kind. News. Stuff that happens. CNN. ABC. Fox (does that really count?). NBC. BBC. CBC. Sky. Reuters. AP. Der Spiegel.. and the list goes on. They shape how we view the world more than most of us will ever appreciate.. since so few of us really get the chance to see both sides of these events.

We're more connected than ever. We like to think we're more informed than ever. But so much happens.. how do we filter? How do we really know what's going on? How can we be certain to read the right stories and not the wrong ones?

Last week The Guardian got an exclusive with Curveball - this is basically the guy that lied and said Hussein had WMDs - because he wanted regime change - and arguably was instrumental for the whole Iraq war along with the yellow cake uranium nonsense. How many people heard about this? Who understood the significance? What will we do with this information? The answer is probably.. nobody and nothing. 

Dennis Fox's 1985 paper Psychology, Ideology, Utopia, and the Commons talks about the interaction between global problems and individual problems. He counters that the traditional solution - centralization of power, of authority in order to more rigorously manage and enforce something.. is not working.

I knew this before I'd ever heard of this paper, I'd had the idea of organic groups of stakeholders probably since I was 15 after witnessing the utter and despicable failures wrought by fisheries management policy and more broadly foreign aid policies in the "third world" countries I grew up. You know, the places where we think people are too dumb to run a country so we had to show them how to do it. In the process we usually just screw things up.

Fox posits that.. an alternative solution is to democratize it - or more precisely to create an organized anarchy (or direct democracy if you prefer). To get stakeholders involved - and keep it small. Small enough that people can really feel that they are invested in the process.. but large enough to act as a real force. Hmm.. Switzerland?

And this is where I have found hope. In the streets of Benghazi. Cairo. Tripoli. Yemen. Kuwait. Bahrain. Sudan. People are rising up and actually changing things - not just talking about. And they're reporting about it themselves. And all the "mass media machine" can do is link their blog posts.. their youtube videos. It'd be comical if the topic weren't so tragic. Hundreds of people dying.. and we barely hear about it - but the fact that we hear about it at all. That I can go to a livestream from Libya. Photos on flickr. Videos on youtube. This is raw as it gets. It's hard to spin at the source.

They're democratizing the democratic process by ensuring information can freely flow. These people are heroes.

I'm under no illusion that many of these will fail. That promises will retrograde. Movements will falter. And yes, perhaps some will be co-opted by movements more sinister. But that is the risk of change - and our current "stability" policy is just not working. We need to let self-determination happen.. and the only reason it's so violently coming out.. is because it has been suppressed so harshly for so long. Of course the violence is mostly coming from those trying to maintain the status quo.

The fact that in the end.. despite massive military support to their "security forces", despite decades of tyranny - even trying to shutdown telecommunications in and out of these entire countries.. that ordinary people.. leveraging tools like Youtube, Facebook & Twitter.. but also SMS, phones, satellite feeds, and even just old fashioned notes or face to face "social networks".. people are still getting the job done. They are getting their word out. It is being reported, and real progress will be made.

Azad Essa asks the question - does a revolt need to be documented to succeed? I don't know that it's necessary, but certainly if people believe they are being heard they are more willing to speak out further. This is why citizen reporting of these events is so powerful. Atrocities occur in Africa very frequently, but are not so graphically and immediately broadcast to the rest of the world. Yes people died in Egypt, but wouldn't it have been worse without international pressure? What would a Bosnia or Rwanda look like with social media?

Aside, political change need not be violent. Recent protests in Wisconsin and at universities in Puerto Rico have also shown us that.

It's just not information either - at least not of the kind we're accustomed to. You see the same sort of movements in CSAs starting to press on monoculture farming.. and so on.

In the end, I remain very skeptical about our fate. I'm not certain that we will adjust in time - that our attention will be maintained. Still, to dramatically witness that the whole world has not merely become sated zombies sucking on the media teat of large organisations means there is chance yet for positive change. So perhaps even for a cynic like me.. there is hope.

The question remains.. can we do it? You know.. those of us with jobs and shiney cars. When does it matter for us as well?