The New Democracy

By Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

When one thinks about Democracy one cannot help thinking about the role that it may have played in the birth of Philosophy.

The social, political and economic context of the Greek city-states, can be considered as having given way to what can be called the reflecting citizen.

The exercise of citizenship, the political experience as a reflexive experience of the polis, and the birth of Philosophy in Ancient Greece, may be thought to be connected. The exercise of building up an argument, of criticizing it, of questioning it, all become necessary in a democratic structure that is akin to that built up by the Ancient Greeks.

No democracy today approaches that of the Ancient Greece, the current democracies invite a different kind of social participation and reflection. The reflection that precedes the vote, the reflection of the public opinion manipulated by the mass media, the Country-state Democracy rather than the City-state Democracy found its apex in the 20th Century.

The Country-state Democracy does not invite to a reflection as the Ancient Greece Democracy, because the type of social structure that supports it impedes the citizen himself to exercise his citinzenship directly, there are various control mechanisms that prevent this.

First and foremost the fact that no citizen has a direct voice in politics, but only an indirect one through the elected officials that (miss)represent the citizens by serving the political and economic interests of themselves and of the groups that directly support them.

There are factors that serve to prevent a complete dictatorship of a small group, one of them, the most important one, being the fact that there are always different groups competing for power and countering each other’s moves.

The other control factor is the mass media that became a power structure capable of manipulating the public opinion, with effects upon the citizen’s voting direction, upon the divulging of corruption in the government (a good example was the Nixon scandal)...

But the mass media are inevitably non-neutral, becoming economic, politically and ideologically committed. The Citizen Kane and the Citizen Kane of Berlusconi, provide interesting examples on a reflection between the relationship of the mass media and politics.

The country-state democracy is a complex issue, the political decision ending up to be the best deal of the different groups of interest, and the only deal that the citizen can expect.

But despite the complexity there is a fundamental rationality that can be considered to be at the foundation of the country-state political experience, a mass rationality. This mass rationality characterized the bulk of the 20th Century... the mass market, the mass advertising, the mass media, the mass dynamics, the manipulable masses...

The masses are easily led, and can be led through the democratic scheme into a dictatorship. The country-state democracy is extremely vulnerable and amenable to dictatorship schemes, be them from the right or from the left.

Portugal constitutes a good example of both. After the end of Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship, there was the threat, during an extremely brief period of time, of a communist left-wing dictatorship.

There is also the democratic monarchies like Britain, these may seem to be more resilient than democracies against a dictatorship, given that they are not complete democracies to begin with (in Britain there is the figure head of the Royal Family to prevent the taking over of parliament, unless the Queen and her family were beheaded by an iconic new dictator).

The dictator needs to get rid of the iconic monarch, because the dictator must become the reference and the referent.

However, given the right social instabilities both monarchies and democracies can fall into an extreme dictatorship, and the examples of films like V for Vendetta or Fahrenheit 451, as well as Orwell’s Big Brother become frightening reminders.

However, all of these rest upon a rationality of masses, controlled and controllable.

We are now witnessing a new change in civilization and a new rationality – the web rationality and with it comes what may be the heralding of a New Democracy. Different names can be given to it... Web Democracy, Cyberspace Democracy, Hyperdemocracy...

The following article of El País deals with the latter term:

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/porvenir/catastrofe/elpepusoceps/20090222elpepspor_9/Tes

In the new Civilization - the Web Civilization - we are no longer dealing with the simple masses of the 20th Century, we are dealing with a super-planet-wide-organic-web, where each node behaves in a complex way, and where the nonlinearities may amplify discourses and memeplexes.

In this new Civilization the exercise of citizenship becomes more intense and closer to the Greek. But this is not a city or even country-delimited exercise, it is global, planetary.

The idea that this new Civilization is amenable to a Big Brother is foolish, independently of how many surveillance mechanisms are used. The fact is that the web-based market needs the publishing of the individual experience to be fed, and this experience can spread, replicate. Real time critical reflection immediately spreads to the system without control.

The mass media have already lost their power, and with them the mass-based rationality. The past manipulation of the transmission of wars contrasts with the new web-based transmission of event recordings from cell-phone and private cameras, recordings that people post online before any control mechanism is activated.

Censorship becomes impossible in the new web-based rationality, the system is much too complex, but it is exactly that web-based complexity that makes the New Democracy unique in human history.

The phrase in the El País article that best expresses this is “interacción planetaria en constante transfusion” that is, planetary interaction in constant transfusion.

A local insignificant reflexive thought or argument discursively expressed through text, picture or video can spread to the web like a virus. The systemic clinamen and stand alone complexes become frequent in the new viral-web-rationality.

The new citizenship is not a mass citizenship, it is a web citizenship, where each individual becomes a citizen of the planet in a very literal sense, for the new polis is the planet itself.

Here, each citizen expresses himself or herself in his or her singularity, and there, on the planet, that expression finds an adhesion by others with similar experiences that are voiced together... and so it spreads...

Such a democracy is more resilient than the others. None of the control schemes that were used to silence the masses or individuals can be used here, no repression is possible without shutting down the web, and with it the planet. There is no head to cut, because the web has no leader and, thus, no head.