Digital Technology and Democratic Theory

By Lucy Bernholz, Hélène 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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226748603

Book preview

Digital Technology and Democratic Theory

Digital Technology and Democratic Theory

EDITED BY LUCY BERNHOLZ, HÉLÈNE LANDEMORE, AND ROB REICH

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74843-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74857-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74860-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226748603.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernholz, Lucy, editor. | Landemore, Hélène, 1976– editor. | Reich, Rob, editor.

Title: Digital technology and democratic theory / edited by Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore and Rob Reich.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020024755 | ISBN 9780226748436 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226748573 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226748603 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Technological innovations—United States. | Computer networks—Political aspects—United States. | Information technology—Political aspects—United States. | Digital communications—Political aspects—United States.

Classification: LCC JC423 .D629 2020 | DDC 320.973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024755

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich

1 Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere

Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung

2 Open Democracy and Digital Technologies

Hélène Landemore

3 Purpose-Built Digital Associations

Lucy Bernholz

4 Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal

Seeta Peña Gangadharan

5 Presence of Absence: Exploring the Democratic Significance of Silence

Mike Ananny

6 The Artisan and the Decision Factory: The Organizational Dynamics of Private Speech Governance

Robyn Caplan

7 The Democratic Consequences of the New Public Sphere

Henry Farrell and Melissa Schwartzberg

8 Democratic Societal Collaboration in a Whitewater World

David Lee, Margaret Levi, and John Seely Brown

9 From Philanthropy to Democracy: Rethinking Governance and Funding of High-Quality News in the Digital Age

Julia Cagé

10 Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Bryan Ford

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich

This book explores the intersection of digital technology and democratic theory. We assembled scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy practice and democratic theory. We asked our contributors to consider what democratic theory—broadly defined as scholars engaged in debate about the values and institutional design of democracy—can bring to the design, development, use, and governance of digital technologies. The simple goal: through a series of workshops that spanned nearly two years, we would examine how democratic ideals might provide us with a framework for understanding and, more importantly, shaping the digital transformation of our lives.

What kind of transformation? On the one hand, digital technologies allow for greater connectivity and transmission of information among individuals the world over. They empower people to produce and share content and to act collectively, all with access to more knowledge than ever before, across borders and distances previously considered insurmountable, and at virtually no financial cost. The Arab Spring, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, and many of the color revolutions around the world, as well as Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Yellow Vests movement in France, and youth-led climate action in the United States and Europe, would not have been possible without social media.¹

Digital technologies were similarly essential to the creation of the free, open-source, multilingual, and universal encyclopedia Wikipedia. They were central to the concept of open government first put in place by the Obama administration in 2009 and later expanded into the Open Government Initiative, an international network of countries seeking to fight government corruption via increased transparency and citizen participation. Digital technologies allowed Iceland to produce, in 2011, the first crowdsourced constitutional proposal in the world. In Taiwan, an innovative process for deliberative governance called vTaiwan has used digital technologies to facilitate successful negotiations among authorities, citizens, and companies like Uber and Airbnb. In France both the Great National Debate of January–March 2019 and the following Convention on Climate Change of October 2019–June 2020 relied heavily on digital technologies to experiment with deliberation at the scale of a large nation. Finally, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the world, digital technologies enable some people to telecommute, stay connected, exchange information, and serve as an essential element of public health surveillance.

On the other hand, the very same forces that connect individuals the world over and allow them to produce and share information also lead to a superabundance of content, and its global dissemination, which threatens the health of a functional public sphere and perhaps democracy itself. This flood of content has contributed to the rise of so-called post-truth politics,² in which citizens, lacking easy ways to sort good from bad information, are susceptible to misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. Additionally, the business model of dominant tech firms—capturing and reselling users’ attention—may reinforce or exacerbate political polarization by locking people in filter bubbles and echo chambers where the like-minded speak to the like-minded, ultimately increasing the distance between political discourse and reality.³

Additionally, network effects mean that a platform becomes more influential and valuable the more people who use it. This has enabled the domination of global platforms such as Google (including YouTube) and Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), which, because they serve as the main gateways to information on the internet, confer on these companies extraordinary power. From the standpoint of any individual, or any nation, a tiny number of companies is responsible for algorithmically constituting our informational ecosystem. The policies of Facebook and Google are more consequential for permissible speech than is anything decided by Canada, France, or Germany. In Timothy Garton Ash’s phrase, big tech firms are the new private superpowers. And with such power naturally comes the possibility of abuse of power, manipulation, and mass surveillance.

It was once fashionable to regard technology through a starry-eyed utopian lens. The internet was an immaterial space beyond the reach of politics. The power of bits and bytes and microchips would topple authoritarian regimes, spread democracy, and connect distant peoples. Today conventional wisdom holds that technologists have brought the world addictive devices, an omnipresent surveillance panopticon, racist algorithms, and disinformation machines that exacerbate polarization, threatening to destroy democracies from within. Many suspect the companies are led by a band of ahistorical techno-libertarian merry pranksters who, after minting their billions by collecting our digital exhaust stream and selling personalized access to advertisers, are now either discovering the reputation-cleansing project of big philanthropy or readying to escape to Mars.⁴

This book went to press in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and during a period of intensified activism and heightened media attention to endemic racism and police brutality in the US. The health crisis laid bare both the worst and the best of our digital dependencies, from an infodemic of false cures and conspiracy theories to heightened commitments to use and protect online tools for public health and for conducting the essential business of the democratic institution, such as the census, public deliberation, and court proceedings.⁵ In an emergency, however, time horizons are shortened, and we look to any available means to cope.

What is needed is an avoidance of digital utopianism and dystopianism, and a more sober, long-term, assessment. How should we understand the powerful interactions between digital technologies and democratic ideals? We are overdue, in particular, for scholars of democratic theory to take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions. In this collection of essays, scholars from across multiple disciplines examine enduring democratic commitments of equality and inclusion, participation, deliberation, a flourishing public sphere, civic and political trust, rights of expression and association, and voting through the lens of global digital networks. What we offer is a beginning—a research agenda for more cross-disciplinary scholarship. This volume makes clear that there is much work to be done to understand and, possibly with the aid of technology itself, to improve democracies in the digital age.

Whither Democratic Theory?

Despite the obvious ways in which digital technologies are having profound effects on democratic institutions and citizens, democratic theorists have yet to confront those effects. In recent years, democratic theorists have been more focused on the nontechnological aspects of the widely diagnosed crisis of democracy, whether the various democratic deficits built in existing institutions and particularly parties and electoral systems; the economic nexus of money in politics, neoliberalism, globalization, and increasing economic inequalities; political polarization and the decline of civil discourse and democratic norms; the rise of an age of distrust and shifting popular expectations in terms of political legitimacy; or the threat of populism or authoritarianism.⁶ As a result, what scholarship exists on the intersection of digital technology and democracy has been done by scholars in media studies and communication theory, scholars of race and technology in African American studies and sociology, and by journalists, lawyers, and activists.⁷

Why have democratic theorists been so silent? The relative novelty of digital technology is one explanation. John Rawls observed that the politician looks to the next election, the statesman to the next generation, and philosophy to the indefinite future.⁸ The time horizons of philosophy are long, dealing more comfortably with perennial questions and slow-moving issues. But digital technologies and the phenomena they give rise to are new and puzzling objects. Facebook, for example, grew from a start-up in a Harvard dorm room to one of the most powerful companies on the planet in only a decade and a half.

We suspect as well that democratic theorists have been silent because familiar conceptual frameworks for thinking about politics and, specifically, democratic governance are maladapted to the task of analyzing the civic and political dimensions of the internet and the dominant tech companies. For instance, should we see giant platforms like Facebook and Twitter primarily as social networks or as media platforms? Are Facebook users best conceptualized as consumers, produsers (a portmanteau to refer to the dual identity of social media users as both users of a product and producers of content), subjects, or stakeholders? Is Google search best conceptualized as a service provided by a private corporation or as something akin to public or civic infrastructure? Do these platforms deliver products, services, public goods, or all of the above?

We haven’t yet found agreement on whether technology companies are only technology companies or also publishers, news organizations, transportation providers, and even, in the vocabulary of philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, new forms of private governments.⁹ For example, there is robust debate about how to best to conceptualize just what a platform provider is.¹⁰ Such decisions about how to think about technology companies are consequential: when Twitter in 2016 decided not to ban Donald Trump despite his repeated violations of its terms of service, the company appealed to a notion of public interest that shifted its role in the conversation from private company to civic platform. And in 2019 when an appeals court ruled that Trump could not block people on Twitter, it similarly interpreted Twitter as a public platform. At the same time, companies such as Facebook initially invited comparison to a digital public sphere but have more recently backed away from such analogies in favor of describing their services as hosting private communities.

Yet another difficulty lies in the fact that the big tech companies are global businesses, which raises questions at a supranational level that the conceptual toolbox of democratic theory has long had difficulty addressing. If we still cannot quite envision what a global democracy is or should look like, or even more minimally how to create a just global order in a world of nation-states, it is difficult to theorize about the regulation, control, and possible democratization of these already-global digital tools and services.

Beyond the conceptual difficulties, it is a familiar observation that new technologies race ahead of sensible public policy. Well-designed industry or public regulation arrives, if at all, only after the initial effects of a technology are widely felt and understood. For all of these reasons, political philosophy, including its more empirically sensitive branch of democratic theory, is playing catch-up with the fast-moving world of digital technologies.¹¹

Finally, democratic theorists have not made serious attempts to work in tandem with engineers to understand the potential of digital technologies, let alone to design technologies to contribute to democratic practices and institutions with the aim of better fulfilling democratic ideals. There is enormous potential to harness, shape, and craft digital tools to serve various democratic aspirations. Consider experiments in online deliberation, crowdsourcing, e-voting, participatory budgeting platforms, and enhanced online communication between elected officials and constituents. Consider, finally, recent work on race and technology. Ruha Benjamin, for example, points out the many examples of discriminatory design built into our digital worlds and, in response, sketches out, together with the contributors to her edited volume Captivating Technology, a plurality of technological futures that aim to be anti-racist, liberatory, and more just overall. In an age of AI, big data, social media platforms, and justice (as well as discrimination) by algorithm, the lack of attention by democratic theorists to digital technologies is increasingly problematic and puzzling.¹² Consider also the creation of cryptocurrencies that are decoupled from state sovereignty, algorithmic determinations about how states distribute benefits or courts apply sentences, and the creation of a digital public sphere by social networks that shape what we get to see and do online. In an age of AI, big data, social media platforms, and (in)justice by algorithm, the lack of attention by democratic theorists to digital technologies is increasingly problematic and puzzling. This lack of attention to technology, interestingly, also affects theorists of race issues, as long as they operate from within the boundaries of political theory, rather than other fields. For example, Eddie Glaude’s Democracy in Black (2016) and the otherwise excellent volume by Rogers and Turner (2020) on African American political thought address democracy and capitalism through the lens of race but without an explicit consideration of technologies).¹³

On the technical side, developers and engineers often overlook or ignore scholars in the humanities and social sciences, especially women of color, who have led the way in exploring the ethical and political dimensions of technology. Technologists and democratic theorists alike can draw from critical race and feminist theory on technological innovation and social systems. Many of the most powerful digital technologies have civic and political externalities, the foreseeable outcomes of shifting individual pieces of complex social and governing systems. Technologists, too, have been playing catch-up in dealing with the consequences of multipurpose technologies, from Twitter trolls and cyberbullying to algorithmic bias to a privacy-violating business model of surveillance capitalism to the simple fact that much of the internet seems dominated by white men with strong opinions. Indeed, the digital technologies that have changed our world were produced by a category of people that skews male, white, socially liberal, and libertarian (or at least antiregulation), and is geographically concentrated in Silicon Valley.¹⁴

Put most simply, the omnipresence of networked digital technologies requires us to reexamine several of the most fundamental questions of political theory: Who governs? What are the boundaries of the demos? What rights, freedoms, and obligations do individuals have?, and How do we track or generate something like a common good? Democratic values and aspirations also enable us to imagine—and perhaps design and implement—digital technologies that facilitate self-governance, expand the franchise, center justice, protect individual liberties, cultivate more informed civic and political participation, and nurture the pursuit of collective goods.

This volume arose out of a conviction that digital technologies are having a profound influence on democratic governance and that, reciprocally, the shape and content of democratic institutions can influence the design and evolution of digital technology. Our starting point was to move beyond the techno-utopian rhetoric that surrounded the emergence of the internet as well as the Chicken Little alarmism in the wake of the 2016 US election. The digital tools and platforms that are so ubiquitous in our lives are neither inherently liberatory nor destroyers of democracy.

Our goal was to bring a more rigorous approach to these questions by organizing an interdisciplinary conversation among scholars who are not frequent collaborators—political philosophers, social scientists, and technologists. Despite the civic and political dimensions of services such as Google search, Facebook, YouTube, and so on, engineers rarely work alongside social scientists and philosophers. And despite the increasing body of scholarship by social scientists on the effects of various technologies, we rarely see collaboration between them and the engineers who design and bring the technologies to market.¹⁵ If we assembled scholars from a variety of disciplines, all with interests in democratic theory, to explore the intersection of digital technology and democracy, would they have a common conceptual vocabulary? Would there emerge new frameworks of analysis or novel approaches to the understanding of, and potential design of, technologies in support of democratic aims? Could interdisciplinary conversations contribute to disciplinary thinking as well as to ongoing public debate?

There is an abundance of opportunity for interdisciplinary scholarship. Political leaders and media analysts such as Stacey Abrams, Tiffany Cross, and Symone Sanders have written about the ways policy, race, and technology shape contemporary political campaigns. Race and gender scholarship on Black Twitter and hashtag activism examine questions of participation, identity, and exclusion—all core to the democratic project. In taking up digital technologies as a force within democracies, political theorists have considerable work to draw on from these adjacent domains.¹⁶

We did not imagine that we would come to any definitive conclusions. But we hoped to find ground for dialogue, to model constructive cross-disciplinary exchange, and to identify in our work a research agenda for the future. We view the contributions in this volume as the start rather than the conclusion of a scholarly conversation.

The Conceptual Landscape

Consider the basic terms of our title: digital technology and democratic theory. We did not impose definitions for either term, instead allowing our ongoing dialogue to reveal potentially shared conceptual territory.

Our conversations began with the idea that digital technology could be understood as the set of information and communication technologies that make use of the networked electronic generation, processing, and storage of data. Digital technology is thus an umbrella that covers computers, the internet, smart phones, and much more. Each chapter examines particular technologies of interest to the authors.

We characterized democratic theory as the field concerned with the study of democracy as both a theoretical and an empirical object, in both its descriptive and its normative dimensions. Central to democratic theory is the ideal of collective self-determination or self-rule, the ideal of the power of the people (demos-kratos), as rule of, by, and for the people.

But how to analyze the intersection of digital technology as such and democratic theory as such? For any useful analysis, we had to disaggregate various kinds of digital technologies and distinguish various institutional designs or components of a democratic society. Rather than attempting to analyze the effects on democracy of something as diffuse as the internet, we had to consider the political consequences of different phenomena, like the online public sphere or the changing nature of trust in online interactions. And when thinking of how various aspects of democratic governance might be used to evaluate or design new technological objects and infrastructures, we had to think not in terms of democratic governance in the abstract, but from specific evaluative viewpoints, like inclusion, power, legitimacy, representation, and deliberation. On both the technological and political sides, productive analysis required a finer-grained set of definitions.

As a consequence, this book contains discussion of multiple digital technologies and different democratic theories. On the technological side, our contributors considered digitized data, the use of algorithms in processing digitized information, and decentralized technologies such as blockchain. Of course, we cannot seek to be exhaustive: absent from this volume are systematic discussions of important subjects such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and virtual or augmented reality. As a result, although at least two contributors (Ford and Landemore) venture into what could be considered science-fiction territory, the chapters tend to remain in the space of known or immediately foreseeable technological applications. None of the chapters explores the more radical and fantastical visions of an AI-based democracy, as imagined, for example, by Martin Hilbert or Cesar Hidalgo.¹⁷

On the political side, our contributors brought a variety of complementary theoretical perspectives on democracy. Many chapters are committed to a framework that emphasizes the role of deliberation in the informal or formal public sphere. Others operate in a (compatible but distinct) pragmatist lineage, emphasizing an experimentalist approach to solving social problems. Seen through this lens, democratic institutions are problem-solving tools, much like technology itself. Others are committed to a more classically Schumpeterian model of democracy, emphasizing electoral competition and vote aggregation. Finally, many put their emphasis on the rich ecology of offline or online associations that a thriving democracy depends on, inscribing themselves in the tradition of participatory democrats such as Robert Putnam, Carole Pateman, and Benjamin Barber. Meanwhile, some look to digital technologies as a means to move beyond representation and return to more direct forms of democracy at scale, whereas others yet see them as mechanisms to rethink democratic representation along nonelectoral lines. Perhaps, more grandly still, some aspire to use digital technologies to move beyond the nation-state and globalize democratic governance. Cutting across these distinctions, some look to democracy mostly for procedural fairness; other mostly for the quality of outcomes, including in terms of knowledge aggregation.

Therefore, although our title is formulated in the singular, the book volume represents an exploration of the intersections of digital technologies and democratic theories. And these intersections remind us of the importance of asking old questions in democratic theory while being mindful of the promise and peril of new technologies.

An Emerging Research Agenda

The chapters in this volume lay the groundwork for an emerging research agenda in democratic theory. That agenda starts from a set of perennial questions in democratic theory, exploring them in light of the design and dissemination of various digital technologies. We believe that progress on this research agenda will be made through the collaboration of democratic theorists, social scientists, and engineers.

Among the perennial questions are: What are the informational conditions of a healthy public sphere and an informed and deliberative citizenry? How does the free speech ideal fit into a digital public sphere? Must we reestablish gatekeepers in order to build conditions of trust between citizens and experts, between citizens and politicians, or among citizens themselves? What are the geographic boundaries of the demos? Who counts as a citizen?

Democratic theory can also help formulate, question, and potentially address new issues as they are implicitly raised by digital technologies and the new categories those technologies create. How can a technology affect the inclusion or exclusion of citizens? How does the technological landscape affect the balance of power in a democratic society—between experts and others, corporations and the state, citizens and foreigners? What is and who owns digital data? What counts as online consent, whether to terms of agreement or to the sharing of one’s data? What, if anything, do companies owe to social media platform users? Could we imagine a democratic, non-state-based, blockchain-enabled cryptocurrency, and what principles should it encode? What normative principles should shape the design of algorithms that curate information and news?

Digital technologies have also reopened questions seemingly closed by mainstream democratic theory before the advent of the Internet: Is direct democracy on a mass scale possible and, if so, desirable? Specifically, is deliberation on a large scale possible and, if so, desirable? Do we still need representation, and if so, of what kind? As online voting allows for vote delegation, bot voting, vote splitting, and vote budgeting, is one person, one vote still the best way to implement political equality?

This set of diverse questions—perennial, new, or freshly reopened—invites renewed inquiry in democracy theory and also new cross-disciplinary consideration. This volume models the practice of bringing different scholarly disciplines to shared questions.

Stimulated by the questions outlined here, the chapters in this volume revolve around several common themes: the informational conditions of a healthy democracy; the potential for, and nature of, expressive and associational spaces; the definition of a digital demos; the role of silence and exclusion in understanding participation; and the division in democratic societies between institutional and individual responsibilities. These are some of the core themes, we posit, at the heart of a new research agenda in democratic theory. Adjacent literatures important for theorists to engage include studies of race, power, artificial intelligence, justice, and algorithmic accountability.

THE INFORMATIONAL CONDITIONS OF A HEALTHY DEMOCRACY

Democracies rely on informed citizens. The contributors to this volume share some assumptions about what is necessary for a healthy digital public sphere: access to information, knowledge, and news; opportunities for deliberation; some form of minimal truth tracking; and trust (both vertical, between readers and journalists, citizens and government, and horizontal, among citizens themselves, between parties). An important conclusion emerges from reflecting on how digital technologies have transformed the public sphere: there exists a potential trade-off between quality and quantity (or diversity) of content. The internet reduces the cost of consuming and distributing information to near zero, enabling mass participation in the digital public sphere while also facilitating the amplification of misinformation or disinformation. How should we assess what some of the chapters refer to as the aperture and filter dimensions of digitally enabled communication when it comes to the overall quality of the public sphere?

The question of the quality of our existing public sphere is opened rather than closed by the chapters here. We still do not know, for example, if, despite popular opinion to the contrary, our current public sphere is less able to track the truth about various facts and the public good than the public sphere of the preinternet age. From a purely theoretical perspective, the literature on collective intelligence tells us that if digital technologies could cultivate inclusive deliberation in the new digital public sphere, its outcomes might be better than those produced by the more gated, less diverse model of the preinternet era.¹⁸ A key condition for this to be true, however, is that genuine deliberation takes place. At the moment, we are still groping for a way to make genuine online deliberation happen and are experiencing the turbulence of what could be a long transition phase out of an old order into a new one.

Our contributors fall, loosely speaking, into two camps on the question of free speech in the digital age: the Millians and the Rousseauvians. The Millians deplore the abuses of free speech online but see education and intersubjective monitoring of citizens as the appropriate answer, over and above legal or platform-based speech restrictions. The Rousseauvians, by contrast, favor more democratic or community-based self-rule and the active inclusion and protection of vulnerable minorities, even at the cost of some restrictions on free speech, whether imposed by governments or by platforms.

As a result, we see a research agenda for normative theorists (e.g., must we adapt our understanding of the free speech ideal in a digital era?), for social scientists (e.g., what is the effect of big tech companies on quality and quantity of information, on echo chambers and filter bubbles, on polarization?), and for engineers (e.g., how can digital tools and platforms be designed with democratic ideals in mind?). Several chapters here lay out a framework to understand the informational conditions of a healthy democratic society and try to take stock of the transformation wrought by digital technologies.

NEW EXPRESSIVE AND ASSOCIATIONAL SPACES

Liberal democracies seek to guarantee a slate of individual rights, including free expression and freedom of assembly. In addition, one of the core topics of debate in democratic theory is the role of information and an informed citizenry. Digital environments are the result of the interplay of, on the one hand, engineered designs and algorithmically mediated choices (which can in turn be shaped by commercial priorities), and, on the other hand, human desires for interaction, persuasion, knowledge, and entertainment. Digital technology opens up a wide variety of communication, including from person to person, from person to organization, from person or organization to government or state, from constituent to representative and back, and so on. These communications can be horizontal, taking place among individuals or groups positioned at a similar level of the governance or hierarchical structure, and vertical, between individuals or groups on the lower rungs and individuals and groups or entities (corporations, states, governments) on the higher rungs of this same chain structure.

These pairings open up new research questions concerning how digitally enabled expressive and associational spaces might aid the pursuit of democracy. In doing so we also must be alert to how digital spaces might be designed or used to suppress freedom or produce inequalities.

This presents us with two key tasks for new scholarly work. First, we must consider whether and how our networks of digital communications accommodate and protect individual rights to expression and association in ways that also protect privacy and resist corporate or state surveillance. If one research agenda is to analyze the digital public sphere, then a second and related research agenda is to delineate the infrastructure of digital civil society and to understand its promise and peril. Several chapters focus attention on the realm of expressive and associational spaces in a digital age.

REDEFINING THE DEMOS?

Digital technologies offer new opportunities to imagine and define the demos above and beyond the traditional boundaries set by geography and history. First, the ability to vote and partake in other political action online allows citizens to participate in their government from outside the physical borders of a democracy. Attempts to implement remote voting and participation through physical methods (like paper) have been cumbersome to the point of dissuading participation, and many countries give no political participation options at all to citizens living abroad. Digital technologies can massively lower the cost of enfranchisement for citizens who do not physically reside in their country.

Second, digital technologies enable virtual communities that crosscut or transcend traditional boundaries for community and to which people the world over can self-ascribe at will, for example, on the basis of shared interests. Digital technologies therefore allow for the creation of new, virtual demoi, completely independent of physical and territorial constraints. Finally, digital technologies could even empower something like a global democracy, a community that is physically located on planet Earth. Might technology enable a humanity-based demos, if only with respect to global issues such as climate change, North-South inequalities, transnational migrations, and terrorism? Scholars have yet to explore and assess the revolutionary potential of such new opportunities. Several chapters in this volume point to a research agenda enabling us to explore how technology can facilitate a reimagination of the demos.

Silence and Exclusion

For all their promise of bringing back together scattered demoi, creating new ones, or constituting a global demos, digital technologies also foster exclusionary group definitions or redefinitions.

If we take inclusion on equal terms as both a precondition of and an ideal for democratic society, then everyone’s interests must count, and count equally, and everyone must have equal rights, and perhaps roughly equivalent means, to participate in civic and political life. Digital technologies promise greater access to the political sphere, but they also create new barriers, entrenching what is perhaps an ultimately unbridgeable digital divide. Some of these barriers are physical and economic. Many communities are sidelined because of insufficient built infrastructure, or because existing infrastructure is, in the absence of regulatory requirements that would ensure universal access, not accessible. In response, long-standing struggles for equal access expand their focus to digital inclusion.

Active participation takes many forms in the analog world, and so we must consider many possible parallels in the digital world. Protestors often make their point by removing themselves to the edge of the discussion. They exercise their voice and signal their disagreement by standing silently on the edge. Choosing to step out of digital spaces as a form of civil disobedience requires a new form of signaling. To understand—and design—digital spaces as democratic fora, we must account for those who are present, those who are excluded, and those who chose not to participate. This requires engineering for equity and inclusion. Two contributions here identify promising new research frontiers by foregrounding the democratic dimensions of silence and refusal in a digital age.

INDIVIDUAL AGENCY VERSUS INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN APPROACHES

Many of the chapters speak specifically to, or demand certain capacities of, individual actors in their roles as democratic participants. They point to specific digital literacies we need or must strive to develop. Others expect or call out for new individual responsibilities for our interactions in the digital public sphere, and some suggest that technology can be developed and deployed to enhance civic expertise and judgment.

Democratic theorists point out the basic tension underlying these options as determining what is the responsibility of individuals and what is the responsibility of the state. Where authors challenge the notion that individual agency is enough, and place their attention on regulatory, technological, and corporate changes, we have to also specify what may or may not be possible.

What is new here for democratic theory is the need to take full account of the governing roles that software code and digital systems can play by virtue of their default designs and the business models of their creators. The more our human systems of governance come to depend on software code and digital infrastructure, the greater the need to design democratic norms directly into these engineered systems. How to understand these dynamics between humans and digital systems, how to design digital systems specifically for democratic purposes, and how to hold such systems accountable is a new frontier for political theorists, digital technologists, and the public citizens. All the contributors to this volume explore in some fashion this new frontier in democratic theory.

Chapter Overview

We open the volume with two very different theoretical frameworks. The first chapter assumes a Habermasian paradigm of deliberative democracy, whereas the second chapter, also committed to deliberation, is centered on nonelectoral forms of democratic representation (specifically bodies constituted by random selection). The deliberate juxtaposition of these two visions is intended to engage readers immediately in a range of possibilities about the meaning and possible institutionalization of democracy as well as the role digital technologies can play in relation to these possibilities. From there we move on to more specific and empirical chapters that point out the democratic limits as well the possibilities and resources inherent to the deployment of digital technologies in the political space. Along this arc, we alternate disciplinary angles while preserving a thematic continuity from one contribution to the next. Because the chapters were written for a multiple-stage interdisciplinary workshop, they make frequent reference to one another. The chapters are in a loose dialogue.

Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung’s opening chapter, Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere, begins with the Habermasian two-track model of the public sphere and focuses on the informal sphere of deliberation in the wild, the unstructured online public exchanges that are meant to inform and shape the debates in the formal decision-making sphere (e.g., Congress, Parliament, Courts). The authors also trace the path from internet optimism to techno-pessimism. In so doing, they spotlight how digital fora raise anew questions of equality, access, identity, liberty, and deliberation central to democratic theory.

Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy and Digital Technology imagines how key institutional principles of her new paradigm of open democracy could be facilitated using modern technological tools. This chapter defends technologically empowered forms of nonelectoral yet democratic representation, centrally by means of networked open minipublics based on selection by lottery. Landemore argues that digital technologies, when properly harnessed, allow for the better realization of the democratic ideals of inclusion and equality.

The following three chapters look at questions of participation, representation, and institutional supports. Networked digital technologies and digitized data present opportunities for institutional reinvention. The key question that undergirds this opportunity—how to use private resources for public benefit—has been asked before. One answer from the past, when the resources at stake were rival and excludable, was nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations. Lucy Bernholz’s Purpose-Built Digital Associations examines how efforts to protect and direct digital data toward public purposes finds us adapting old organizational forms to serve new associational purposes.

Seeta Gangadharan’s Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal draws our attention to a key question of democratic theory: who participates and how? By focusing on the physical and economic infrastructure that is required to provide broadband access, Gangadharan shows how entire communities and regions are excluded. Certain community responses to this exclusion are presented, however, as evidence of an assertion of political power rather than disadvantage. The chapter highlights the informational needs and associational options that are necessary for digital participation.

But the digital square, like its analog predecessor, is not defined solely by what is said or communicated. Those who abstain from participation as a form of protest are also part of the democratic process. Mike Ananny’s chapter, Presence of Absence: Exploring the Democratic Significance of Silence, argues that digital silence can be seen as a form of civil disobedience.

The grouping of chapters that follow considers questions of governance, trust, and legitimacy. In The Artisan and the Decision Factory: The Organizational Dynamics of Private Speech Governance, Robyn Caplan examines the way that organizational structure influences how different platform companies curate content. Though governed by a common set of regulations, specifically Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act and the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, Caplan finds that platform companies are effectively self-governing when it comes to content moderation and that organizational culture plays a large role in how Facebook, Twitter, and Google approach their roles as information gatekeepers.

Henry Farrell’s and Melissa Schwartzberg’s chapter, The Democratic Consequences of the New Public Sphere, asks how trust between citizens is shifting when news and information is produced and accessed online. With many more producers of information, and fewer gatekeepers, they find potentially troubling shifts in whom citizens find to be trustworthy providers of information.

How can we use digital technologies to cultivate human capital and prepare citizens of any age for a rapidly shifting economy? In Democratic Societal Collaboration in a Whitewater World, David Lee, Margaret Levi and John Seely Brown examine the possibilities that microtasking and distributed participation present for addressing economic and educational inequality. In contrast to more familiar arguments that digital technologies will replace, or at best augment, human workers, their chapter examines how digital tools and platforms can be used to help people continuously learn new skills. Structuring educational processes in this way also involves redesigning nonprofit institutions, touching on new associational possibilities.

Julia Cagé’s From Philanthropy to Democracy: Rethinking Governance and Funding of High-Quality News in the Digital Age considers the economics of digital technologies and how we might reimagine the provision of news and information. This chapter brings together historical insights from past financial structures, theory on the role of informed citizens in democracies, and contemporary analysis of digital-first business models.

In the final chapter, Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges, Bryan Ford brings his training as an engineer to propose that we use technologies to reinvent more than just new communication spaces, public spheres, voting systems, or general governance designs. Building on his own preferred model