Emergent Democracy and the Second Superpower

During the ramp-up for the war, I was amazed at the size and immediacy of the anti-war rallies. Millions of people moving in concert into the streets in cities all over the world in response to a war that had not yet been launched? This was historic, an event the world had never before witnessed. I am convinced that history books will look back at this war as a watershed event - not so much in geopolitical terms (though it may well be), but as the catalyst for the creation of a new socio-political model.

Information now moves more quickly than governments can control it. Effective organizing has become several orders of magnitude easier, no matter what the cause or belief. The internet has supplanted the cable news networks as the best source for information and opinion on the war. Weblogs disseminate alternative news, fact-check the governments and major media, and act as organizing hubs for protest and direct action. The public square, so central to democracy and so long missing, has been re-established as a sort of trans-democratic institution that increasingly ignores geopolitical boundaries.

A new international progressive movement is arising, with the ability to move hundreds of thousands of people into the streets at a few days' notice. And yet, it is largely leaderless and decentralized. It is a new political form that has evolved in response to the rapid centralization of power in the hands of governments and corporations, a pair whose interests are increasingly difficult to disentangle and at times directly antagonistic to those of their citizens and customers.

Jim Moore is a senior fellow at Harvard whose blog is batting around some very big ideas - including the notion that the biggest winner of the US-Iraq war is China - despite being a whopping four days old. He has an article up in which he labels this neo-populist phenomenon the second superpower:

The Internet and other interactive media continue to penetrate more and more deeply all world society, and provide a means for instantaneous personal dialogue and communication across the globe. The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.

Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of “emergent democracy” that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.

How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.

In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of the second superpower can, I believe, be expected to eventually prevail. Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in picketing, in exposing corruption, and in purchases from particular companies, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society. More effect, I would argue, than the devastating but unsustainable effect of bombs and other forms of coercion.

Meanwhile, over in Tokyo, Joi Ito is examining the same notions. His essay "Emergent Democracy" looks in rather deeper detail at the formation of this movement and the political economy and theory of it. The essay defies easy summation, so you should take the time to read it (if that's your cup of tea). He concludes the piece by saying:

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers should be encouraged to consider their possible positive effect on the democratic process as well as the risk of enabling emergent terrorism, mob rule and a surveillance society.

We must protect the ability of these tools to be available to the public by protecting the commons. We must open the spectrum and make it available to the people, while resisting increased control of intellectual property, and the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must work to provide access to the Net for more people by making the tools and infrastructure cheaper and easier to use.

Finally, we must explore the way in which this new form of democratic dialog translates into action and how it interacts with the existing political system. We can bootstrap emergent democracy by using the tools to develop the tools and create concrete examples of emergent democracy. These examples can create the foundation for understanding how emergent democracy can be integrated into society generally.

I do agree that something enormous and profound is occurring. For the past couple of decades, activism has seemed to be on the wane due to a sense of fatalism and disempowerment among progressives. People's eyes are opening to a new set of power dynamics at work in the 21st century. It is nascent and still evolving, and the outcome is not yet determined, but I just can't see how this doesn't herald the beginning of a new polity.