Make the internet democratic again

Want to know why I started Untangled? Read to the end.

The internet is anti-democratic. But in the Untangling, we can find trailheads toward a more democratic future.

Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about technology and power.

Last week, I argued that automation is a structural and political problem, not an individualized one, and that power lies with those who frame the problem. Right, as I’ve argued before, problems are ‘made’, not found. Whether we individualize the problem or consider its structural elements; whether we consider it a technological problem or a social one; what frames we use and whose experience is legitimized -- all of these things contribute to the ‘making’ of a given problem.

Correctly framing the problem is half the battle. If there’s no such thing as a ‘tech problem’ — if every problem is sociotechnical — then there’s no such thing as a ‘tech solution’ either. There are only sociotechnical interventions with consequences for different populations and how power is (or isn’t) redistributed. In this issue, I’m analyzing interventions offered by papers addressing one big ol’ problem: the internet is anti-democratic.

On to the show!

---

Making the internet more democratic goes to the heart of Untangled: power is concentrated at the top, so we need to democratize it. In my contributions, I’ve analyzed citizen assemblies, critiqued Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and offered a set of concepts and norms that might replace the problems inherent in ‘scale thinking.’

All to say, I was thrilled to come across a new series of papers from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The first paper to catch my eye was “Democracy On, Not Just Around, the Internet” by Nathan Schneider, the first-ever guest on the Untangled podcast. In it, Schneider drills into the internet’s democracy problem: “the trouble of living our lives in contexts where daily democratic practices are unavailable.” Right, we comment, click, meme, and rant online, but we don’t participate in democratic practices online. Here’s Schneider:

To maintain the faith that democracy requires, as well as the skills it demands, people need to experience co-governance in their daily lives. They need to see it work and feel their own power.

So how might we intervene? Schneider imagines an Oversight Board picked by platform users, social media protocols that support co-governance processes, and new laws that promote “counter-power.” For example, new laws could require tech companies to support labor organizing, create a board seat for users, or allocate capital to participant projects. In other words, Schneider is offering interventions that redistribute power while nurturing the daily practice of democracy. He concludes this way:

We can no longer afford to regard democracy as something external to online life, as something to be protected from the internet or that governs it from above. Democracy anywhere depends on the democracy we cultivate in online spaces themselves.

👉 If you want to dig into alternative mechanisms for cultivating democratic practices online, read “How can we govern speech fairly on anti-democratic platforms?”