Book. David Bollier. Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. New Press, 2009.

David’s book is an indispensible recount of the re-emergence of the Commons as a theme, but also as a movement and its already concrete realisations.

For our ‘book of the week’ treatment, we will choose from the last concluding chapter, where David tries to tease out the political conclusions from his investigations.

One of those is that David sees the emergence of a new “fourth type” of citizenship.

For background, we have to know what the three others are.

David Bollier:

“In his book, The Good Citizen, sociologist Michael Schudson describes the evolution of three distinct types of citizenship over the past three centuries:

When the nation was founded, being a citizen meant little more than for property-owning white males to delegate authority to a local gentleman – and accept his complimentary glass of rum on election day. This “politics of assent” gave way early in the nineteenth century to a “politics of parties.” Parties conducted elaborate campaigns of torchlight processions and monster meetings; voting day was filled with banter, banners, fighting and drinking…. The third model of citizenship, ushered in by Progressive reformers, was a “politics of information.” Campaigning became less emotional and more educational. Voting was by secret ballot.

We are heirs to the “politics of information,” a model of citizenship that presumes, like economics, that we are rational actors who, if armed with sufficient quantities of high-quality information, will make educated decisions and optimize civic outcomes. But as Walter Lippmann noted and Schudson echoes, “if democracy requires omnicompetence and omniscience from its citizens, it is a lost cause.” Life is too busy, fast and complex. A new type of citizenship is needed. Schudson offers a fairly weak prescription – the “monitorial citizen,” a watchdog who vigilantly monitors the behavior of power.

What then is not only needed, but already emerging as a …

Fourth Type of Citizenship

David Bollier continues:

“But it is precisely here that the Internet is offering up a new, more muscular model of citizenship. I call it history-making citizenship. The rise of the blogosphere over the past ten years is emblematic of this new paradigm of citizenship. So is citizen-journalism, free software, Wikipedia, the open educational resources movement, open-business models like Jamendo and Flickr, and the Creative Commons and iCommons communities. In one sense, the citizenship that these groups practice is “monitorial” in that their members spend a great deal of time watching and discussing. But “monitoring” barely begins to describe their activities. The commoners have the ability – rare in pre-Internet civic life – to publish and incite others to action, and then organize and follow through, using a growing variety of Web tools. With the advent of blogs, Meetups, social networking, text-messaging and many other digital systems, citizens are able to communicate, coordinate, organize and take timely action on a wide range of matters, including matters of public and political concern.

I call the new sorts of citizen behaviors “history-making” because ordinary people are able to assert moral agency and participate in making change. This capacity is not reserved chiefly to large, impersonal institutions such as corporations, government agencies and other bureaucracies. It is not a mere “participatory citizenship” in which people can volunteer their energies to larger, more influential leader, political party or institution in order to help out. It is a citizenship in which the commoners themselves choose projects that suit their talents and passions. Dispersed, unorganized groups of strangers can build their own platforms and social norms for pursuing their goals; instigate public action that would not otherwise occur (and that may clash with the practices of existing institutions); and push forward their own distinctive agenda.

These behaviors exist in some measure in offline realms, of course, but they are a growing norm in the digital republic. A few examples will suffice to make the point. The Web helped create and propel a handful of cause-oriented candidacies – Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Ned Lamont – who rapidly raised enormous sums of money, galvanized large numbers of passionate supporters, and altered mainstream political discourse. Although none prevailed in their races, Barack Obama made a quantum leap in online organizing in 2008, raising $50 million in a single month from supporters via the Internet. Obama’s candidacy was buoyed by the rise of the “netroots” — Web activists with a progressive political agenda – whose size and credibility enable them to sway votes in Congress, raise significant amounts of campaign funds and influence local activism. The stories are now legion about blogs affecting political life – from the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott after he praised the racist past of Senator Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party, to the electoral defeat of Senate candidate George Allen after his uttering of an ethnic slur, “macaca,” was posted on YouTube.

Citizens are now able to initiate their own policy initiatives without first persuading the mainstream media or political parties to validate them as worthy. For example, a handful of citizens troubled by evidence of “hackable” electronic voting machines exposed the defects of the Diebold machines and the company’s efforts to thwart public scrutiny and reforms. (The effort has led to a nationwide citizen effort, www.blackboxvoting.org, to expose security problems with voting machines and vote counting.) An ad hoc group of activists, lawyers, academics and journalists spontaneously formed around a public wiki dealing with the lethal side effects of a best-selling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and the manufacturer’s allegedly illegal conduct in suppressing evidence of the drug’s risks. (Prosecutors later sought a $1 billion fine against Pfizer.)

The Web is giving individuals extra-institutional public platforms for articulating their own facts and interpretations of culture. It is enabling them to go far beyond voting and citizen vigilance, to mount citizen-led interventions in politics and governance. History-making citizens can compete with the mass media as an arbiter of cultural and political reality. They can expose the factual errors and lack of independence of New York Times reporters; reveal the editorial biases of the “MSM” – mainstream media – by offering their own videotape snippets on YouTube; they can even be pacesetters for the MSM, as the blog Firedoglake did in its relentless reporting of the “Scooter” Libby trial (Libby, one of Vice President Cheney’s top aides, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with press leaks about CIA agent Valerie Plame.) Citizen-journalists, amateur videographers, genuine experts who have created their own Web platforms, parodists, dirty tricksters and countless others are challenging elite control of the news agenda. It is no wonder that commercial journalism is suffering an identity crisis. Institutional authority is being trumped by the “social warranting” of online communities, many of which are themselves a kind of participatory meritocracy.

History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, misinformation and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU Linux improbably drew upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir – platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, passionate commitment and social legitimacy. In 2005, Joichi Ito, then Chairman of the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative democracy can barely 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 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 informed, viable consensus.” Ito concluded that a new, not-yet-understood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of “intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems.

Clearly, the first imperative in developing a new framework to host representative democracy is to ensure that the electronic commons be allowed to exist in the first place. Without net neutrality, citizens could very well be stifled in their ability to participate on their own terms, in their own voices. If proprietary policies or technologies are allowed to override citizen interests (Verizon Wireless in 2007 prevented the transmission of abortion rights messages on its text-messaging system, for example ), then any hope for history-making citizenship will be stillborn.

Beyond such near-term concerns, however, the emerging digital republic is embroiled in a much larger structural tension with terrestrial “real world” governments. The commoner is likely to regard the rules forged in online commons as more legitimate and appropriate than those mandated by government.

Again, David R. Johnson:

The goals of a successful legal organism must be agreed upon by those who live within it, because a legal system is nothing more than a collective conversation about shared values. When it ceases to be that kind of internally entailed organism, the law becomes mere power, social “order” becomes tyranny, and the only option, over the long term at least, is war. Organisms can’t be repaired from the outside. But, with reference to interactions that take place primarily online, among willing participants who seek primarily to regulate their own affairs, that’s exactly where existing governments are situated – outside the vibrant, self-regulating online spaces they seek to regulate. Their efforts to engineer the Internet as if it were a mechanism are not only fundamentally illegitimate but doomed by the very nature of the thing they seek to regulate. They are trying to create social order, of course. But they have not recognized…that order in complex systems creates itself.

The commoner is likely to regard the rules forged in online commons as more legitimate and appropriate than those mandated by government. After all, he or she is likely to have had a more meaningful personal role in crafting those rules. Now, of course, people live their lives in both online and terrestrial environments; there is no strict division between the two. That said, as people’s lives become more implicated in Internet spaces, citizens are likely to prefer the freedoms and affordances of the open networked environment to the stunted correlates of offline politics, governance and law.

Indeed, this may be why so many activists and idealists are attracted to online venues. There is a richer sense of possibility. Contemporary politics and government have been captured by big money, professionals and concentrated power. Professor Lessig cited such facts in announcing his plans, in 2007, to address the systemic corruptions of U.S. democracy and policymaking. In the digital republic, the ethic of transparency deals harshly with institutional manipulations, deceptions and bad faith. They literally become part of your “permanent record,” forever available via a Google search. More fundamentally, however, the digital republic has a fundamental respect for everyone’s ability to contribute. It respects the principle of open access for all. The “consent of the governed” really matters.”