Felix Stadler has an interesting essay in First Monday, unfortunately titled Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies.

It describes two countervailing tendencies: self-aggregating publics that are challenging traditional politics centered around a public sphere, and the tendency by authoritarian state forces to use data capture as an enforcement and control mechanism. Midway, he also has a nice overview of theorizers of networked individualism.

We are quoting the part, where, using the example of bilaterals.org, he explains how these new forms are a real challenge to the state.

Felix Stadler:

“The old mode of political (mass) communication is not just becoming weaker, but is actively challenged by a new one.

Perhaps the most unexpected challenge is in the area of international treaty making, the exclusive domain of nation states since the creation of the Westphalian system in the seventeenth century. Since most international treaties are highly specific and technical, mass media, driven by the need to address the broadest possible audience, rarely reported on them in a prominent fashion. Thus, even the negotiations which were legally public were de facto closed and the representatives of states were amongst themselves. Not anymore.

One of the new actors challenging the state in this once exclusive territory is the collaborative project bilaterals.org (http://bilaterals.org/), which bills itself as “a collective effort to share information and stimulate cooperation against bilateral trade and investment agreements that are opening countries to the deepest forms of penetration by transnational corporations”. Through collecting, aggregating and publishing critical information in real time, they create a public in order to challenge the state in an arena — international treaty making — that is has never been challenged before. But who is bilaterals.org? One the one hand, some of the people who run the site can be identified with hyper–precision and they are easily accessible via e–mail. On the other hand, they are merely temporarily aggregating information generated by much larger networks, which are very hard to identify with any precision because they are built on open, weak cooperation. As they write “no one owns or controls bilaterals.org, [but] a small group of people collaborate informally to keep the site going on a day to day basis.” Yet, this loose organization has the capacity to analyze and digest very large amounts of information and thus create a critical public in areas where there has never been one, even if the underlying information has, formally, always been public. By networking local and global actors, the organization is not just capable of creating a translocal public, but mobilizing people to take to the streets when state representatives meet and try to discuss the issues behind closed doors. Bilaterals.org is not an exception. There are thousands of groups like it, advocating the full range of imaginable demands.

What makes it hard for the state to interact with such organizations is not just that it can be hard to identify whose really responsible. That problem can be solved. What makes it really difficult is that these organizations are not built on the principle of representation, but on the principle of weakly coordinated action. They stake their legitimacy not on formal membership, but on expertise, moral imperatives or informal public support. Here, people, by and large, speak for themselves or for their often very small organizations. They do so on behalf of very large constituencies (the “people”, the “global south”, “developing nations”), but they do not represent them, nor do they have any authority over them .

The state and its organizations have a highly developed capacity to deal with homologous organizations — structurally similar to itself — with a small number of representatives with a formal mandate to speak on behalf of many people — such as unions or professional associations. Yet, they it poses significant challenges to interface with organizations that are structurally very different as described above. For one, there are simply too many of these networked organizations and taken together, their demands are often contradictory. They filter their demands not in a way that bureaucracies can easily recognize and address them. The lack of representation — which is so characteristic for these networked organizations based on weak cooperation — makes it dangerous for the state to interact with them because the state draws its very legitimization from representation. Thus, in a formal way, incorporating non–representative organizations further undermines the legitimacy of the liberal state.

One of the ways in which the state can react to this development is by trying to withhold certain types of information, thus preventing the analysis and publication by networked actors most likely very critical of their actions . The notion of “executive privilege” — that is the right of the government to act outside the realm of public scrutiny — is playing a key role in the governance of the current U.S. administration. But similar tendencies can be observed in Europe as well, which lead, as Saskia Sassen observes, to a general strengthening of the executive organs at the expense of the legislature tasked with overseeing them and interfacing with the public at large .”