[LINK] Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Circling the wagons: the net politics of exclusion
By Will Davies
Published Monday 8th November 2004 18:36 GMT
The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/net_politics_of_exclusion/

Election 2004 Here's a fable. In summer 2004, a vacancy comes up in a
London office, and the manager sets about recruiting. He interviews a blue
man and a green man. The blue man has impeccable qualifications and very
good experience. The green man’s qualifications are weak, and he is
under-experienced - but he's witty and he gets on well with the manager.

After more background research, the manager reflects on their
qualifications and experience, and he also reflects on their personalities
and reputations. He decides that although the blue candidate is clearly
better on paper, that he got on so well with the green candidate, that he
will give him the job. He reckons he’ll fit in well, despite the fact that
he isn’t an especially strong candidate. That’s the politics of groups for
you.

In this fictional London of 2004, the Royal family are green, 95 per cent
of the House of Commons is green, and 84 per cent of the population of the
UK are all green. Blue people are only around two per cent of the
population.

However, being blue is associated with lower educational outcomes and worse
employment prospects. Centuries-old political inequality, built on a
history of imperialism, combined with dubious socio-biological theories
have resulted in a society which is, from some perspectives,
institutionally racist.

But the manager's decision to give the green man the job was not racist,
nor was it motivated by the desire to oppress people. It was simply
motivated by the desire to build a strong team in the workplace, and by the
fact that the two of them gelled. As an example of the politics of groups,
it was perfectly understandable.

As an example of the politics of this particular society in 2004, however,
it was wrong. The blue candidate was objectively better qualified in terms
of the institutions that had endorsed him, while the green candidate was
aesthetically better qualified on the basis of the mannerisms and
personality traits that won him friends.

So what does this have to do with the politics of the internet?

The group isn't us

Well, what we call 'the politics of groups' is not really politics at all.
But there is a danger that the politics of the net is supplanting real
politics with a false notion of group politics. In truth we are only able
to make the most important political distinctions - those between justice
and injustice - on the basis of sociological analysis, and never on
analyses of group activity. The politics of groups is not good or bad, it
is just true or false

But just see how popular this analysis is in the context of the Internet
has become. For example, Clay Shirky's writings on social software are
based almost entirely on group psychology. The notion of 'a group is its
own worse enemy', for instance, is an observation of how groups tend to
behave; it attributes innate characteristics to social behaviour. Groups
can't help but be as they are.

Once we increase the scale of the social unit involved, different forms of
analysis are called for, but it still has no critical dimension. Once the
scale of the community goes beyond anything explicable in terms of group
psychology, people look around for analogies. The biological analogy of
emergence is used; the mathematical analogy of power laws is used. Both
attribute innate qualities to social behaviour, and duck often troubling
political questions in the process. Inequality, according to the theory of
power laws, is not wrong, but simply an outcome of scale.

This sleight of hand is almost identical to what the neo-liberal right did
in the US and the UK during the 1970s and the 1980s, when it set about
convincing people that free markets are a natural and innate social order,
rather than a deliberate political construct with winners and losers.
Inequality was not presented as the political preference of the right, but
an outcome of the market's natural mechanics. Perhaps if someone had told
Thatcher about power laws, she would have used them instead.

Sociology, on the other hand, looks at institutions, intellectual systems
and political decisions. It locates individuals, groups and communities
within the social systems that it believes shapes them. Perhaps most
importantly, it is able to identify the people and cultures that get
excluded from mainstream politics, and sometimes never get their voices
heard in the first place. It is this form of sociology, what's referred to
as critical theory, that I think is an crucial condition of a genuinely
political world view. And it's almost entirely lacking on the internet. Why
is this?

We can keep you out: the diminishing social space of the net

I think we have a difficulty in viewing the net sociologically and
critically partly because it is a global system with very remote governance
structures. Rather than see it as a constructed social system, driven by
politics, it is far easier to see it as an entirely neutral and indeed
natural social space, within which new political units can be created. New
Labour takes a similar approach to capitalism these days – it sees it as
too massive and complicated to be changed, so it becomes easier to see it
as part of the furniture.

One result of this is that the politics of the net tends to involve
shrinking it as a social sphere. This is what social software does, through
creating new hierarchies, built on reputation and recommendation. It is
very difficult for progressive politics to be built upon the shrinking of a
social space, because this inevitably requires the creation of new forms of
exclusion and division. By contrast, the progressive thinkers of the
enlightenment in the late 18th century, such as Immanuel Kant, looked to
newspapers and pamphlets to expand the sphere of debate, to include more
people, across more nations. Divisions between people were to be broken
down, until there was a single public sphere which included everybody.
Newspapers were about lifting people out of communities, into society;
social activities on the net threaten to reverse this process.

The real politics of the net does not consist in creating new communities,
with new forms of governance, moderation and values. It consists in
mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, that tend to follow pre-existing
sociological and economic divisions.

A progressive agenda for the net, as with the progressive agenda of
newspapers, books and pamphlets, is to overcome pre-existing forms of
exclusion. We can think of familiar examples – an alienated gay teenager in
a rural community who uses the net to discover that others face the same
difficulties; the old person who cannot leave the house, but relies on the
net for social contact. These are the old, slightly corny examples of the
net’s political potential. We may have grown slightly bored of them, but
that doesn’t mean that they have ceased to matter.

A regressive agenda for the net, on the other hand, consists in using it to
entrench exclusion. The digital divide, which is rarely discussed amongst
the geek avant garde, is a genuine form of exclusion – not a new one,
because it follows existing forms of exclusion, but a real one. It still
exists in this country as a sociological fact. Even if 96% of people know a
place where they can get online if they need to, close to 40% of people
face some form of physical, cognitive, sensory or motivational barrier to
full enjoyment of the internet.

And once people are online, the net can be used to entrench other forms of
exclusion and privilege – routers can be programmed with software that
prioritise packets of information differently, based on real-time,
corporate judgements of the real or potential profitability of the person
sending the traffic.

Blog rolling, rolling

But what’s perhaps most disappointing is how those with the most
egalitarian hopes for the Internet can often end up constructing equally
impenetrable hierarchies. The geek avant garde rarely discusses macro
socio-technical issues, and tends to prefer micro-political systems, which
calls self-organising and emergent. I was at ETCON in February, and as a
slight outsider, I wondered how much that community realised how
hierarchical and exclusive it appeared. It seemed that the technical
mechanisms of reputation, such as blog-rolls and Technorati, had codified
social inequalities in charisma and popularity (the politics of groups),
until they had actually become institutionalised political forms.

There’s an analogy often made between the American settlers and internet
dwellers, and it’s a good one (things like ‘the cyber-frontier’). Like the
American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was no
politics before they arrived. In order to establish entirely new and
egalitarian communities, American settlers had to ignore the fact that the
land was already occupied. To the same end, Internet settlers choose to
ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the Internet is run,
who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide
people. The risk is that the politics of the net follows America towards
gated communities, each having only an inward-looking, group-based notion
of politics, and ceases to question the macro institutions and systems
around them.

About the author

William Davies is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Public
Policy Research in London. At the Work Foundation he authored You Don't
Know Me, But ... Social Capital and Social Software. This speech was
delivered at the NotCon 2004 conference in London in June.

Related Election 2004 Analysis
How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush 
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Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States

[see the original for links to the above]

-- 
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. 
-- Ambrose Bierce

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at austarmetro.com.au