Cross-posted from Flaming Hydra.
I am a professor who has spent the past decade arguing that there should be more democracy on the Internet. There is a certain convenience in this position. Democracy can sound either radical or respectable, depending on who’s listening. Who would disagree with democracy?
But then, when I gave talks in various pandemic-era international Zoom calls, I started to hear a troubling critique. It came first from digital rights activists in India. Their concern about democracy was not its slowness or inconvenience—normally the worry among Americans—but the dangers of majoritarian rule. This was not an abstraction but a reality very much manifest in their lives thanks to the duly elected, ethno-nationalist regime of Narendra Modi. Thanks to democracy, or at least the Indian ballot box, they had to resist a government that was trampling on dissent and reclassifying non-Hindus as second-class citizens or worse.
I could choose to consider the billion-and-a-half inhabitants of India an exceptional case, or insist that real democracy depends on rights, and not only votes, and thus draw my definitions carefully around the inconvenient case. But now the cause for that critique is coming closer to home.
In a United States that now anticipates its second Trump regime, I have to recognize that those voices from India were speaking to me from a future that is now fast approaching here—a future that has already arrived (to paraphrase the William Gibson quip) but has been unevenly distributed.
Majoritarian democracy has always been the greatest threat to true democracy in this country, ever since it was founded on the bloody backs of slaves and the dirt of stolen land. Now, that democracy is poised to devour itself completely—to become the kind of pretense that democracy has long been in the many constitutional dictatorships of the world. The supposedly democratic medium of the Internet has helped accelerate this process, as it facilitates the spread of disinformation and toxic rabbit holes. But that is not the whole problem. Political establishments have consistently failed to speak to or meet the needs of their people.
U.S. voters have elected a party that denies the legitimacy of elections it does not win, that appoints jurists who shield the president’s criminality from the law, that does not even pretend to honor international standards of human rights. The people who run tech companies as self-described “benevolent dictators” have claimed the White House as their latest disruption. Democracy has spoken in a decisive gasp. What use now is that word democracy?
Some people—for instance, those in the Democratic Party establishment—contend that democracy is in need of a firm defense. The problem is not the thing itself but its bulwarks. The institutions fortifying modern democracy are centuries old, in some cases, built on infrastructures and assumptions that no longer seem able to serve us. To think our way past them, the word itself might need a break, at least.
The philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has interpreted the recent wave of coups against elected African governments as a death knell. He writes of a “post-democratic” condition in which democracy is not necessarily over but indeterminable, confronting a crisis whose outcome is impossible to see from here. I buy that reading. This is the open ocean, a habitat that our species’ evolution did not prepare us to comfortably inhabit.
What are the things we want even if we can’t have democracy? Bread and circuses might do. Would it be enough to have some basic rights, somehow guaranteed by fiat, robot, or treaty? Perhaps, as in parts of China, we can forego power over the distant national government but still have a voice in shaping the local places that affect our lives most. Would it be sufficient to have a decent user experience, like a Google Suite for civilization, plus a modicum of customer service? Perhaps the vote no longer matters, given enough convenience and a low enough price.
While democracy cannibalizes itself like an AI model trained on its predecessor’s slop, the question of what comes next is wide open. If we develop the sort of distaste for it that Plato and Aristotle had, centuries may pass before democracy sounds like a good idea again. We may need other words, other notions to guide us to the possibility of a fairer world.
Vladimir Lenin, and then C.L.R. James, imagined a democracy not of votes and candidates, but a society where “every cook can govern.” That will be hard to achieve without a Department of Education. Experiments with citizen assemblies try to approximate a similar kind of utopia with randomly selected juries designing policy—potentially, in place of politicians. The more enlightened blockchain people design for the promise of “coordination,” whereby communities and economies could proceed through signals and feedback, without the need for coercive collective decision-making. Meanwhile, the “campaign financialization” of the latest election cycle, with its flurry of prediction markets and candidate-branded securities, is the glimpse of a world in which betting supplants ballots, sublimating the common good into the machinations of speculation. Maybe it would be simpler to just accept that humans just keep coming back to kings.
If there are answers, Akomolafe says, they will begin in the cracks—in the neighborhoods and group chats, in those ordinary places where we find each other and try to get some relief. Perhaps there we can begin to rediscover how to be accountable to each other in ways that governments have failed to be.
I don’t think I can hope for democracy anymore, at least the way we have known it. I crave instead the conversations and experiments that do not take ballots, parties, and nation states for granted. Let this latest apocalypse—this veil-lifting, literally—help us see each other and ourselves more clearly.
When I wander through the foothills where I live, among the mosses, barks, bugs, and streams, the unleashed dogs and anxious deer, the microbes and the ancient rocks, I feel embarrassed to think about democracy. None of the creatures there vote, none of them have constitutions, none of them purport to idealize a theoretical justice that does not exist in practice. I want to learn from them, while also knowing we are part of that world, as are the most exalted aspirations we have for ourselves. But our old idols will not save us now.