Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, August 22, 2010

More Trouble in Libertopia...

My friend Michel Bauwens over at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives occasionally re-posts material from Amor Mundi, especially stuff about foundational political theory, and over the last few days he has posted large excerpts from an older piece of mine Trouble in Libertopia: Spontaneous Order on the Right and on the Left (that link will take you to the whole unexpurgated piece archived here), which has been the occasion for some interesting comments. I have to admit Michel Bauwens himself tends to be the most interesting interlocutor on these issues for me, but in any case I did find myself responding and elaborating at length to a thought one of the comments provoked, and so I am re-posting the whole response here as well:

Thanks Michel for posting material from both parts of Trouble in Libertopia, you dug deep within the archives for that one!

The unifying thread between the two parts is a critique of the metaphor of "spontaneous order" which figures so prominently in the arguments of so many techno-centric commentators to this day, from both the right (which, contra many of its proponents, is where I properly locate the politics of market libertarian ideology) and the left, enabling in endless variations what amount to superficially anti-political arguments most of which typically function to support elite-incumbent politics in substance. Although the re-posted piece is a rather old one, it seems to me that a lazy recourse to such spontaneist and anarchist figurations has gotten no better in recent years, and fatally suffuses quite a lot of otherwise indispensable work on p2p-networks, activism, net neutrality (so-called), and more general discourse on online sociality, creative expressivity, organization.

It is crucial to remember that every norm, custom, pricing convention, institution, subcultural trait, architectural feature, however monolithic, stubborn, inertial it may seem is a product of historical struggle, that things have been otherwise, things could be otherwise, things surely will be otherwise, and at least part of what politics means is the collective contestations and collaborations that yield the vicissitudes in the career of apparently only natural, that is to say, naturalized conventions. If it makes sense to say such a thing, then it follows that there is always a politics in the declaration that some actually-contingent outcome is not political, is beyond contestation, is natural, neutral, technical, autonomous... there is a politics of the de-politicizing gesture, the taking off from the table that which could be otherwise.

For one thing: That this is a gesture that will tend to the benefit of incumbency -- the acceptance as natural, inevitable that which is given in the status quo, deserves special note.

For another thing: Also deserving such note is that technoscience has no politics (in making this point I leave to the side the ethnography of political strife in lab settings, funding battles, publication histories, figuration of paradigm shifts, marketing appropriations, and so on), that is to say that the warranted descriptions arising from consensus science have no inevitable politics but are nonetheless always only deployed in the world according to the different politics of those who take them up. This makes technodevelopmental questions particularly susceptible to facile determinisms, autonomisms, reductionisms, technocratic elitisms premised on such de-politicizing naturalizations of the play of their changes in history.

I am personally very interested in what I describe as p2p-democratization, the taking up of p2p-formations within the normative, legal, institutional context of reasonably representative democratic-identified societies by those who would educate, agitate, and organize for more equitable, consensual, diverse, convivial political outcomes and culture.

It is crucial to grasp that these efforts do not in my view express an underlying ethos of p2p-interaction or e2e network architecture, but represent historically specific, politically opportunistic, ethically mandated efforts that should be documented, facilitated, celebrated (just because my own politics are of the democratic consensualist left, devoted to equity-in-diversity), but which are far from inevitable, natural, more structurally "apt" to the forces at hand than antithetical elite-incumbent or authoritarian deployments also afoot in this changing landscape.

Crucial to ensuring that democratizing and consensualizing deployments of p2p-formations prevail is an awareness, in my view, not only of the actual contingency and artificiality of democracy and the scene of consent, but a better understanding of what is conceptually unique to the spheres of the ethical and the political in which these struggles and outcomes make their way and make their home. That is why I am very pleased that Michel has also re-posted here several texts in which I take up these issues very specifically, among them recently Peer to Peer Democracy and the State and older pieces like Defining Left and Right and Democratizing the State Rather Than Smashing It.

Given that the democratic state is rightly imagined to be a space facilitating the non-violent adjudication of inevitable disputes (including fraught disputes about what should count as violence and non-violence), a space in which the diversity of peers who share the world can come together despite their differences, and none get left behind for good, it is important to grasp how different such a role and such a space is in its legitimacy from "optimal outcomes" presumably yielded by comparative advantage, positional advantage, competitive advantage and the other mechanisms that figure so prominently in so many non-political (technocratic and determinist) and anti-political (spontaneist and libertopian) delineations of the organizational terrain of p2p-formations.

Needless to say, actually-existing democracies relentlessly fail to live up to their guiding ideals, but there is all the difference in the world between those who respond to this failure by relinquishing the ideal of civitas altogether and those who are spurred to reform what actually-exists in the direction of those ideas (reforms in which p2p-democratization figures centrally, hopefully, in this moment, in my view). But worse than resignation to the inertial pull of incumbency and authoritarianism and the cynical or interested relinquishment of democratization and consensualization in my view, is the widespread ignorance of the distinctive substance and promise of democracy and consent as political phenomena and hence the blindness to and heedless loss of both among good-intentioned people who should know better but simply don't because we are so abysmally uninformed and misinformed about political matters on which our worldly lives nonetheless depend for our survival and flourishing.

By way of conclusion, I am interested that though Mr. Carson affirms that he differs from my assessment of market libertarian ideology (as I already happen to know many scores of people obviously do), he actually doesn't say much as to why he does himself or respond to any of the points I made in the piece at hand, which leaves me bereft of his reasoning from which I am sure I and others would benefit enormously. I am also intrigued by the spectacle in which Marcel assures me how very facile and wrong and behind-the-latest-libertopian-times I am to impute to market libertarians the attitude that even apparently nice public servants are little better than jack-booted thugs and yet with the passage of scarcely a sentence is driven by his market libertarian logic to assert, with what I would propose is perfectly predictable robotic behavioral inevitability, "they’re not jack-booted thugs, they’re smiley-tyrants who just want to ‘help’ you get back on your feet. By finding you a boss."

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