p2p-Democratization

Whenever "consent" arises from misinformation or duress it is in my view vacuous, a rationale for exploitation and abuse. The scene of consent is rendered substantial by formal legal-citizenship-status, equal recourse to the law, access to collective bargaining, access to education and reliable information, access to social services, healthcare, housing, income. Declaring market outcomes "consensual" by fiat, whatever the terms of misinformation and inequity that may duress them in fact, as market libertarians tend to do, scarcely does justice to the notion of consent in my view.

The planetary precariat -- illegal immigrants, temporary and informal workers, insecure indebted citizens in neoliberal post-welfare states, dwellers in peri-urban slums and refugee camps are profoundly limited in their capacity to engage in acts of consent.

The struggles for democratization (ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them) and for consensualization (ensuring that the scene of consent is ever more informed and nonduressed) together drive the interminable struggle for equity-in-diversity on which the figure of the peer, the planetary successor to the nation-state's citizen-subject in my view, depends for her legibility and force in the world.

What I am stressing is that the political legitimacy of the democratic state -- that is to say, the normative-institutional order that justifies its existence by reference to the standard of equity-in-diversity, by providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes (including, crucially, disputes as to what qualifies as violence in the first place) and by providing for a legible scene of reliably informed, nonduressed consent (by means of a suite of legal and welfare administration) -- derives from a profoundly different set of standards than the ones that are typically discussed by p2p-new media theorists, even the ones who focus on questions of governance and impacts of digital networks on state institutions.

I regard as indispensable, say, Clay Shirky's discussion of the way digital networks have flooded subcultures with suboptimal but satisfactory free content and so undermined the gatekeeper-credentializing role through which capital has rationalized hitherto its role as censor, or his discussion of the way digital networks have flooded organizations with amateur innovation and so undermined the investment in professionalism through which capital has rationalized hitherto its central-hierarchical control of institutions. However, I disapprove the way in which such insights are taken up and glibly misapplied via spontaneist-anarchist-market libertarian figurations to political phenomena.

Take the first insight. Subculture is a moral concept (moral, from mores, yields an identification that depends on dis-identification with a constitutive outside for sense, the "they" excluded from the moral "we"), whereas culture is an ethical concept (ethics, from ethos, yields a formal-universality that solicits identification putatively indifferent to differences, substantiated against the grain of moral intuitions, via strategic recourse to, say, posterity, the good opinion of mankind, government of laws and not men, the principle of nonviolence, universal declarations of human rights, and the like): And hence the emancipatory undermining of gatekeeper-censors standing between people and their subcultural enjoyments and parasitically skimming rents for the privilege is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot scale from subculture to culture to provide a route through which to "smash the state" tasked with maintaining a democratically accountable rule of law or administering the services on which a legible scene of consent depends. It is usually only a prior investment in the false and facile figure of spontaneous order that provokes such misreadings in the first place.

Similarly, take the second insight. The maintenance of the legal order and administration of services on which the scene of consent depends in democratically-identified societies is legitimated by recourse to equity-in-diversity and not simply to profitability: And hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed.

Given the vulnerability to abuse that obviously inheres in the investment of any parochial worldly actors or institutions with ethical mandates, endlessly many institutional experiments have been devised to ameliorate these risks, from horizontal separation of powers and vertical subsidiarity, to jury trials, to declarations of inviolable rights, to extensions of the franchise, to extensions of welfare entitlements, to subsidization of citizen participation in government.

I regard the p2p-democratization of broadcast-media, of political parties and of organized labor as extraordinary and encouraging developments, but it is important not to misread these developments as providing a route through which eventually "to smash the state," rather than as experiments like the preceding, to ameliorate vulnerabilities to worldly corruption and abuse inhering in the formal universality of the State, by further democratizing participation in that State and by rendering the State ever more accountable to the substantial consent of the governed. Like the widening of the franchise, like the expansion of access to reliable knowledge and welfare entitlements to better ensure the scene of consent is more informed and less duressed, like the rendering of organized labor and political parties more responsive to their members, none of these efforts are properly understood as a shrinking or limiting of the state but a strengthening of the democratic state of, by, and for the people. These struggles, and the work of p2p-democratization is of a piece with these, indeed p2p-democratization is indispensable to some of these very struggles themselves, is work to democratize the state, not in the least to smash it.

If the rights of minorities can be denied by the vote of a majority, there are no rights. If individuals can consent to violation or enslavement there is no consent. If functionaries can lie or mislead with impunity there is no possibility of contract, promise, or forgiveness. Equity-in-diversity legitimates governments which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas profitability under conditions of competition simply yields optimal instrumental outcomes. This is not to denigrate improvements arising from competition but just to insist on the actually substantial difference in kind between ethical categories like justice and legitimacy as against categories like profitability, competitiveness, optimization, to insist on the difference in kind between freedom as against the amplification of instrumental capacitation.

Education, agitation, and organization facilitated by p2p-formations are efforts to reform and better administer the apparatus of the democratic state, not intimations of "spontaneous order" except for those who have a prior investment in such figures.

I propose these formulations to encourage a more useful discussion in this moment, one that does not re-enact the usual joyless ritual of arguments with market libertarians who believe it is wholesome to let "markets decide" outcomes despite the fact that markets are artifacts whose historical forms are determined by human decisions, not trans-historical tidal forces of supply and demand which, alas, radically under-determine the contingent legal structure of commerce and production from polity to polity, from epoch to epoch, nor by primordial predilections for barter elevated to the neglect of no less primordial predilections to mutual-aid, fair-dealing, and sharing.

I propose that finding our way to a better understanding of the civitas without which we cannot find our way to justice nor experience true freedom, as well as the possibilities inhering in emerging p2p-formations for the facilitation and frustration of that civitas is a useful thing for at least some of us to be doing right about now, especially those of us whose temperament and training lends itself to this sort of thing.