Authors: Benjamin Barber
Fred Friendly has been calling for an “electronic bill of rights” for a number of years, but government has been moving in the opposite direction, with the Clinton administration, despite its apparent belief in open access, committed to letting the market make the moves with a minimum of regulation. The “public airwaves” are still auctioned off to private vendors who sell them back at exorbitant rates to the public during election campaigns—increasing the costs of democracy and the dependence of elections on money at the very moment when government has backed away from regulation. The 1984 Cable Act gives local franchisers (cities and towns) rather than the federal or state government control over cable, in effect abandoning it to market forces that have shown scant regard for public needs.
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In 1994, Senator Inouye introduced a bill into Congress directing the Federal Communications Commission to require the “reservation for public uses of capacity on telecommunications networks.” His aim was to guarantee the public some voice in development of the Information Superhighway. His bill received little press attention and expired without action at the end of the 103rd Congress. Fear of government has incapacitated the public’s only agent in diverting the new technologies into public channels. The model of Channel One, a classroom network (started by Whittle Communications and now controlled by K-III Corporation) that extorts classroom advertising time from needy schools in return for desperately wanted hardware, suggests that the public is likely to be served by the new technologies only in as far as someone can make serious money off it.
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It may be a cause of satisfaction, as Walter Wriston insists, that nowadays it is the citizen who is watching Big Brother and not the other way around. To be sure, in most post-Communist societies, as in our own market societies, Big Brother is no longer watching you; but neither is he watching those who
are
watching you, and even adversaries of regulation may find reason to be disturbed by that omission. If the classical liberal question used to be who will police the police, the pertinent liberal question in today’s McWorld ought to be who will watch those who are watching us? Who will prevent the media from controlling their clients and consumers? Who will act in lieu of a government that has demurred from representing the public’s interests?
There would perhaps be less cause for concern if technology and telecommunication markets were truly diversified and competitive. But as we have seen, the conglomeration of companies focused on programming, information, communication, and entertainment suggests that government’s erstwhile big brother has been dwarfed today by Ma Bell and her overgrown babies, who are currently buying up the cable market and trying to purchase entertainment and software production companies as fast as they can. Their aim is to stay competitive with infotainment companies like Time Warner. Thus US West bought a significant minority interest (along with Toshiba and C. Itoh) in Warner Brothers film studio and Home Box Office only to have Time Warner acquire Cablevision ($2.2 billion) and Houston Industries ($2.3 billion) in 1995, and thereby regain control. The harder the American government tries to stay out of the development of a free market information highway, the harder corporate multinationals are trying to get in; and if they cannot effect a total takeover of the digital thoroughfare, they aspire at least to gain control of its gateways and tollbooths.
Democrats should not be the Luddites Jihad’s anxious tribal warriors have become; they cannot afford to make technology and modernity enemies of self-determination and liberty. Technology is a neutral tool: allied to democracy it can enhance civic communication and expand citizen literacy. Left to markets, it is likely to augment McWorld’s least worthy imperatives, including surveillance over and manipulation of opinion, and the cultivation of artificial
needs rooted in lifestyle “choices” unconnected to real economic, civic, or spiritual needs.
Not so long ago, the prescient historian J. G. A. Pocock suggested that
[today we find] ourselves in a post-industrial and post-modern world in which more and more of us were consumers of information and fewer and fewer of us producers or possessors of anything, including our own identities. When a world of persons, actions, and things becomes a world of persons, actions, and linguistic or electronic constructs that have no authors, it clearly becomes easier for the things—grown much more powerful because they are no longer real—to multiply and take charge, controlling, and determining persons and actions that no longer control, determine or even produce them.
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The world Pocock describes is McWorld—what Neil Postman, another savvy critic of the tyranny of technology over its makers, calls technopoly. Technopoly suggests “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”
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Postman is not a technological determinist and recognizes that technology can be both friend and enemy. But liberated from our common democratic choices and left to the market, we are more likely to confront the enemy than the friend. Which is perhaps why John Pocock thinks the key to living in the postindustrial, postmodern world is finding “means of affirming that we are citizens … that we are persons and associating with other persons to have voice and action in the making of our worlds.”
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Many who are skeptical of McWorld have assailed in particular its pervasive materialism. These include traditionalist advocates of the moral Jihad against the West’s consumer culture, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or his more militant Islamic brethren as well as some of Jihad’s harshest critics like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has blamed the temptations of tribalism on the West’s “permissive cornucopia” that breeds materialist self-gratification and a “dominant cultural reality” defined by the “dynamic escalation of desire for sensual and material pleasure.”
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American kids from small towns in the farm belt with ears cocked to the siren song of urban shopping districts and suburban
malls hundreds of miles away are no different than Russian veterans of communism succumbing to the insistent commercial jingles that come tumbling from their new Japanese TVs. “My dad won’t even let us get MTV,” complains a teen from Nebraska, whose friends “see the shopping mall as the great hangout of the rest of the nation, and they don’t have one.”
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So, the kid from Nebraska and the kid from Smolensk end up in L.A. or St. Petersburg where whatever distinct culture that may have attached to their youth is stripped away and replaced with the videology of a McWorld utterly indifferent to diversity or democracy.
Such attitudes and behaviors are as much the product as the cause of McWorld’s strategies, and make understandable the alliance against McWorld’s global culture forged by Jihad’s warriors—an alliance that leads premodern tribalists and postmodern Puritans to make common cause. Are these aroused and zealous camp followers of Jihad then really so nutty in their censuring of materialism and their call for modes of living more commensurate with the needs of the human spirit? How different is their rhetoric from the more austere and secular argument advanced so fervently by Vaclav Havel, who has not permitted his reputation as an ironist to obscure his unselfconscious commitment to forging a strong connection between politics and service to others? Havel calls for an awareness of “the secret order of the cosmos” that makes “genuine conscience and genuine responsibility … explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed ‘from above.’”
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The complaint against McWorld represents impatience not just with its consumption-driven markets and its technocratic imperatives, but with its hollowness as a foundation for a meaningful moral existence. These absences translate into profound civic alienation that disconnects individuals from their communities and isolates them from nonmaterial sources of their being. Citizenship is not a cure for spiritual malaise but spiritual malaise is a roadblock to citizenship because it impairs the capacity to create the community institutions on which a civil society and a democratic culture must rest.
As Robert Putnam has wisely suggested, “The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government,” so that when people start bowling alone instead of together in leagues, even so pedestrian an activity as this
may signal trouble for democracy.
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That is why Harry C. Boyte and other supporters of renewed citizenship have argued that we learn to be citizens not first in politics but in the “free spaces” of school, church, 4-H club, and YMCA.
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A culture of advertising, software, Hollywood movies, MTV, theme parks, and shopping malls hooped together by the virtual nexus of the information superhighway closes down free spaces. Such a culture is unquestionably in the process of forging a global
something:
but whatever it is, that something is not democracy. For democracy rests on civil society and citizenship, and while the new telecommunications technologies are not necessarily averse to either, they produce neither unless directed by citizens already living in and dedicated to a civil society.
A
S A FRAMEWORK
for democracy, the nation-state is twice impaired: the challenges of global McWorld and regional Jihad are not susceptible to its interventions; and the ideology of laissez-faire that accompanies McWorld and has become the mantra of its proponents within national government undermines whatever residual capacity it might have for action in the name of public good. Sovereignty is indeed in a twilight, condemned to a shadow world by government’s myriad postmodern detractors—ex-Communist and postindustrialist alike. In the post-Communist East, government is too closely associated with totalitarian despotism: to speak of citizens still evokes the language of comrades and faithful party hacks. In the democratic West, government remains too identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and a professional political class in whom peoples everywhere have lost confidence, if in part because they have lost confidence in themselves. Until we retrieve our public institutions and reclaim their powers as surrogates for our own, government and its communication technologies will be part of the alien world we confront—part of “it”—rather than a tool with which we can confront “it.” To make government our own is to recast our civic attitudes, which is possible only in a vibrant civil society where responsibilities and rights are joined together in a seamless web of community self-government.
At the same time, democracy demands new post-nation-state institutions and new attitudes more attentive to the direct responsibility people bear for their liberties. To be sure, global government, above all democratic global government, remains a distant dream; but the kinds of global citizenship necessary to its cultivation are less remote. Citizenship is nurtured first of all in democratic civil society. A global citizenship demands a domain parallel to McWorld’s in which communities of cooperation do consciously and for the public good what markets currently do inadvertently on behalf of aggregated private interests. This is no easy task. More than sixty years ago, John Dewey had already suggested that the problem was to identify a democratic public. “Not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions,” he wrote. “There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond comparison.”
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How much more elusive than Dewey’s national “public” is a global “public”—not just a network of NGOs, but a civic nexus across all boundaries; not just groups like “Doctors without Frontiers”
(Médecines sans frontières)
but a world of citizens without frontiers?
The creation of a public is the task of civil society. Only there are attitudes likely to emerge that favor democracy and counter the siren song of McWorld. Only there are communities possible that answer the human need for parochial interaction in ways that remain open to inclusion and to cosmopolitan civic sentiments. But how can civil society be constructed in an international arena? Those wishing to try—not just in Russia and Germany where patience and civic cunning are imperative, but in an America and Western Europe that have grown complacent about the civic domain—need both to recall the story of democracy’s founding, and at the same time to invent new institutions appropriate to novel global conditions. Old democrats often suffer from their civic longevity. They forget the lessons of their own history, forget how violent and disruptive democratization can be, how long it takes to construct a foundational free society before a democratic constitution can ever be raised up upon it. Like the cautious senator who cannot remember the risk-taking boy he once was, the modern democrat represses the memory
of revolution and tumult in which he first reached his own uncertain majority, pretending that he was forever a prudent sage and that it did not take a prolonged and painful childhood to learn the arts of liberty (if they were learned at all).
Specialists seem persuaded that to construct a new democracy, whether for Russia, Somalia, or for the whole planet, requires nothing more than the export of prefabricated constitutions and made-to-order parliamentary systems. Joshua Muravchik is a perfect exemplar whose problems begin with the very title of his new book:
Exporting Democracy.
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Fed Ex the Federalist Papers to Belorussia; send a multiparty system to Nigeria by parcel post; E-mail the Chinese the Bill of Rights; ship the U.N. a civilian-controlled, all-volunteer, obedient but conscience-sensitive peacekeeping force from a country with a high tolerance for casualties and no interests of its own … and in the flash of a laser beam: democracy! For global government, do exactly the same thing, globally.