If you’re reading this site, the odds are that you’re optimistic about how technology is changing politics worldwide. That’s certainly the conclusion of many from the diverse array of smart people from the worlds of government, technology, journalism and activism who we asked during the winter holiday break to ponder the following question: “If 2011 was a year of tumult fueled, in part, by our growing ability to network, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the year ahead — and why?”
Of the nearly thirty people who answered, just about half — a polymorphous mix of Republicans, Democrats, hacktivists, journalists and academics — came down strongly on the optimistic side of things. Increasing instability, inequality, and secrecy; the heightened efforts of governments to clamp down on freedom; the increasing levels of distraction produced by all our media — these negatives were all outweighed by what this group sees as networking technology’s beneficial effects. Greater democratic empowerment, more accountable government, and more people making their own lives better; these are the trends that our optimists are focused on.
Over the next three days, we’re going to publish all the responses we received, starting today with the optimistic folks, then tomorrow hearing from the pessimists, and then finally ending with some whose answers were somewhere in between. Below you’ll find comments from Ralph Benko, Rob Bluey, Cheryl Contee, Chuck Defeo, Colin Delany, Esther Dyson, Nathan Freitas, Cindy Gallop, Sam Graham-Felsen, Scott Heiferman, Alex Howard, Craig Newmark, Zephyr Teachout, and Jonathan Zittrain. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments thread.
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Ralph Benko
Rob Bluey
Cheryl Contee
Chuck Defeo
Colin Delany
Esther Dyson
Nathan Freitas
Cindy Gallop
Sam Graham-Felsen
Scott Heiferman
Alex Howard
Craig Newmark
Zephyr Teachout
Jonathan Zittrain
Ralph Benko, Author, The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World
The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades. To see it, though, one might have to downshift on reading and watching the “news,” which is, faultlessly, slanted toward drama.
As I wrote in 2011 in “The End Of Politics,” initially published in Forbes.com and reprinted in half dozen other significant venues:
“This column debuted a year ago and proceeded to make a troubling announcement: World peace has broken out. The political implications of world peace are dramatic — but difficult to credit.
“A year later, however, the Annunciation of the Peace has turned into something of a cottage industry. The AP’s Seth Borenstein reports:
“We’ve never had it this peaceful. That’s the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem. In his book, Pinker writes: ‘The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.’”
The reduction in world mayhem seems alien. TV news and newspapers present freighted drama, not dry facts. That obscures the trend. Also, a dramatic peace trend sounds implausible to those habituated to war.
But scholars of such matters observe that the number of war battlefield deaths has dropped by a factor of 1,000, falling from 500 per 100,000 in prehistoric times, to 60-70 in the 19th and 20th century (notwithstanding epic wars) to… less than one such death per 300,000 now in the 21st. Genocide deaths have dropped by well over a factor of 1000 from 1942 to 2008.
The number of republics has quintupled in just 65 years, the number of authoritarian regimes has dropped from 90, 35 years ago, to 25. In England, murder fell by a factor of 100 from the Middle Ages until today. The trends are much broader than this and although a single nuclear exchange or terrorist incident could skew the numbers, even such a horrific tragedy, Heaven forbid, would not skew the secular trend.
Much of this is documented in Steven Pinker‘s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War, and in a new study by the Human Security Report Project.
In short, it is becoming nearly irrefutable that peace has broken out. To proponents of human flourishing in liberty, dignity and prosperity, this is wonderful news. To the political class, not so much.”
This is a long term trend and thus it would be inappropriate to be overly literalistic as to whether optimism is warranted for “the year ahead.” Evidence is decisive that optimism, at least cautious optimism, is fully warranted for the years ahead.
Moreover, war and peace act as headwinds and tailwinds for prosperity and social harmony. The ending, and the cultural assimilation of the ending, with victory on the part of liberal forces over totalitarian dictatorships — first against the National Socialists (the Nazis) and then against the International Socialists (the Communists) — acts as a tailwind for liberal republics and a headwind for forces committed to centralizing power in the State or a State/Corporate collaboration. (War, of course, had the opposite effect, operating as a tailwind for statism and a headwind for liberalism.)
Nothing can be taken for granted. Vigilance against reactionary forces dealing from the bottom of the deck is a an urgent necessity and even duty. But the deck has been stacked in favor of human rights, peace, and a cultural renaissance of epic proportions.
This geopolitical shift far transcends the significance of “left vs right.” It portends a politics of “humanitarian populism” vs. “utilitarian elitism,” with the populists, of course, empowered by the Web. This portends the possibility of the end of the warfare/welfare state and the dawn of a golden age.
As Keynes said with his last breath, “I should have drunk more champagne.”
Rob Bluey, Director, Center for Media and Public Policy, The Heritage Foundation
Working in such close proximity to Capitol Hill, it can be difficult to have an optimistic attitude about the year ahead. We live in an era when negativity and name-calling dominate — and are often rewarded. Tackling big problems and working together are so rare that it’s almost shocking when two adversaries agree on anything.
It might be foolish to think our growing ability to network will make things better in 2012 after the rocky episodes we endured in the United States and the world in 2011. Fortunately, there are reasons to be optimistic as we begin a new year.
Technology is driving remarkable change in politics and government. We see this daily on the presidential campaign trail. Candidates use social networks to complement their ground game in primary states, relying on this engagement to influence voters. The incumbent, Barack Obama, continues to transform the modern presidential campaign and set new standards with his remarkable reach online. Citizens have an unprecedented ability to shape the course of history.
On Capitol Hill, House Republicans have ushered in a new era of transparency. Citizens can get alerts on their mobile devices about floor votes, access legislative data in a centralized location and follow the action of House committees through webcasts on their home computer. These changes are long overdue and will hopefully be just the beginning of reforms to make members of Congress more responsive to their constituents.
Despite the gridlock and partisanship in Washington, there were two notable breakthroughs in late 2011 that make me optimistic.
Bloggers on the left and right united against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), forming a loose-knit coalition to seriously damage the bill’s prospects. I haven’t observed such unity on a legislative issue since the successful effort to enact the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (also known as Coburn-Obama) in 2006.
And finally, after much demagoguery throughout the year, two lawmakers were able to put aside their partisan differences to come up with a framework for reforming America’s biggest ticking time bomb: Medicare. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) took fire from partisans on the left and right, but they also showed that it’s still possible to work together in Washington to tackle significant problems.
There will certainly be no shortage of drama in 2012 — even more tumult — but we can hope that through it all emerges a more informed and engaged citizenry made possible by our growing ability to network.
Cheryl Contee, Co-founder of Fission Strategy and JackandJillPolitics.com
I’m optimistic that 2012 will continue to show the power of the internet to empower movements that have been mis-construed as “leaderless.” We are witness to the creation of a truly global society in which each person has the power to be a leader of their local or international community. That’s very exciting and I feel privileged to be a part of this ongoing & historic transformation.
Chuck Defeo
Participatory Democracy. We use the term “social media” to describe it but when talking about politics I prefer the term “participatory media.” How does technology improve and expand participation in the political process rather than just improve a particular campaign’s ability to drive a message? We will continue to learn the answer to that question for years but I am particularly optimistic about what we will learn in 2012.
Citizen participation in the creation of content, in the distribution of content to drive what message(s) are read, heard, and viewed, and ultimately accepted by U.S. voters should be at an all time high in 2012. That alone is reason for optimism. It was just a decade ago that declining voter participation at the polls led Harvard’s Kennedy School to conduct their Vanishing Voter Project. The trend has reversed for several reasons but participatory media cutting into broadcast media usage is a key contributing factor. Participatory media combined with the importance of this election will continue the growing trend of improved voter participation.
Political campaigns are rarely seen as engines of innovation but the last two winning Presidential candidates understood and proved that to win at that level, you must innovate. I see on both sides of the political aisle a commitment to innovate and a commitment to participatory media that I have not seen in previous election cycles – more reason for optimism. Just as we have seen several successful social businesses (Yardsellr.com, Fab.com, etc.) and social-centric marketing campaigns, I believe we will see social/participatory centric efforts from both major parties’ Presidential candidates. Their influence will not only lead to potentially successful political marketing but should also inspire citizen created social efforts that have impact on the outcome.
Innovation by those who focus not on elections but on making people more social will continue to be important. “House parties” by Presidential candidates would not be such an important part of a candidate’s grassroots effort if not for Scott Heiferman’s MeetUp.com and its use in the 2004 election cycle. Facebook was the social technology of the 2008 cycle and Facebook’s innovations will make it the center of participatory technology again. But 2012 will also see the emergence of another important social platform be it Tumblr, Pintrest, or something else that moves it into the national political dialogue.
There are numerous reasons to be optimistic about the coming year but ultimately it is the fact that these predictions aren’t really predictions as much as an expectation of continued behavior. People who are most engaged in social media are most likely to participate in the electoral process and encourage others to participate as well. While the outcome of the 2012 elections matters, getting to the result through an informed and engaged electorate matters just as much.
Colin Delany, Epolitics.com
Optimistic? Absolutely – I like the drift of things. History’s messy in the short term, but the long-term trend is clear: we’re getting rid of kings and taking power ourselves. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the spread of Revolution and the end of European domination of the New World, while the 20th century destroyed the colonial empires and the first industrial/mass-media-era dictatorships in Germany and the Soviet Union. This new century has seen the germ jump the Mediterranean to North Africa, and rulers-by-fiat from China to Iran must be feeling the resulting chill.
So as people take charge of their own lives and their own destinies, I’d argue that we’re experiencing what I hope are the end stages of a long transition away from dictatorships and oligopolies toward something resembling democracy and self-determination. Technology helps create the potential of action by connecting people, absolutely, but it also spreads and connects ideas – note that the American Revolution helped spark its French descendent, and the fact that Eastern Europeans could see the fruits of Western economic progress on television helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
I see a future – I hope not far off – where knowledge and the potential for action will spread to the remotest parts of the world. Think of the power of distributed power generation (spray-on solar cells, anyone?) married to ubiquitous internet access via satellites, high-flying balloons or long-range antennae on the ground. When people in the smallest village or the poorest slum in any country on Earth can access information, human connections and the physical power to make things happen, we will live on a very different planet. I can’t wait.
Esther Dyson, Angel investor
Optimistic…. because normal people had the courage or motivation to speak out across the world – the MIddle East, Russia, all the Occupiers. I think the biggest impact of “our ability to network” is less that we can use these tools to organize and to meet, but that they get people into the habit of speaking up. Suddenly, people feel they are present in a way that they were not before. Each individual has a voice; individuals can see others speaking… and realize they can and should speak for themselves.
Nathan Freitas, Guardian Project
No matter how many turns for the worse things have seemed to take as of late, I cannot help but maintain optimism due to the ever increasing power of the individual – the thinker, maker, tinker, hacker, writer, creator, organizer and leaders. Never before have I been exposed to so many powerful unique voices simultaneously, and been able to reach back out to them in return, to build upon their contribution, or ask for their help in my own. Violence, war, crime, depression, theft – these things seem constant in our world – but the frequency and opportunity that an individual has to fight back against them, seems to me at a level never before attained in our civilization. While the victories can still be short lived, and a revolution is still not always a revolution, and much of our progress is cyclical, I can’t help but think that we are spinning while moving forward down the path towards something better. One need to only look at the Kickstarter phenomenon to see that people are now actively engaged in designing (and funding!) a better future in a million different ways.
Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO, IfWeRanTheWorld
Optimistic – because I believe adversity brings out opportunity in very interesting places. It’s only when things get as bad as they are currently and everything breaks down completely, that new ways of thinking about things and new models of doing things emerge, in ways they never would have done if the status quo had continued.
Sam Graham-Felsen, Writer, Former Obama Campaign Chief Blogger
In 2011, I saw people of my generation rising up, across the world, in unprecedented numbers. And while I doubt the scale of networked, bottom-up rebellion will be replicated this year, I expect that young people in Egypt, Spain, Israel, the US, and elsewhere will continue press for change — and that we’ll see new movements cropping up in other countries as well. Of course, I also expect that after a year like 2011, governments, corporations, and other bodies of concentrated power will redouble their efforts to counteract mass movements. But ultimately, I’m optimistic. In 2011, the sleeping giant of the Millennial generation woke up — realizing its own power — and I don’t think it will be sleeping in 2012, or any time soon.
Scott Heiferman, Meetup
People are starting to see that the people are powerful together. For many people, it’s the first time (or first time in a while) that they realize this. A seed is planted in their brain. The seed grows, and that’s why I’m optimistic.
Alex Howard, O’Reilly Media
On balance, I’m optimistic. On most days in 2011, we were reminded by how great the challenges that face ahead of humanity are. We could spend 2012 cataloging the problems, much less solutions to them. At the same time, an increasingly networked planet has more capacity to connect people of good faith and innovative ideas to one another and a global marketplace.
Craig Newmark, Craigslist
I’m optimistic…
– increasing interest in protecting voters against people trying to disenfranchise them.
– increasing interest in restoring fact-checking, and trust, to news reporting.
Just in case… if either are defeated, that’ll be very bad for the country.
Zephyr Teachout, Assistant Law Professor, Fordham Law School
I don’t know whether optimism or pessimism captures it, but there is a space–an opened imagination–that seems terribly important. Up until recently the sets of ideologies seemed relatively fixed–certain technologies could be used to build or destroy these fixed sets of beliefs–but these were enhancing or destroying, not actually shifting the common grammar of politics. What is more interesting now is that sense of a door opened on what we might believe about, in particular, the organization of the economy.
So far, the cracks have led to what feels like the definition of anticlimax–let us break down wall streets walls!!!!…. to have a financial transactions tax (mind you, i like the financial transactions tax). But the persistent sense of opening is there, and you hear it less in activist circles, where our minds are welded in circled rows, and more in strange places, where men in Applebees are discussing the nature of tax, or teenage lovers are talking about banking.
I don’t have either the anarchists or the techno-utopian’s faith that change largely leads to improvement–self government is rare, and all the more rare after tumult. But that possibility, the opening of a door–well that is exciting. There must be some german word for it — der geistoffnungzeit? — but I don’t know it. That, of course, is the strange bet–that there will be words we don’t know that become the most important ones.
Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Optimistic. Information flow will continue to outpace political censorship, and even as people come up with new ways to astroturf social media, there will be new ways to sort the astroturf from genuine grassroots.