as the citizens of Massachusetts came to feel the effects of slavery and the citizens of Virginia came to feel the effects of a drive for freedom. As Nicholas Negroponte puts it, “Nations today are the wrong size. They are not small enough to be local and they are not large enough to be global. ” [8] This misfit will matter.
As we, citizens of the United States, spend more of our time and money in this space that is not part of any particular jurisdiction but subject to the regulations of all jurisdictions, we will increasingly ask questions about our status there. We will begin to feel the entitlement Webster felt, as an American, to speak about life in another part of the United States. For us, it will be the entitlement to speak about life in another part of the world, grounded in the feeling that there is a community of interests that reaches beyond diplomatic ties into the hearts of ordinary citizens.
What will we do then? When we feel we are part of a world, and that the world regulates us? What will we do when we need to make choices about how that world regulates us, and how we regulate it?
The weariness with government that I described at the end of the last chapter is not a condition without cause. But its cause is not the death of any ideal of democracy. We are all still democrats; we simply do not like what our democracy has produced. And we cannot imagine extending what we have to new domains like cyberspace. If there were just more of the same there — more of the excesses and betrayals of government as we have come to know it — then better that there should be less.
There are two problems here, though only one that is really tied to the argument of this book, and so only one that I will discuss in any depth. The other I mentioned at the end of the last chapter — the basic corruption in any system that would allow so much political influence to be peddled by those who hand out money. This is the corruption of campaign financing, a corruption not of people but of process. Even good souls in Congress have no choice but to spend an ever-increasing amount of their time raising an ever-increasing amount of money to compete in elections. This is an arms race, and our Supreme Court has effectively said that the Constitution requires it. Until this problem is solved, I have little faith in what our democracy will produce.
The solution to this problem is obvious, even if the details are extremely difficult: Spend public resources to fund public campaigns. The total cost of federal elections in 2004 was probably close to $4 billion.[9] In the same year, we spent $384 billion on defense and $66 billion on the war in Iraq.[10] Whatever you think about the wisdom of defense spending and the war in Iraq, at least the purposes of all three expenditures is the same — to preserve and promote democracy. Is there any doubt if we made campaign contributions essentially irrelevant to policy we’d have a more certain and positive effect on democracy than the other two?
But there is a second, oddly counterintuitive reason for this increasing failure of democracy. This is not that government listens too little to the views of the public; it is that government listens too much. Every fancy of the population gets echoed in polls, and these polls in turn pulse the democracy. Yet the message the polls transmit is not the message of democracy; their frequency and influence is not the product of increased significance. The President makes policy on the basis of overnight polling only because overnight polling is so easy.
This is partly a technology problem. Polls mark an interaction of technology and democracy that we are just beginning to understand. As the cost of monitoring the current view of the population drops, and as the machines for permanent monitoring of the population are built, we are producing a perpetual stream of data about what “the people” think about every issue that government might consider.
A certain kind of code perfects the machine of monitoring — code that automates perfect sample selection, that facilitates databases of results, and that simplifies the process of connecting. We rarely ask, however, whether perfect monitoring is a good.
It has never been our ideal — constitutionally at least — for democracy to be a perfect reflection of the present temperature of the people. Our framers were keen to design structures that would mediate the views of the people. Democracy was to be more than a string of excited utterances. It was to be deliberative, reflective, and balanced by limitations imposed by a constitution.
But maybe, to be consistent with the arguments from Part III, I should say that at least there was a latent ambiguity about this question. In a world where elections were extremely costly and communication was complicated, democracy had to get by with infrequent elections. Nevertheless, we cannot really know how the framers would have reacted to a technology that allows perfect and perpetual polling.
There is an important reason to be skeptical of the flash pulse of the people. The flash pulse is questionable not because the people are uneducated or incapable of good judgment, and not because democracy needs to fail, but because it is often the product of ignorance. People often have ill-informed or partially informed views that they simply repeat as judgments when they know that their judgments are not being particularly noticed or considered.
Technology encourages this. As a consequence of the massive increase in reporting on news, we are exposed to a greater range of information about the world today than ever before. This exposure, in turn, gives us confidence in our judgment. Never having heard of East Timor, people when asked about it might well have said, “I don’t know.” But having seen ten seconds on TV, or thirty lines on a Web portal news page, gives them a spin they didn’t have before. And they repeat this spin, with very little value added.
The solution to this problem is not less news or a ban on polling. The solution is a better kind of polling. The government reacts to bad poll data because that is the only data we have. But these polls are not the only possible kinds of polls. There are techniques for polling that compensate for the errors of the flash poll and produce judgments that are both more considered and more stable.
An example is the “deliberative” poll devised by Professor James Fishkin. Rather than a pulse, Fishkin’s polls seek an equilibrium.[11] They bring a cross-section of people together for a weekend at a time. These people, who represent all segments of a society, are given information before the poll that helps ensure that they know something about the subject matter. After being introduced to the topic of the poll, they are then divided into small juries and over the course of a couple of days argue about the topic at issue and exchange views about how best to resolve it. At the end they are asked about their views, and their responses at this point form the “results” of the poll.
The great advantage of this system is not only that information is provided but that the process is deliberative. The results emerge out of the reasoning of citizens debating with other citizens. People are not encouraged to just cast a ballot. They give reasons for their ballot, and those reasons will or will not persuade.
We could imagine (we could dream) of this process extending generally. We could imagine it becoming a staple of our political life — maybe one rule of citizenship. And if it did, it might well do good, as a counterweight to the flash pulse and the perpetually interested process that ordinary government is. It would be a corrective to the process we now have, one that might bring hope.
Cyberspace might make this process more possible; it certainly makes it even more necessary. It is possible to imagine using the architecture of the space to design deliberative forums, which could be used to implement Fishkin’s polling. But my message throughout is that cyberspace makes the need all the more urgent.
