Remember when the internet was our best hope for a democratic future? Summing up the mood in 2003 with his inspirational book Open Source Democracy, Douglas Rushkoff predicted hopefully that “the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.” Things have turned out quite differently, but was it realistic to expect everyone to follow his advice? As it happens, Facebook launched the next year. So, while Rushkoff was right, the internet provides the hardware for global democracy, our lack of cooperation has allowed capitalists to design the software in their own interests.
Some now see the internet as the source of many of humanity’s problems: democracy’s decline; extreme political polarization; social isolation causing an epidemic of loneliness and rising suicide rates. As Thomas Friedman said, “we’re all connected, but no one’s in charge.” That’s a great way to characterize the internet, but also, capitalism itself. Despite being cooperative by nature, humans are all trapped in a global system forcing us to compete to survive — as individuals, as communities, and as heavily armed nation-states. We evolved to cooperate in relatively small groups where we know and trust each other. Global cooperation requires a system we can all trust.
Occupy Wall Street in 2011 provided new hope that we might be witnessing the beginning of the end of capitalism. And maybe, had the movement continued growing, ultimately uniting the 99% it aspired to represent, maybe it could have changed the world. But isn’t that the real problem? How can we get 99% of humanity to agree on anything? And isn’t every movement, in essence, working toward that goal — convincing enough people to work together for change? That works for single issues, but we desperately need collective action on a global scale, something that’s never existed before. The optimism of the internet’s early days returned briefly with the Occupy movement, but ultimately, neither lived up to the hopes they inspired. Maybe we should consider organizing global change differently.
While the internet enables global communication, we can’t trust it. And, without trust, we can’t cooperate. Now, with the rise of AI and deep fakes, we can’t trust anything except our real communities — neighbours, co-workers, fellow students, members of our religious or cultural communities, and any other type of self-determining community. It’s in our real communities that humans cooperate. The term ‘online community’ is an oxymoron. True, many people share interests, make friends, and even lasting relationships online, but clearly we can’t trust online connections without verifying identities.
Global cooperation necessitates using the internet without giving up the trust we have within our communities. It will take time, but might not be that hard. A global democratic network could be created gradually with a useful platform-cooperative requiring registration of a real community to participate.
Picture a global digital community centre with one requirement for membership: registration of a real community we belong to, that verifies our identity. Individuals choosing to join the platform, which obviously must be worth joining, simultaneously connect their chosen community to a growing network of communities.
I lack the skills to build it, but I do know that people create websites all the time, and occasionally, some get really big. So, imagine if a democratic open source website required registration of a real community to participate, and was popular enough that it continued to grow, eventually it might include nearly all of humanity — pre-organized into our communities of choice. If enough internet users had listened to Douglas Rushkoff, or a platform like Facebook had been built in this cooperative way years ago, we could’ve been well on our way to global democracy now.
Of course, this strategy wouldn’t automatically provide a functioning global democracy any more than the internet’s existence did originally. What it would give us though, is a chance to build a new democracy together, gradually. As David Graeber wrote about the embryonic democracy developing during Occupy Wall Street, “was it our job to come up with a vision for a new political order, or to help create a way for everyone to do so?” Building this platform together, we would have to continuously develop and refine the best practices of democracy preparing to one day govern the world collectively.
This method would produce a different and, I would argue, better form of democracy than liberal democracy. Some call it council democracy; others, democratic confederalism; the Haudenosaunee people have called it the Great Law of Peace for nearly a thousand years. These are all different names for a democratic system in which communities govern themselves, each electing representatives to a central governing body. This type of system has existed on a small scale many times throughout human history but never to govern the whole world. And yet, that’s exactly what we need to solve global problems.
In most cases, council democracy has been created spontaneously during revolutions such as the Paris Commune in 1871, and the Russian revolution in February 1917. Tragically, they have never survived as a functioning democracy for long. The Paris Commune managed only two months before being crushed by the French and Prussian states. Soviet democracy was destroyed from within, when the Bolshevik party seized power in October 1917, creating the authoritarian regime which has been mislabelled ‘communism’.
Created during revolutions, these democratic networks are immediately thrown into confrontation with capitalism itself. None have survived long, and it seems unrealistic to expect different results. But if instead a democratic system grew gradually using the internet to connect our real communities, it might stand a better chance of scaling up to be able to change the world. Posing no immediate threat to capitalism, it might be left undisturbed to gradually grow until it includes enough of humanity, organized democratically, to collectively decide how to replace capitalism.
Others have proposed ‘e-democracy’ using the internet, but they typically require complicated and potentially very expensive methods of verifying identities. It would be nearly impossible to prevent sabotage or abuse of such a system, and since access to the internet is not equal for everyone, it would still not be a fair and representative democracy. The internet is a great tool to help us build it, but democracy must be based in our real communities in the real world if we expect people to trust it and choose to participate. Having our identities verified by our chosen community will encourage better behaviour by individuals because their community will hear if they misbehave. That will provide an online space we can trust as we build a new global democratic system together.
Why would anyone choose to join? For the same reason we join any other web platform — it must offer us something we want. Eventually it should offer everything anyone needs from the internet, but it would likely begin with a handful of people creating a useful tool and then scaling up gradually from there. If this idea makes sense to you, please get in touch to help build it. If you think I’m wrong, please tell me why.
