I don’t really buy the grander claims that the lack of democracy online is leading us to authoritarianism offline, but Schneider doesn’t really put a lot of force behind making that link. Nevertheless, it could still be good for our online associational lives to be more democratic, and Schneider presents a number of creative ideas about how we could go about making that online democracy happen.
But, here’s the thing, Group decision making, democracy, politics—they can be a real drag.
When I am thinking about joining a website, the promise of getting a chance to argue with strangers about what we should do next is not a selling point. Later, if I come to care deeply, I may be very grateful for the chance to have a say, but it’s not what gets me in the door, and may well dissuade me from stepping through.
Most of people who buy a condo aren’t doing it because they want a condo board.
Most of the best fun I’ve had in my life have been in big group projects that required lots of group decision making–putting together community circuses, political activism, starting a business, marriage. But, I’ve also spent a lot of time participating in group decision making for endeavors and institutions that were very, very far from the best fun. Democracy can be a joy, but it often isn’t. I do wish the book attended more to designing for democratic joy.
Schneider returns often to Hirschman’s classic enumerations of how people can respond to a bad situation: loyalty, exit, and voice. Under the authoritarian default of online spaces, our only recourse is to exit. Schneider would like us to have effective voice.
But a democracy that’s only important when things are dire doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.
]]>What fits into those times, and what can I make to fit?
Activities that fit have these qualities:
I’ve been thinking of these as “casual activities.”
Examples of casual activities:
| No phone | With phone |
|---|---|
| Knitting | Texting with friends |
| Looking at plants or telecom equipment | Playing casual games like candy crush or duolingo |
| Thinking about things | Social media |
| Not thinking about things | Listening to music |
| Whittling | Reading |
I’ve been trying to make some other activities I want to want to do
more casual. If activities can fit better into my life, my hope is
that I will do more of them.
Datasette, Observable, and GitHub Actions make data analysis much more casual. It’s not pleasant to write SQL on a phone, and even worse to write JavaScript, but it’s possible to do casually now.
This is the second post I’ve initially drafted in the notes app of my phone. Again, it’s not a great way to write, but it make writing casual.
I’ve been debating about whether casual qualities have another necessary property: discreetness. I have everything I need to do a few push-ups, stretch out my hamstrings, or practice harmonica while hanging at the playground, but it seems too embarrassing to draw that attention to myself.
But I’m not sure that’s right. Maybe I need to just get over it.
A lot of the internet depends on taking our casual time, but I haven’t been able to find good writing about it. I’m sure it’s out there and if you know about it, please send it my way.
]]>It is time that is interrupted; interruptible; passing at places not fully under my control; and during which I need to passively attend to what my kids are doing.
Civic and political life is largely a life of meetings, which require a different type of time: time of uninterrupted attention at specific hours and locations.
I have almost none of that type of time. And so outside of the work I do at DataMade, I haven’t participated very effectively in political and civic life since my children were born.
In the last year, I have been working with three very talented activists and researchers to understand the systemic dynamics of Chicago Public Schools and contribute what we learn to the public conversation about what schools are and should be.
It is the most satisfying and impactful, non-professional, civic action I’ve done in the last twenty years.
We have had two meetings.
Most of what we’ve accomplished is because my collaborators are very experienced, thoughtful, and seasoned in their expertise and relationships.
But a lot is also due to the fact that we all take care of young children, and have found a way to work together that doesn’t just accommodate that, but takes advantage of the particular type of time caregivers have.
It’s a group chat.
And like all group chat you can dip in and out of it throughout the day, catching up when you have a few minutes, and crucially, dropping when you don’t.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours getting to know my collaborators, learning from them, and expanding our vision of what could be possible. I have the time to do that because it fits into my life and my obligations. It doesn’t compete.
For generations, feminists have been pointing out how caregivers are excluded from public life, and demanding childcare so that caregivers can participate in meetings that require intensive time and attention.
It is absolutely right to demand that. But, I have also been experiencing the power that is available if we don’t require intensive time and attention from each other in order to build together.
]]>Before the internet, the ability to widely publish information, opinion, and perspectives was only affordable to a limited number of institutions. These institutions shaped what issues were on the public agenda and what the public thought about those issues.
Because of the internet, it’s all so cheap now. The monopoly is broken.
Open source and cheap computing have similarly transformed the productivity of people who can program. Individuals who can program are able to undertake information processing tasks and creative endeavors that were once the work of entire departments.
The manifestos of the early 2000s were wrong: the empowerment of individuals has not led to a more free and democratic society.
The hope that empowering individuals would lead to a more free and democratic society assumed a basic conflict in our social and political life between people and institutions. The underlying political idea was that the gap between the power of individuals and the power of institutions and organizations eroded freedom and democratic self-determination. Information technology would increase the power of individuals relative to institutions and that would make us more free and, almost tautologically, more democratic.
I embraced this vision, and it is a vision that I think motivated much of open data, open source, open gov, and transparency work. We believed that information technologies really had a chance to give individual people more power relative to institutions, and if we did, then good things would proceed.
This way of splitting up the worlds has not been useful. The most important struggles of our time are not between undifferentiated people and powerful institutions. Our struggles for our uncertain future were and remain as struggles amongst social groups, classes, and organized powers.
The way to make a people more powerful is to make its institution more powerful, and accountable, and democratic. We should have spent the past 20 years focused on that project of people power.
Individuals acting as individuals, even very empowered individuals, are not very relevant to to the struggles.
Honestly, that is for the best.
]]>Agar’s unfolds a story about a series of “expert movements” to get the British government to collect information about its peoples, industry, and governmental operations and to appropriately use that information for effective and efficient government. The conflicts, organizational forms, and even personality types should be familiar those who have been taken part in similar movements in the early 21st century.
Many of Agar’s analyses and and critiques of our Victorians and Edwardians predecessors still slice. It’s a good book and I recommend it.
Today, I want to talk about one part in particular. In Agar’s account, the leadership of the British civil service was ready to adopt office machines (like card sorters and punch cards) because there was already a mental and bureaucratic division between the leadership of the civil service who made and directed policy and the lower ranks that carried them out. Indeed, the lower ranks were already sometimes described as “mechanical.”
The elites of the civil service, at worst, did not see mechanization as a threat, and often saw it natural and reinforcing the division between the thinking part (what they did) and the execution what the clerks and secretaries and the rest of the apparatus did.
To put it coarsely, the introduction of mechanized office machinery and tabulation fit the worldview and class interests of the civil service elites, which made it relatively easy to mechanize the civil service.
Putting aside whether Agar’s claim is true in fact, it seems like the “digital services” and egovernment movements have not had the same alignment with the worldview and class interests of top bureaucrats in their age.
Indeed, it has often seemed to be opposed to it. Proponents of these movements have often positioned them as about introducing different values into government as much as, if not more so, then introducing new technology.
I don’t really know how true this is. I don’t have the needful intimacy with the leaderships of governmental departments to speak to their worldview or interests as group. Still, it has me asking a few questions.
Namely:
I wanted to add that this are not the universally optimal principles. These make sense when we have to improvise to take care of one another because the response and coordinating capacities of institutions fail.
It is much better when state and civic institutions can act as the adequate means through which a community takes care of itself.
Some of the problems of the improvised aid.
I realized I kind of take it for granted that American governments and large institutions will never be equal to the crises we will face, because I have never seen them be equal to a crisis.
But, that’s not what we should want.
]]>In 2005, I worked in a relief kitchen in St. Bernard Parish for couple of months. I had a lot of time and material with which to think about disasters, about why the institutional response was so bad, and what did make people safe and helped them recover.
Then, life moved on, and I moved on, and I thought about other things. But in 2016, I started thinking about disaster again.
In St. Bernard Parish, the kitchen was called the Made with Love Cafe. It was organized by the Rainbow People and while I was there we made a few thousand meals a day.
The Rainbow People comes out of the 1970s American counterculture, that self-organizes large Gatherings in remote wilderness. They build temporary settlements – up to 30,000 people – listen to jam music, do drugs, and enjoy each other’s company. Then they pack everything out and do it again next year some place else.
The founders of Organic Valley were into all this. Their son had bought a school bus that he had outfitted to be a mobile kitchen for Gatherings. After Katrina, he drove the bus down, found a parking lot, and started feeding folks. The cafe accreted folks and equipment, including a huge geodesic dome from a Burner that we used as the dining hall.
Here’s what I learned from the Cafe.
The way that I learned to prepare for a crisis was to help a community build the relationships, resources, and skills that could be flexibly repurposed.
After the election, I tried to find ways to concretely do that. Some things have worked, and some of the relationships I’ve build have been useful. But, I haven’t done enough.
What would a Civic Technology field look like that was ready to be repurposed for a crisis? What would my practice look like?
One thing I notice is technology has been enormously helpful in the grassroots way that people are finding to help one another. In particular, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Zoom, and Slack are the stack that we see over and over.
These technologies are ready for a crisis:
They are convivial.
]]>Readers of this newsletter know that’s something I’m trying to figure out right now, but I gave him a couple of answers.
Here’s one:
It is becoming possible to know the current state of the complex social systems within a city like Chicago and how those systems are evolving. This means that people who are trying to affect social systems should be able to form better strategies. Strategy should largely be determined by how you want the world to change, what you know about the world, and your resources to affect the future.
The number of people in a position to form and direct a medium and long-term strategies is not large. In my limited, but direct experience, many of the people who have been elected or appointed to positions where they could work strategically, have a very poor understanding of the overall state of their own systems and how those system are changing.
This is true for governments, civil society institutions, and businesses.
This could because it’s still to hard to get this type of intelligence. It could also because the demands on the leaders are such that they don’t want to or cannot undertake mid and long-term strategies.
Certainly there are many cases where leaders do know the current state of the system and how it will evolve based upon their actions, and make poor long term decisions anyway. The Illinois and Chicago fiscal crises and climate change are two examples.
So, when is knowing the present and possible futures useful?
Assume that we could provide perfect intelligence of systemic trends in a way that was ideally suited to be digested by each individual.
What other things would we need to do to facilitate use of that information?
]]>Such movements, of course, exist – the free software movement and the electronic civil liberties are two clear examples. However, the civic technologist labors for somebody else, or for everybody else, which is about the same thing.
This dislocation has a few sources.
One, a political program of empowering technologists, as a group, is not inspiring. As a group of workers, technologists are among the highest paid and highest status. From the outside, they are not the group I would prioritize to provide additional power and privileges. So, just as a matter of Darwinian selection, civic technologists argue that their work is for someone else. Arguments to justify government spending on open data, or grant funding for a civic tech project are made in terms of the benefit to some other public. People who don’t make these types of arguments don’t survive in civic tech, (not that many people do regardless). Please note that I am not saying these arguments are disingenuous.
Second, many of the technologists in civic tech are well aware how much better they have things than almost everyone else. They understand that they enjoy their position because of their command of a set of technical skills and capacities that are socially powerful. If they lent some of these special powers for good, that would be good. Many people come to civic tech with this redistributional mindset, a kind of noblesse oblige or maybe médiocre oblige.
This mindset sensitizes the technologist to their privileges, the often vast gulfs between status and material comfort between technologists and our neighbors. Insofar, as technologists are predominantly male, white, straight, and otherwise socially normative, these examinations and privileges can be far reaching indeed. In attending to inequity, the civic technologist often looks for opportunities to help close this gap. This typically turns into the idea of helping other people do better, instead of lowering the technologists own social position.
Third, as is probably true of most Americans, the people who are civic technologists don’t think of their own problems as public problems.
Let me make this a bit more concrete. I have a young son, less than two years old, and I live in a large American city. I’d like my son to go to a school that he enjoys and helps him flourish. Figuring out if that can happen for him in the public schools of Chicago is a source of concern, anxiety, and much, much, much discussion with friends who also have small children. In these discussions, we talk about we can do as families – move to a neighborhood with a school with a good reputation, try to navigate the selective enrollment process, or consider private schools.
We don’t talk about organizing together to demand that every school in Chicago is wonderful. It’s not because that seems like an large and indefinite amount of work. The strategy just doesn’t come up. For us, getting a good education for our children is each family’s responsibility, not a public responsibility.
This lack of imagination is the difference between privilege and power.
I would like to live in a school district where the decision of where to send you kid was of absolutely no consequence, because all the schools would good. And not for equity, for my own self interest.
I would like to move into any apartment or house and not worry that it was poisoning my child. And not for equity, but for my own self interest.
As a South Sider, I would like it if the Metra Electric District had regular, frequent service and not just at rush hour. And not for equity, but for my own self interest.
What would happen if civic technologists looked to their own lives and thought about their problems as public? It is certainly true that if we are concerned with equity, we will recognize that solving some of our problems would bring harm to people more oppressed than us. However, for many problems, we might actually recognize the other not as someone for us to aid, but someone to struggle with.
]]>Beyond it dominance in American society, liberalism is particularly prominent within civic technology because of particular role that information plays in liberal diagnoses of the problems of governments
Democratically elected governments sometimes act foolishly and indecently and wreak great harm. A potential explanation of this fact is that electorate is composed of people who are foolish, indecent, and who want to wreak great harm. This is not an explanation that liberalism can accept.
Liberals have always accepted that certain categories of people do not have the capacity for the moral judgment required to be full citizens. Currently, in the United States, these classes include children, noncitizens, and in some states, the “mentally incompetent,” and people convicted of felonies. Historically, of course, American liberalism also countenanced the disenfranchisement of women and non-whites.
However, while the boundaries of who counts as a full citizen has changed greatly, within the magic circle, there is no appetite to grade who is wise and foolish, moral or wicked. Under liberalism, the competence and legitimacy of fellow citizens is taken for granted. This is a very nice thing about liberalism.
However, if the electorate is more or less good, then how do understand when our government does things that are bad. One venerable solution is to identify an enemy, foreign or domestic, that is conspiring to subvert the will of the electorate. Richard J. Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is the article to read about that.
The other major explanation is that the electorate hasn’t been able to get all the facts. If voters vote for bad governments, it’s because they don’t know they are bad. People just need the right information.
If your job is in information technology, this diagnoses is particularly beguiling. The problems of our democracy are precisely those that you are have been trained to address. Here’s the theory: if you make it easier for voters to be informed, good things will be sure to happen.
Here are some projects that I admire or was a part which tested that theory.
There are lots of others in this vein.
In my experience, some of these projects are very useful. But the ones that I know intimately were not useful in way I hoped. Making information about campaign finance or the activities of legislators much easier to access has had very little direct influence on Chicago voters and through them on capacity to govern ourselves well. These sites have found uses and users but those users have not been the “the public,” at least not directly.
Okay, I think that’s enough for this installment.
]]>