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The Medium IS the Message!

by Willy Chaplin

Regular readers of this column are aware that I am a real fan of democracy...the more the better. However, readers have written to inform me that this is a little confusing, since there are multiple definitions of the word. For example, I am often reminded that the US is a republic, not a democracy. That is, we elect representatives to do our legislative and administrative work for us, rather than doing it ourselves. Even countries, like the People's Republic of China, which claims to have a "people's" democracy, instead does most of its work through the communist party, who are irregularly "elected" by the people. No collection of more than fifty people attempts to have "direct" democracy, where all decisions are made directly by the people. It would be unworkable. No one would have any time to do anything else but govern.

So, I use the term to loosely mean a government where the people, through elections or other forms of participation, have SOME say in the government. This is why I think it is mostly propaganda to assert that communist "dictatorships" were in no way democracies. There were many things wrong with Marxist/Leninism, but the amount of or "purity" of democracy wasn't one of them. It isn't at all difficult to make the case that we have no more democracy than the Vietnamese. Try reading some of THEIR propaganda if you doubt this.

Nor am I going to get into any kind of pissing contest over who has the better form of democracy...who allows more participation, or freer participation in government. I will leave this to the political theologians and spin doctors. Instead, I want to talk about the bottom line. How easy is it for the people to participate in their own economic activity, in the day to day decisions that determine, roughly speaking, their quality of life?

It has often been proclaimed that the Internet provides an ideal mechanism for allowing people to participate in their own governance. Email provides a quick and relatively painless way to have your views known to those who represent you. Of course this assumes that your representatives have email accounts and that their addresses are known to you. But, what is the representative to make of this new flood of opinion "from below?" Does he or she give more weight to those who write most frequently or those who write most cogently? And what about those who either have no access to the Internet at all, or simply can not write well? Are they to be ignored?

The Web is another way to communicate. Those, like myself, who "own" websites, have an opportunity to get our opinions read by...theoretically, at least...everyone in the world. In reality, it is not true that "if you build it, they will come." There is already an enormous amount of competition for attention on the Web. Estimates vary, but currently there are probably 250,000,000 pages of HTML on the Web vying for your eyeballs and minds. As anyone who has surfed the Web knows, this overabundance of information often leads to confusion and frustration unless you really don't care much where you end up. Furthermore, it is unlikely in the extreme that our representatives spend much time searching the Web in order to find out what their constituents think. Indeed, you can't easily tell where the originator of any given thought resides! So, the Web too has its disappointments when it comes to furthering democracy.

Does this mean that the Internet is essentially useless to advance the cause of popular participation in government? Not at all. What I think it does do is provide a way for like minded individuals to interact in a multitude of ways. Not only can you read openly political articles like this one, you can also participate in discussion groups, "threads" and "rings" of similar Web sites or email exchanges with those you "meet" on the Internet. In this sense, the Internet presents a tremendous organizing tool for getting people together.

But, politics is not just about elections or law making or governance. As I said at the outset, it is also about the day-to-day economics of making a living, of accumulating the wherewithal to advance one's quality of life. Nor is that last just about gathering possessions. The Internet and the World Wide Web provide forums for people with similar interests to "gather" as well. Whether your thing is belonging to a Madonna fan club, collecting old lampshades, viewing the work of obscure artists or simply finding new ways to make a buck, the Internet is exploding with opportunities to do so.

I think that we are in the infancy of a whole new era of politics, the Internet Age. I further believe that we are beginning to see the formation of global "gangs"...Earth spanning formations of folks who share major interests...and that these interests will no longer be concerned merely with the traditional political concerns or even with mere culture or philosophy. They will neither inform nor be informed by government sources, but rather by and for one another. Any traditional politician that joins in the action will be just one more voice in a multitude, judged by others in the gang by the quality of his or her individual contribution.

Since people are by nature quite complicated beings, we shall each become part of many overlapping gangs, just as now members of the same church might also belong to varying political or cultural groups. It will be possible, of course, for members of any given gang to become "interest groups," affecting elections or lawmaking bodies by lobbying or otherwise promoting their shared interests. But, the global nature of these new gangs, not to mention the virtual anonymity of individual members, will make it quite difficult to focus on the politics of locality, whether national, state or local. The statistics of the Dream Machine cluster of Web sites, of which I am one participant, show that we are routinely viewed by people in more than 80 countries! So far in April, one or another of our pages has been seen by someone in each of the following countries: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Egypt, Spain, Finland, France, Great Britain (UK), Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Croatia (Hrvatska), Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, India, Iran, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Korea (South), Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, Mexico, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand (Aotearoa), Oman, Peru, Philippines, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Paraguay, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovak Republic, South Africa, Switzerland, Turks and Caicos Islands, Thailand, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam and Yugoslavia. Impressed? I surely am. The list reads like the role call at the U.N.!

So far, not much has come of this. I for one, do not know quite what to make of it. I have considered tailoring what I am saying to fit this audience. But, I couldn't figure out just what to change. The answer was obvious. Change nothing. Those who are attracted to what I have to say will return. Those who are not, won't.

What does this mean for libertarians? I would say that it portends very good times indeed! Instead of worrying about getting rid of or radically downsizing the existing national governments, we can basically ignore them and concentrate on spreading our message of "actual existing freedom" far and wide. Just as foreign consumers of US-made movies used to concentrate more on the material abundance portrayed in those movies than on the plots, current foreign consumers of US political thought can lick their chops over our ACTUAL freedom to say precisely what we want to say, rather than what exact subject we are discussing. Whether we are discussing the arcanery of the economics of the market system, promoting electoral politics or getting ourselves ready for the UFO creatures who are going to appear at the millennium, the mere fact that we are able to engage in these discussions is proof positive of our intellectual freedom.

And once again, McLuhan was correct. The medium IS the message. Our medium is the Internet and freedom is the message being broadcast. Any libertarian can find comfort in that thought. As for those who would rule the world with cruelty and deceit...mark my words...your days are numbered.

Talk to you later...

Willy Chaplin is a man who calls himself a libertarian and thinks he has something to say to us all. This rant was previously published on How Can You Laugh at a Time Like This?