Governmentalists vs Networkians
In “The Conservative Sensibility,” George Will notes that despite their seemingly fundamental differences, Republicans and Democrats have a shared belief that the best way to address their respective political disputes is within the hierarchical institutions of government. He labels this meta-group “governmentalists.”
In “The Wealth of Networks,” Yochai Benkler describes the voluntary cooperation of individuals and groups in networked environments, and how it unlocks creative work that otherwise would not have been done by traditional market participants expecting compensation. In “Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship,” Andrey Miroshnichenko observes that these interactions are inevitably drawn to socially-relevant subjects, as highly-charged issues within politics will elicit the most powerful responses from a large number of individuals. I will label the meta-group that aims to allocate resources and coordinate action via networked interactions “networkians.”
Miroshnichenko’s thesis is that in collisions between rigid, hierarchical institutions and fluid, networked authorship, the latter group will inevitably chip away at the perceived legitimacy of the government and those who seek to wield it.
The networkians will highlight every discrepancy between the world as the governmentalists would like to present it (with an eye toward staying in power) and the world as it is (or, at the very least, some other perspective that acts as an alternative to the consensus view). If a problem is sufficiently motivating, these networkians can coordinate action and pool resources far faster than the rigid state, further highlighting that a disproportionate share of state actions are oriented at maintaining the status quo in which government institutions are required and not addressing needs responsively.
Of course, plenty of governmentalists spend time in networked spaces, coordinating action and building consensus through rhetoric and discussion, just like the networkians. They are thus motivated by the same thirst for strong response, which means speaking to broadly-relevant subjects with crowd-pleasing propositions — “we could have a better world if only we could more completely enact our preferred policies.” This, combined with a negative partisanship that makes more advantageous to embarrass the other side of the political aisle than to achieve objectives, drags each side of the traditional political spectrum to distorted extremes of governmentalism: communism and fascism.
This totalitarianism works best under the old model of information distribution: hierarchical, broadcast media. Far more people will begrudgingly consume propaganda when it’s one of three channels available on television and one state-run newspaper.
On the flip side, totalitarian government is quite vulnerable to networkian action. Its claims of success will more pointedly deviate from lived and observed circumstances, and it will still fail to be as responsive as networkians in the domains where they still have freedom of action.
Looking forward through these lenses, the 21st century looks less like a Groundhog Century where we relive the philosophical and imperial battles of our grandparents and more like the beginning of a cycle where we reach some new equilibrium between the nation-state model of coordination and emergent, opt-in actions of globally networked individuals. One side offers safety in exchange for illusory consent given to coercion at home and abroad. The other offers seamless cooperation between individuals at their exact level of interest and ability.
Some see this emergent cooperation as dystopian: the GoFundMe for a child in a medical emergency feels distasteful when compared to the theoretical situation where the state eliminates the need to think of payment when getting necessary healthcare.
But we do not live in a reality where aggregated policy preferences look like they’ll deliver that situation any time soon for those of us in the US. So maybe the pragmatic thing to do is to embrace bottom-up, emergent coordinated action and work to expand the set of people involved to bring the pool of resources and attention that can be allocated by such means to the point where the magnitude of its impact is closer to that idealized top-down state.