Democracy 2.0 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

So I followed a link to the MediaShift blog, on the PBS website, from somewhere on digg and I had to say something. On MediaShift, Mark Glaser talks all about the media revolution, the meaning of things like the explosion of popularity in sites like YouTube that feature user-generated content, and what it means to people who want to keep up with it all.

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In Glaser's latest entry, Spelling Out the Media Shift, he describes the media shift for which his blog is named in terms of movements towards more free media, greater degrees of user participation, etc. I haven't exhaustively read all of Glaser's writing, but his thinking seems to be going in the right direction. While this process is only in its fledgling stages at the moment, I believe that us members of the Web 2.0 movement are presiding over the beginnings of the overturning of the traditional structure of information generation, distribution, and consumption. We make our own entertainment, writing, art, movies, and music. We distribute it ourselves, for free, via unrestrictive licenses such as Creative Commons, and websites such as YouTube or Google Video, or this blog website. We search for it on the recommendation of other users, via social news sites, and decide when and where we want to see what. Everybody still has a tv set, but even tv is changing, with OnDemand and newer levels of interactivity.

According to Mark Glaser, all the typical leaders in the traditional structure of content creation and delivery will have to sit down and rethink their approaches and adapt in order to survive this shift. According to me, the typical leaders of the traditionally restrictive content-delivery system can go to hell, although they probably won't. The vertical structure is going to eventually collapse though, because everybody from the base is climbing up. Even if it is, as I've heard in some places, only about 1 in 10 users that make the effort to create and post original content, that's still a vast sea of talent and content in the long run, and I think its eventually going to reach the point where it obviates the backwardness of production studios and other restrictive media groups, such as publishers of books, record labels, etc. They probably will live on, but the way things exist now, they are just trying to stem the tides of change in order to protect a stupid, inefficient system where they are the sole distributors and hence can reap the greatest degree of profits.

What YouTube's explosion of popularity means, and what the open source movement, and the creation of Wikis, and propagation of blogs all mean, is that users are, when enabled with the proper tools, fully willing to assemble into groups all on their own for the sake of talking about, thinking about, and developing topics of interest to them. We don't need others to make it happen for us so much anymore. Web 2.0 isn't just the clever use of css and ajax, its the means of organization by which human beings can thwart the typically better equipped systems of old governance, television standard's bodies, editors, etc. Web 2.0 is the mortar between the bricks in the massively distributed processing of human achievement. This is the 20th century crashing down around our ears.

Does that seem too radical? Consider your own personal browsing habits at YouTube. If you're like me, you end up on that damn site for hours at a time just clicking through videos. Consider the fact that now there are Peer to Peer networks created not just for the sake of file transfers, but also a P2P lending group and ideas for things like P2P labor arbitration on the horizon. Open source software development is distributed and peer-reviewed arbitration of labor already, just limited to software development. This is still in its early stages, but this is more than just a media shift. This is a better way to do things, in the way of which stands large corporate interests, opposed to progress for mankind at large, in exchange for the profits that can be reaped by keeping us all held back.

Application to the Political Process

A P2P network is, in essence, an assembly of people to further their common interests. This sort of assembly is actually protected in the United States constitution because by its very nature it is powerful, and it should be the essence of a democracy such as the US. In nations with more strict governments, the freedom of assembly is, of course, denied, because the government cannot tolerate an organizational structure rivalling its own. In fact, the work done on Wikipedia and open source software is often far more transparent, rapid, and thorough than that done by groups of people that are paid to do the job. How long before that same transparency, thoroughness, and efficiency is allowed to be applied to something like the voting process? It wouldn't even be a question of liberal or conservative either, it would be the overhauling of a system that has outlived its usefulness. So it will be as more and more of the pieces of industry and government are relinquished to the networks of individuals that will handle them best.

In fact, I would argue that file transfer networks are the MOST democratic construct we have seen so far. Their entire goal is the sharing and spreading of information. In the United States, at least, the body of citizens has been granted the right to self determination. This is a meaningless power without an informed populace. Hence, creating tiers to the internet, limiting the spread of information, and other such nonsense in the vein of the net neutrality laws are movements totally opposed to a segment of the population that has gone to great effort to both acquire more information and share it with others. Not to be blind to those who merely swap files for the sake of free entertainment, but many forms of art present differing points of view and serve to alter the understanding, political and otherwise, of those who view them. These are meaningful exchanges of information and signs of a populace going to great effort to inform themselves. As for copyrighted works that are transferred, the sheer popularity of the file transfer movement also serves to underline the failure of the current distribution system of movies and music already in place. This is something that will need to be dealt with in the future, rather than simply criminalizing those who transfer files, and outlawing technological progress for the sake of keeping companies represented by the RIAA profitable.

It is imperative for us to look to leaders in defending the internet, such as boingboing's Cory Doctorow, and groups like the EFF. Long live the American Pirate Party! Restrictive governments such as China's are right to attempt to censor and control the internet, because freedom of information is poison to those who would attempt to rule unjustly. Eventually, its all going to be out in the open and subject to peer review, and then may the user with the highest reputation rating win.

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