The idea of emergent democracy is the hottest thing in the libertarian/technocratic world of internet thinking. The vision is of a global mechanism for very quickly making complex decisions about matters that are literally too complicated for any individual or small group (such as a government) to comprehend--a mechanism, moreover, that is completely in the control of the people because it does not rely on any institution or governing minority. So far so good--but while the science of emergent systems lends a new authority to experiments and theories in this area, the ideas are far from new. After all, Marxism attempted the 19th Century version of an emergent government via the notion of communist collectives. (To all of you knee-jerk thinkers out there: I'm not saying that emergent democracy is a form of communism. The Marxist (not Leninist) idea was to eliminate elites and govern out of a consensus that arose naturally from the way grass-roots collectives were organized. Sound familiar?) In fact, the very idea of the "golden rule" is arguably an example of a rule for an emergent system. Kant's Categorical Imperative describes how such emergent systems work in human society: "if most people behaved like X, most of the time, then civil society would emerge naturally." So: not new in principle, but emergent systems now have the advantage of being testable, using computers and modern mathematical tools. That makes the 21st Century version of a categorical imperative much more likely to be successful than the various sets of "thou shalts" that humanity has struggled to perfect up to now.

Emergent systems can doubtless improve all our lives. But is emergent democracy going to be better than the governments we have now? This is where the paper veers off from well-grounded speculation into ideological flag-waving. Ito makes a number of bald statements that simply aren't supported anywhere in the article. For instance:

• "The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand." Is this true? It sounds great, but you could equally say that many issues are too complex for anyone other than a small set of experts to understand. I don't want the blogger community to diagnose my diseases, or guide the hand of my surgeon. Representative governments have the resources and systems for hiring experts and overseeing their research; in Canada, we just ended a years-long study of our health care system that was chaired by Roy Romanow, a respected politician. Of course the issues were too complex for the people at the top to understand, but that's why they consulted with a broad range of experts, lay-people and interest groups. Representative democracies do this sort of thing all the time, arguably quite successfully.
• "Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are also very limited in their ability to solve global issues." Again, this is just asserted, not supported. Arguably, the international community coordinates its activities better now than at any time in history. Policies such as the Kyoto Protocol aren't perfect, but they're better than anything we've achieved before. And the nations that are blocking the full implementation of Kyoto are not the more organizationally primitive ones... So maybe organization and coordination are not the problem here.
• "The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world can not provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus." Perhaps not. On the other hand, blogs and internet technology in general remain tools of a very small technocratic elite. I would argue that the big issue is not creating this powerful new political medium: it is how to put it in the hands of everyone, including welfare moms, illiterates, indeed the whole constituency of people who simply don't use computers and don't care to. The vote is a mechanism available to all, even people on ventilators in hospital. The blogosphere relies on an elite of plugged-in newswatchers. That doesn't strike me as very democratic.
• "One of the aspects of weblogging that has increased their value over traditional web pages is the frequency and speed of the discussion." Speed is not necessarily a good thing in government. It's often touted as one of the great features of electronic democracy, but in fact many of our institutions are specifically designed to slow down the process of decision making. The Senate exists for that reason, for instance. Oversight and cautious second thought are built into modern representative democracy. For some governmental functions, speed is good; but an emergent democracy needs to have checks and balances built in as well.

(To expand on that a little: Ito assumes that once consensus is reached, things will get done. This assumption comes from a blind spot regarding how modern states function; this blind spot is common to libertarian thinkers. Things get done in modern states because stable, powerful institutions exist specifically to get them done. In the absence of such institutions, nothing gets done. They may in the future be administered in a more fluid medium within the net; but we will still need them in one form or another. And these institutions are themselves powers, with their own constituencies and agendas. So government does not consist just in the activity of creating policy as Ito's article suggests. It also by necessity enforces policy. The system of enforcement has to have a stable existence to be effective; once it does, it becomes a power in itself and demands a say in creating policy. Ito's paper does not provide a solution to this issue.)

I sound like I'm attacking the value of emergent democracy; I'm not. In fact, I'm playing with these ideas in my new work. But mixed in with the theorizing in Ito's paper is a fair amount of pure propaganda for the libertarian/technocratic ideals of direct democracy. If you read up on this subject, you should be aware of these threads weaving throughout the discussion.

In "Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web", Joe Gregorio invokes the notion of Stigmergy coined by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé to talk about how blogs work. According to Grassé, "Two individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy." The creation of HTML links, says Gregorio, is like ants leaving pheromone trails: it's a stimatic communication to other web surfers.

I think this is a great idea, but it doesn't go far enough. After all, if websites are a means of communicating through the environment, aren't buildings even more so? In fact, human beings are unique in crafting their physical environment to suit themselves; and the physical environment, including the technologies that mediate our interaction with it, constitute a vast message board that we attend to all day, every day.

Now connect the dots. Is blogging that fundamentally different from what humans have been doing all along using a wealth of different technologies, from newspapers to streets; or is blogging just faster than those methods but achieves the same ends? Efficiency can be good, but efficiency is not the only human value, particularly where matters of governance are concerned. (Which is better: the most efficient government, or the one that best reflects your personal values?)

What interests me more than blogs as a mechanism for emergent democracy, is how any pervasive technology changes human behavior, hence altering the emergent behavior of the whole human system. It's a case of computer-centric myopia to apply this thinking only to the internet; you need to consider how buildings, clothing, The Pill, and any number of other technologies have beomce factors that we have to deal with as animals moving through a landscape that is increasingly constituted by technology itself. Emergent democracy is potentially enabled by internet technology, sure; but what other emergent behaviors arise from the systems we already have--and will continue to arise even if we eliminated representational democracy and lived entirely in the blogosphere? It's not internet technologies that give rise to emergent mass behaviors--it's technologies, period.

In designing the societies of the 21st Century and beyond, we need to look at the entire mix of technologies that a people use, if we want to understand what sort of society will emerge--and particularly if we want to plan for potential problems. Because there's another term that applies when a variety of influences come together, one that is as evocative of the unforeseen as emergence itself: synergy.

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