Surprising no-one, democratic experiments like Wikipedia and eBay require top-down control. But what if control works most effectively when it comes from the bottom?
There was a little micro-flurry of discussion recently about the limits of crowd-sourced initiatives online. Nick Carr, Kevin Kelly and even everyone’s favourite luddite Andrew Keen had something to say about the benefits and drawbacks of sites that aim at a sort of pure, self-governed democracy. I’ll leave it to you to pick out the details of each piece, but if I might try and crystallise, Carr and Keen are both responding to recent changes to eBay’s notoriously broken feedback system, while Kelly is simply thinking about ‘bottom-up systems’ in general.
As a quick summary, Kelly’s long post argues that bottom-up systems require a balance of the ‘hive mind’ and top-down control. His metaphor essentially boils down to the crowd possessing an enormous amount of processing power that takes time to develop and sift through which, consequently, requires top-down control to act as a consolidating force to speed up the process. Carr (whose Big Switch I swear I’ll review soon) responds to Kelly by arguing that top-down control is necessary not to amalgamate or speed-up but to impose order, to provide a network of reassurance and restriction that mitigates the fact that crowds are basically groups of self-interested individuals. As for Keen, he somehow ends up talking about the dictatorship of the consumer which, as I understand it, is a product of people having the temerity to express themselves.
But what is most interesting is the idea of opposition at the root of the top/bottom dichotomy. Democracies ostensibly find freedom in that opposition – that governments exert control through laws and policies and the people/the courts/the press etc. resist and protest when the government oversteps its bounds. In many cases, this model of ‘checks and balances’ transfers over to online democracies in which there is an ideologocal struggle between top and bottom for control. A common example is the arguments on Wikipedia over notability in which what is and what is not ‘notable’ is of course a product of how one defines the term. Similarly, eBay’s change in rules is one side of this equation: of the top responding to unease in the bottom.
But to what are the limits of checks and balances? Both Carr and Keen argue that at certain points, self-policing breaks down and in this I agree. Where we diverge, however, is at the point where control is seen as an external imposition on the crowd. Control in democracies has always been only partly about the top-down; the other half stems from turning the crowd into its own policing mechanism. What I don’t mean is that the crowd looks after itself or becomes self-governing; rather, the bottom internalises the rules of the top and then enforces them on behalf of the ‘top’. A clear example in contemporary society would be the tendency of young women to enforce standards of beauty and femininity for each other. The ideas of the top are not propagated in some grand top-down mechanism but rather, filter and spread through day-to-day interactions in the crowd itself. In fact, thought of this way, the very division between top and bottom becomes difficult to maintain as the two are inextricably linked in systems of control.
And all of this is a very long-winded way to say that the limits of online democracies are the same as their real-world counterparts: control works best when we are taught to control ourselves and the people around us. It all sounds very paranoid, but the big question, of course, is whose interests are served and it’s here that things get very murky. There is nothing inherently negative about systems of control – driving would be really difficult without them. But is the crowd-sourced a genuine alternate space or does it work through a false sense of control? Will something like CNN’s iReport produce unexpected journalism or end up reproducing the usual ideologies we get in the news anyway, precisely because that’s how we think anyway? It’s far too broad a question to answer here and, even if I had the space or time, I still don’t think I could. It is, however, something worth thinking about as “citizen-based” and “crowd-sourced” initiatives are only set to expand.
