<nettime> Democracy Net Zero

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Full text: http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/net-zero-democracy/

Net Zero Democracy

“by the end of the twentieth century, the era of party democracy had 
effectively passed: although parties themselves remain they have become 
so disconnected from wider society and pursue a form of competition that 
is so lacking in meaning that they no longer seem capable of sustaining 
democracy in its present form” (Peter Mair, Governing the Void, 2013)


So what logic, if any, is governing today's void so eloquently described 
in Peter Mair’s classic?....

It is the ‘epistemic turn’ that is fast becoming the ascendent political 
paradigm of our age. Manifestations of this new logic operate at every 
level of power from national political parties at the apex of electoral 
success to the back alleys of the internet spawning progressive 
evidential art and activist networks bubbling alongside sulphuric 
conspiracy cults and much else besides.

This relatively new political grammar is founded on a growing consensus 
on the need to give a central place to ‘knowledge’ in what we take 
democratic politics to be. But there are in play very different 
understandings of what constitutes knowledge or truth for the 
structuring polarities of today’s politics: *populism* and 
*technocracy*.

Although populists and technocrats are often seen as pitted against each 
other Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (1) have persuasively 
argued that the populist and the technocrat have an underlying affinity 
in that both associate politics with a kind of truth. For the populist 
truth lies with ‘the people’ in popular common sense, in folksonomies, 
in the wisdom of the crowds, frequently channelled through leaders who 
claim to know what the (ordinary) people think and believe. Whilst for 
the technocrat the truth is located in the evidence, expertly 
interpreted in order to arrive at the appropriate policy outcome. It is 
this underlying affinity that allows populism and technocracy to fuse 
into ‘technopopulism’. This recent synthesis paradoxically claims to 
simultaneously represent ‘the people’ whilst also draping itself in a 
mantle of superior technocratic competence. Macron’s En Marche, the 
Italian 5Star movement (M5S) and Boris Johnson’s freshly purged 
Conservative party are all contrasting examples of the way the 
technopopulist paradigm is playing out in electoral terms. It is this 
form of politics that currently governs the ideological vacuum at the 
heart of societies typified by fragmented, individualised and weakened 
class affiliations.

It is not enough however to see this new logic only in terms of the 
hollow superstructure of electoral politics. The sustaining vitality of 
the epistemic turn originates in a wider set of prevailing social 
processes that can be brought together under the umbrella term 
‘cognitive mobilisation’. We return to this aspect of the story later.


The Spring is Still Silent

What gives these questions so much urgency is that it is by no means 
clear that our current democracies are capable of rising to the 
herculean challenge of tackling the climate emergency. Particularly when 
autocratic regimes, most notably China are challenging the West by 
selling themselves as pragmatic alternatives to the chaos of liberal 
democracies.

To get a comparative sense of where we currently stand its useful to 
contrast today’s environmental politics with the political impact of 
Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ published in 1962. As is well known this 
was an account of an imaginary community afflicted by environmental 
calamity. Although a fiction the narrative drew on detailed evidence 
from events that had already actually happened in a number of separate 
incidents. Carson had simply and brilliantly drawn these threads 
together into a worst-case scenario.

Amazingly within a short time ‘Silent Spring’ had come to the attention 
of Kennedy who referred her conclusions to the Presidential Advisory 
Committee on pesticides in 1963. “Their report eventually found that 
Carson’s warnings were largely sound [… ] and a decade later the use of 
DDT was banned.” Another land-mark moment occurred in 1970, when during 
Richard Nixon’s first term the Clean Air Act was passed in the Senate by 
a vote of 73-0. Unanimity on any issue, above all an environmental one, 
is almost unimaginable in the current climate”.2 This obvious case of 
deterioration in liberal democracy is starkly underscored by the 
salutary fact that Richard Nixon was able to achieve more in 
environmental policy than Obama.

Anyone today who is looking hopefully towards the Biden administration 
will not be reassured by recent interviews with climate czar, John Kerry 
making it clear that too much of the administration’s strategy is being 
premised on technological fixes that do not yet exist. In some ways more 
insight into the problems and possibilities of today’s environmental 
politics can be found in the situation unfolding in France.


Opposing Macronomics

At the time of writing the future of attempts to revitalise democracy in 
ways that go beyond elections and empower citizens is playing out in 
France (at the time of writing) as tens of thousands are marching to 
demand that the policies agreed in a Citizens Assembly convened by 
Macron himself should be implemented as promised.

Macron and his party En Marche! represent the paradigmatic version of 
technopopulism channelled through Macron who as hyper-leader likes to 
style himself as the “people’s problem solver” But in 2018 his En Marche 
project began seriously unravelling under the impact of the Yellow 
Jacket uprising. And his increasingly desperate attempts to hold his 
movement together culminated in 2019 with the so called ‘Grand Debate’. 
A series of mass consultations that Macron advertised as giving citizens 
a voice in decision making. Among these assemblies was the ‘Citizens 
Climate Convention’. Unwittingly he had set in motion an alternative 
concept of ‘techne’ that was neither populist nor technocratic but 
deliberative and genuinely participatory. The Convention recently 
submitted its findings and recommendations for consideration by 
Parliament or to the people in the form of a referendum “without 
filter”. Well at least was what was promised by Macron in June 2020.

In theory this assurance gave the assembly some teeth. At least in 
comparison with the UK’s equivalent Citizens’ assembly on Climate which 
has been effectively ignored by the Johnson government. But Macron had 
backed himself into something of a corner. His on-the -record public 
assurances that the recommendations would be implemented could not so 
easily be buried or obfuscated.  Predictably he has indeed rowed back on 
his commitments, severely watering down the recommendations of the 
Convention. “I’m not” he declared in a press conference “going to say 
that because 150 citizens have written something it’s the Holy Bible or 
the Koran”. As Macron’s diluted bill comes before parliament there is of 
course mobilisation and push back from all quarters including the 
members of the Convention itself.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that Macron’s autocratic 
leadership style could not accept a genuine expansion of democracy 
beyond its current rigidities. It was inevitable that he would not 
relinquish patrician control. But what is instructive is what the 
current unfolding of events tells us about what happens when the more 
autocratic mode of technopopulism collides with new experiments in 
direct deliberative democracy based on new understandings of popular 
sovereignty through citizens’ assemblies.

It raises the question of whether the climate emergency requires 
something as focussed and resourced as today’s “pandemic politics” and 
accompanied by a cognitive revolution resulting in something more 
holistic than the hyperpartizan paralysis of today? Is it perhaps here 
that we see the potential to go beyond the one-dimensional politics of 
‘technopopulism’ towards something approaching a deliberative knowledge 
democracy.


Cognitive Mobilisation

The epistemic turn in democratic politics is inseparable from a much 
wider social process captured in the notion of ‘cognitive mobilisation’.

The term was originally coined in the late 1960s by political scientist 
Ronald Inglehart who used it to “capture a variety of complex social 
processes” including the “effect of increasing education levels and 
public exposure to new forms of mass media”.(3) Writing much later 
Russel Dalton claimed that “because of cognitive mobilisation, more 
voters now are able to deal with the complexities of politics and make 
their own political decisions” he went on to argue that “more 
cognitively mobilised citizens would be less likely to participate in 
traditional forms of partisan activity due to the inherently 
hierarchical bureaucratic nature of partisan organisation”.(4)

Although the origins of a cognitively mobilised society lie in the 
global telecommunications revolution of the 1960s we are currently 
witnessing the latest in a series of radical intensifications of this 
trend as the dynamics of social media combine with a generation shaped 
by gaming culture to form anonymised participatory sub-cultures. They 
range from toxic conspiracy fantasists such as QAon through to forms of 
progressive investigative activists such as Bellingcat and Forensic 
Architecture that make up the wider movement of ‘Evidentiary Realism’.

Who Will Bell the Cat?

If one were tasked with imagining an idealised manifestation of a 
cognitively mobilised citizenry it would be hard to find a better 
example than Bellingcat, the legendary collective of on-line 
investigators, who in a few short years have notched up an impressive 
series of scoops from confirming Russian involvement in bringing down 
MH17, Malaysian Airlines aircraft through to identifying the Russian FSB 
operatives who attempted to assassinate Alexai Navalny.

In the remarkable book ‘We Are Bellingcat’(5) the organisation’s 
founder, Elliot Higgins, reveals how it really did all begin with 
Higgins sitting at home as a bored out of work administrator from 
Leicester watching an endless stream of Youtube videos from the Syrian 
civil war and gradually turning himself into an expert on deadly 
munitions based on information gleaned exclusively on what was in the 
public domain on the internet.

Methodological Modesty

Higgins’ culminating epiphany was the realisation that “if you searched 
on-line you could discover facts that neither the press nor the experts 
knew.”

And his greatest strength lies in an unlikely combination of high 
ambition and methodological modesty that stemmed from his early 
realisation that his niche “was the detail”.

In his many thousands of posts Higgins never attempts to tell the 
complete story, as a news reporter strives to do, he describes how ‘I 
unearthed nuggets that others might use. This simple ambition was more 
important than I realised.” […] “I had no personal connection to the 
Arab Spring, and no partisan views.” “Plenty circulated but plenty was 
false. My focus became valid information. I sited all my sources, making 
it clear where information derived from, always acknowledging the limits 
of my knowledge. This approach developed into what would become the 
guiding principle at Bellingcat: the response to information chaos is 
transparency.”

Like the conspiracy fantasist followers of QAnon, Higgins acknowledges 
that an important part his success is owed to the years spent immersed 
in intensive gaming, when he led a group of forty players adding that 
“Social media offers a refuge to the disenchanted and frustrated and 
this benefited some; you could consider Bellingcat a product of this 
development.”

Higgins is fully aware that the capabilities he celebrates are equally 
likely to give rise to the destructive dimension on-line communities 
spreading lies, provoking violence and dividing societies.

Recognising that from the outset his life in gaming was full of glaring 
disparities starting from the fact that of the forty players in his 
on-line gaming group 39 were male. Interestingly he also points out how 
the” on-line misogyny related to Gamergate and all the Trumpian toxicity 
that was to follow in its wake emerged at exactly at the same time as 
Bellingcat was founded in the Summer of 2014”. (Higgins 2021 
P218-P.219).


Conspiracy Fantasists

Narrative maybe one of the “large categories or systems of understanding 
that we use to negotiate with reality” but it is not the only one and 
increasingly it is having to compete with a rival epistemic category; 
the game.

The author, prankster and activist Wu Ming 1 in conversation with 
Florian Cramer (6) argued that calling toxic narratives such as 
Pizzagate, The Great Replacement etc, ‘conspiracy theories’ is a serious 
category error that runs the risk of de-legitimizing investigations into 
the many actually existing conspiracies. He prefers instead the term 
‘conspiracy fantasies’. Importantly though he takes an important step 
further by arguing that it would be equally foolish to simply debunk 
these fantasies as however wild they invariably cluster around a kernel 
of truth that must be acknowledged and understood. It is futile to 
dismiss these ideas through techniques of fact-checking and the like 
which Wu Ming characterises as ‘primitive rationalism’.

Later in the conversation Cramer suggests that there are two types of 
knowledge claims at work here. We are not simply dealing in truth claims 
framed as stories to be understood with the traditional analytical tools 
of semiotics and narratology. They are also, crucially, about ‘decoding’ 
and analysis. Not simply ‘truth telling’ they must be understood within 
the logic of gaming, particularly alternate reality games. A genre in 
which revelations emerge iteratively through clues that encourage 
followers to ‘do their own research’ to ‘go on-line and find out for 
yourself’. It is this combination of story and game that makes these 
movements distinctive. Cramer describes it as a process in which any 
particular narratives are rapidly superseded and transformed from basic 
story telling “into an apparatus for generating conspiracy myths”

Wu Ming goes so far as to describe the electorally successful Italian 
populist 5Star Movement (M5S) as also having its beginnings as an 
on-line cult before becoming something else. The interweaving of 
technopopulist logics operating at different levels of interpretation is 
illustrated by this trajectory.

M5S

The Italian populist 5 Star movement (M5S) like all successful 
technopopulist enterprises is not merely undefeated by its 
contradictions, it is defined by them. Of all the electorally successful 
technopopulist projects M5S remains the most complete articulation of 
the popularisation of the ‘Californian ideology’ and an expression of 
how the industrial and post- industrial age has sought to “recast the 
meaning of technocracy in a way that tied it more closely to the 
liberating potential of modern technology.” (7).

In 2013 speaking at an international conference in Cernobbio, on the 
edge of Lake Como, the co-founder of M5S Casaleggio said the following 
words

‘We are far from Athenian democracy; the story took a different 
turn…[However], maybe the Internet can help to regain that inspiration, 
in that it makes us equal in being smart (cited by Mosca 2018)

The formulation of ‘equal in being smart’ is the core of the 
technopopulist synthesis operated by the M5S. The language of 
citizenship and popular sovereignty is using a conception of politics 
that is primarily epistemic in character- that is, about finding the 
‘right’ answers to common problems. This sets it apart from other 
“digital parties” such as Pirate Parties whose concerns are primarily 
around ‘rights’ rather than knowledge. (8)


Focus Group Politics and Beyond

One of the foundations of modern party political technopopulism was the 
UK’s New Labour party of the 1990s. Tony Blair’s populist credentials 
are often overlooked but it was clear from the outset when he made the 
radical assertion that “New Labour was the political wing of the people 
as a whole”. This statement was an early signal of his aim to go beyond 
a partisan class-based politics and draw the sting from the ideological 
struggles of left and right. It speaks to a holistic view of the 
society. The epistemic configuration New Labour sought most often to 
draw on was that of the pollsters. In the Blaire, Mandelson and Campbell 
coalition we see the emergence of focus group-based politics that though 
primitive by today’s standards is much closer to the Dominik Cummings 
model of technopopulism than the techne of either Macron or 5Star.
The obvious predicament of the technopopulist paradigm is that for a 
variety of reasons very little of these offers contain any trace of the 
genuine cognitive empowerment we need to transform our polities into 
knowledge democracies? As leading scholar of deliberative democracy 
James Fishkin argued focus groups merely ask “..what we think when we 
don’t think..” That is why it is precisely in the field of experiments 
in deliberative participation through Citizens’ assemblies that we 
locate the possibilities transformation. When properly configured (as in 
the case of the recent climate assembly in France) they offer a far more 
powerful epistemic foundation.
As Fishkin famously asserts in genuine and seriously configured 
citizens’ juries and assemblies are a way of discovering ‘what the 
public WOULD think had it a better opportunity to consider the question 
at issue. (9). Or as Graham Smith argues it enables us to “bring the 
considered judgement of citizens into the political process”9 and  
“recast the traditional relationship of power between citizens and 
experts […} to an extent we can understand mini publics as a mode of 
democratising expertise.” (10). It is here where through public 
deliberation in collaboration with experts and stake holders that facts 
can be transformed into ‘public facts’.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti Technopopulism
Oxford University Press 2021

2. How Democracy Ends
David Runciman Profile Books 2018

3. Ronald Inglehart Cognitive Mobilisation and the European Identity  
Princetown 1977


4. Russel Dalton 1984 Cognitive Mobilisation and Partizan Dealignment in 
Advanced Industrial Democracies, The Journal of Politics 46


5. Elliot Higgins - We Are Bellingcat Bloomsbury 2021


6. Disruptive Fridays https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD9U9bQUlSs

7. Chris Bickerton The Rise of the Techno Populists New Satesman 2020 
October

8. Lorenzo Mosca. Democratic Vision and online participatory spaces in 
Italian M5S 2018 Sited in Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti 
Technopopulism Oxford University Press 2021


9.Fischkin J. 1997. The Voice of the People. Yale University Press 
(P162)

10 . Smith G. 2009. Democratic Innovations. Designing Institutions for 
Citizen Participation. Cambridge University Press p.88

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