Submitted by Jim Brown on October 8, 2008 - 8:17pm
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to Mark Pesce’s talk on “Hyperpolitics”. I had never heard of Pesce, but this piece intrigued me. Pesce is a “digital ethnologist,” and his discussion of “hyperpolitics” draws on a discussion of Wikipedia, Flickr, and the Obama campaign. At times, it’s difficult to tell whether Pesce is championing digital technologies that empower users or decrying these technologies for their reliance on mob rule. But the dystopian tones begin to come through when it comes to his discussion of politics and, specifically, how the Obama campaign has tapped into Web tools to build a sprawling “organization” (if that’s what we can call it):
“We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds—economic, academic, cultural—will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different.
Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, don't believe a word of it. It's whistling past the graveyard. It's clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isn't a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency...For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.
Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he'd never given the question any thought, before answering, "I don't know. I don't believe anyone's thought that far ahead." There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he'd like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King's horses and all the King's men. And yes, that's scary.”
Pesce’s got an interesting point here. What happens to this “movement” after the election? Regardless of how the election plays out, election day puts some kind of punctuation mark on this movement, and it’s not clear what will happen next. But however much I’m interested in Pesce’s “What next?” question, I am far less interested in his answer:
“Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes' 'war of all against all.' A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.”
This Hobbesian view of the multitude is one version of events, but it is only one. And this version of what might happen is directly linked to what you think a democracy is (or, what you think it should be). Pesce makes it clear that he equates democracy with a liberal model, and thus his view of a Hobbesian "all against all" scenario is not surprising. Pesce says democracy is done: “The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.”
But the future of democracy does not have to be tied to a theory of agency that situates the “individual” as the beginning and end of politics. If we open up our definition of agency, it becomes possible to see other versions of what might happen to the various movements being built via “hyperpolitics.” If we see agency as distributed (and complicated), the Hobbesian mob is not necessarily the logical endpoint. I don’t pretend to know the answer to the “What next?” question (and now I sound like Obama and McCain in the debate last night…guys, thanks for going out on a limb and telling us how can’t predict the future). But I do know that the tale of an “arms race” and “a war” is linked to a particular definition of agency, and there are other definitions…and thus other tales to tell.
