E-democracy

by David Ellis

Warren[1] expresses doubts about the integrity of our increasingly complex and technical administrative system. He says the resultant increase in regulation has led to the development of “a new representational approach to administrative law and regulatory government . . . , characterized by significant public participation in agency decision making.” He adds that Congress and the courts have “promoted broad interest-group participation in the administrative process.” I am going to argue that technology has strapped a powerful rocket booster to this transition from representative to participatory democracy, but that a bit of loose insulation could do to Democracy what it so sadly did to Columbia.

Warren attributes the participatory trend to pragmatism, because power needs to be increasingly delegated to administrators in this increasingly complex society. The administrative system has become the fourth branch of government and is not just unconstitutional but inherently undemocratic, closed, political, and a sitting duck for corruption by special interests. Efforts to democratize it through such instruments as FOIA, ombudsmen, etc., have “all failed” according to some critics.[2] Their opponents maintain that the value of the administrative system lies precisely in its being closed and expert: if we let the riff-raff in, it is ruined. Others say people may not like them, but have to admit they perform a public good, therefore people want them, therefore they reflect the will of the people and are a democratic artifact.

The acceptance of, or resignation to, the participatory trend is shared by some in the business community. One leading guru says that our system of representative democracy is "a polarized, mass-based party system that is based on the communication capacities and class divisions of nineteenth century Europe." Modern businesses, citizens, taxpayers, and consumers are used to doing things digitally, but government is not, she says. In short, government and democracy are behind the times. Worse, she says, they have got stuck in this debate about direct versus representative democracy. Nevertheless, she sees an inexorable move toward direct democracy. [3]

In 1999, senators Joe Lieberman and Fred Thompson sought to explore the Internet’s potential for improving the functioning and quality of service of representative government. So they ran a simple web poll.

A key question they asked was whether government officials and activities should be publicly accessible through the Internet.[4] My rough-and-ready analysis of the responses as of mid-September 2000 found that people wanted rather more than mere access. Out of roughly 50 on-topic responses, 11 people or 22 percent wanted direct, participatory e-democracy. They wanted to vote on issues online, because then they could be sure their views would at least be heard, even if not always adopted, and that the corollary retreat from representative democracy would weaken the power of special interests and reduce corruption in government.

On the other hand, seven people (14 percent)[5] said they would rather use the Internet to enhance representative democracy. Through email and bulletin boards, they thought citizens could give representatives a better idea of what citizens want, and representatives could give citizens a better idea of what they think citizens need to know.

Those who preferred direct democracy over representative democracy seem, on the face of it, in tune with Thomas Jefferson, who advocated “making every citizen an acting member of the government”; with James Madison, who disliked the potential of special interest groups to subvert democracy through undue influence over elected representatives; with Alexis de Toqueville, who admired the civic participation he observed in American towns and villages; with John Stuart Mill, who saw participation as breeding good, unselfish character; and with John Dewey, who saw it as prerequisite for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Evidently, the founders and early observers of the American democratic system were, for various reasons, believers in participatory democracy -- but only at the local level, and unfortunately the local civic participation so admired by de Toqueville has been in decline throughout the 20th century and into the present one. As Putnam has shown, our involvement in political campaigns, local community activist groups, church, social philanthropic bodies such as the Kiwanis and the Rotary, bowling leagues, the PTA, and even in playing cards with a group of friends has lessened significantly.[6]

But in a global village, community, state, nation, and the entire globe are all local. The technology that sets us free from the confines of locality is a cause of the decline in parochial involvement as we have traditionally defined “local.” We have become less tied to, and therefore inevitably less concerned with, local community. We have lost our former “sense of place”[7] and turned into “resident expatriates.”[8] We have become reciprocally more tied to, and therefore inevitably more concerned with, the planet as a whole, and at the global level civic engagement is growing rather than declining, by means of the Internet and related technologies.

For the founding fathers, the citizen voter’s proper place was within a “riding,” an area bounded by the distance a person could ride on horseback in a day. When it came to state and national issues and elections, the founders took care to limit civic participation. In the early days of the republic, the only portion of government elected by the people was the House of Representatives. State legislatures appointed senators, while the electoral college--selected either by popular vote or state legislatures--picked the president. Which is why today, other than at a general election the closest we usually get to having a say in state or federal affairs is through checkbook membership in associations and through the proxy we give to our elected representatives. With one key exception: the referendum or ballot initiative, a process which “allows citizens to circumvent a reluctant legislature.”[9]

The Referendum/Ballot Initiative

The number of state and local ballot initiatives has been growing apace with the power and diffusion of information and communication technologies, notably of late the Internet. If the trends are correlated, and if they continue, then we can expect to see partisans demanding to use the Internet to vote directly to impact policy and legislation. This is in addition to partisan use of the Internet for gathering support and funds for their issues and elections campaigns.

But the Internet presents the prospect of a voting superhighway along which elections and referenda and recalls and impeachments can travel at breakneck speed. Crashes -- by which I mean the election of ruinous representatives, the adoption of harmful initiatives, or the rejection of beneficial or necessary initiatives -- resulting from “careless voting” would thus be that much more catastrophic than in a more sedate information transportation era.

Technology has already sprung on an unprepared federal government an informal and imperfect but powerful form of referendum: public comments on proposed government rule-making, in which policy decisions and regulatory actions are directly affected by supposedly public input.

For example, a notice of proposed federal rulemaking on the “Know Your Customer” rule (in 1999, I think) that would have changed banking privacy and made people’s bank accounts and transactions more accessible to government agencies attracted half a million public comments, a number unimaginable before the Internet.

Many of the public responses are believed to have resulted from a broadcast email message asking people to write to the FDIC and others about it. 171,000 responses were generated by a Libertarian Party website, which encouraged visitors to click on a button which then sent an email to that person’s congressional representatives and the FDIC. There were other letter/email campaigns targeting Congress and the agencies by other organizations as well.

The FDIC alone received half of all the comments. The Federal Reserve received about 40,000 by regular USPS mail, since it did not then have a public comments site on the Web. A federal official told me that no previous notice of rulemaking in history had generated more than a couple of thousand responses.

This incident illustrates a relatively benign outcome of the amplifying effect of technology on democracy. But depending on one’s point of view, the effects may not always be regarded as benign.

FReeping

Take, for instance, “FReeping,” which is not about the Detroit Free Press but about a right-wing website called the Free Republic.

In an interview on CNN during the Hanging Chads phase of the 2000 elections, a conservative columnist cited a CNN.com online public-opinion poll showing that 89 percent of respondents felt Al Gore should concede the election to George W. Bush. This was not even remotely a scientifically valid and reliable poll, yet how would the ordinary viewer know that?

Making it even less valid and reliable was the possibility that the result had been rigged, or “Freeped.” FReepers are members of the Free Republic, a heavily trafficked right-wing Web site, who are dedicated to proselytizing right-wing conservatism. They do the usual peaceful demonstrations with signs and speakers, phone, letter, and e-mail campaignss to support conservatives or castigate liberals. But they also do Freeping, which means they continually surf the net looking for new online polls, then they post on Free Republic links to those polls and urge other FReepers to visit and vote “the right way.” There is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course. What’s wrong is that some people deliberately vote repeatedly, to rig the results. Even systems which in theory only allow one-person, one vote are easily and frequently fooled. “It's not thousands of people voting one way; it's one or two people voting hundreds of times.”

Even tainted results have a real effect if quoted as news, as in the Florida controversy. The media clearly share some of the blame.

Some FReepers believe so strongly in the ultimate good of their goals that they advocate or participate in violent and illegal activities. Such behavior is surely in principle no different from that of the 911 fanatics. Most FReepers may be decent human beings, “but there's a violent underbelly." The underbelly surely does not represent most Republicans, but like Al Qaida, it can do damage out of all proportion to its size and representative status. Unlike Al Quida, the damage it does is largely hidden and rather more insidious.

If flag-waving, Freeping, Americans can influence American politics in this way, what do you think flag-burning foreigners can do?

Foreign influence

There appears to be no way the government can have known for sure how many of the people objecting to the “Know Your Customer” case were U.S. citizens, let alone registered voters.

A couple of years ago, I was involved in an online campaign to free a dog on canine Death Row. The campaign did not succeed in having the verdict against the dog overturned or its sentence reduced, but it did force local elected officials to spend time dealing with a deluge of emails from around the world and it saved the animal’s life. On the eve of execution an animal rights group, alerted, informed, and motivated by the Internet campaign, dognapped the animal from Death Row.

The campaign’s most active phase was orchestrated by a Netherlands citizen. A European’s influence in freeing an American dog from the American justice system might not appear to be terribly significant, until you consider that:

· The collapse of the Soviet Empire was due in part to the dialog between Soviet and Western intellectuals and activists over electronic bulletin board systems and the Internet; that

· An Amnesty International email campaign resulted in the release of a Turkish political prisoner facing torture and probable death under an Ottoman regime not known for weakness of the knee; and that

· Crown Prince Abdullah has acknowledged publicly the likelihood that the Internet will bring about fundamental change to Saudi Arabia’s ancien regime.

The Chinese and Singaporean governments, two other more-or-less benevolent forms of dictatorship, are also struggling to cope with what they correctly perceive as foreign cultural and political contamination from the Internet. The prognosis is not good, from their perspective. In this global village, they are in our neighborhood now. The flip side is that we are in theirs. Though some may be slower than others, everyone is developing the same sense of place, and many foreigners would like to have a say in U.S. elections given the power of the United States to impact global warming, global trade, and other factors that affect them directly but over which they have little direct say.

Or had. In the 2000 U.S. elections, any foreign or native individual, corporation, government, or other entity that wanted a direct say could apparently buy votes at auction over the Internet. Voteauction.com (“Bringing Capitalism and Democracy Closer Together”) asked:

Are you planning on staying home this election day? Now you can profit from your election capital by selling your vote to the highest bidder. To register with voteauction.com, click on the “sell” button on the left hand portion of your screen.

Vote buyers went through a similar process of privacy-protected registration, and could then submit bids for available vote blocks.

When the site’s developer was threatened with state prosecution, he sold it to an Austrian businessman who promptly transferred it to a server in Bulgaria, taunting: “And we can even move it further on, if it’s necessary. We can disconnect it from my person. We’re very flexible with this.”

It turns out that Voteauction may have been a spoof designed to draw attention to the issue of the soft-money buying of votes. It was all “made up,” the developer later claimed, though the Austrian, safely beyond the arm of U.S. law, demurred. He said it was no joke.

Events at the World Trade Organization in Seattle in December 1999 provided another indication of what lies ahead. Activists used the Internet to organize and efficiently run online and offline protest demonstrations that almost led to the failure of the WTO meeting. A year later, forewarned and forearmed, Canadian police were better prepared for trouble at the next WTO meeting, but the demonstrators did force delegates, including the President of the United States, to respond publicly to their concerns, and a few months later, the eyes of the world were on a Genoa under siege. This is power and participation fringe groups did not have before technology leveled the playing field for them in terms of organizing, fund-raising, and publicity.

Indeed, technology’s growing importance in these regards has made the Internet itself a target. No sooner did hostilities resume between Israel and Palestine in October 2000 than website wars erupted between Israeli teenagers, who sabotaged a Hezbollah website, and Islamic groups, who crashed several Israeli websites through denial of service attacks. The Hainan spy plane incident of early 2001 appears to have led to a viral skirmish between American and Chinese hackers. The Code Blue computer worm released in September 2001 is thought to be a U.S.-based retaliation against the Code Red worm released in June and which, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office,[10] is believed to have started at a university in China. The SQL Slammer worm that did so much damage just a couple of weeks ago probably originated in China, America’s only viable competitor for the position of global Hegemon. Slammer, by the way, was just 367 bytes of code, a mere nothing; yet it hit 50 million servers within 4 minutes of its release. If it remains that easy, and that fast, to almost bring down the Internet, we might be wasting our time talking about the trend to e-anything.

The desire of citizens in all countries to become involved -- for whatever reason, good or bad -- in the social, political, legal, economic, and cultural affairs of other countries is significantly greater than at any time in history, and is growing rapidly. So rapidly that governments are having a hard time keeping up. As of July 2001, for example, the European Union was vacillating over whether Internet content should be subject to the laws of the country whence it originates or whither it is destined for consumption. After being firmly in favor of the latter, the EU recently flip-flopped to the former. The French court decision requiring an American company, Yahoo, to obey a law prohibiting publication of Nazi material in France could be nullified if the EU opts for the country of origin approach, but it would then mean that the U.S. First Amendment would not protect Nazi speech if that speech originated in France. In other words, speech would be protected in countries that would rather ban it, and unprotected in countries that would rather not!

In reality, if the country of origin approach is adopted globally, then Internet speech will default de jure (as it already has de facto) to the lowest common global denominator: Hate speech by a French Nazi could easily be sheltered under the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution; violations of US copyright would be protected by more liberal, or simply non-existent, Russian law; Internet drug trafficking by an American cannabis dealer could be sheltered under Dutch law; and video from a Chinese porn producer could be sheltered under Danish law. Nothing illustrates more clearly that we are in each other’s neighborhood now, and have enormous stakes in each other’s legal, economic, and political systems.

The Digital Divide

After direct manipulation of our democratic ways and institutions as just discussed, the second potential downside to e-democracy is the Digital Divide. The argument is that it is not democratic if some eligible voters cannot afford or are otherwise unable to access or use the technologies of modern democracy.

President Bush has said he is committed to closing it. At least in terms of today’s technologies -- a PC and an Internet connection -- it is indeed more a matter of political commitment than funding: the divide could be closed for the cost of a stealth bomber or nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier and the cost is falling. It takes one Web-enabled TV set -- a PC is unnecessary -- to close the digital divide for one household.

But there is a more enduring and insidious form of digital divide: the gap between those who have access to advanced technologies (currently, for example, those incorporating robotics and high-level artificial intelligence) and those who do not. To the extent advanced technologies create inequalities, they are a danger to any democracy that that includes “Equality” in its motto. Just as major corporations use the most sophisticated (and therefore expensive) technology to identify, profile, and engage customers, usually at the expense of smaller competitors, so too do major political parties use it to identify, profile, and engage supporters and voters, at the expense mainly of the smaller, less well-funded parties.

This divide extends beyond national borders. The U.S./U.K/Australian Echelon communications monitoring system, for example, deploys advanced technologies including artificial intelligence algorithms unavailable even to other leading first-world nations including members of the European Union, whose parliament has protested with some vigor.

Cyberbalkanization

The third downside to e-democracy is cyberbalkanization. The division of heterogenous civic issues into smaller homogenous units, which technology facilitates, diminishes the need to face and address diversity; i.e., to be broad-minded. The argument is that a narrow-minded citizenry will be unable to exercise good judgment on matters of broad public policy. Yet just as the citizenry is growing more narrow-minded, it is gaining a more direct say in public policy. In other words, it is more able to exercise a judgment that grows worse.

Cyberbalkanization means a tendency to wear blinders to avoid the growing number of distractions on the periphery of our focal plane. One can no longer be an expert on hotrods-there’s too much information on too many cars and too many engines. One can only hope to be expert in (say) Chevy hotrods. The Internet facilitates this tendency, and (through information overload) even forces us to it. We now have to rely on intelligent software agents to filter news and information for us. As a result, we become ever more specialist and correspondingly less generalist, a situation that some claim is a serious threat to democracy.[11]

The Libertarians and others who organized responses to the “Know Your Customer” rule capitalized on this trend by summarizing the issue for people and by preparing for them a canned comment that could be delivered with a mouse click, much as the Dutchman did for the dog and Amnesty International did for the Turkish political prisoner.

Entertainment

The fourth downside to e-democracy is that the Internet has more potential to entertain the masses than to engage them in serious pursuits. Instead of increasing civic participation, the distraction of a multitude of entertainment options on the Internet could further decrease it.

So we might have to make politics and government interactively entertaining, if we are to avoid the danger of becoming what Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian has called “a spectator democracy, not a participatory democracy.”[12] This is hardly a new idea. “We must take man as we find him,” Hamilton said, “and if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in doing so.”[13] Some have envisioned a political Gong Show in which viewers recall officials on little more than whim for perceived inadequacy of performance. [14] And why not? After all, we have it on the authority of Henry Kissinger that “The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar.”[15]

As information and communication technologies reveal more and more of the backstage as well as the front-stage behaviors of star-politicians and officials, recalls and impeachments can certainly be expected to increase.

At a more intellectual level, one could envision government -- from township board to the United Nations -- becoming Web-enabled computer games combining features of Sim City, Civilization, and Risk.[16] The only differences would be that the real “game” would involve real issues, and the players’ (voters’) aggregate choices would be implemented in the real world.

We are closer to such a scenario than you might think. The differences in scope and scale and complexity between the real world and a game simulation might seem enormous, but the world’s growing complexity and interconnectedness already forces data-deluged policy analysts to employ supercomputers for their simulations and econometric models. It is only a matter of time before the toy simulation engines of Sim City and the others become as powerful as the ones used by weather forecasters, traffic engineers, and econometricians.

Even without going as far as direct voting on issues, game-like entertainment of the type much in vogue among today’s youth could well “play a key role in politically re-energising a turned-off generation” that considers it “‘cool’ to disengage.”[17] Drawing on the relative success of irreverent versus sober websites in the U.S. 2000 elections, a British 2001 elections website gave citizens the opportunity to put their least-favorite politician in a virtual blender, throw virtual eggs at one, and run over bogus asylum-seekers in a virtual truck driven by the (then) Conservative Party leader. The Labor Party’s own website made a stab at entertainment by offering a free, downloadable game in which players could cut public services.

MSNBC brought a measure of entertainment to the U.S. 2000 elections with its running scorecard of the presidential race as though it were a sporting game. Such treatment of an election as entertainment conceivably contributed to the first increase in voter turnout in 40 years.[18] To the extent voters are influenced by such scorecards before casting their own ballot, the method represents something more than purely passive entertainment.

Nader Trading

A fifth downside to e-democracy is exemplified by “Nader trading,” another innovative but --compared to Voteauction.com -- less clearly illegal method of manipulating the results of a U.S. election via the Internet. It emerged just two weeks before Election Day 2000. “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush,” said panicked Democrats, and in swing states like Michigan and Florida they were right. Nader trading websites offered a simple mechanism to facilitate the pairing of voters. A swing-state liberal would agree to vote for Gore, thus helping keep Bush from winning that state’s Electoral College votes, while his or her non-swing-state, vote-trading partner would promise to vote for Nader, thus helping the Green Party acquire five percent of the popular vote and, with that, millions of dollars in federal funds for the next election campaign.

With just a week to go before Election Day, one website alone had 6,700 registered vote traders. For all we know, Nader trading might have given Gore Michigan, and might have caused the fiasco in Florida. Nader trading was copied by the British, who called it “tactical voting.”[19] Ideas, good and bad, spread at the speed of light on the Internet.

Foreign Campaign Financing

Finally, it is worth noting – especially given the endless U.S. debate over campaign financing – that extreme right-wing parties in the United Kingdom may have “used the web to raise money from America.”[20] Money has always been a factor in politics, but as politics -- like trade and economics -- becomes globalized, then the growth of transnational campaign financing among not just local lunatic fringes but also global political and commercial interests is a sure bet.

Implications

In their own right, and as examples of the potentially disruptive impact of new technologies and their innovative uses, phenomena such as vote auctioning and trading are not to be taken lightly. Viewed with blinders on, they may look like flashes in the pan; but in the broader contexts of globalization, changing public attitudes and values, and technological innovation, they are key trend indicators. Whether or not Voteauction.com was genuine, whether or not anything could be done to stop something like it operating outside the United States, and whether or not Nader-trading websites are illegal or stoppable are important questions, but even more important is that:

1. Buying and selling U.S. (and other democratic countries’) votes – directly or via transnational campaign financing -- on a large scale over the Internet is technically possible and may be valuable, viable, and legitimate as a business enterprise in some foreign jurisdictions.

2. It is no longer true (if it ever was) that “all politics is local.”[21] Foreigners have what they may see as a legitimate interest in the outcome of U.S. (and other democratic countries’) elections and may have the ability to manipulate them through Internet initiatives such as Nader trading. We shouldn’t be (but we are) surprised when foreign use of communication technology has an effect at home. Legal constraints (copyright) introduced in the late middle ages in response to the printing press were often circumvented by foreign presses, which would print and smuggle pirated or banned works into the home country. (Ellis 1989:10-11)[22]

3. Voters in one state can effectively vote in another state, rendering the electoral college system even more dubious than currently perceived as a mechanism for ensuring fair and balanced state representation in the election of the president.

4. Voteauction.com was both a trendsetter and a reflection of a cynical shift in cultural attitudes and the Internet’s power to advance the destruction of democracy as we know and practice it.[23]

5. Current U.S. law and state electoral processes will not be able to cope with the speed and scale of innovations we can expect to see in upcoming elections, from a wide variety of people, frivolous to sinister, who have now seen the potential for mayhem or profit.

Like pornography, gambling, and copyright infringement, the 800 pound genie of election manipulation over the Internet will not slither submissively back into the lamp. Copycat successors to Voteauction.com will anticipate and encourage an enormous spurt in business when votes bought at auction online can be as effortlessly cast online, and Senator John McCain predicted that we will be casting our votes over the Internet “two elections from now.”[24] If he is right, or even if he merely might be right, then something needs to be done if we are to avoid a situation more serious by far than Florida and if we expect people to trust future election outcomes. Public mistrust and cynicism towards politicians cannot be repaired through term limits and referenda and elections if there is mistrust and cynicism regarding the process itself.

The Technology Exponent

The technology that stimulates statements like Senator McCain’s is evolving through accelerating trends of its own. Within 30 years individual computers will be at least a million times more powerful than they are today, and the world will be controlled by a network of intelligent, sentient, loquacious, mobile, dexterous, extremely complex, in some cases extremely small (even invisible), and fully autonomous machines. Most people under 50 today and (through accelerating breakthroughs in medicine and the rapid extension of lifespans) many people older than that will live to see it.

Obviously, we cannot ignore the nearer term. By the time of the next elections, technology and innovative applications thereof will have advanced and will probably impact the election in unexpected ways. In 2000 we were blindsided by voteauction.com and Nader trading, yet they were predictable. The proof lies in the fact of their existence: in order to create them, someone first had to predict them.

To reduce near-term uncertainty, to take active control of the future and not be passive onlookers as ever bigger waves of change crash down upon us with growing frequency and greater impact, we must all democratically help create the long term context. To create the future, someone has to predict it. For the most part, the people making the predictions are commercial interests that seek to understand, create, and control the future for the benefit of shareholders. But perhaps shaping the future should be a societal and not just a market prerogative. Some argue passionately and cogently for direct democratic review and consent prior to full-scale adoption of new technologies;[25] a well-intentioned proposal, conceivable in a social democracy but untenable in a liberal democratic society that demands less, not more, restraint on everything.

Technologies are politically and morally neutral, but they do nevertheless “help define or regulate patterns of human interaction” just like “laws, political and economic institutions, and systems of cultural belief.”[26] This equivalence means that Microsoft, AOL/Time-Warner, and a handful of other private companies have even more power than is suggested by their nation-state-equivalent wealth and superpower-like transnational tentacles, and at a minimum it requires of the leaders of those companies the social responsibility suggested by a growing number of commentators, from public policy analysts[27] to the Archbishop of Paris.[28]

Some argue that technology is governable and should be governed.[29] But once technology becomes small (therefore able to be hidden) and inexpensive (therefore affordable and potentially ubiquitous) it is already difficult to police, and once it becomes autonomous, it might become impossible to police. The last Shah of Iran was helpless against the subversive photocopier and the cassette recorder, and the Ayatollahs are faring little better as the Internet spreads in Iran.

In any case, technology is ungovernable ipso facto in any society that rejects regulation, as the U.S. has deliberately and conspicuously done in the case of the Internet. The operative question is not, as some claim, whether technology can be subject to the limitations of laws and rules, and not even whether it should be. The key question is will it be regulated and policed, and if the answer is no, or not much, then the other questions are moot.

But given that technology grows more powerful and clearly will not be regulated to any great extent there is an urgent need to determine what the future may hold. It is only with this sense of the pragmatic realities of growing technological capability in the context of increasing corporate power, globalization, deregulation, and devolution (on the one hand) and decreasing government power (on the other) that we can validly assess the future whether in the short or the long term.

Going Forward

There is inexorably growing citizen demand for a bigger voice in government, via technology. Some want it through direct vote on issues; others, through a closer online relationship with their representative. In both cases, the enabling technology exists, is in use, and is already having an impact.

And it is happening faster than we think: When senator McCain said that two elections from now we’d be voting on the Internet, he was evidently unaware that some 200 U.S. military personnel were about to cast their Election 2000 votes over the Internet, as part of a pilot project conducted by the Defense Department.

This accelerating trend in e-democracy, added to the accelerating and amplifying trends in technology itself, could result in the end of both representative and direct democracy as we know them and could replace them with a technology-dominated form of democracy combining elements of both representation and participation. Given:

· The accelerating rate of advances in technology,

· The accelerating introduction of innovative applications of technology in government, elections, and other aspects and functions of democracy, and

· The potential danger of unforeseen change to our fundamental democratic system and institutions wrought by technology and its innovative application for monetary and political gain

we must urgently consider this and other potential futures. In a discussion about the role of technology in the September 11 tragedy, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said:

The real problem we face is not slowness in technological innovation. The real problem is slowness in legal and civil rights innovation in response to the technological change. . . . The reason for this failing has lots to do with the way lawyers think. We are reactive traditionalists. It is hard to think creatively. But if we used the same kind of innovative creativity that our Framers used in crafting our government, we could craft creative balances between technological capabilities and human weakness.[30]

Immediate issues include:

· One respondent to the Lieberman/Thompson study asked whether politicians, prone to answering citizen concerns with canned responses, would “hear us any better on the Internet?”

· If careless voting, like careless driving, can hurt oneself and others, as we move faster and faster down the superhighway of e-democracy should we impose speed limits? And should we revisit the old idea that voters, like drivers, be educated, tested, and licensed?

· When information overload forces us all to become masters of one narrow trade, who -- or what -- will be the jack of all, and if there is none, what will the world be like?

· Despite Napster’s capitulation to the music industry, and despite a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming copyright for writers whose published work is re-published online, ultimately technology may render the law powerless to protect patents and copyright. Does this sort of “freedom” enhance -- or does it threaten -- democracy?

· Is it really so inconceivable that we will one day progress -- if that is the right word -- to totally direct democracy? Or, perhaps, to a form of representative democracy that is equivalent to direct democracy, whereby each of us has an “artificial representative”-- a software agent with intimate knowledge not only of our individual desires, values, needs, and proclivities but also of every social, political, and economic issue recorded on the Internet?

· Why should elected representatives assume they are immune from the disintermediary devastation visited upon travel agents and bank tellers?

· What are the necessary preconditions for a successful and sustainable transition to e-democracy, and to what extent are those preconditions satisfied?

· Could one of those preconditions be that the international community makes, adopts, and enforces common laws and regulations governing technology as it is in the process of doing with respect to trade, on the grounds that a global village cannot function peaceably without ordinances that apply to every villager? Do we need a world government?

· The overarching question is: How can we prove Socrates wrong, and introduce and maintain a viable e-democracy while avoiding a catastrophic saltation to e-tyranny?

Efforts to answer these and other questions have been or are being undertaken by various government organs, philanthropic bodies, public and private think tanks, and grassroots organizations, but none takes full account of the whole cloth of social, cultural, and political dynamics in the context of accelerating technological and globalization dynamics. Without both the global and the technological perspectives – especially, an accounting of the acceleration in both -- important local questions and issues ranging from the implementation of online voting for the next elections to the e-democratic establishment and e-governmental implementation of policy in transport, education, energy, and so on are being addressed blindly.

My talk was designed to stimulate awareness of the future impacts of technology on governance and democracy, so you (if you involved in administration) can begin to help meet the preconditions for a successful transition to e-government and e-democracy.

* * *

David Ellis is a futurist and author of the award-winning Technology and the Future of Health Care: Preparing for the Next 30 Years. (Jossey-Bass, 2000.)