Democracy in the Age of Networks & Covid-19
Covid-19 is collapsing the Industrial Age and accelerating the terrifying rise of the Network Era: here’s how to harness it for everyone instead of autocrats and oligarchs
1. The Covid-19 pandemic infected more than 33 million people and killed more than a million of its victims around the world. Hiding in plain sight for weeks, like a serial killer or terror network; the raging pandemic suspended the world’s commerce, locked up much of its population, and brought home to rich countries a level of devastation they usually view from afar. Moreover, these world’s most technologically sophisticated economic blocks, the US and the European Union,dithered, exacerbating deep economic and social wounds along national, regional and racial lines.
The powerful western democracies were equally unprepared for the 9/11 terrorist attacks that lured them into interminable Mideast wars and domestic strife, the subprime contagion that ignited the Great Recession and Euro crisis, and troll networks that turbocharged autocratic nationalism around the world. All were asymmetric network attacks: like Covid-19 and the misinformation epidemic around it, they were able to incubate and scale in the fragile gateways between disconnected communities and a hyper-connected planet, eventually bursting into everyone’s lives.
The increased frequency, impact and synchronization of crises around the globe and across the political divide suggests a postwar order past its breaking point. My four decades of work on technology’s impact on society strongly suggest that the proliferation of distributed technologies — PCs, smartphones, big data and AI — has accelerated the pace of change and the way societies work by connecting more than 10 billion devices across 130 trillion web pages and apps. These vast interlinked electronic webs are largely two-way and peer-to-peer, running circles around the industrial age’s top-down institutions and mass communications. They create what network science calls small world effects that enable key components of power itself — stories, videos and money — to travel at lightning speed around the world without asking governments’ or companies’ permission. Innovators, activists, insurgents and viruses alike bypass family and institutional bonds, relying instead on so-called weak ties to forge explosive coalitions, as well as global contagions, at lightning speed.
The incessant feedback between digitally amplified connections creates lots of noise and uncertainty, enabling what sociologist Manuel Castells predicted a decade ago would be “The Rise of the Network Society”: an era of “… instantaneity, random discontinuity … split-second capital transactions, flex-time enterprises, instant wars, and … daily war making … scattered all over the planet …”
This poses both a fundamental threat, as well as a vital opportunity, to reinvent democracy by harnessing the technological wave of the times. Like the industrial age before it, the network paradigm can’t be resisted and can’t be managed using old-fashioned tools and worldviews. If democracies pry these fast, limitless and relatively clean network technologies out of the hands of autocrats and oligarchs, they stand to usher in an era of unprecedented freedom and sustainable growth. If they don’t rise to the challenge, even harsher lessons await them.
2. Asymmetric network attacks, even outsized ones like Covid, are generally absorbed by growing and dynamic societies. But when a social order becomes old and frayed — after failed wars, economic dislocation and an unravelling unifying narrative — the anxiety that it no longer protects its citizens sets in. Governments’ incapacity to protect and connect its citizens has produced a marked loss of faith in democracy and widely observed pessimism in the West. This “state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance” as British historian Arnold Toynbee called it, is today recognized by social science as a collapse of social capital and inter-group understanding.
Rural and urban communities in rich democracies experienced a very different pandemic from mobile and connected cosmopolitan elites. The latter benefited from every crisis since the 1980’s — most of all from the Great Recession and Covid — while left-behind small towns and minority communities have suffered disproportionately. Rising income inequality is only the tip of the iceberg: the greater impact comes from local business closures, abandoned schools and hospitals and younger generations leaving for better opportunities.
Brexit Britain, Trump’s America and what historian Philip Ther refers to as “interrupted Europe” are unravelling under the unbearable burden of lonely disconnectedness and deaths of despair. Elite incomprehension and criminalization is the indispensable catalyst in radicalizing them, as it was for Black America during the crack epidemic of the 80’s and 90’s and Muslim communities after 9/11. The condescension and disconnection has created, in Trump’s America and beyond The True Believer, as social philosopher Eric Hoffer has called desperate people who rally behind despised slogans, images and leaders whose craven violence reflects their own relentless rejection.
A large body of historical work confirms historian Toynbee’s contention that a distressed middle class like Trump’s left-behind Americans is decisive in triggering a “schism in the body social” that collapses empires. Unlike minority communities with greater burdens, unsettled mainstream pluralities can invoke powerful homophily ties — family, professional and cultural bonds — to commandeer parties, money and media against more fractious majority coalitions.
Thus a once-mighty middle class is this atomized into warring particles through the centrifuges of technological media. It won’t relent by being ignored or defeated — society itself has to change or they will change it.
3. The network paradigm would see the decades-long march toward division, inequality and disconnectedness as a massive failure of network inclusion: elites hoarding vital connections, information and decision-making forums that drive wealth, health, liberty and creativity. Ideologies can’t solve the problem because they are the problem: either loftily top-down or destructively bottom-up. In network societies innovations and creativity follow a largely lateral, peer-to-peer diffusion path laid out by sociologist Everett Rodgers: bustling enclaves attracting early adopters from direct connections within communities, with successful insurgents eventually winning over mainstream markets.
Diffusion is largely self-organizing. Its fundamental property is emergence in which deceptively simple innovations in crowded markets — like mobile phones, book and DVD sales, desktop tools, search engines and social networks — create the vast empires of Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
While initially liberating, the process is subject to power laws — science’s name for the 80/20 rule — that automatically favor a handful of agile incumbents, successful renegades and connected gatekeepers that collect vital connections. Digital networks make this stratification worse by vastly expanding the reach and control of elites.
Power laws ensure that replacing an old guard with new innovators, reformers or revolutionaries, without taking into account how networks operate, creates new bosses often worse than the old ones. Power in the network era has to be diffused outwards from where it’s concentrated to where it’s lagging, community by community.
Nature has magnificent ways of reining in predators and reinventing systems. Biologists see allometries across all species that slow down creatures as they become large, while smaller animals gang up to swarm larger predators, checking their power and feeding off them. But lasting change comes only after democracies, under existential pressure, transform notions of property, capital and citizenship. If Covid doesn’t provide the impetus then even harsher lessons await democracies.
4. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson as well as management consultants at McKinsey agree that transformation requires broad coalitions, mobilization, agile new agencies and leaders who deeply understand institutions as well as public sentiment. In my own experience, though, words will sound stale, coalitions stand to crumble and policy fails without amplifying them through the technological wave of the times. A new paradigm offers, as science historian Thomas Kuhn put it, “a whole new way of regarding the problems”.
Any new coalition to beat back the autocratic tide has to embrace adversaries through language that transcends current conflicts. In the urgent context of the US presidential elections, the Democratic challenge against Trump has to promise to reconnect small town, urban and suburban communities without fear or favor to the very heart of the American dream.
A key lesson of network society can be learned from the long struggle of Black America. A reignited burst of integrity and determination after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 changed the game for democracy on the planet, an example of asymmetric network power as a force for inclusion. The peer-to-peer activity included congressman James Clyburn’s March 2020 candidacy-saving endorsement of President Elect Joe Biden; the voter turn-out work of Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight in Georgia, and the institutionalist integrity of Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris and the tireless dignified work of the the Black church, activists, and each and every vote-counter in Detroit and Atlanta. A small but culturally critical minority of 44 million citizens in the US used network small worlds, and the power of so-called weak-tie coalitions, to become the vanguard of democracy’s fight-back against autocracy on a planet of nearly 8 billion people.
But lasting change, in the network era, can only come by reversing existing government and commercial connections that extract taxes, fees, work and data from consumers. A three year post-Covid income, payroll and corporate tax exemption for family businesses, care and protective workers and individual contractors would be a great start. Portable healthcare passports that can’t be arbitrarily rejected would be another. Integrating university, transport, digital and capital support so that disconnected regions can import rather than export talent — like the Marshall and GI plans — is critical.
Going further, paid and unpaid work should be re-valued for their measurable network contribution rather than distorted labor market prices. AI and networked technologies that enhance worker productivity should carry subsidies while robots that replace people should be taxed for their social costs.
Personal data should be private or community property, garnering off-the-top royalties from giant tech monopolies the way songwriters participate in every penny generated by their songs. Platforms should be open — interoperable in tech jargon — to competing producers, search engines and components. Consumers should be able to seamlessly transport their content and data from platform to platform like phone and social security numbers.
The value of these incredible troves of data, along with the trillions of dollars of government subsidies that made their monetization possible, should be subject to monopoly, subsidy and gate-keeper taxes. The proceeds shouldn’t go into politicized and siloed government bureaucracies but rather fund flexible universal capital accounts for enhanced education, relocation, enterprise and investment the way trust funds secure flexible futures for the children of the rich.
Economies reordered by software pioneers Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergei Brin and Larry Page require what network scientist Duncan Watts calls multiscale connectivity: new agencies — especially for protection and care — should integrate all the levers of power, not just money and force but information, education, health, housing and transport; connected up and down hierarchies and across disciplines and overseen real-time by Wikipedia-inspired forums and assemblies.
Structural change takes a long time and people get discouraged. Demonstrable action on the ground makes all the difference. Strategy consultant Richard Rumelt calls these proximate objectives: “close enough at hand to be feasible.” The New Deal’s earliest and most popular program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, mobilized millions of young people to take care of the environment. Today a Regional Protective Care Corps should furnish training, cash and college credit to millions of young people ready to return to their rural, urban and suburban communities to provide supervised, empowering social, protective and environmental care. The approach works because of a network property called Hebbian synchronization: people (like cells and organisms) that work relentlessly toward the common goals forge strong bonds.
The greatest and most attainable goal is converting messy, finite industrial btu-energy with nearly infinite, relatively clean cpu-power including electrification, intelligent infrastructure and accelerating the migration of work and entertainment to the digital realm in order to free up resources to heal a parched planet and its Covid-stricken communities.
Monitoring weak links, managing surges and outages of power and diffusing all forms of energy including money, knowledge so that all the organs of the organism can thrive is network management. If newly elected US President elect and a new generation of European leaders adopt network management, they would make democracy, in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, “worth fighting for.”
Network scientist Watts summarizes the challenge in his book, Six Degrees: “… the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each other’s burdens as well.”
The admonition is echoed by every major religion: “… if you go on biting and devouring one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.”
As in so many earlier critical junctures, democracies stand at the precipice of ruin or regeneration depending on whether or not they inclusively harness the powerful technological wave of our times. Covid-19, and the seismic events around it, has made clear that we have no choice but to embrace the network paradigm, with its clean and agile peer-to-peer power, to survive and thrive for the sake of our children and the planet we all live in.
[for more detail, references and readings, see Paradigm Lost, also on Medium. Also follow the project on twitter, https://twitter.com/oeralp]
