Hyperdemocracy

(7 of 8)
The oft-expressed hope for cyberspace is that any tendency toward fragmentation into contending groups will be offset by a capacity for edifying deliberation. And decorous dialogue has indeed been seen there. But cyberspace is also notorious for bursts of hostility that face-to-face contact would have suppressed. And a perusal of the Internet's newsgroups suggests that any tendencies toward convergence will have some real gaps to bridge. There's alt.politics.greens, alt.politics.libertarian, alt.politics.radical-left, alt.fan.dan-quayle, alt.politics.nationalism.white, alt.fan.g-gordon-liddy, alt.rush-limbaugh.die.a .flaming.death. In a nation that has trouble fixing its attention on the public good and is facing increasingly bitter cultural wars, this is not a wholly encouraging glimpse of the future. There's no alt.transcendent.public.interest in sight.

Not to worry. In the Gingrich camp, optimism runs rampant. Alvin Toffler and a few other seers prepared a "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" for the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which supports Gingrich. The authors dismiss in Tofflerian language those who fret about social balkanization in cyberspace as "Second Wave ideologues" (that is, Industrial Revolution dinosaurs, not clued in to the "Third Wave," the knowledge revolution). "Rather than being a centrifugal force helping to tear society apart, cyberspace can be one of the main forms of glue holding together an increasingly free and diverse society." The key to a "secure and stable civilization" is to make "appropriate social arrangements." Unfortunately, they never get around to specifying the social arrangements.

If there are "arrangements" that would indeed bring stability to a cyberdemocratic society, they might be found by first dispelling all residues of election-year rhetoric and acknowledging that Washington, far from being out of touch, is too plugged in, and that if history is any guide, the problem will only grow as technology advances. The challenge, thus conceived, is to buffer the legislature from the pressure of feedback.

One possibility is electoral reform. But limiting the number of congressional terms, the current vogue, makes less sense than expanding the length of terms. The incentive to vote for a responsible budget that's < healthful in the long run but painful in the short run depends on whether you face election next year or in three years.

There is another possible solution: leadership. Someone -- a President, say -- could actually stand up and tell the truth: that various public goods call for widespread sacrifice. But leadership is harder in an age of decentralized media -- an age of "demassification," in the Tofflers' term. In the old days a President could give a prime-time talk on all three networks and know that he had everyone's attention. But this sort of forum is disappearing as conservatives watch National Empowerment Television, nature buffs watch the Discovery Channel, sports fans watch ESPN. When Clinton sought to address the nation last December after his party's debacle, the networks, conscious of their competition, were reluctant. But they finally gave him the midsize soapbox they can deliver these days. He used it to promise a tax cut.