Public discourse in the age of the Internet
Republic.com 2.0
by Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp.
Create Your Own Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp.
Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total.”It is some time in the future,” he writes. “Technology has greatly increased people’s ability to ‘filter’ what they want to read, see, and hear.” His vision continues:
You are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. You can choose your own programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping and news of your choice… You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less…
Of course, this world is already approximated today by the Internet. From the consumer’s perspective, the Internet represents the fullest triumph yet of free, individual choice in the marketplace of ideas — never before, we are so often reminded, have the barriers to getting information been so low, and the choices about where to get it so many. Sunstein’s unsettling proposition in Republic.com 2.0 is that this choice might not necessarily be a good thing.
Consider the fact that every choice requires negation — that every time you say “yes” to one option you are reflexively saying “no” to all the others; that the more choices we have, therefore, the more stuff we end up rejecting. On the Internet, this is brought to its logical extreme: every time you choose to read one article, you are saying “no,” implicitly, to the hundreds of thousands of others available only one click away. Choosing one site — one blog, one review, one photo — you reject the vast majority of human knowledge ever produced. It’s a heady proposition, to be sure, and it seems to suggest that making choices well about what information we consume is one of our highest responsibilities as individuals. In an infinite marketplace, the individual is solely responsible for his own salvation. And in the infinite library of the Internet, the question of ignorance is not whether the information exists — it does — but whether we’ll choose to access it. To Cass Sunstein, this is unsettling. Sunstein is a constitutional law professor who believes that individuals have obligations to their communities as well as rights within them, and who also believes than a citizenry exposed to the right information is essential to the survival of the republic. To him, the very fact of having these choices about what information we consume means that we cannot, in fact, be prepared to make them well.
Sunstein makes two major arguments in his book. The first argument is a constitutional one: he claims that a republic needs a citizenry that is first, “exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance,” and, second, “share a range of common experiences.” This is the case, he argues, because a self-governing republic requires a citizenry committed to the process of deliberating on issues of public concern. Without their being exposed to a diverse amount of information, and without having a common basis on which to discourse, the very idea of a “sovereign people” begins to break down. Beyond its ability to satisfy our individual interests, Sunstein says, information exists as the glue that holds our republic together. Sunstein’s key contention, then, is that free expression in a republic requires not just freedom but also responsibility — that each citizen not only can but must access diverse information and deliberate on it critically and respectfully. The very act of flipping through a newspaper, then, is an exercise in civic virtue.
Sunstein’s second argument is, in effect, that the Internet is undermining all of this. Because it allows us to filter out materials that we do not want to be exposed to, Sunstein argues, the web creates what he calls “personal information cocoons.” As our ability to choose becomes greater, the number and precision of these personal information cocoons proliferates, until each person can live in his own little informational world customized to mirror all his prejudices. In this state, of course, people can’t find common ground; they don’t operate with the same facts. By avoiding material that unsettles their worldviews, they become radicalized and intolerant.
The problem with choice, for Sunstein, is that it runs contrary to our positive responsibilities as citizens in a republic. Choice isolates us. It dislocates us from the collective. And the problem with the Internet, for Sunstein, is that it is the ultimate choice machine. It’s paradoxical, to be sure: the very diversity of information available leads directly to our insularity; its abundance leads to our ignorance. It’s our freedom to choose that undermines systematically our freedom to self-govern.
Sunstein’s argument, while compelling, strikes me as only half-right. The fragmentation of our culture is a vitally important concern, and it’s unequivocally real. Sociologists show that American community has been in decline for over fifty years. People are less connected to their fellow citizens; they are less likely to feel trust or affection toward their elected officials; and they are less likely to join organizations and more likely to — as famously put by sociologist Robert Putnam — “bowl alone.” Yet one wonders, can a trend that has been proceeding for nearly fifty years have anything to do with the Internet?
Consider this summer’s healthcare debates. Few things in recent cultural memory have epitomized as clearly what it means to be “uncivic” in a self-governing republic. Numerous much-touted town hall meetings approached open violence; outdoor rallies were filled with apoplectic, openly-racist sloganeering. It’s easy to see in these events exactly the sort of fragmentation that Sunstein warns about: our culture fracturing into information cocoons, where lies like “death panels” gain wide currency; a citizenry that can’t enter into a space of public discourse without, quite literally, bringing its guns; the difficulty (or perhaps impossibility) of legislating positive change in these conditions of self-government. All this was brought to bear as Sunstein predicted. Yet the Internet seems not to have been the cause at all. The causes of a radicalized right wing are many. They are sociological: questions of ethnicity, income, and religion all come into play. And there’s a case to be made that there are relevant wider cultural phenomena as well: a general drift, pervasive in all aspects of American society, away from priority of community and civic virtue generally.
Yet whatever the causes of the splenetic right wing, the Internet is not among them. To paraphrase a review of the first addition of Sunstein’s book: you could un-invent the Internet and you’d still have each and every picketer on the national mall with a swastika painted onto President Obama’s forehead. If the Internet’s to be blamed at all, then, it’s for reflecting cultural predispositions, not creating them. The question we have to ask ourselves is not where the Internet went wrong — but where did we?
Depending on your point of view, however, maybe even that judgment is premature. While Sunstein fears for the break down of the collective, there are some who openly embrace it. Fragmentation, they say, is another word for individualization, and individualism, so it goes, is the essence of freedom. In Create Your Own Economy, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen proceeds from just this perspective, and ends with conclusions stunning in their contrast to Sunstein’s. Cowen hails the Internet on the exactly the grounds that Sunstein fears it: the power that it gives the individual to construct his own informational world. “The notion of ‘ordering information’ may sound a little dry,” Cowen writes, “but it is a joy in our everyday lives.”
We are entering a world where the collection and ordering of information has reached baroque, extravagant extremes, and this is (mostly) good thing. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating our own economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.
The “path to prosperity in a disordered world,” as the subtitle of the book reads, is nothing less, Cowen says, than learning to actively create our own consciousness through the Internet. “At its core it is all about you,” he writes. “Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns.” Cowen takes this notion alarmingly far. About a third of the book is dedicated to reconceiving “autism” as a virtue in a world that demands consciousness-creating: “In essence we are using tools and capital goods-computers and the web-to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics.” At another point, he tells the individual to step into Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine,” saying that our problems are not an over-willingness to delude ourselves but an under-willingness. “Isn’t our general tendency to clutch at the thought of reality just one more instance of the illusion that we are always in control? I say let’s put down our polemic against living in our heads and let’s put down our bias against interiority.”
If we want to understand our own cultural fragmentation then we might be served well by reflecting not only on these arguments, but on the assumptions that underpin them. Cowen not only speaks about the positive effects of fragmentation; he also, in his way, symbolizes their cause. His entire argument depends on his readers accepting that individualism is the highest goal of freedom, and that the problem with our society is that we’re not willing enough to work only for ourselves as we assemble the information around us. This idea, of course, is nothing new. Since at least the 19th century in America — which witnessed the advent of the “Darwinian” rationale for industrial competition and the expansion of the frontier out west — the myth of the self-creating individual has been a mainstay in our cultural discourse. And by all accounts, this myth has only gained in stature in the wake of the Reagan-Goldwater conservative movement. Cowen’s argument is novel, then, because he applies the ideas of consumer sovereignty to the Internet space. His ideal of an “autistic mental type,” who weaves stories for himself from the tidbits he glean from the blogs in his RSS reader, and of whom nothing is asked other than to “create his own economy” — this is the cowboy individualist of the technological world. Cowen’s book thus serves as a double indicator for the fragmentation of our culture: not only does he explain the fragmentation potentials of the Internet, he applauds them. Not only does his book tell us about the effects of the Internet on the fragmentation of our culture, but it also serves to symbolize the intellectual movement that seeks to sustain and legitimize that fragmentation.
Both of these books, then, are unlikely tracts of cultural warfare. The rift between them is between two notions of freedom and citizenship. Yet if both books are, in effect, cultural polemics, then neither of them admits it. And thus both miss the point: this is not about the Internet. The question of what it means to be a free citizen in a republic cannot be contained in an analysis of a tool, no matter how powerful or catalyzing. The Internet, after all, is only a framework for gathering existing cultural assumptions and social values. Whether choices exist is not nearly as important as both Sunstein and Cowen believe; the real question is how as citizens we make these choices, what we feel our responsibilities are, and what we feel entitled to. In short: unless we as a culture re-adopt a vocabulary of civic virtuousness — and can ask of ourselves to think less like consumers and more like citizens — than it doesn’t matter one bit whether it’s from the Internet or the newspaper that we’re getting our news.
In 1996, the writer Jonathan Franzen published an essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. In one line he captured this feeling of cultural anomie: “Human existence,” he wrote, “is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe.” Market capitalism, he argued, has thus been successful precisely because it compounded the delusion that we are, each of us, at the center of our 0wn universe. The problem with the Internet, then, is that it takes this delusion one step forward. The traditional role of reading, Franzen claims in his essay, was to help us overcome the limitations of ourselves: forcing us to experience other’s thoughts; to enter into dialogue with another’s consciousness; to deliberate on issues of public importance. The essence of reading, in some sense, is that we don’t have a choice about the thoughts to which we are exposed, or about the nature of the cultural dialogue we enter. To the extent that the Internet places individual choice at the center of its paradigm, it undermines the traditional role that information (ie reading) plays in teaching us to think beyond ourselves. It reinforces the delusion that our own individual choice and our own immediate gratification are the central matters of a well-lived life.
Yet to say that the Internet created this delusion is disingenuous and wrong. The problem is deeper. The problem of the Internet, in fact, is that it is just one more step, on more tax — like the car over the bus; like the suburb over the city; like the iPod over the concert hall — on our abilities as citizens to relate to one another in a self-governing community. To blame the Internet alone is beside the point. It’s like blaming the mirror for its reflection of ourselves.