Politicizing Digital Space

Front matter

TREVOR GARRISON SMITH

Theory, the Internet and Renewing Democrac y

Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy

Contents

2.1 2.2 2.3

2.4 2.5 2.6 27 2.8 2.9

What is the Place of Politics?

Introduction

In the wake of the so-called ‘Arab Spring? Occupy, and Anonymous movements, attention has increasingly been paid to the intersection of politics and the internet. In the popular media, commentators such as Roger Cohen of the New York Times took a technological determinist approach, as he declared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to be the true leader of the protests spreading across North Africa (Cohen 2011). The internet was positioned as causing the protests, as technological modernity was positioned as bringing with it political modernity, thus leading to the overthrow of long-standing dictatorships. Against this technological determinist view, many scholars swung to the opposite side of the spectrum and declared that the internet was not really important at all, and positioned it as merely another useful tool among many for political activists (Burris 2011). What is missing from these two positions is an appreciation of what the internet could mean for a reinvigorated idea of politics itself. These movements are interesting not simply because they used social networks and mobile phones as part of their protests, but because they demonstrated some of the latent possibilities of using the internet to usher in a new form of radically democratic politics.

While I will argue that the internet is more than a useful tool for protesters, the biggest obstacle to establishing a new form of online politics is not technological but political. Too often, theorists take the idea of politics for granted without discussing what it means. This theoretical confusion has led people to claim that everything is political, thus diminishing the specificity and value of politics as a concept, or has led the public to equate politics with the exercise of authority by government. In this sense, politics is now seen by many as simply a dirty word, as something to avoid and distance oneself from. As Colin Hay points out, we have gotten to the point where the word politics is now used as a term of derision in every day speech, as to ‘label an activity or process “political” is, it seems, invariably to deride and distance oneself from iť (Hay 2007, 5).

Smith, T. G. 2017. Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, The Internet, and Renewing Democracy. Pp. 1-9. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book5.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

All of the aspects of the internet which might help enhance political space and improve engagement will be lost if the concept of politics as something worthwhile and empowering is abandoned. We cannot talk about new forms of online politics enthusiastically when people have given up on politics altogether.

Traditional structures of authority have increasingly begun to fail in recent years. Not only did the Arab Spring come out of nowhere to bring down what seemed liked eternal dictatorships, but traditional structures of authority within representative democracies have begun to come under attack as well, as people continue to turn against ‘politics’ In the extraordinary 2016 United States election campaign, the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump ushered in a serious challenge to the American party establishment of the Democrats and Republicans. The loss of trust in the traditional party power structures opened the door for these two outsider candidates. Trump’s strong support from the working class in the de-industrialized Rust Belt is a sign of the failure of the authority of traditional unions, as they have lost their power to organize the working class politically. The 2016 election also can be viewed as a failure of the traditional authority of the corporate media establishment. Trump was able to manipulate media coverage so that he was continually the focus, while at the same time instilling a sense of distrust towards the mainstream media in his supporters. The election of Trump, the victory of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum of 2016, and the rise of the alt-right or post-fascism (see Tamas 2000 for an insightful overview of post-fascism as a political philosophy) demonstrate rejections of ‘politics’ from the right. From the left, the election of Syriza in Greece in 2015, the new-found popularity of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party in 2015, along with the Occupy Wall Street movement entering the public consciousness in 2011 were all rejections of the traditional political establishment as well.

These rejections of establishment ‘politics’ should be interpreted as a rejection not of politics itself, but of a latent, although unarticulated, desire for more politics. Many political theorists, ranging from Chantal Mouffe to Slavoj Zizek, have recently described the status quo in Europe and North America as post-political, a point that was being made by Hannah Arendt as early as the 1950s. The problem was not that politics has become oppressive, but that we simply lack avenues for politics altogether. In recent years, the neoliberal consensus ushered in an era where even social democratic political parties adopted neoliberal economics under the so-called Third Way. The recent events just described represent an undoing of this post-political neoliberal consensus as well as a desire to throw a wrench into the standard operating procedures of representative democracy. While people want to break this anti-political status quo, and are doing so by rejecting establishment politicians and traditional power structures, these repressed desires for more politics can also be dangerous if they lack actual political avenues of expression and simply become a call for further depoliticizations.

Without a positive vision for what politics could be when it is freed from the shackles of representative government or mere reactive protest, this popular uprising against the establishment can easily be channelled into post-fascist movements which harness the desire for change into an even more insidious form of anti-politics. The Arab Spring movement swapped a dictator for an elected Islamist government which was then overthrown by the military, making it a true full-turn revolution. The rejection of establishment politics and the decline of the neoliberal consensus has led to the election of Donald Trump and new popularity for other post-fascist leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France. There is a popular desire globally for a new way of doing and being political which moves beyond both the alienating structures of representation and the simply reactive forms of oppositional politics which has become overly focused on victimization and identity. A positive conception of politics as empowering and participatory is required to prevent this anti-establishment sentiment from becoming the grounds for something worse. It is the contention of this book that to reinvigorate the idea of politics, it must go online in order to find new spaces and modes of being political that are unavailable offline. The goal is to articulate a theory of politics that is realizable with the help of the internet, thus making politics something that can be actively worked towards and not merely a far off dream.

The internet is no longer new or strange, but is now simply a normal part of our lives. In the early days of theorizing the internet, there was a feeling that the internet held radical potential to change everything about our political structures. As the current trend of cyberscepticism is keen to remind us, those early ideas about the internet transforming everything have failed to materialize. The cybersceptics tend to overstate their case, however, and in the process make the same mistake as the cyberutopians when they make claims about “The Internet’ as a whole. The internet is not a monolith, and thus being utopian or sceptical about its potential makes little sense. It is time to move beyond somewhat simplistic ideas of talking about the internet as if there was only way to use it and only one type of website. It is time to look at the internet as a collection of different websites, applications, and hardware configurations and thus realize that any statement about The Internet being political is as meaningless as speaking about the political suitability of planet Earth. The primary interest in the internet for the purposes of this book is precisely that online space is so malleable. The internet is interesting and necessary for reinvigorating politics because it can provide possibilities for beginning something new. New websites and applications can be created which can help facilitate various aspects of politics in a way that is simply not possible offline. Thus the argument of this book links politics to the internet because, as Arendt argued, politics is inherently about beginning something new, which today is most easily accomplished online.

Both left and right responses to the lack of politics that are driving anti-establishment sentiment have failed to lead to any real change. Despite my enthusiasm for Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, both movements failed to put forward an alternative vision which could lead to real change. They were successful movements but only insofar as they were reactive: yes, we were all opposed to the dictators in Egypt and Tunisia and were opposed to the 1% around the world, but neither of these movements had any success in articulating alternatives. The same can be said for the newfound anti-establishment post-fascist movements. They have been successful in rallying people against some of the more excessive elements of neoliberal globalization and have harnessed popular sentiment against neoliberal technocrats, but their alternative to the status quo is an even deeper form of depoliticization. Both sides have engaged with creating political space online, which as many scholars have outlined (see for example Fuchs 2014, Milan 2015, Atton 2006), provide a few nascent examples of how a new form of politics can operate online. What is needed is to take these examples as a starting point, and consider the wider theoretical idea of how to use the internet to be political in a way that moves beyond both unsustainable street protests and the election of populist representatives. This book seeks to develop a theoretical account of some of the primary issues such a new form of online politics will face. This is not a book about how political activists currently use the internet, but instead is about how political theory can help us think ahead in order to address the sort of problems and arguments that arise when we seek to be political online.

In order to create online spaces that can facilitate more political engagement, we need a clear understanding of what we mean by politics, especially in relation to its opposing force of anti-politics. The political theory of Hannah Arendt is somewhat unique in that she takes politics as its own domain of human activity seriously. For Arendt, politics is not merely the exercise of state authority or a subfield of economics or ethics. Politics is what makes us free, rather than what oppresses us, and it is precisely this positive connotation of politics that must be reinvigorated. Arendt’s political theory is attractive precisely because she views politics as beneficial in its own right, and not a mere means to some other end. If the existing anti-political deadlock is to be broken, activists must seek to reinvigorate politics, rather than escape it. In addition to drawing on Arendt’s theoretical framework for an empowering rather than oppressing understanding of politics, there is a growing group of contemporary thinkers who are seeking to reclaim politics as a specific and serious activity. I will place these contemporary theorists in a supporting role to the central figure of Arendt.

While it can be difficult to lump groups of diverse theorists together, thinkers such as Jacques Ranciére, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Zizek have been actively attempting to reclaim politics as precisely what is needed to bring change. This group of thinkers actively position themselves against the reduction of politics to state-based administration common among mainstream liberal and conservative thinkers as well as against the postmodern left who dissolve the specificity of politics into the critique of differential power relations. Politics as the state or politics as differential power relations ends up creating deeply anti-political attitudes in which the political is equated with restrictions on freedom. For the neoliberal, politics as state administration oppresses the free market and individual, and for the postmodern leftist, politics is an unequal power relation which generates the oppression of minorities. In both cases, politics is positioned as a problem to be overcome.

While Ranciére, Zizek, and Mouffe are important contemporary figures because they are shifting the conversation toward viewing politics as something worthwhile, the work of Arendt on this measure stands above them all and often seems just as, if not more, relevant to contemporary issues than the work of those alive today. After writing On the Origins of Totalitarianism, a book with a pessimistic undertone that sees totalitarian impulses seeping into all forms of government, Arendt witnessed the events of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 which spurred her to write The Human Condition and The Promise of Politics. These two books are primarily concerned with the value of politics and its ability to create something new in order to break from even the most oppressive anti-political situation. Against the backdrop of today’s general hostility to politics, Arendt stands out as a staunch defender of politics in a way that demands contemporary attention.

Arendt’s reception in contemporary scholarship is varied and complex, reflective of her own varied and complex thought. While there is a body of scholarship that focuses on her defence of politics,’ Arendt is often invoked in ways that are antithetical to her commitment to politics. As Kalyvas points out, there is a trend in Arendt scholarship that is gradually moving away from the political qualities of her writings. Today she is read more as a philosopher and a moral thinker rather than as a political theorist concerned predominantly with the secular realm of appearances (2009, 188).

The recent edited collection on Arendt’s thought for the occasion of her 100" birthday Thinking in Dark Times demonstrates this trend (Berkowitz, Katz, and Keenan, 2009). The bulk of the essays in the book treat Arendt’s thought outside of and even in some cases against her explicitly political concerns. Theorists such as Seyla Benhabib (1992) interpret Arendt as an advocate of consensus rather than as the staunch defender of agonistic politics she actually was. Such interpretations have spread and have even led prominent proponents of agonistic politics, such as Chantal Mouffe (2005, 8), to engage in polemics against Arendt as a supposed supporter of eliminating political conflict. Zizek (2010) and Ranciére (2004) also engage with Arendt only with respect to her definition of totalitarianism and concept of human rights, again underscoring this trend where Arendt is recast as a moral philosopher, despite her continued insistence that she was not a philosopher but in fact a political theorist. These depictions of Arendt as hostile to the project of recovering politics by this group of political theorists are all the more remarkable because of how much they share with

Arendt’s core project of asserting the value of politics. In reading these contemporary thinkers as an extension of Arendt’s thoughts about the promise of politics, Iam seeking to reassert Arendt’s proper position as a political thinker and demonstrate her sometimes obscured influence on these thinkers, while also using these contemporary thinkers to make up for some of her limitations.

At the same time, the theories of these thinkers have been around for awhile, yet have failed to inspire confidence in a political alternative to the anti-political status quo, not just in the wider population but even among activists. After the fall of long standing dictatorships in North Africa, the response to the question of what came next was representative democracy, not as an enthusiastic victory that activists had been fighting for, but more as a kind default answer for lack of any better ideas. It is on this register, however, that we need to reinvigorate political theory by pushing an engagement with the internet. To digitize political theory is to re-examine the work of Arendt and the others for ways in which new avenues of application may be opened up by emerging technologies. While Mouffe and Zizek have expressed hesitation with respect to the prospect for online democracy, and Ranciére has said next to nothing on the topic, Arendt has traditionally been interpreted as being somewhat sceptical of the prospects for politics in relation to technology. Arendt begins The Human Condition with an analysis of the launching of Sputnik, which she fears is ushering in the ultimate form of alienation which could render politics impossible. What she did not realize was that satellites would become part of a global communications network which has the potential to greatly enhance the ability for people to directly engage politically with each other.

The argument of this book rests on the idea that politics as a concept and practice can be reinvigorated by both digitizing the political and politicizing the digital. Political theory can help restore the poor reputation of politics but only if it appears relevant to our daily lives. We can theorize radical democracies and new forms of participatory decision making, but without the technological aspect that presents a real path toward implementation, such theorizing comes across as disconnected from reality. At the same time, much of the literature that focuses on the internet from the perspective of communication theory and political economy tends to lack a proper engagement with the notion of the political. The fact that political activists might use social media to organize with other activists or that these social media platforms are owned by large corporations are interesting aspects of the interaction of politics and the internet, but are somewhat narrow concerns without a proper account of what it means to be political in the first place. This book does not simply assume that politics is obvious enough to not need an explanation, but instead focuses primarily on providing a theoretical account of what politics is and how it is complicated by placing it online.

To develop this point that politics itself needs an explanation in order to make sense of how politics can operate online, I argue that politics can be defined in terms of four terrains of contestation (public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict), which act as sliding scales between political and anti-political configurations of a situation. While this makes politics as an overarching concept harder to define, as it consists of configuring public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict in ways that are more political than anti-political, it can allow us to use these four terrains to make judgements about whether a situation is political or not. Since each terrain is a sliding scale from political to anti-political, the terrains can be used as both evaluative criteria and as sites of action, as the goal is to push each terrain toward a more political configuration. Rather than simply setting out a definition of politics as a whole, and leaving a question mark on how to get from here to there, adopting these four terrains as sliding scales means that action toward politicization can be more concretely envisioned.

Each chapter will focus on one of these terrains and both argue for why configuring it in a more political fashion is superior to an anti-political configuration, and how the internet can help achieve the goal of increased politicization. The internet will also be a complicating factor in many terrains, as simply placing politics online does not automatically lead to more politicization. I persistently argue that the internet is malleable and open to different configurations, given that the software layer allows the creation of new spaces and the reprogramming of old ones. Again, it is important to remember that when I speak of the internet, I am referring to a collection of websites, hardware configurations, and different possible uses. Thus the focus is on how to use the internet to bring about more politicization while at the same time being aware that the internet can be used in many depoliticizing ways as well.

In the chapters that follow I will develop the argument that Arendt and the group of contemporary thinkers mentioned earlier can provide a theoretical ground for understanding a technologically enabled politics. In a time when the political realm is considered an exclusive space divorced from everyday life, we can build an online political realm that is readily accessible at all times. In the face of the state’s continuing operations to place people in identity boxes which mark them as unqualified to take part in politics, we can enter online spaces which disrupt identity and qualification in a radical way. When participation in public affairs is deemed too complicated or impossible for the average person, we can go online to engage and participate in unofficial forms of politics at the same time as millions of other people. When consensus has become a reigning idyll and dissent is seen not as the basis of politics but as something disruptive of it, the internet provides outlets for the expression and organization of dissent and conflicting opinions. Considered together, the internet is not simply something helpful or useful for a reinvigorated politics, but is the space within which the reinvigoration of politics will take place.

In order to make this argument, the next chapter will deal with the terrain of the political realm in terms of what it entails and how placing it online can be beneficial. Against anti-political attempts to deny the need for any defined political space and against the weaker arguments in favour of a public sphere, I position the political realm as a necessity for the commonality of politics. In order to be political, we need a protected space to exercise our political freedom in a positive sense. When thinking of how we interact online, it becomes clear that the internet is not just a technological object or tool, but a new form of space. Online space opens up a whole host of new ways of being and interacting, which can also call into existence new ways of being political. By placing such a political realm online, it both enables easy access to such a realm and generates debates about the political status of the body. I argue that politics is not a collection of mute bodies but a network of relationships based on the ideas and actions of people, so that what matters is not physical proximity but the capacity to engage with others in such a way to allow the kinds of debate and action that are essential if politics is to flourish. The chapter goes on to contrast the anti-political social realm with the political realm in terms of various websites and seeks to distinguish between hardware and software layers online, thus presenting a case against essentialist arguments that the internet as a whole is this or that way.

Having presented how a political realm should operate, I then move to the question of what it means to be political within such a space. Chapter three takes as its starting point the renewed interest in theorizing political subjectivity as universal and places it in contrast to anti-political attempts to assert various forms of particularized social identity. Given that such theories of subjectivity do not posit a set of universal values that an individual must adhere to in order to become a political subject, but in fact aim for a stripping away of all such properties to ensure universality is empty, the way people interact in online political discussion forums naturally lends itself to this political subjectivization process. The new forms of space that are created online can lead to new ways of being political and new forms of political subjectivity that may not have made sense in the pre-internet era. While many have taken issue with the idea of a disembodied online political subjectivity, I argue that disembodiment and pseudonymity are the greatest strengths of the online political subject because it helps undermine the dominance of identity in physical space which places so much emphasis on bodies being represented. The representation of bodies not only leads to huge problems with respect to discrimination in the form of racism, sexism, and homophobia, but it also entrenches alienating political systems which aim to represent bodies rather than give voice to individual subjects. Such a discussion of online subjectivity leads to questions about how Arendt’s concept of subjectivity as revealing oneself might operate within the often bodiless and anonymous fluctuations of online space.

With an understanding of how to become a political subject within the political realm, chapter four is concerned with the activities of these subjects in the political realm. My argument is that participation is one of the most basic requirements for politics, as the ability to speak and be heard and to take part in action is essential for any attractive understanding of politics. Anti-political strategies seek to deflect participation away from the political realm or minimize it to extreme infrequency such as through voting for representatives. Participation in society is framed anti-politically as having a job and paying taxes, which promotes a form of political passivity in favour of economic activity. The internet presents a challenge to these anti-political models by making political participation extremely accessible, and thus undermining the classic argument against participatory democracy that there is not enough time or space for any but a select few to take part in politics. The internet can also facilitate deeper forms of participation, which move beyond the simplistic demands for referendums which so often simply empower the mob rather than enabling serious forms of engagement.

The fifth chapter will engage with the terrain of conflict, which naturally arises when unique political subjects participate in speech and action inside a political realm. I argue that conflict is an inevitable outcome of the basic fact of human plurality and that it is the primary driver of politics. Conflict is valuable and inevitable, and having a political outlet for conflict is necessary in order to prevent it from escalating into violence. In this manner, politics is a kind of ‘talking cure’ for conflict that allows people to voice their disagreements and try to persuade others of their opinion without having to result to violent force. The internet presents an interesting dilemma for theorists of agonistic politics, as on the one hand it can facilitate political conflict as it is much easier to not only find people with other points of view but to disagree with them without any fear of the disagreement turning violent, while, on the other hand the internet can facilitate filter bubbles and lead to various forms of uncivil speech which depoliticize conflict. Questions thus arise about whether the internet allows anyone to become Socrates, questioning the views of everyone else and making society better by causing people to think about their own beliefs, or whether it turns everyone into the Socrates as seen by his accusers who was simply a social nuisance engaged in a primitive form of trolling which seeks to cause annoyance and conflict without a higher purpose.

The internet on its own obviously will not solve our problems for us by magically bringing about new forms of more engaged political practice. At the same time, however, any attempt to reinvigorate politics must find its home online or risk simply coming across as old fashioned and as yet another attempt to dream up theoretical solutions with no real path toward implementation. The internet is now a normal part of our lives, but this does not mean that it has to be seen as drained of any radical potential. While the internet is not new, it still contains an enormous amount of untapped possibility that could change the way we think about what politics should be and about what types of politics are possible.

CHAPTER 2 2.1 What is the Place of Politics?

The question of where politics can take place, is in many ways, the core problem of conceptualizing an internet enabled politics. Yet, before we can question whether politics can be located online, there are questions and disputes over where it can be located offline. Under the conditions of modern government, and within popular and mainstream political science, the location of politics is generally considered to be the exclusive domain of legislative or executive authority. The people inside such an exclusive understanding of the political realm are there because they meet a qualification, either of being elected or appointed. Before we can even begin to question whether politics might be able to be placed online, the question of whether or not politics can occur outside of these limited and exclusive institutions of official government must be considered. The first task consists in asking what exactly the political realm consists of, and asking how it might function outside of the official spaces of governmental authority. The answer consists of conceiving of a political realm as an open space of freedom and appearance for all. While there have been many conceptualizations of such a political realm, and I take Hannah Arendt’s depiction as a theoretical basis, the implementation of full-fledged political realms of this nature have either fallen far short of the theory or have lived extremely brief lives. The internet, however, presents a new hope for a robust political realm as it involves a new kind of space that is less prone to both forceful dismissals by those who wish to constrain politics, and also lacks the physical obstacles that have challenged previous attempts to build an offline political realm.

The significance of the problem of the political realm, or rather lack of one, is perhaps best demonstrated by how the Occupy movement and the activists in Tunisia and Egypt attempted to create their own spaces of political circulation. These spaces were meant to not just communicate a message of opposition to

Smith, T. G. 2017. Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, The Internet, and Renewing Democracy. Pp. 11-40. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book5.b. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 the government, but to enable and put into practice an alternative arrangement which, to some degree, was meant to establish a political realm open to all. The fact that the most common and effective means of protesting the state comes from establishing alternative political spaces speaks to the frustration that people feel from being structurally excluded from the official realm of government proceedings. These movements are particularly interesting examples precisely because they used the internet to expand their temporary political realms beyond the site of physical protests and out into the global cyberspace. It then became possible to enter the political space of these protests without actually physically being in New York, Cairo, or Tunis, demonstrating the potential of the internet as a site of politics to truly open up the political realm to anyone who wishes to take part.