Local Democracy Notepad

Clay Shirky: 'Second thoughts.'

I don’t know about you, but this term ‘Goverati’ makes me slightly nervous.

“What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.”

I was speaking to a friend recently about the education debate in Northern Ireland. We were discussing the idea of running an ‘unconference’ on the hugely complex issues involved.

He’s a good deal longer in the tooth than I am, and he has a huge amount of experience in the difficult political situations that we were discussing. He pointed out that there is a huge multifaceted divide between the kind of people that would operate well in an ‘unconference’ discussion, and the people and processes by which policies are made. Particularly in Northern Ireland. The kind of processes that we were talking about are not even being negotiated yet – there’s a huge presumptive sell going on here.

On the one hand, politically, I suspect that the ‘Governati’ would tend towards the progressive end of politics. I argue this on the assumption that this is not about getting the hidden hands of the markets to make decisions, but more about getting real participation from rational human beings expressing their rationality in the pursuit of good policy.There is, of course, the more regressive demagogic use of crowd sentiment, but I’ve never heard this being discussed approvingly in such circles.

But in the widespread enthusiasm for new ways of making policy, are we really seeing an attempt to solve existing problems without regard for the new ones such solutions would create?

Charlie Beckett has written up a recent seminar with Clay Shirky:

Discussing the impact of ‘Here Comes Everybody” on democracy, Clay is clearly having second thoughts about the purity of the democracy that the Internet can facilitate:

“But how do you distinguish between the campaign by Mysociety against MPs who tried to cover up their expense claims, with a bunch of potheads trying to get their spliff decriminalised? In Clay’s words, we “need to find an algorithm that works”.”

Regular visitors here will know that there are two sides to the question of the democratic value of MySociety’s campaign. But today we can see, again, the bigger question of how far it is in any way desirable to do anything that promotes direct democracy. There appears to be a genuine chance that the Swiss – in a referendum – will give legal expression to Matthew Parris’ view of what the public believe. Last year, the Swiss nearly decided to do something a good deal more sinister than the current proposal.

Parris argued that the public don’t believe in freedom of movement, and they don’t believe that an immigrant should be allowed to have a job where it may be done by the ‘indigenous workforce.’ I’d find it hard to disagree with him on any of these points.

This begs the question: Social media protagonists seem to generally have progressive views on most subjects. I say this from personal experience – going out and talking to people in this industry. But they are in danger of urging a system of governance upon us that has the potential to be profoundly regressive.

When someone as close to the top of the tree on this discussion is ‘having second thoughts’, (and could get a relatively free ride ignoring this question the first time around) perhaps this is cause for concern? There’s something about the sentence “we need an algorithm that works” that suggests a certain complacency – a sense that centuries of wisdom on how the public can legitimately participate in their own governance will not be taken very seriously.

This is not an implementation detail.