STRENGTHENING THE STATE THROUGH DISSENT: GLOBAL PARTICIPATORY ACTS AND THE STATE
By Patricia Camilien, université Quisqueya
INTRODUCTION In Alvin Toffler‟s Future Shock (1970), three types of men coexist on the planet. Men of the present, living in the here and now as they are carried away by the waves and currents of the world; they are rather vulnerable to "future shock". Men of the past, who have remained in a past time long gone, are living in the twentieth century but are still in the twelfth. Men of the future, informed, insightful and perceptive, who are already surfing on the major trends of tomorrow. In today's world, these men of the future are part of a transnational and nomadic elite helped by the increasing liberalization of trade and the disappearance of borders – at the least for them. Transnational companies like oil brokerage firm Trafigura i – made globally (in) famous in 2010 by a journalist‟s tweet about a file hosted on WikiLeaks – exemplify this (future) global world. They enjoy the best of corporate law around the world and diversify their operations accordingly. This use of different national laws according to the benefits they offer is not limited to transnational corporations and their owners, but now extends to individuals who, while they are not billionaires in dollars, are so in reticular connections. Using global participatory acts (heretofore participactions), they seem to be the ones to help the people move from the present to the future. Moral and social entrepreneurs, they are the vanguard of the future changes in society they are trying to drive through networked actions as relayed by mass self- communication.
Bold and innovative, these global participactions, helped by the States‟ growing inability to respond, alone, to many of the challenges of today's world, highlight, confirm and reinforce, by their growing success, the double democratic deficit – both internal and external – of an increasingly discredited (nation-) State. This paper is based on the first findings of a research project that hopes to evaluate the impact of such actions on the State and provide a model of intelligibility able to anticipate and guide their effects. We have retained the following hypothesis:
1. Erving Goffman‟s Theory of Marginalization and the Discredited Self, conditions the renewal of credibility to two actions: the discredited must play another role and find another audience. 2. Global participactions being actions by cooptation, a coopted state modeled after the Catalonian anarchism and heterarchical modes of organization could satisfy both conditions.
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3. This new social contract, freely chosen – as in not simply justified by political philosophy –reinforces the sense of belonging to the state and therefore its legitimacy.
We seek to reconcile the resolutely post-state nature of these participactions and the still inter-national world we live in, in order to understand the continuation of the State in the new reticular society. We have identified several mechanisms that can be used by governments and have already been applied in various domains. Among them, two global trends stand out the most: global participatory projects such as Facebook,Groupon, Bitcoin or WikiLeaks, and the growing importance of “legal tourism”. The latest is an international forum shopping that has grown recently with the enactment by national legislators of laws that are specifically designed to attract foreigners. Examples include the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) in Iceland, commercial surrogacy in India and the opacity of financial havens. This increasing "commodification of sovereignty" indicates a competition between the States for the favors of the transnational elite. In this, it is already similar to a system of gradually co-opted organization upon which can be built the new post-national state. A state that has successfully changed its current reputation, from that of an entity of questionable legitimacy [Part I] to that of smart efficiency [Part II], to eventually become, as a Reddit user puts it, “the next evolution of humanity‟s social structure, one of equality and accountability” [Part III].
PART 1: CHALLENGING LEGITIMACY In late 2009 and early 2010, while researching the controversial websiteii, we met, on WikiLeaks‟ secured IRC channel, Coheniii, a young 19 year old computer science student from Germany. Clearly devoted to what he saw as a good way to bring about social change – which later turned out to be the famed diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world – he would easily, as a volunteer, spend hundreds of hours working on restricted documents, while trying to convince his friends and acquaintances to contribute financially to the organization. He also gave his blood – literally, by selling it to the Red Cross and donating the money – to the whistle blowing website.
The first time Cohen heard about WikiLeaks, he was reading a blog post about a leak on the Bundesnachrichtendienst networks. “I love this type of thing. ;)”, he confided candidly. When we, jokingly, remarked that giving his blood to WikiLeaks made him “practically a saint”, he answered very seriously: “I‟m only living my passion. There‟s a difference between knowing the way, and going and showing the way”. About two years later, going and showing the way, Mohammed Bouazizi would go even further than Cohen by setting himself ablaze and the Arab Spring in motion. The events that have unfolded since then, including the Occupy and Indignados movements, have emphasized and drawn attention to the global confidence crisis; underlining the need to understand its basis as well as explore the possibilities of change it offers.
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UNDERSTANDING THE CONFIDENCE CRISIS In the world of pre-Cablegate WikiLeaks, they were many Cohens "going and showing the way". According to statistic averages from Alexa and Quantcast, wikileaks.org, at that time, was usually visited by men of Caucasian descent, who had higher education, between 18 and 30 years - with a focus on the 18-24 range - and had no children. Virtually the same demographic could be found on the WikiLeaks IRC channel or, currently, on Reddit, arguably one of the most influential websites on the Internet. They are students in computer science, mathematics, history, political science … Like Cohen, they love "everything that has to do with democracy, freedom, modern stuff and the economy" and, like him, "[they] hate those fucking lying politicians”. Born into a general confidence crisis (Dalton, 2004), they are much more affected by the many moral panics that regularly accompany the double democratic deficit and, therefore, are significantly more likely to be seduced by the rather radical remedies like WikiLeaks. Of no particular political orientation - some self-identified as anarchists - or religious beliefs, they seem to be naturally libertarian, akin to the cyberspace where they dream and work for a better world. They are part of a new emergent global polity in which loyalties are increasingly conditional; with the Internet acting as a rhetorical public sphere.
In international relations theory, three approaches attempt to define this new polity. Globalization theorists (see (Held, et al., 1999)) use the existence of a democratic deficit at the top – due to the inability of national democracies to influence the global forces that affect them – to defend the idea of a cosmopolitan democracy. Inspired by the democratic deficit within the State, Transnationalists (see (Badie, et al., 1999)) describe a constant globalization of interconnected local societies. Neo-medievalists (see (Linklater, 1998)) reference a political order roughly identical to that of the Middle Ages in Europe, before the arrival of the modern state; successfully linking the first two, to give, in our view, the explanatory model that is best suited to the global civil society. An echo of the neo-medieval analysis proposed by Hedley Bull (1977), this relatively recent International Relations theory presents a political order of overlapping authorities. An international order characterized by the coexistence of different levels of (sub-, national and transnational), none of them dominant. In doing so, it assumes the existence of a civil society simultaneously global and fragmented where the intermediate dialogues of these (rhetorical) public spheres can be part of a planetary conversation.
Participating in that conversation was Ólafuriv, a then 24 year old History student from Iceland I met in the same WikiLeaks IRC channel, in January 2010. In his dream of a better world was an Iceland, where lies and secrets like those that had just led an entire country to the brink of bankruptcy where no longer possible. An admirer of the WikiLeaks project, he and some friends, invited its leaders to an international conference in December 2009. Two of them (Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, who have since then parted in less than amicable terms) came ... and stayed. Two months later, on February 17th, 2010, a bill to make Iceland into a
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"refuge" for journalists around the world, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative was introduced to the Parliament by its newly elected Member and WikiLeaks supporter, Birgitta Jónsdóttir.
When asked about his involvement with WikiLeaks, Ólafur who participated in writing and translating the proposal from Icelandic to English, seemed to be aware of the global nature of his actions, or, at the very least, wishing it were the case. He felt part of a global movement, that of the hacker community that he described as "a group of people dispersed, wide enough, who are technically competent and clearly prefer to see technology used to limit the exercise of power rather than complete it." Wary of most (traditional) activists, he found in projects like WikiLeaks "a refreshing freedom from the identity politics that seem to dominate today”. Practical, he is part of generation that wants to get rid of frills – and of which Twitter and its hundred and forty characters is a very telling symbol; a generation that wishes to get results quickly and efficiently. He ultimately got his wish. The proposal went on to being unanimously adopted by the Parliament on June 16th, 2010. It has since evolved into the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), an international institution developing safe havens for investigative journalism.
EXPLORING POSSIBILITIES The fact that a global participatory project (WikiLeaks) has led to an instance of commodification of sovereignty (the IMMI) by a State working and succeeding at regaining (part of) its legitimacy shows that it is possible to combine the two previously identified trends to convincing results. The goal is to create a model of State that can overcome the nation-state‟s double democratic deficit and offer a response to the growing influence of global participactions. Said model would have to provide the State with interactive applications able to make its action more effective, increase its legitimacy and reduce centralization. A reticular organization is central to our approach, that is to say, we propose a model in which the agents‟ (inter) actions are networked. We plan to divide our research into three parts: legitimacy, efficiency and self-organization (stigmergy). The three are to be combined into a model intelligible enough to be useful to governments.
However, if a proper use of the model depends on the political systems and regimes, we do not see clearly how such a goal could be achieved. We have decided to tackle this problem by adopting the political agnosticism of the classical Aristotelian:
- (Good) governments want the good of the governed. - Government tools are used for this purpose and add to the functionality and efficiency of the State, which contributes to (strengthen) its legitimacy.
This political agnosticism is not just theoretical posturing. It is characteristic of a new community marked by multiple loyalties: the networked society. Castells (1996; 1997; 1998) presents it as the result of the convergence of three processes: the revolution in information technology, the restructuration of capitalism and 1980s‟
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Statism and the cultural social movements of the 1960s. It is the advent of a world where the nation state must deal with a multitude of strategic competitors, multinational corporations, transnational organizations, sub-national networks ... where the nation-state is forced to rethink social relations. This state of affairs has resulted in the emergence of problems now familiar in many democracies, including low voter turnout in most developed countries and a decreasing level of membership – as active members– to political parties.
If the Millennium Survey (1999) shows an overwhelming support by the majority of the world's population to the democratic ideal, it especially puts forward their distrust of the democratic character of their respective governments, particularly in the older democracies such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Holland. According to Gallup International‟s latest Voice of the People (2005)v, 79% of the respondents believed democracy to be the best form of government (i.e. 10% more than the previous year), with percentages up to 93% in countries like Denmark and Norway, but also in Ghana and Ethiopia. Just the same, the lack of trust remained.
The assumed inability of the people to directly participate in public affairs has led to Democracy‟s development around professional politicians acting as intermediaries, the "representatives" of a people relegated to the role of observer and occasional participant. As a consequence, a situation of mistrust now exists on both sides. The people are presumed ignorant and the rulers are seen as corrupt. The public sphere thus formed is gradually impervious, inactive, unintelligible, dubious and intolerant. Hence a decreasing effectiveness that has led to situations where representatives make decisions for the people even when they formally opposed them (the Treaty on the European Constitution), where leaders are elected because no one had ever heard of them or only marginally (as happened in 1980s and 1990s‟ Brazil) or present themselves as not part of the established political class (the entire orientation of the American presidential campaign of 2008), and where political parties are increasingly positioning themselves as non-ideological.
This abandonment of the ideological reference signals a (re)opening to dialogue and exchange in an attempt to rally the citizens who are calling for a rhetoric public sphere open to participation. These citizens 2.0–by analogy to the participatory nature of the Web 2.0 –want to move from their roles of spectator-citizens to that of actor-citizen. Whether they are part of the smart mobs (Rheingold, 2003), the netwars (Arquilla, et al., 2001) or the multitude (Hardt, et al., 2005), they are actively working for gradually free (as in open) governments where, like the users of the electronic network, the human network can effectively and efficiently contribute to the direction of society.
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PART II: CROWD-SOURCING EFFICIENCY On Day 4 of its Decoding Big Data seriesvi, The Financial Times tackled the use of target personalized messages by advertisement companies and their clients to reach customers more effectively. Using information from social media as well as online shopping and browsing habits, data scientists are providing companies with personalized dossiers on each potential customer, helping them offer products and services that are tailored the customer‟s wants and needs. Evidently, this “power of intimacy” raises questions that we won‟t address here, if only because this paper has already assumed the bias of advocating the use of information, that people are putting out voluntarily, in a stigmergic way. Of interest to us are the “sophisticated automated systems” used to “search[…] for patterns in the data [...] tell stories and tap[…] algorithms to evaluate the effectiveness of [their use]”. An effectiveness that had been previously proven in many instances and of which the globally shared story of how American retail giant Target figured out a teenager was pregnant before her dad didvii isn‟t the least puzzling.
These developments coupled with the media power shift (Castells, 2009) in the public sphere are indicative of a world where a legitimacy-challenged nation-State must and can change its role and public; from the monopoly of legitimate violence to the legitimate monopoly of governance; from the nation to the people; through the use of collective intelligence in a redefined public sphere.
ASSESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE In mid-2011 already, in what could be a template for the (new) State, Icelanders unveiled a new crowd-sourced constitutionviii. Compiled online by a group of 25 elected citizens – the Constitutional Council – the draft was presented to Iceland‟s parliament on July 29, 2011. It went on to be backed by 2/3rd of the voters in a referendum on October 21st, suggesting a shift to a new public sphere where collective intelligence from social media informs the government.
In post-2008 crisis Iceland, the experiment – whose shortcomings in methodology, have been readily highlighted by observersix– is a welcome change in a country where approval of The Althingi – Iceland‟s Parliament –is at 10%. It was proposed by Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, well aware, for having been elected in the wake of the 2008 protests, of the Icelanders‟ lack of trust in the political elite they collectively blame for the Icesave debacle. Following a one-day national forum where 950 people were randomly selected to discuss the new constitution, 25 people out of a list of 500 candidates were elected to form the Constitutional Council (Stjornlagarad). For 4 months, the Stjornlagarad welcomed comments on its Facebook page, interacted with citizens through its Twitter account, posted interviews with members on its Youtube channel, shared pictures of the 25 members at work on its Flickr account and streamed its open to the public meetings and deliberations live on its website and Facebook pagex. In total, over 3600 hundred
6 comments and 370 suggestions were made by the public. The public‟s input were discussed and voted on by the Stjornlagarad on a consensus basis.
Naturally, the fact that Iceland has one of the most computer-savvy populations in the worldxi and that its roughly 320 000 members are, in the words of Mayor of Reykjavik (Iceland) and social media darling, Jón Gnarr, “all friends on Facebook”xii, could limit the experiment‟s repeatability. Questions of scalability and portability are likely to arise, should other governments decide to follow Iceland‟s example. However, the use of social media to truly involve the public in the drafting of their fundamental law has the potential to be a great lesson in democracy and the democratic process that invites reevaluations of the current theories of social contract.
The public‟s current lack of confidence in the government and the State stems from a global democratic deficit fueled the globalization of democracy itself. With democracy seen as a universal value, people all over the world feel empowered to ask more from their governments. However, conscious of its inability to decide alone on matters that affect directly its activities and operations, the national community is networking with others to overcome said deficit. In this newly created public sphere, communication plays a major role in power relations Castells (2007; 2009). In the technological context that characterizes the network society, the media have become the social space where power is decided. Using collective intelligence is the best way for the State to change the balance in its favor. Naturally, this can only come with an increase in transparency (Castells, 1998) to the cost of a traditional power often built in secrecy (reason of state). The uptake however is a more legitimate power and, hence, stability of authorityxiii.
In the case of Iceland, that would mean, for a start, the implementation of the crowd- sourced and backed by a national referendum constitution draft. This new Iceland, where checks and balances, designed by the people for the people, are in place to prevent another Icesave, would be closer to Ólafur‟s – and many others – dream of a more accountable State. Remains the possibility that the whole exercise will be dismissed by the Althingi who has to approve the Stjornlagarad‟s draft twice, with an election in between, before it becomes the law of the land. However, a complete dismissal could come at great costs for the legitimacy-challenged Parliament if it were to ignore the ongoing redefinition of the public sphere aided by the Internet and social media.
REDEFINING THE PUBLIC SPHERE Digital activist have offered many concepts in an attempt to define power relations in this new (rhetoric) public sphere. Many models have been offered to help conceptualize the post-State era. Among them the hive concept, liquid democracyxiv or wikipoliticsxv enjoy relative popularity. Some like the hive concept have been co- opted by the new non-ideological parties such as the Best Party in Iceland and the many Pirate Parties in Europe and Australia. Others like liquid democracy live 7 somewhere on the Web and are remembered more or less frequently during debates between like-minded activists and sympathizers. All of them, however, are based on the stigmergic properties of the Network Society – both on and offline – and hope to harness them into better governance practices.
On the Web, the citizens‟ (political) activity manifests itself in processes where every one of them, for reasons often personal and individualistic, leaves traces that can help the community find solutions to their problems. Contrary to the idea of a social community dreamed by the World Wide Web‟s developers (Flichy, 2001), the Web 2.0 promotes self-production by its produsers (Bruns, 2006; 2008). A consequence of the progressive individualization of contemporary societies (Castells, 1998; 2002) this self-production is possibly the result of the growing importance of one‟s social and cultural capital, a desire to be unique and visible, as evidenced by the current experiments with new forms of identity construction and the search of reputation and fame (Allard, et al., 2003). However, these new forms of personalization being inherently relational, they give rise to processes that are certainly individual but remain collective and connected through weak ties. They become the source of indirect interactions where strictly personal information left by one agent is being used by another and so on.
Aguiton and Cardon (2007) use this "strength of weak ties" to study the cooperation of existing Web 2.0 and postulate the existence of new innovation models driven by a very specific ecosystem, the "strange mix of entrepreneurs and social movements." Most Web 2.0 applications are built by people looking for "cool" tools that will be useful to them first. Aguiton and Cardon note the existence of a strong relationship between how these tools are designed and built and the subsequent appropriation by users. The Web 2.0 has thus managed to make the two major currents of the academic debate about the Network‟s users, allowing the utilitarian agent looking to maximize its personal interest (Ghosh, 1998) to contribute to collective action and the sharing knowledge (Rheingold, 1993).
By using the Web 2.0 environment to communicate with each other users take the opportunity to use this public space as an "opportunity to cooperate" (Aguiton, et al., 2007), reinforced by its rhetoric. These collaborative post-action practices result from the actions of a "creative class" that acts as scouts for the rest of the communityxvi. Others, depending of their response to a given topic, might undertake the same track and road, mutually reinforcing it and giving it an increasing importance and influence on the community. This stigmergic process – reminiscent of that of social insects like the ants and used in optimization algorithms – is the comment system currently used by Reddit with growing and enduring success. The model has already inspired political institutions with the most famous example being the White House‟s online petition websitexvii.
Despite concerns about its efficacyxviii, the We The People section of whitehouse.gov has been enjoying a growing popularity since its launch on September 22, 2011xix.
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On January 2013, the website had received 9,178,278 signatures for more than 141,310 petitions at an average rate of 807 signatures per hour from 5,410,525 users. The “unexpected” success has been given as a reason to raise the threshold from its initial 5,000 to its current 100,000 signatures. Other interesting statistics come from the number of responses and their reception by surveyed signers who have received an answer to the petition with 86% saying they would create another petition, 66% who considered the administration‟s answer “helpful to hear” and 50% who have “learned something new”.
PART III: REINVENTING THE STATE The main thesis here is that global participactions may, despite their opposition to the centers of power, strengthen the State. In other words, global movements of dissent supported by post-State innovations can and will make the State stronger. In theory, such a result is particularly difficult and goes against the conventional wisdom that sees these exercises in bypassing the state are a sign of its decline (Althusser, 1976; Ohmae, [1999] 1990; Giddens, 1991; Waters, 2001) or a serious threat to its integrity (Clinton, 2010). In practice, however, the identification to a global community remains limited by the real barriers of geography, culture, technology or identity; and while the Weberian state model will be more and more difficult to hold, the reports of the death of the state have been greatly exaggerated. It is more likely that the State will adapt into a new form of political organization.
This new form might very well be a(new) post-national state based on the three pillars of stimergic actions (from all citizens), à la carte or wiki activism (from the moral entrepreneurs) and commodification of sovereignty (from the State) as they are informed by global participactions, the democratic deficit and participatory media. Together, they form a workable model that can fulfill this project‟s ultimate goal of establishing a state compatible with global participatory acts and that can drastically reduce the double democratic deficit through participatory media.
DESIGNING A NEW MODEL OF GOVERNANCE Creating this model of governance will require two separate tasks: 1) identifying the data and 2) developing the model. The categories of data concern the agents, the environment in which they operate as well as the purpose and the means used to achieve it. Theoretical explanations – to properly contribute to the development of the model –will require a database of these networks and a set of dynamic maps of the existing architecture of global networks in the same area of a social movement or conflict system. The data used must therefore identify common patterns of organizational change, while groups form, separate, merge, collaborate, compete, change direction, adopt or renounce participatory media, grow, shrink and eventually cease to exist. So far, in our own case studies as well the thousands of
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MobileActive.org and the now defunct DigitalActive.org, we have seen some patterns emerge.
The first of these patterns is the often ad hoc nature of these actions. Whether they are monitoring and challenging governments or the private business sector, their lifespan tends to be relatively short. Nonetheless, as a bottom-up approach to politics, they are a constant source of innovative dissent and increasingly emerging as a countervailing force and a counterweight to the traditional centers of power. In this, they are similar to other acts of the global civil society acts (Anheier, 2005), global social movements (various World Social Forums) or transnational networks of defense (Global Witness or Corporate Watch), monitoring the market and State. However, the global participactions such as Dumbledore's Army for the Real World, Bitcoin or WikiLeaks are characterized by a masterful use of the infosphere, identification with a global polity and a common desire to end what they perceive as a moral crisis of this civilization.
Aware of their limited resources and, therefore, their inability to fight in the economic and political spheres, the global participatory acts are endeavoring to move the fight to the cultural sphere by focusing on a set of global values and defending the elevation of humanity over profits and politics. Driven by moral entrepreneurs, these actions use, with remarkable skills, the media, old and new, to mobilize their base, their supporters and the general public, thus obtaining a significant influence in putting their causes on the agenda. Very creative, they combine 1) actions that are unique and original, 2) a horizontal internal (in)organization, 3) an interconnection between informal networks, 4) unconstrained relationships of trust and tolerance and 5) a system of à la carte engagement that facilitates the organic flow of information from one network to another.
Model development will build on these and other experiences of horizontal (self-) organization (both heterarchical or anarchical) and thrive to enlist the previously identified requirements of effectiveness and legitimacy. However, as global participactivism often use "naming and shaming" to force States into more transparency and accountability, the "public relations" aspect must also be taken into account and a reputation management system included in the model. Here, research in sociology and social psychology on impression management will be particularly useful, especially with regard to the presentation of self (Goffman, 1959; Schlenker, 1980; Schlenker, et al., 2000) and the control and regulation of information in social interaction (Ebert, 2001).
The final model – a decision support system (DSS) – will be generated from these specifications and specific types of data, which will have been translated into an organizational model that can easily be embedded into any form of government. This DSS will help governments cater to the needs and pleas for transparency and take into account the global participactions that pertain to them. In accordance with data type specifications, applicable policies and resources at their disposal, they will be
10 able to facilitate stigmergic actions (self-organization), the frequency of reforms (updates) as well as the choice of some reform practices rather thanothers (efficiency).
THE POST-NATIONAL STATE In some ways, we expect the model to resemble a technology-supported – and real time – version of the United States of America as envisioned in the Federalist papers No. 51 – and inscribed in the 10th Amendment of its Constitution. A model where (horizontal) competition between the States is seen as a “double security […] to the rights of the people [with t]he different governments control[ling] each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself” (Madison, 1788). The assertion shares the same Kantian overtones with WikiLeaks‟ original About pagexx where the whistle blowing website remarked that “[i]t is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government.”This reopening of the public sphere beyond State borders is a welcome revival of the concept of a transnational public sphere as it existed before the nationalist movements and the Cold War, led contemporary authors, including Habermas ([1989] 1962), to re-conceptualize it as the result of a civil society, itself attached to a State.
In Marxist terminology, commodification refers to the transformation of goods, services and ideas to commodities, by assigning an economic value to something that was not previously considered in these terms. By analogy, the commodification of sovereignty refers to the use - by the national legislature - of its sovereign capacity to legislate as an economic mean. In the context of international free trade, this decision results in a competitive international market in which states try to attract certain "consumers".
As a basic theory of international trade, the law of comparative advantage states that a country must specialize in the activity where it is the most efficient compared to others. However, the present States being built on the Weberian model, in the “sovereignty market”, they broadly have similar skills. In these cases, competitive advantage theory supplements the classical theory by adding differentiation of products and services as it is helped by consumers' taste for diversity. When a State embarks on the "commodification of sovereignty" business (see Figure 1), it can offer products – legislation on surrogacy, freedom of the press or the income tax; refuge for illicit activities, drugs or terrorism – where it will be more or less competitive depending on cost and/or quality.
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Laisser- faire Comparative advantages Protection Favorable legislations Competitive Encourage advantages ment
Commodification of Practices Laws sovereignty
FIGURE 1: THE COMMODIFICATION OF SOVEREIGNTY
These developments are part of the same the logic of liberalization and specialization of globalization and should lead to an international “organic society” with increased density dynamics conducive of stigmergyxxi . Global participactions have understood these dynamics and use participatory media to make their cause into more of a wiki activism where the popularity of said cause is a function of its takeover by mass self-communication. Successful campaigns are characterized by (s) elective and co-opted participations which, consequently, have strengthened their legitimacy. This as fine a blue print as the State can have to start using the creativity coming from collective intelligence as well as the vast amount of data that are already exploited by commercial contractors and are beginning to be so by moral entrepreneurs.
CONCLUSION In this paper, we have tried to envision the continuation of the State in the new reticular society. We have combined lessons from the use of participatory media by global (digital) activism and current trends in state branding to suggest a (new) (non- Weberian) post-national State with a (new) (co-opted) social contract. The idea of using participative media in governance isn‟t new. The current interest in e- governance is high as well as the interest of politicians for popular social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or Reddit. However, this needs to move further, beyond using these tools as a mere way to gauge public support for a decision, to integrating them directly in the process of governing. Although, still rudimentary, the partially European Union financed PEOPLE (Pilot smart urban Ecosystems leveraging Open innovation for Promoting and enabling future E- services) project is a good start. In January 2013, students at Université Quisqueya in Haiti will start using its “Improve My City” application to help the Institute for the Protection of the National Heritage (ISPAN) recover the lost parts of a colonial aqueduct in Turgeau (West of Port-au-Prince) that had played an important part in our History. If successful, we will move to establishing partnerships with the City of Port-au-Prince and the Ministry of Environment to work at changing the university‟s neighborhood and, eventually, beyond.
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i Trafigura‟s headquarters are in Lucerne (Switzerland), its operational center in London, its tax domiciliation in Amsterdam, its holding in Malta ad its staff shares in a trust based in Jersey. ii The work referenced here is “Cybermilitantisme global et médias participatifs : l'exemple de Wikileaks”< http://www.sudoc.fr/153346345> iiiAnonymous. ivAnonymous. vA Voice of the People 2006 was announced but never undertaken and, apparently, the series of polls stopped there. vi The Big Data Series is accessible on the FT‟s website
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xvii We The People
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