Democracy is Not the Issue Here

As my colleague Ethan has been kind enough to supply me with a starting point, I will attempt to refute him.

He correctly points out the problems of unabridged democracy, but he fails to consider the defining factors of the internet. Let's take two of the primary missions of government: protecting its citizens and maintaining an orderly distribution of resources.

Firstly, individuals on the Internet are incapable of harming each other in any serious fashion*. To the extent that the Internet mirrors the Athenian forum, each of us is maneuvering across it in a little bullet-proof Pope-mobile, which is also blessed with the power of teleportation. The potential for tyranny of the majority here is rather limited.


Governments also concern themselves with the distribution of various limited resources. And from the territorial perspective, the Internet is without bounds. Land is cheap and the construction of any edifice is limited purely by time and the skill of the architect. Anyone** can have a website, and even more so a blog, MySpace profile, Facebook account, Youtube videos. These are all proprietary services, of course, but they are all products of the cheap-space economy. So if communities can't control what you own, where you are, or what you do, what do you have to fear from government?

Well, alright, it is possible to restrict movement on the internet, as the government of China is happy to demonstrate -- you just need to control or have leverage on the entire infrastructure. This, of course, is the reason for net-neutrality advocacy -- to pressure actual governments into preserving the Internet as a level playing field with a low entry cost. ISPs, Governments, and backbone providers all have the ability to change the "laws" of the internet, but from the internal perspective these are more like physical laws.

But really, what I am trying to get across is that the Internet isn't a democracy, it's an anarchy -- at least for the individual consumer. From the view of a business, it is far more of a democracy. That's the beauty of advertising revenues -- everyone's eyeballs are assumed to be equally valuable (They aren't, especially if you want to get statistical, but it's close enough). A retailer or content provider may very well consider itself at risk of being voted out of existence if no one uses their site. But this is just capitalism layered on top of anarchy. A slightly different mechanism holds for sites dependent upon community acceptance or involvement, such as Wikipedia. Although in raw form, Wiki editing is fairly anarchical as well -- it's only when you zoom out to an extended time frame that the results look democratic.

So if your options are unlimited and no one can tell you what to do, where's the catch? In a word: noise. The currency of the Internet is information. You can go anywhere, but you need to know how to get there, and you need to derive some utility from what you find there. Utility here is anything from lower prices on bulk sorghum to intellectual debate to pictures of cats -- assuming you wanted pictures of cats. If you wanted pictures of cats and I give you hardcore pornography, your interests are not being served. Because of this, search engines are the biggest enablers of the Internet as we know it.

The search engine is an inherently meritocratic idea; your position is determined by your relevance to the question at hand. As a website owner, you don't need to do anything beyond create the site. Just be relevant, and Google or Yahoo or MSN will come find you and tell people you've got what they want -- and these people will tell their friends, and link you on their blogs or Facebooks or what-have-you. Even better, these days, most engines (Google most notably) will account for this word-of-mouth support by increasing your relevance score. At least in theory. Now back to that bit about noise.

Noise is anything bad (subjectively) that gets mixed in with what you want (the signal). If your information is noisy, it costs you more time to pick out the signal. If you can't effectively search for what you want, you just aren't going to bother. This is why no one tries to get a date by flipping through the phone book. Actually, that one is noisy both ways -- you probably wouldn't want to date someone who cold-called you from the phone book (which makes you less likely to try). It's also why no one is reading this essay by this point. And this is why advertising is the most dangerous thing for the egalitarian internet. Money buys noise.

I'm going to stop there before this becomes completely unwieldy, and expand on this in another post. Suffice to say, I don't see democracy as the problem. "Of course not," you may say, "Dumb people are the problem." Nope, not even them. Part 2 coming soon, I hope. Christ! Why is analyzing society from the ground up so complicated?

*Identity theft and fraud being the exceptions -- and this will play into my larger point.

**Above a fairly low economic threshold, at least in the developed world.