Deliberative democracy has never been so bad since it began to be named. This does not, in any way, speak negatively of the model: deliberative democracy appeared in the eighties as a cry of protest, which is still valid.
That movement, which grew in the theoretical world in the nineties with the help of some of the best thinkers of our time, such as Mansbridge and Cohen, could not foresee the emergence in this century of the greatest deliberative transformation of recent years. times: the appearance of social networks and their consolidation as the essential core of the arena of public debate.
It is no coincidence that the great philosopher of communication and democratic deliberation has had, at 94 years old, to write a new book, entitled “A new structural transformation of the public sphere”, six decades after his “History and criticism of public opinion.” Now, Habermas warns us about a current shakeup of the public sphere spurred by the power of social media to exert uncontrolled influence over our thinking and our democratic deliberation.
Let’s go back. In his considerations of representative government, John Stuart Mill expressed himself about parliament by saying that it was the arena of public opinion. Public deliberation, once concentrated in a few actors – the media, parliaments and elites – has today escaped to other spaces; More is deliberated in the networks than in the political institutions themselves. Deliberation also partly escaped the media, which had the predominance of the deliberative space during the 20th century. This will not be resolved by the creation of new and interesting institutional designs that encapsulate deliberation, such as random citizen assemblies, although today they are the main promise of democratic innovation.
Things, simply put, will not go back to the way they were before. And, although we sometimes look back on that past world with nostalgia – the “great” minds, the sophisticated writings, the “enlightened” opinion –, we do not forget that the price of all that was exclusion. At the same time that we lose democracy with the networks, we have gained it in other ways: the price we pay for having to endure a precarious public debate may be the possibility of obtaining new leadership, being able to dispute previously hegemonic voices, control them, introduce new topics and arguments and counteract the dominant ones.
Parliaments tried to improve with quotas, with electoral rules, but all this, of course, has limits. Two hundred people, or even a thousand, cannot include, nor probably represent, all the diversity of the political world. The networks, on the other hand, have allowed a social openness and a diversification of the debate that only a parliament would have been able to achieve if, like Borges’s imaginary congress, it included everyone.
For this reason, shortcutting political deliberation will no longer be possible or desirable. It is essential to change focus: instead of trying to bring deliberation to democracy, we must bring democracy to deliberation. And today the deliberation is on the networks.
Never have the rules of deliberation been so beyond the control of the people as now. There is some naivety on our part: we are in no way facing a regulatory vacuum: social networks are already regulated: someone decides, it’s just not us. Networks are not neutral, nor “free”. Its rules are chosen by individuals, without even criteria of corporate governance, established social ethics, or transparency.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world, naively, continues to think that the political destiny of countries depends on their traditional constitutional aspects. Nothing of this.
The point is that if social media so affects deliberation and our own democracies, they must be the object of institutional design and cannot continue to be dominated by the wild law that represents the absence of democratic regulation.
It’s Elon Musk or us.
The algorithms that govern social networks must be discussed by political societies and democratically elected by themselves.
As? As we do everything in democracy, through laws. Every democratic country should be able to have a frank and open discussion about how algorithms that show us information first, messages first, reaction possibilities first should be regulated.
Two arguments against: classical freedoms of expression and business.
Freedom of expression? Freedom of expression also has a social dimension: this consists of the freedom of peoples and political communities to be able to express themselves publicly in a deliberative environment that is the product of their own organization and not of external domination. Freedom of expression, understood in this way, is not only my freedom to express my opinion; It is also our freedom to have institutional budgets to debate public issues. An exaggerated gain for the former should not be obtained at the cost of a defeat for the latter.
The other argument tells us that networks are global goods that cannot be restricted by national provisions. But don’t multinational telecommunications or service companies have to comply with a package of measures to enter a market? Why couldn’t Twitter or X or whatever it’s called be asked the same thing? Companies that provide these services, like any other company in any other market, should be able to comply with these regulations.
The democratic regulation of algorithms is the first need for institutional reform of our time. It is more pressing than any other political or electoral reform on a national scale. All electoral rules may be changed, aspects may be introduced in the parliamentary design, innovative modifications may be introduced at the institutional level, but as long as social networks are governed from California we will have this precarious and undemocratic public deliberation. It’s as if we allow Zuckerberg to regulate the way we vote, or our parliaments.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#flight #deliberative #democracy