Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet (review)

In an infamous post to the Rhizome e-mail list, Lev Manovitch wrote that "a western artist sees the Internet as a perfect tool to break down all hierarchies and bring art to the people. In contrast, as a postcommunist subject, I cannot but see the Internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present are lines for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen." In the midst of recent debates over the politics of virtual, disembodied space, I find myself longing for something more corporeal. How about a history of democracy that limits itself exclusively to the evolution of the coffee house? Such a study would range from eighteenth-century salons, hotbeds of democracy utopianized by Jürgen Habermas, to the Starbuck's cybercafes, dens of über-capitalism, sprouting across the globe. This coffeehouse book, which could include a Frommer's-like tour guide of important caffeine-injecting haunts, would provide a usefully visceral counterstudy to Diana Saco's comprehensive, posthuman reflection on democracy and cyberspace (a term that she adeptly deconstructs).

From the emancipatory rhetoric of Howard Rheingold and William J. Mitchell to the futurist cyberfascism of Wired magazine, since the early 1990s there has been no shortage of utopian discourse on the Internet-mediated future of democracy. Saco carefully sidesteps this chorus by unfurling a sound philosophical and historical argument, focusing on how cyberspace productively complicates our understanding of spatiality. This complication opens the door to new conceptions of social space, namely, a conception that does not rely on "wetware," the term Saco uses to align the human body beside the rubrics of software and hardware. The big question, then, is "whether the ideal of participatory democracy depends always on a mode of sociality derived only from face-to-face interactions with others; or whether, alternatively, one can derive a participatory democratic politics from a sociality without faces" (p. 45).

Although Saco is wary of cyberutopian ideology, she tips her Internet-ready hand on several occasions, especially in her attempt to rescue a bodi-less politics from Hanna Arendt, who is otherwise antitechnological, and a technologically mediated politics from Jurgen Habermas, who idealized the physical engagement of the coffeehouse. The result of this intelligently wrought concoction is Saco's suggestion that an "unencumbered (i.e., disembodied) liberal self" (p. 71, Saco's parenthesis) might take the stage in a new democratic sociality of cyberspace. While I am equally enthusiastic about the possibility of unencumbered liberal selves communicating in an objectively mediated social space, I am skeptical that such a space awaits us on the corporate-financed, government-monitored Internet. What strikes me the most acutely here, however, is the author's elision of the terms "unencumbered" and "disembodied."

In her important, even ground-breaking look at how cryptography and hacking have helped define a new mode of cybermediated politics, Saco notes that the Internet makes possible a "politics of concealment" (p. 175); it levels the democratic playing field by erasing physical markers (race, gender, age) that "have been the basis for systematically excluding people from political debate" (p. 205). I would counter by arguing that oppressive ideology, not physicality, is the encumbrance to democracy. Removing the signifiers of wetware from the democratic process will not erase the prejudices ingrained in individuals over the course of centuries; these will return once the cyberdemocrat turns away from the screen and is forced to interact with other bodies. The result of an invisible democracy is ultimately one more exclusion: that of the embodied (technologically disenfranchised) human being. To be fair, Saco demonstrates concern about the digital divide that exists on both a local and global scale. However, it is difficult to swallow a theory of distance politics rooted in the argument that physical "proximity may give rise to contempt rather than respect" (p. 72).

Before we consider...