Table Of ContentDigital Technology and Democratic Theory
D igital Technology and
Democratic Theory
edited by lucy bernholz,
hélène landemore, and rob reich
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 74843- 6 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 74857- 3 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 74860- 3 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226748603 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernholz, Lucy, editor. | Landemore, Hélène, 1976– editor. | Reich,
Rob, editor.
Title: Digital technology and democratic theory / edited by Lucy Bernholz,
Hélène Landemore and Rob Reich.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2020024755 | isbn 9780226748436 (cloth) | isbn 9780226748573
(paperback) | isbn 9780226748603 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Democracy—Technological innovations—United States. |
Computer networks—Political aspects—United States. | Information
technology—Political aspects—United States. | Digital communications—
Political aspects—United States.
Classifi cation: lcc jc423 .d629 2020 | ddc 320.973—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024755
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 1
Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich
1 Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere 23
Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung
2 Open Democracy and Digital Technologies 62
Hélène Landemore
3 Purpose- Built Digital Associations 90
Lucy Bernholz
4 Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal 113
Seeta Peña Gangadharan
5 Presence of Absence: Exploring the Democratic Signifi cance of Silence 141
Mike Ananny
6 The Artisan and the Decision Factory: The Organizational
Dynamics of Private Speech Governance 167
Robyn Caplan
7 The Democratic Consequences of the New Public Sphere 191
Henry Farrell and Melissa Schwartzberg
8 Democratic Societal Collaboration in a Whitewater World 219
David Lee, Margaret Levi, and John Seely Brown
9 From Philanthropy to Democracy: Rethinking Governance and
Funding of High- Quality News in the Digital Age 241
Julia Cagé
10 Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology?
A Layered- Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges 274
Bryan Ford
Acknowledgments 309
Index 311
Introduction
Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich
This book explores the intersection of digital technology and democratic
theory. We assembled scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the
question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamen-
tal questions about democracy practice and democratic theory. We asked
our contributors to consider what democratic theory— broadly defi ned
as scholars engaged in debate about the values and institutional design of
democracy— can bring to the design, development, use, and governance
of digital technologies. The simple goal: through a series of workshops that
spanned nearly two years, we would examine how democratic ideals might
provide us with a framework for understanding and, more importantly,
shaping the digital transformation of our lives.
What kind of transformation? On the one hand, digital technologies allow
for greater connectivity and transmission of information among individuals
the world over. They empower people to produce and share content and to
act collectively, all with access to more knowledge than ever before, across
borders and distances previously considered insurmountable, and at virtually
no fi nancial cost. The Arab Spring, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong,
and many of the “color” revolutions around the world, as well as Black Lives
Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Yellow Vests movement in France, and
youth- led climate action in the United States and Europe, would not have
been possible without social media.1
Digital technologies were similarly essential to the creation of the free,
open-s ource, multilingual, and universal encyclopedia Wikipedia. They were
central to the concept of “open government” fi rst put in place by the Obama
administration in 2009 and later expanded into the Open Government Ini-
tiative, an international network of countries seeking to fi ght government
2 introduction
corruption via increased transparency and citizen participation. Digital tech-
nologies allowed Iceland to produce, in 2011, the fi rst “crowdsourced” con-
stitutional proposal in the world. In Taiwan, an innovative process for delib-
erative governance called vTaiwan has used digital technologies to facilitate
successful negotiations among authorities, citizens, and companies like Uber
and Airbnb. In France both the Great National Debate of January– March
2019 and the following Convention on Climate Change of October 2019–
June 2020 relied heavily on digital technologies to experiment with delibera-
tion at the scale of a large nation. Finally, as the COVID-1 9 pandemic ravages
the world, digital technologies enable some people to telecommute, stay con-
nected, exchange information, and serve as an essential element of public
health surveillance.
On the other hand, the very same forces that connect individuals the
world over and allow them to produce and share information also lead to
a superabundance of content, and its global dissemination, which threatens
the health of a functional public sphere and perhaps democracy itself. This
fl ood of content has contributed to the rise of so-c alled post-t ruth politics,2
in which citizens, lacking easy ways to sort good from bad information, are
susceptible to misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. Addition-
ally, the business model of dominant tech fi rms—c apturing and reselling
users’ attention— may reinforce or exacerbate political polarization by lock-
ing people in fi lter bubbles and echo chambers where the like- minded speak
to the like-m inded, ultimately increasing the distance between political dis-
course and reality.3
Additionally, network effects mean that a platform becomes more infl u-
ential and valuable the more people who use it. This has enabled the domina-
tion of global platforms such as Google (including YouTube) and Facebook
(including Instagram and WhatsApp), which, because they serve as the main
gateways to information on the internet, confer on these companies extraor-
dinary power. From the standpoint of any individual, or any nation, a tiny
number of companies is responsible for algorithmically constituting our in-
formational ecosystem. The policies of Facebook and Google are more conse-
quential for permissible speech than is anything decided by Canada, France,
or Germany. In Timothy Garton Ash’s phrase, big tech fi rms are the new
“private superpowers.” And with such power naturally comes the possibility
of abuse of power, manipulation, and mass surveillance.
It was once fashionable to regard technology through a starry- eyed uto-
pian lens. The internet was an immaterial space beyond the reach of politics.
The power of bits and bytes and microchips would topple authoritarian re-
gimes, spread democracy, and connect distant peoples. Today conventional
lucy bernholz, hélène landemore, and rob reich 3
wisdom holds that technologists have brought the world addictive devices, an
omnipresent surveillance panopticon, racist algorithms, and disinformation
machines that exacerbate polarization, threatening to destroy democracies
from within. Many suspect the companies are led by a band of ahistorical
techno-l ibertarian merry pranksters who, after minting their billions by col-
lecting our digital exhaust stream and selling personalized access to advertis-
ers, are now either discovering the reputation-c leansing project of big philan-
thropy or readying to escape to Mars.4
This book went to press in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and
during a period of intensifi ed activism and heightened media attention to
endemic racism and police brutality in the US. The health crisis laid bare
both the worst and the best of our digital dependencies, from an “infodemic”
of false cures and conspiracy theories to heightened commitments to use and
protect online tools for public health and for conducting the essential busi-
ness of the democratic institution, such as the census, public deliberation,
and court proceedings.5 In an emergency, however, time horizons are short-
ened, and we look to any available means to cope.
What is needed is an avoidance of digital utopianism and dystopianism,
and a more sober, long-t erm, assessment. How should we understand the
powerful interactions between digital technologies and democratic ideals?
We are overdue, in particular, for scholars of democratic theory to take stock
of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic
societies and institutions. In this collection of essays, scholars from across
multiple disciplines examine enduring democratic commitments of equality
and inclusion, participation, deliberation, a fl ourishing public sphere, civic
and political trust, rights of expression and association, and voting through
the lens of global digital networks. What we offer is a beginning—a research
agenda for more cross-disciplinary scholarship. This volume makes clear that
there is much work to be done to understand and, possibly with the aid of
technology itself, to improve democracies in the digital age.
Whither Democratic Theory?
Despite the obvious ways in which digital technologies are having profound
effects on democratic institutions and citizens, democratic theorists have
yet to confront those effects. In recent years, democratic theorists have been
more focused on the nontechnological aspects of the widely diagnosed crisis
of democracy, whether the various democratic “defi cits” built in existing in-
stitutions and particularly parties and electoral systems; the economic nexus
of money in politics, neoliberalism, globalization, and increasing economic
