Roadgrading Community Culture: Why the Internet is so Dangerous to Real Democracy

This article forwards an anarchist analysis of the internet as inherently degrading of local community and the possibility of real democracy emerging. The authors suggest that rampant virtuality, based on the eradication of time and space as functional communicative restraints, acts to separate individuals from their face-to-face relationships and localities. They forward that local community is the only forum in which genuine democracy and an ecological society can hope to thrive. The article argues that in asking the question Where do you want to go today?, the internet attempts to create a virtual everywhere, a universalising logic that is to communication what the WTO and globalisation are to economics. Further, the piece forwards a view of technology and society in dialectic relationship with one another, suggesting that democratic tools and a democratic society rely on one another for their emergence.     

A Soiled Password: Democracy,the Word and Democracy,the Thing

The word‘democracy’ to be distinguished from the thing‘democracy.’ Removal by the Italian parliament of a corrupt and scandalous Premier for a respected, honest technician and a form of civil service government does not infringe the second category. Referendums give strength to a handful of already overmighty rich men controlling media outlets. Witness Fox Radio and TV and the poison of Glen Beck, also the virulent nationalism of the Murdoch and Desmond papers. Note the fifty plus year lag in enfranchising women in Switzerland, a self‐evident democratic advance held back by ‘the voice of the people’ in successive referendums. Government should be free from populism and be run by educated, intelligent people both in parliament and the Civil Service. ‘Yes Minister,’ however amusing, has done us a disservice. I would trust a senior civil servant above a press lord any day of the week. Witness the good sense of the Upper House in its current informed and experienced composition. The Lords blocked Tony Blair's plans to by‐pass Habeas Gorpus, refusing authoritarian government to an elected Premier with no sense of the rule of law or constitutional principle.