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In a world nominally committed to greater democracy but dependent upon technology to
achieve that end, there has been a massive and volatile accumulation of power. Calls for
sustainable development and appropriate technology register the desire to scale down this
accumulation of power and to modify the dispositions it has created. More romantic movements
for simplicity have some of the same goals. These efforts to restrain the growth of power have
been more than outweighed by corporatist applications of organizational technologies. The
growth of power has reached the point where what we have, in Darin Barney’s words, is a “stand-
in” or poor substitute for democracy.
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Breathing new life into democracy will require the
creative use of technology in the service of democracy, not the substitution of technology for
democracy. What we have now is a kind of humanistic corporatism that feigns concern for the
natural environment and economic well-being while depreciating democratic responsibility. To
see this more clearly, let me distinguish three levels on which technology and democracy now
interact.
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“For the majority of modern citizens, public-relations spectacles combine with the
periodic registration of private opinions derived from self-interest and propaganda to stand in for
democratic self-government...network technology is but the latest in a succession of stand-ins for
the real thing.” Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of
Network Technology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.268. For a similar
argument that is skeptical about tele-presencing, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet (New
York: Routledge, 2001).
Convention