As part of our Cyber Week eBook Sale (Tuesday, November 28 to Sunday, December 3), Malka Older’s political cyberpunk thriller Infomocracy is only $2.99 at your favorite ebook retailer!
I have lived in, worked in, and visited a lot of countries with on-going separatist movements. (That includes the United States and, in fact, almost any country you might be reading this from.) Some are more noticeable than others. When I lived in Sri Lanka, the LTTE had carved out a band of territory off-limits to the Sri Lankan government, complete with its own (limited) public services, radio stations, and time zone (this territory was later violently overrun and no longer exists). When I traveled in Spain, Spaniards were boycotting cava because of Catalonian secession movements, and there were warnings about attacks by ETA, the armed Basque separatist organization. When I worked in Timor-Leste, one of the newest countries in the world was still figuring out things like economy and orthography after centuries of colonialism. A few hundred kilometers to the north, in Maluku, people were still deciding whether the new autonomy offered by the Indonesian government was worth giving up their dreams of independence.
These urges for breaking up countries into smaller and smaller administrative units reflect one of the fundamental problems with democracy: oppression of the minority by the majority. Democracy is, after all, a system by which a group with greater numbers can impose its will on all other groups in the country. Different countries have tried to address this in different ways: mandatory representation in parliament (e.g., a number of seats that are only open to a certain minority group); an independent judiciary to (in theory) assure basic human rights to all; federalism. These solutions may work to a certain extent, but the whole idea of self-determination being so fundamental to democracy means that people are going to continue to look for ways to have their preferences met.
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Infomocracy: A Novel
To put it another way, take the most recent, contested, complicated, U.S. presidential election (I’m confident this example will continue to work if you’re reading this four years from now, or eight, or even just looking at the midterms). No matter who wins an election, a county-by-county breakdown of votes will show a patchwork: some wide swaths of blue or red, but many places where tiny blocks of colors are mixed together side by side. Polarized democracy means that only slightly more than half the people get what they want at the national level, although people have more influence over their local elections.
As that last point suggests, this can be looked at as a problem of scale: as gerrymandering shows us, depending on where you draw the lines, demographics shift. This is what separatist movements, so common that scarcely a country in the world is without one, try to do: draw new lines so that their group – which may be ideological, ethno-national, or formed of any other common interest – is the majority, even if it’s in a brand new country.
So I came up with an idea: every geographic unit of 100,000 people (roughly) gets to chose the government it wants out of any of the options, anywhere in the world. Because population would be the operative number, not geographic size, immigration becomes a positive; at the same time, fewer people need to immigrate, because they can vote for what they want without moving to a place where it’s available. Micro-democracy, as I called it, lets more people get closer to their preferred system, and encourages innovation and competition as a wider range of governments compete for votes.
It’s not such a stretch. There are already many examples of countries with non-contiguous territories: Alaska, for example. Gibraltar. Réunion. That part would be easy enough to manage. The tricky thing, the part that makes this science fiction rather than a policy proposal, is getting countries to give up their historically determined territory, and let people vote on where they want to belong.
We live in a world when most economies no longer depend on geographic size; if people don’t want to be a part of your country, doesn’t it make more sense just to let them go and self-determine? Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about? Yes, I understand that everyone is scared of admitting borders aren’t forever, even inconvenient and senseless colonial borders, but wouldn’t it be nicer if they were fluid? Look at the patchwork of county results in any U.S. presidential election. Wouldn’t it be nicer if we could pick the kind of government we want—all along the spectrum of social safety nets and taxes and regulations and cultural preferences—wherever we live?
The other major issue with democracy that I was ruminating on was the problem of an informed electorate. Fear of uninformed (or uninformable, in the racist, classist and sexist paradigm of the time) voters was how we ended up with representative democracy. Today, the problem is not so much quantity of information, but quality. It is shockingly easy to find out anything you want to know, although it remains easier for some (in broadband areas, able to afford smartphones, within walking distance of a library) than others. But even for those with access, a surfeit of information is almost as debilitating for decision-making as a lack. Just as we have the food production capacity to feed the world, but fail to do so because of poor organization and lack of political will, we have the information, but we are not managing it in ways that get us what we need.
We have fact-checking, we have statistics, we have data journalism, and yet it is still all but impossible to have a meaningful discussion with someone on the other side of the political divide, not (just) because of any lack of civility or philosophical common ground, but because we can’t agree on basic information that should be easy to confirm. Without a single mandated organization, any “proof” that can be offered is easily countered by “data” from another source.
It was the extreme frustration with this pattern during the 2012 U.S. presidential election that led me to imagine an all-encompassing bureaucracy, part Google and part United Nations, that not only collects data, but makes sure it’s (literally) in everyone’s face through augmented reality. This organization would annotate candidate statements, offer statistics and interpretations, puncture lies and half-truths. It reflects our current obsession with measuring, recording, and scrabbling for an elusive truth.
Of course, these are not perfect solutions. There are always going to be minority opinions in any group, no matter how granular micro-democracy gets. A monolithic purveyor of information begs problems of the who-watches-the-watchmen category, not to mention privacy concerns (on the plus side, it does away with 24-hour cable news and #WellActually). But these flaws only made the idea more interesting to me. They eventually cohered into my novel Infomocracy, a boots-on-the-ground exploration of this idea through science fiction.
Soon, I was weaving a drama into my thought experiment, a high-paced thriller that involved election workers, anarchists, and representatives of Information, the global bureaucracy controlling data. Infomocracy plays out the dangers of assumed neutrality, technological dependence, and data manipulation while also exploring the flaws and pitfalls of the micro-democracy system.
Imagining how this hypothetical system might work also gives us a different vantage point from which to examine how our current democracy fails and succeeds. Writing about a world in which people can choose any government they want highlights the limitations of a two-party system. The idea of a single, incontrovertibly authoritative news source, problematic as it is, offers a critique of current media.
The point of exploring the concept of infomocracy and micro-democracy is not to prove that either of these innovations is necessarily the way for us to go; although they might give us some ideas for tweaks we could make or new directions to try. The point is that to keep trying to make our democratic systems better; to keep adjusting to new technologies and new needs and new realizations of how we have failed in the past. Ultimately, to keep moving towards more inclusiveness, representation, and education for a more perfect government.
The Centenal Cycle—Infomocracy and its sequel Null States—is available from Tor.com. Book three, State Tectonics publishes in Fall 2018.
This article was originally published in November 2016.
Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and Ph.D. candidate at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations studying governance and disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than eight years of experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali. Infomocracy is her first novel, and the Centenal Cycle continues with Null States and State Tectonics—publishing in Fall 2018.
I’m trying to think of other works of fiction that have examined this idea. Maybe Heavy Object, a slight touch of Barrayar’s principle of voting by foot rather than for the aristrocratic Vor Counts, or even Jackson’s Whole (in a loose sense), might be a few others that aren’t coming to mind at the moment.
Giant bureaucracies are always a Bad Idea. They are unaccountable and soon become more about self perpetuation and perks and privileges for the administers rather than their putative purpose.
Freedom means dealing with a certain level of mess.
I can’t remember the book — it’s been many decades since I read it — but I remember a book in which the people owning land on a border were able to move their allegiance from one country to the neighboring country. After a while, the national borders had moved a lot, in both directions.
I think the idea was to keep the countries contiguous, but it was a conservative variant on the idea.
@2: This was addressed (badly) by our Constitution, which only gave the federal government power in certain areas. Those limitations have been ignored. The Swiss did a better job of it — they used the United States as a model — and their federal government only has power over a couple of areas. Everything else is left to the cantons. (One reason that they might have done better is that the people can override the national legislature on any bill. If there’s a certain number of people signing petitions, or if a certain number of canton governments object to a law, then it goes to a national vote. There are four election days per year. If the law is voted down, it can’t be brought up again for a couple of years.) There are times when moving seems like a good idea, until I realize that I don’t speak any of the languages, and it’s a very expensive country to live.
@3: How does that work? How do countries stay contiguous?
Imagine you have territories organised that way (with more X territories on the left that are not represented, and more O on the right):
XOO
XXO
XOO
The two X territories on the left corners are free to become O since they’re at the border, and then the one in the middle left can change its allegiance too. Leaving a map where one X is surrounded by O’s and isolated from the other X’s further on the left.
This kind of thing only matters if you expect Government to be a giant, all encompassing bureaucracy that deals with everything. If you expect Government to be limited then the fact that Government doesn’t do much right is of little consequence.
Creating a giant, all encompassing Bureau of Information to make sure we all believe the same things so that we can all choose to be governed in a suitable way is a laughably childish idea. And, it’s not original. Stalin is calling his patent lawyers from beyond the grave and Orwell wants to see you about plagarism.
In fact government not doing much is the ideal. There is also the problem of language and culture, borders are not entirely artificial boundaries they are the result of centuries of development and organization. And I think we all know how successful both the UN and Google have been in the matter of objective honest information.
Since these comments have been mostly critical, I am jumping in to say I enjoyed this book and it sequel. I have no idea how we would get to this state of affairs or even if it is desirable, but it certainly is food for thought and an interesting SF exploration of what would happen if you had left-wing, right-wing, libertarian, nationalist, corporate governments, etc. all competing for these small districts.
Oh it’s certainly an interesting concept but decidedly problematic – which of course makes for a good book
7, that depends on whose ideals, and if anything, it’s quite possible as many people out there to corrupt a lack of government as an excessive. Or to put it another way, there’s people who lie about the smallest of things to the greatest of harm.
The basic problem with government of any kind is people! ;)
Yeah, but it’s worse to leave people to do what they want. That’s how minorities and those less fortunate get left behind, and how business practices become predatory. Government might have its flaws, but it beats not having any.
That’s what I meant, you need government because People, but government itself is problematic because PEOPLE! Basically all you can do is what our Founders did, design a system to limit the potential for abuse and hope for the best.
Yeah, that worked out wonderfully. :/
Actually it has. Though not without hiccups.
@14:
Compared to what has come before it in history? Yeah. Wonderfully. Its even robust enough to survive the current streak of idiocy we are putting in office. (Talking Congress here, before a flame war starts)
Like I said, Humans are incorrigible. The best any system can do is limit the damage and the Constitutional division of powers is one of the best come up with so far.
Democracy in general is better than what has come before. Now, individual country cases are best not discussed.
As Winston Churchill famously said Democracy is just a terrible form of government – until you consider that alternatives.
11, isn’t that life? Hell is other people?