Strategic multiplexity revisited: a conceptual update

Four years ago, I posted about “Strategic multiplexity: another notion for our troubled times.” I proposed the term as a way to help think about the fact that U.S. relations with many actors abroad increasingly combined a mix of cooperative, competitive, and conflictive ties, all at once.

The term extended from my interest in how, in complex systems fraught with shifting alliances, out-competing may depend on out-cooperating. I also meant for the term to reflect work by Jeffrey Cooper and others who were wondering how best to deal with complex network-like situations where cooperation, competition, and conflict were all interactively intertwined.

Cooper was focused on discerning “New Approaches to Cyber-Deterrence” (see appendix below). But the underlying challenge — how to deal with situations that produce wild gritty mixes of cooperation, competition, and conflict — extends far beyond the cyber domain. Indeed, it dominates the news this very day, as Arab and other Islamic streets explode with anti-American rage, mostly in societies where we’d like to have cooperative relations.

When I drafted the 2008 post, I searched to see whether anyone else had fielded the term “strategic multiplexity” — and nothing turned up, though of course “multiplexity” by itself is a key term in network analysis. Now, four years later, I’ve come across (h/t orgtheory.net) a pertinent essay titled “Strategic multiplexity” by Andrew Shipilov (INSEAD, France) in the journal Strategic Organization (August 2012, pp. 215-222). His orientation is quite different and more academic, but it tracks with my own and thus helps keep the term in motion — which is why I call attention to it here.

According to Shipilov, “we are missing a possibility to examine how multiple kinds of relationships could simultaneously affect network dynamics and network outcomes.

“In this essay I attempt to sketch a research agenda for a strategic multiplexity perspective that should address this shortcoming. The three key premises of this perspective are that (a) organizations are simultaneously embedded in different kinds of relationships, (b) these relationships are interdependent and (c) this interdependence influences organizations.” (p. 215)

For Shipilov, as for other network analysts (see appendix below), the term enables network theory to continue moving away from treating actors as though they are unitary nodes who have unitary interests and uniplex ties. The ensuing emphasis, then, is that “strategic multiplexity is inherently a multilevel perspective” (p. 715). Accordingly, various kinds of interpersonal and inter-firm ties may cut across different formal and informal levels within and between firms. And this may help to show how informal interpersonal relationships may lead to formalized strategic partnerships.

Along the way, he lays out an interesting distinction between pipes and prisms:

“We know that networks act as pipes and prisms for organizations. Pipes provide access to resources and information, while prisms shape the perceptions that others have about the organization’s quality and social standing. Strategic multiplexity allows the development of theoretical models capturing the role of multiple kinds of pipes and multiple kinds of prisms that enable organizations to achieve a network-based competitive advantage.” (p. 217)

In sum, he extols strategic multiplexity as a concept for comprehending how the world keeps changing:

“The strategic multiplexity perspective can have a broad impact on social science. As the world around us is becoming more interconnected, reciprocal cross-level effects become more pronounced in our economic and social lives. For example, established formal relationships of exchange and power in many societies have influenced informal communication for centuries, until they were ripped apart by the grassroots communication revolutions enabled by social media. New technologies increasingly play the role of aggregating mechanisms in collectivities, such as societies or organizations. The downward influence of macro- to the micro-structures is increasingly giving way to reciprocal influences in which both micro- and macro-structures co-evolve. By forcing ourselves to better understand strategic multiplexity, the associated aggregating mechanisms and reciprocal cross-level effects, we should be able to better understand the momentous changes happening in the social systems around us as well.” (p. 220)

Good points; I quite agree. Yet it’s not entirely clear (at least not to me) what his paper means by “strategic multiplexity” and how it differs from and improves upon the standard network-analysis notion of multiplexity. Shipilov’s focus, like that of most network analysts, is on multilevel ties that tend to interact so as to reinforce each other. His strategic optic, I gather, is about how multiplex ties may serve to create competitive advantages and strategic partnerships. Thus, his use of the concept is not only descriptive; it starts to have prescriptive implications for strategy.

Okay, fine. But his is still a limited firm-oriented optic. I’d like to see more about multiplex ties, whether at the same or different levels, that involve contradictions and inconsistencies vis à vis other kinds of actors — relations that may be competitive and conflictive as well as cooperative. Therein lie greater challenges for using the concept for prescriptive purposes that may help us understand better how actors delineate strategies for maneuvering in complex situations — be those actors governments, firms, civil-society organizations, or parts and pieces of them, not to mention tribes and clans (or even criminal organizations) who revel in multiplex dealings in parts of the world.

John Arquilla and I used to write quite a lot about the importance of building networks, and many other writers now do so as well. So I don’t want to burden this post with much reiteration about that. Again, my key purpose here is, simply and hopefully, to use Shipilov’s paper to add momentum to the strategic-multiplexity concept. But I would conclude with a remark or two about today’s headline news:

The Arab Spring is suddenly, exasperatingly, showing signs of moldering into an Arab blight. If/as this continues, American links with societies across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will be increasingly fraught with an evermore wicked complexity — indeed, with strategic multiplexity. As I’ve indicated before, in connection with TIMN, patrimonial corporatism exerts a much stronger pull than liberal democracy in those regions, largely because of the enduring sway of the tribal form and attendant tribalisms. In such contexts, figuring out how to deal with strategic multiplexity — discerning what kinds of cooperative and competitive relations to build across which levels and sectors in order to counter conflictive relations elsewhere — is a bigger deeper question than merely asking (if not posturing) whether the U.S. government is perceived to be a strong horse.

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Appendix: Two pertinent writings

I referred above to Jeff Cooper’s paper about finding “New Approaches to Cyber-Deterrence: Initial Thoughts on a New Framework” (2009). It never uses a term like strategic multiplexity, but his points bear on what I’ve had in mind. Hence, I offer the following exemplary quotes from it:

“Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict. Among the most important of the circumstances mandating a new logic is an international system that is no longer dominated by a bipolar structure, in which both non-state actors and networks of actors (among them ““virtual communities””) have emerged as important factors in international relations. As part of reformulating deterrence for this new environment, this research effort introduces two concepts as key components for cyber-deterrence. The first is a new framework that we term the “Three Cs”— Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict. This framework explicitly recognizes that both we and our potential adversaries (as well as friends, allies, and other actors) now conduct multiple but distinct, relationships with each other across numerous and diverse channels of interaction; and as we participate in networks with a wide range of other parties, we perform different functions, can assume different personas, and often exhibit substantially different behaviors at the same time. ...

“Networked Deterrence. The second key concept in this approach — the “networked deterrence” concept — argues that networks themselves are increasingly the key underpinning of international power and influence and, therefore, represent the real source of value.” (2009, pp. 4-5)

“... It [the 3Cs framework] recognizes that actors can pursue different objectives in different networks and that these three types of relations can exist contemporaneously or simultaneously, resulting in complex “mixed-motive games.” Importantly, such “mixed-motive” games do not, unlike Nash equilibria, produce stable optimum solutions. In fact, for assessing decisions by these actors, the decision space may resemble the sets of multiple attractors produced by complex systems in which predicting the choice among them is impossible.” (pp. 121-22)

“[I]t is now a reality that all players — including states, as well as individuals and other non-state actors, regardless of whether or not they are terrorists or terrorist groups — are entangled in multiple types of relationships. The first key aspect of the “networked deterrence” concept rests on an understanding that these relationships powerfully affect every actor’s motivations and behaviors, and hence their decision calculus. This concept argues consequentially that affecting (or threatening to affect) those relationships can influence the behaviors of an actor; and it should be generally applicable to forestalling a wide range of potential threats.” (p. 129)

“Implicit in the results of this research is a conclusion that a policy of “engagement,” if it is to yield any benefits for the U.S., must create a set of conditions in which all parties to the relationship understand that reciprocity is important. Engagement may imply cooperation, that is, seeking a mutually beneficial outcome, but that does not mean the relationship has to be “friendly.” 160-161

Meanwhile, academic network theorists have been turning more and more to the analysis of multiplexity (but not strategic multiplexity per se). A good example is a paper by Seungyoon Lee and Peter Monge, “The Coevolution of Multiplex Communication Networks in Organizational Communities,” in the Journal of Communication (2011, pp. 758–779). It, much like Shipilov’s paper, emphasizes “multiconnectivity” and the expansion of partnerships across multiple sectors. Here are a few quotes (minus footnote and other citation references):

“Typically, studies of organizational communication networks have explored uniplex networks, those built on a single relation that creates a single network, rather than multiplex networks, those involving multiple relations that create multiple networks. Yet, tie multiplexity is a fundamental aspect of social relations because multiple types of network ties are frequently interdependent, and ties in one network have been shown to influence the formation or dissolution of ties in other networks.” (pp. 758-759)

“Ultimately, the dynamics of multiplex networks suggest that organizations can take advantage of their position in one network for building their positions in other networks. Second, efforts for selecting potential partners can be facilitated across multiple networks, as the presence of ties in one network is expected to increase potential tie formation in other networks. Third, for the purpose of mitigating the uneven structure of global networks, it is expected that intervention in one network will influence other networks.” (p. 773)

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Double thanks to Charles Cameron for spotting that a link had an error, and that text was missing near the end of the main body of this post.  Now corrected.

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UPDATE / ADDENDUM — September 22. 2012:

I appreciate an email from Andrew Shipilov noting that my write-up seems “quite right” regarding his view of using the term “strategic” in combination with “multiplexity”.

In trying to learn more about multiplexity, his research, and INSEAD, I came across the results of the INSEAD Conference on Network Evolution 2.0, held October 22-23, 2010. Various presentations dealt with multiplexity (but not strategic multiplexity). Here are germane quotes from two (available via .zip download here):

According to David Obstfeld, Steve Borgatti, and Jason Davis, “Increases in the heterogeneity found in multiplex ties demand greater brokerage intensity. ... The intensity of brokerage behavior increases as network multiplexity increases. ... We predict that brokerage intensity is increasingly relevant in multiplex structures in non-routine environments...”

Moreover according to Goce Andrevski, Joe Labianca, and Walter Ferrier, “Differences in firms’ strategies explain why firms become embedded in different network structures:  – Advantage-enhancing tendency leads to dense network structure and more strong ties – Advantage-creating tendency leads to sparse network structure and more weak ties”.

I also appreciate an email from Peter Monge in which he points out an issue of the International Journal of Communication (2011) that contains a special section on “Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age,” edited by him, Manuel Castells, and Noshir Contractor. I especially recommend a look at the prologue. The focus is on “multidimensionality” — a far broader concept than multiplexity — but its papers occasionally bear on multiplexity (though not strategic multiplexity).

Such readings offer further insight and inspiration for wondering about strategic multiplexity. In particular, they illuminate the significance of brokers — a point that Shipilov’s paper also makes in passages I did not note above. In any case, many questions remain about how strategy and multiplexity may affect each other, and more to the point, how multiplexity may be exploited (even deliberately constructed) for strategic purposes.

UPDATE / ADDENDUM — November 16, 2012:

I'm informed about an early (1996) paper on “economic multiplexity” that tends to be about “strategic multiplexity” as well. It concerns firms that are partners in some instances, rivals in others — “instances of multimarket competition, multiple cooperative alliances, multiple buyer-supplier relations, cooperative ties between product-market competitors, etc.” The paper — Javier Gimeno and Catherine Y. Woo, "Economic Multiplexity: The Stuctural Embeddedness of Cooperation in Multiple Relations of Interdependence" — was published in a professional book series on management strategy.  Today it still deserves to be included in current literature reviews, including for its early discussion of “the consequences of economic multiplexity for interfirm cooperation.”

Blog update in two parts: (2) learning about Colossus

A quick thanks to all who wished me well via blog comments, emails, and calls. But this post isn’t about my recovery from that rear-end auto collision. No, this post is about something I’ve learned as a result of the accident: that there’s yet another computer system out there — one I’d never heard about before — that appears to run against the grain of my old optimistic hopes for the information revolution. This system, called Colossus, looks like a further sign that we’re seeing the rise of a new kind of computerized corporatism: what I’d like to call “cybercratic corporatism”.

I first learned of Colossus in a form letter from the insurance company of the person whose car rammed into my car. And I’ve been told that Colossus may — or may not — be used to determine an appropriate compensation for the medical part of my claim, after I file.

Colossus is evidently an expert system, loaded with data and algorithms, constantly updated and tweeked, about thousands of automobile accidents involving bodily injuries and medical claims. It was constructed in the mid 1990s, mainly at the behest of one major insurance company that wanted to cut costs, curb large payouts, and constrain its adjustors. Today dozens of insurance companies use it. It is owned by an outside computer services enterprise.

I’m not going to describe Colossus in detail here. I really don’t know a lot about it yet. I’m not even sure how central it is. But if you want to learn more and see some sources, just search the web using the following set of four terms: automobile insurance colossus computer. Doing so will yield some remarkable discussions, not to mention criticisms and allegations — e.g., about the possibilty of using it to low-ball claimants, whose “data” may or may not be entered in ways that best reflect their condition; or using it to constrain adjustors, who may receive incentives and bonuses based on their performance vis à vis Colossus.

Now, my interests are broader than Colossus by itself. Many of us — myself included — have long had hopes and expectations that the information age will favor bottom-up forces, foster greater openness, transparency, and democracy, and make hierarchies more responsive. Yet we’ve also remained warily cognizant that the information age may also be used to strengthen top-down controls, enable greater surveillance and monitoring, and facilitate secretive denial, deception, and disinformation operations. Lately there have been myriad developments in the United States and around the world that reflect all such tendencies; and which ones may prevail in the future is far from clear, far from certain.

What I’m learning about Colossus adds to my skepticism and pessimism. Colossus has a sensible economic rationality behind it, including cost-cutting and managerial rationalization. But it seems to be designed and applied as much for game theory as economic rationality. Colossus appears to be a strategic, operational, and tactical device that may be used to exert top-down control over claimants, adjustors, interactions between claimants and adjustors, and perhaps even over relations with other insurance companies.

Why is this so interesting? I have a longstanding theoretical interest in the futuristic prospects for “cyberocracy” (rule by information) and how its rise may modify and even supercede age-old “-ocracies” — like bureaucracy and democracy — not to mention various “-isms” — like corporatism and authoritarianism (see my writings, referenced below). Mostly I’ve tried to track implications for government and society at large, not so much for business, in keeping with my personal interests. Yet, I know the business world is being revolutionized by information-age dynamics, in all sorts of ways that many of you may be better informed about than I am. What’s mostly caught my attention is the development of computerized systems to suit the worlds of banking, financing, marketing, and advertising — and I’m often more dismayed than impressed by what I read. And now I can add Colossus to my sense that we are witnessing a further deeper spread of cybercratic corporatism.


[UPDATE — October 25, 2013: More information about Colossus has come to light — notably, a report by Mark Romano and J. Robert Hunter titled Low Ball: An Insider’s Look at How Some Insurers Can Manipulate Computerized Systems to Broadly Underpay Injury Claims (Consumer Federation of America, June 2012). Its Introduction observes that:

“Over the past ten to fifteen years, the payment of bodily injury claims covered by automobile or home and property insurance has evolved from a system based primarily upon the experience and knowledge of claims’ adjusters to a computer-based assessment that has the potential to be easily and broadly manipulated by insurers. This technology has enabled many insurers to increase profits by reducing the amount paid to consumers who file bodily injury liability claims, including uninsured and underinsured motorist claims. Insurers have also been able to hire less-experienced employees to handle these types of claims, since the computer programs conduct much of the decision-making. Few consumers have knowledge of these practices, while even less understand the significant impact that the practices can have on their financial lives. The authors’ primary objective in writing this report is to inform regulators about the technical complexity of this topic and the need to exercise better oversight regarding how these systems can be manipulated to the detriment of consumers. Expanding on a previous CFA report, we hope to further educate consumers filing bodily injury claims about how they can avoid unfair tactics employed by some insurers who use computer-based assessment systems and receive a fair settlement.” (p. 1)

Note the warning that computer programs may “conduct much of the decision-making.” By now, some insurance companies have apparently ceased using Colossus, while others have turned to downplay its relevance, perhaps largely because of outside pro-consumer pressures. Nonetheless, my sense is that cybercratic corporatism remains on a long-term march.]

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References: Regarding the prospects for cyberocracy, see this paper and this blogpost.

Blog update in two parts: (1) blog on hiatus

A quick videogram in two parts:  This part one observes that this blog is on hiatus, pending my continued recovery from the effects of a rear-end auto collision.

In a few days, part two will focus on something I've learned as a result of the collision:  a kind of "cybercratic corporatism" — built around the use of a specialized computer program — is affecting more sectors than I'd known.

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P.S. I ddon’t know why Blogspot's editor to make and insert a video directly from my laptop looks black at first. But the video does play properly after you click on the start arrow.

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TIMN in 20 minutes: a video presentation

Here’s a video that offers an overview about the TIMN framework, its system dynamics, and some future implications. It was filmed at my home in order to enable a presentation about TIMN at recent Highlands Forum meetings, after I demurred about traveling to participate in them.

The presentation proceeds in three segments. Segment One is about how TIMN got started. It provides background and a basic description of TIMN.

Segment Two is about how TIMN works. It relates my sense of TIMN’s system dynamics, emphasizing general propositions that hold across the evolution of all four TIMN forms.

Segment Three is about where TIMN is headed. It focuses on the rise of the network (N) form and prospects that a new sector may develop around it. It reflects recent posts at this blog about Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, as well as about Red Toryism, P2P theory, and monitory democracy.

My presentation indicated that there would be a slide about follow-up readings at the end of the video, but it's missing from this somewhat shortened version.  So I'm inserting it here:

There is still much to be discerned and said about all these matters. And I am lagging way behind on my intended arc of postings. Yet, for now, the video provides a good update, and points in the right direction — or so I hope.

I’m very pleased, all things considered, that the video turned out so well. Special thanks to Richard O’Neill (Highlands Forum) for making the video possible, and to Marc Alexander (independent filmmaker) for producing it so appealingly.

Praise for “monitory democracy”: a concept attuned to TIMN (Part 2 of 2)

As noted in my Part-1 post on monitory democracy, I’m always on lookout for concepts that may help show how the +N (network) part of TIMN may unfold in the future. John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy” is one of the best I’ve seen lately.

The Part-1 post summarized the concept and provided preliminary review comments. This Part-2 post assesses the concept’s relevance to TIMN.

I’m interested in “monitory democracy” for its own merits. But doing this double-post now is prompted by my intent to refer to monitory democracy, but sparingly, in the final (Part-IV, upcoming) post in my coterminous series on the causes, conduct, and consequences of Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements.

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Monitory democracy and TIMN: major similarities, minor differences

TIMN is about the rise of network (N) forms of organization; how they work differently from older tribal (T), hierarchical institutional (I), and market (M) forms; and how the whole thing can be assembled into a theory of social evolution that spans the ages from monoform (T-centric), to biform (T+I), to triform (T+I+M), to quadriform (T+I+M+N) societies. According to TIMN, the rise of the information-age network (+N) form is strengthening civil society more than state and market actors, and will lead to the growth of a new sector that is different and separate from the existing public and private sectors. TIMN associates this with the spread of networked NGOs and other entities that act as sensory organizations and do lots of watching and monitoring.

Keane’s view is remarkably consistent with TIMN. The concept of monitory democracy parallels, overlaps, and reinforces much that I’ve said about TIMN. The similarities are not precise — see the next two sections for some major differences. Yet his concept is tantamount to a missing piece in TIMN — a piece that slots into place quite nicely. I like it in lots of ways, as follows:

I like his emphasis on monitoring. My TIMN efforts have long pointed to the monitoring roles of NGOs and other actors involved in the rise of the network form (see Appendix 1), and related to that, the growth of vast new sensory apparatuses, both organizational and technological, that enable monitoring (see Appendix 2). But I never thought of elevating monitoring to a degree that redefines and renames the nature of democracy.

I like 1945 as a date for the start of monitory democracy. For TIMN, I’ve often wondered when to date the start of the rise of the +N form. Sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century, for sure. But when, why? The +N form doesn’t start to take-off until faxes come into play in the 1970s. But seminal experiments with organizational networking occurred earlier, in the 1960s, notably with the civil-rights and anti-war movements. I’ve not seen a way to put the take-off date earlier. But Keane’s account shows that the stage-setting ferment for networked activism within civil society began decades earlier, circa 1945, with the appearance of monitoring “inventions” all across civil society, often operating outside the standard boundaries of the state- and market-related public and private sectors. Thus, these early inventions were not extensions of the prevailing +I or +M parts of TIMN; they were a new breed of actors and entities — forerunners — awaiting a capacity to link up and maneuver in +N directions.

I like Keane’s emphasis on civil society. TIMN also regards civil society as a growing source of monitory power vis à vis state and market actors. And related to that, I like Keane’s point that monitory democracy brings new kinds of checks and balances. TIMN is very much about each form being used in proper ways vis à vis the other forms — ways that would keep the forms and their realms largely separated, limited, balanced, and mutually regulated. I see monitory democracy fitting well with that.

I like Keane’s point that the progression from assembly to representative to monitory democracy does not mean that the old forms are displaced by the new. Rather, the old continue to coexist with the new, and they all work on and with each other. Likewise, TIMN is about the layering and compounding of all the TIMN forms and their respective realms, in a preferred progression over time.

I also like Keane’s recognition that all three types of democracy have both bright and dark sides. This too is TIMNish. Keane does not extol monitory democracy in utopian terms, any more than TIMN is utopian about the rise of the +N network form. Indeed, if the trends behind monitory democracy turn out to generate far more surveillance than sousveillance, the outcome might be more a monitory cyberocracy than a monitory democracy.

And I like that Keane’s concept offers a way to look beyond Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. TIMN does so as well; and I plan to eventually post about this. As a reminder, Fukuyama’s famed thesis (1992, p. xi, quoting from 1989) held that “[L]iberal democracy may constitute the “end point of man’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” … the “end of history.”” From a TIMN perspective, Fukuyama’s thesis is thoroughly triformist (T+I+M); it does not grasp that the network form of organization is on the rise and will remake history by creating quadriformist (T+I+M+N) societies. Rather similar to TIMN, Keane’s monitory democracy means that political evolution is far from ending. The forces and dynamics behind Keane’s concept will grow throughout this century. Something quite different from liberal democracy á la Fukuyama seems bound to result.

Monitory democracy vs. TIMN: differences along with similarities

Despite all these likeable similarities, there are some major differences I’d highlight:

Keane’s progression from assembly to representative to monitory democracy makes good sense, and aligns quite well with the progression of TIMN forms. But with qualifications. As I’ve long intended to show (2006, p. 39, fn. 16), each TIMN form may be associated with a different type of democracy. Thus TIMN implies four, not three, types of democracy.

What I’ve had in mind means that Keane’s assembly democracy corresponds well to the tribal (T) form; consultative consensus-seeking in tribal councils — majority rule — was indeed the first type of democracy. Representative democracy evolved later, when it appears first in hierarchical state-centric (+I) societies, and then is more fully realized in later societies where the (+M) market form takes hold as well. Monitory democracy corresponds to the modern rise of the (+N) network form and its effects on civil society.

Which leads to a discrepancy. TIMN implies that representative democracy — or should I say liberal democracy, with its allowances for political parties to compete and for dissenting minorities to have rights — corresponds best to triformist T+I+M societies where the market (+M) form has taken hold, penetrating and modifying the state (+I) realm. That leaves a question as to what kind of democracy corresponds just to a biform T+I system that revolves around a central (+I) state hierarchy, and where the +M form has not emerged, esp. if it is being prevented from doing so. The answer, I detect, is what is now called democratic centralism — a sheltered pyramidal institutional (+I) system in which allowances are made for the selection of lower-level representatives who then select or otherwise approve higher-level ones, tier by tier, until the top ruler (e.g., a dictator like Lenin, Mao, or Castro) is validated, along with his chosen cadre. It’s essentially hierarchical but can claim to be democratic. Variants I’ve spotted include “consultative dictatorship”, “authoritarian deliberation”, and “networked authoritarianism” — mostly in connection with efforts to characterize China’s system today.

From a TIMN stance, such a four-part typology makes more analytic sense than a three-part. But I’ve not yet gone through the history of democracy enough to document that it makes factual historical sense as well. Making a good case would require identifying past examples of democratic centralism, say in medieval monarchies or the Papacy, in order to show that what may seem like early examples of representative democracy can be recategorized and better understood, from a TIMN perspective, as instances of democratic centralism. Any suggestions?

This difference in Keane’s and TIMN’s approaches to typologizing democracy is reflected in our views about the nature of enabling technologies. I like very much Keane’s association of each age of democracy with a different information and communications technology: assembly democracy in ancient times, with the spoken word and early writing; next, representative democracy, with first print, then telegraph and radio, and lately television; and now monitory democracy with all sorts of new digital media. This is very TIMNish. I have long associated the rise of the tribal form with early language and writing; the hierarchical institutional form, with the mechanical print revolution; the market form, with the electronic revolution (telegraph, telephone, radio); and now the new network form, with the digital media revolution.

That’s quite an overlap between our analyses — but notice the discrepancy: Keane associates representative democracy with both the mechanical and the electronic revolutions. In contrast, TIMN says the two are so different that they help explain the phasing of two different forms of organization. The +I and +M phases each require, in turn, a deeper denser information / communications revolution to take hold. This suggests that, at a minimum, representative democracy goes through two phases: an intra-hierarchic (+I) phase and a more open competitive marketlike (+M) phase. Or more to the point, the two phases are so different that the +I phase should have its own name — e.g., democratic centralism — and representative democracy, in its liberal sense, should be identified primarily with the +M phase. That would be more in accord with what I think TIMN implies.

Of course, none of this is to say that one of us is right and the other wrong — that a three-part or a four-part typology is better. We just have different analytic sensibilities and priorities. Mine is to keep elaborating TIMN. Hence my interest in identifying the foregoing differences and discerning ways of adjusting to them. In any case, most are of an historical nature. More significant may be some differences in our orientations toward the future.

Monitory democracy vis à vis TIMN: long-range future implications

As already noted, monitory democracy is a powerful concept that fits well with TIMN. Yet, TIMN contains some pointed themes about future forces and dynamics that are not fully evident in Keane’s approach. I lay them out in this section, with an eye to wondering whether they might benefit future elaborations about monitory democracy or TIMN, if not both.

One key TIMN theme is the growing importance of the network (+N) form of organization. Keane’s writings, to their credit, often refer to networks — “organizations and networks”, NGO networks, global networks, computer networks, media networks, social networks etc. And it seems implicit that all kinds of networks — organizational, technological, social — are making a crucial difference for monitory democracy. But in contrast to TIMN, Keane’s writings do not (yet?) say much about the rise of networks as a distinct form of organization. And I don’t mean this strictly as a plug for TIMN’s +N view; Bauwen's P2P or similar views may be suitable as well. I just think that monitory democracy, as concept and practice, would benefit from a stronger clearer identification with the rise of network forms of organization.

A second key TIMN theme is that the rise of the network form will lead to the creation of a new sector, from out of civil society, that is different and apart from the established public (+I) and private (+M) sectors. Various names have been tried out for this nascent sector over the past several decades: e.g., third sector, social sector, civic sector, citizen sector, social-benefit sector, commons sector. But sure as I am that TIMN implies a new sector, it remains unclear what’ll be its cardinal purpose, scope and scale. Maybe one of the previous names will stick, but I have doubts. In any case, it cannot turn out to be simply a monitory sector, for a lot of monitoring will also be done in and by actors in the other sectors. Yet, monitoring — á la Keane’s concept — will surely be a major function. I’m still trying to figure out this aspect for TIMN. And I will hope that Keane’s future writings offer further guidance. His current writings indicate in spots that a new sector is emerging; and as my Part-1 post noted, he ties the prospects for monitory democracy to prospects for people having “equal access to ‘the commons’”. But that is far from explicitly forecasting a new sector, much less calling for a commons sector.

A third TIMN theme is that the network age will result in new modes of governance. Keane’s mention of “networked governance” indicates that he recognizes this, though he doesn’t elaborate. TIMN, mainly in a paper on future prospects for cyberocracy, expects networked governance to become increasingly significant, perhaps resulting in a “nexus state” that combines multiple modes of governance, as a successor to the classic bureaucratic and modern market states. A democratic nexus-state would surely be a monitory democracy. Keane’s concept also fits well with Michel Bauwen’s P2P concept of a “partner state”. In any case, a lot of work remains to be done on how monitory democracy may affect governance in the future, from local to global levels.

And that leads to a set of final points: One is that the prospects for a new sector and for monitory democracy will depend on what happens with the vast new sensory apparatuses, technological and organizational, that are expanding capabilities for both surveillance and sousveillance. I’d suppose that a balance between them is advisable for the sake of both TIMN and monitory democracy. But at present, surveillance seems to be growing far more than sousveillance. I covered some of this in a 2008 writing (see Appendix 2), but a lot has transpired since then. For example, just the past few months have led to revelations about the construction of a huge NSA electronic surveillance facility (reported here in Wired, blogged here by ever-attentive David Brin). And there’s an idea to build a “social radar” for the U.S. government. But I’ve also come across ideas for a “sensor commons” and “surveillant landscapes” as well as “augmented activism” and “crisis mapping” that are mostly about sousveillance. Quite a lot of ferment! And it’s still in early stages. The balance is far from set.

Something else: A point that is missing in writings so far about TIMN and monitory democracy is that, if a new sector is to become influential in the deep future, new kinds of aggregators and clearinghouses will be needed. I offer this point speculatively, but I’m pretty sure about it. The +I realm has its states with their councils, congresses, parliaments, parties, and elections. The +M realm has various markets, exchanges, banks, and currencies. But so far, the +N sector is lacking in aggregators and clearinghouses of similar scale and scope. Sure, there are bits and pieces, often by issue area, as in social forums, watch-dog networks, opinion polls, and philanthropic entities that do scanning. But we’re still far from seeing major aggregators and clearinghouses that can assemble large amounts of monitoring from multiple diverse sources and give voice to what it all may mean. Perhaps like a Google designed for monitoring rather than searching, or a platform like All Our Ideas that uses “wiki surveys”, where people may even set their own parameters.

A final point: As I noted in my Part-2 post about Occupy! and related pro-democracy protest movements, responsibility is emerging as an important thread. Many activists talk about rights — e.g., Occupy as a continuation of the civil rights revolutions of the 20th C. But I detect a growing emphasis on responsibilities, and have wondered whether Occupy! may develop into a responsibilities revolution more than a rights revolution. Corporate social responsibility and government accountability are strong threads. If monitory democracy is to take hold in the 21st C., it may make sense for activists of all stripes to press on civic responsibilities even harder than on civil rights. A recent plea for this appears here in the Democracy journal. It comes with a liberal / progressive bent, but I’ve seen similar pleas of a conservative bent. Monitory democracy may well turn out to be about responsibilities more than rights — and about how this affects people’s abilities to work together and abide by mutual social compact despite different leanings.

Coda: revisiting a comparison of 1848 and 2011

Previously, in a sidebar at the end of my Part-1 post on Occupy! and related protest movements, I picked up on comparisons of the 2011 movements to the 1848 revolutions, and speculated in TIMN terms that 2011 is to the rise of the +N form as 1848 was to the rise of the +M form:

"If 2011’s wave reflects the rise of the (+N) network form … what about the 1848 wave? Where’s the similarity in that TIMN regard? Back then was too early for the network form of organization to be much of a cause …. But — and here’s my TIMN point — it was an era when the (+M) market form was on the rise, reshaping not only economic but also political and social dynamics. Indeed, representative democracy depends on the penetration of (+M) market principles and dynamics into the (+I) realm of the state. …

"… The 1848 revolutions were “caused” by the rise of the market form, much as the 2011 revolutions are “caused” by the rise of the network form. As to whether the post-1848 outcomes imply being cautious about expecting much from the 2011 wave, I’ve little idea. But my sense of TIMN suggests that the stakes this time around involve a different kind of democracy, not just representative democracy."

After reading Keane, I see that the “different kind of democracy” at stake may well be monitory democracy. If so, then 2011 (or will it be 2012?) is to monitory democracy as 1848 was to representative democracy — a year full of upheavals, harbingers, and turning-points for the future of democracy, but likely to yield mixed results for decades to come.

Thus Keane’s framework — his distinctions about assembly, representative, and monitory democracy — is consistent with (and helps make) a point that undergirds my coterminous series on Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements: These movements are doing a lot to express and propel the rise of the network (+N) form of organization. They will succeed to the extent that they continue to do so, presuming it’s in a constructive manner.

From a TIMN perspective, fostering monitory democracy is one of the most constructive things to do. It’d help with renewing social compacts that have been badly damaged in many societies over the last decade or two. It’d help with assuring that the liberal democracies of the world get fully back on that path, rather than slipping further in the direction of patrimonial corporatism.

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Appendix 1: Excerpt from “A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution” (2002)

What follows is an excerpt from a TIMN-related paper I wrote — “A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution” — in 2002 for Robert Olson and David Rejeski (eds.), Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow: Shaping the Next Industrial Revolution, (2005). The excerpt is from pp. 92-93, 94-97. The paper is available as a download here.

I include the excerpt in order to document and provide elaboration that TIMN has long been moving along a similar track to Keane’s in regard to the monitoring roles of NGOs. The excerpt focuses on environmental matters, but its scope could be applied to other issue areas as well, in keeping with TIMN’s general implications about how the rise of the network (+N) form may reshape societies.

Implications for Future Modes of Conflict and Cooperation

New modes of conflict and cooperation emerge with each evolutionary shift. A society’s efforts to transition from one stage to the next, or relate to a society that is at a different stage, are bound to create internal and external contradictions; indeed, the values, actors, and spaces favored by one form tend to contradict those favored by another. Thus, the rise of a new form induces epochal philosophical, ideological, and material struggles that are jarring to a society’s stability, transformability, and sustainability. This happened in the past when tribal systems faced the rise of states, and states the rise of market systems. It will happen anew now that the network form is on the ascendance, energizing mainly nonstate actors.

Network forms of organization are attracting enormous attention these days; new books and articles appear every few months (with some of the best analysis coming from researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). But it remains quite unclear what a new network realm may ultimately look like. One way it may evolve is through a four-stage progression in network topology: from an initial scattering of groups and individuals that have sparse network ties (“scattered emergence”); to their combining into a “single hub-and-spoke” design where the central hub acts mainly as a clearinghouse and coordinating agency; then to a deeper, more dispersed, specialized “multi-hub small world” design; and eventually to a dense, vast, sprawling “core/periphery” mass of organizational networks.[*] To some extent, the environmental movement (not to mention other civil-societal movements) is already moving through this progression. But just as the molding of a network realm will take time, so will the development and understanding of its interactions with the other, existing realms. …

Long-Term Scenario: New Approaches to Policy and Strategy

As the subversive effects subside and additive effects take hold, a society adapts to the rise of a new form and learns to combine it with the prevailing forms (realms). This may take decades, probably much longer. The deepening of the network age will cause a leap in the strength of civil society, or the emergence from it of a new network-based realm whose name and nature are not yet known. An end result will be the creation of next-generation policy mechanisms for communication, consultation, and collaboration among state, market, and civil-societal (or new-realm) actors, at home and abroad.

Because of the rise of a realm of networked actors and forces, current approaches to domestic and foreign policy will go through radical revisions. Some oft-noted trends will deepen: First, the boundaries between domestic and foreign policy will blur further, as activist NGOs continue to press for transnational perspectives on policy problems and solutions. Second, public-private cooperation, so needed in so many issue areas, will continue to extend beyond state and market actors to include socially minded nonprofit NGOs (who are sometimes said to comprise a new social sector separate from the traditional public and private sectors).

Meanwhile, new challenges will take shape. Taking advantage of the information revolution, people and organizations in advanced societies are developing vast sensory apparatuses for watching what is happening in their own societies and elsewhere around the world. Many innovations are occurring in organization and strategy, often by taking advantage of the new information and communications technologies. For example, one unusual benefactor of the Internet has been birdwatchers in North America, a group that contains an estimated one in four of all U.S. citizens. A few years ago, with the help of the National Audubon Society and Cornell University, bird watchers started sharing data online and have used the network to better understand and map migration patterns.

Mining and analyzing data culled from large networks is not new and has long been used by existing government regulatory, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies; corporate market-research departments; news media; and opinion-polling firms. What is new is the looming scope and scale of this sensory apparatus, and its increasing inclusion of NGOs who watch, monitor, share information, and report on what they see in diverse issue areas. One example is Global Forest Watch (GFW), an international network of local forest-protection groups linked by the Internet and a common data-gathering format. The World Resources Institute collaborated by e-mail with over a hundred scientists in different parts of the world to create a unique set of digital maps showing the location and extent of the world’s old-growth forests. The GFW network monitors all these areas, recording any illegal cutting, burning, or other violations of forest leases on the digital maps. This information is posted to the Internet in near-real time, naming specific violators. Review processes check the accuracy of the data collected and ensure that participating network groups are acting responsibly. The information makes it possible for activists to mobilize quickly, apply market pressures to companies, and pressure governments to regulate effectively.

Developing the kind of early warning capability illustrated by GFW is an increasing concern for many environmental NGOs; so is gathering information to affect the framing of policy options. Determining appropriate designs, and roles, for this array of sensory organizations and their (centralized? decentralized?) internetting will be a growing challenge. Perhaps one day in the future, advances in autonomic and pervasive computing will even enable us to build self-regulating systems that can monitor and report on conditions without the constant involvement of humans. How such networked-based, self-regulating systems may interface with traditional forms of top-down regulation by government is only a speculative question today.

The emergence of a network realm — and of massively networked systems and infrastructures with it — will pose significant challenges for the agencies responsible for environmental protection. Their advisory councils and decision structures will have to open up to more regular participation from NGO representatives, at least in consultative capacities. Indeed, various environmental, health, consumer, and other activist watchdog and advocacy groups are already working — perhaps with more success in Canada and Europe than in the United States — to see that such reforms occur. And as stronger, more transparent connections are built among the responsible government agencies, NGOs, and companies, they will have to learn to work more cooperatively to formulate policy through new governance systems that embrace not only government and business but also NGO representatives. Climate change is probably the best example of an environmental issue that can only be resolved by networking across institutional boundaries of every kind.

Public policy dialogue has, for over a century, revolved around contentions as to whether government or the market represents the better solution for particular policy issues. In the network age, this choice will prove too narrow, too binary, even for blending. New views will come to the fore that the network is the solution. These views may well open up possibilities for major improvements in environmental protection. …

If this view of the role of networks — and of the eventual rise of a new network realm — in long-range social evolution is correct, the growth of transnational NGOs, and the ability of NGOs, states, and market actors to network with each other, should prove a major asset for democratic societies. It may help reanimate the concept of progress — giving it new direction and credibility. It may point the way to developing the structures and organizational processes that will make a sustainable future possible.

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Appendix 2: Excerpt from The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited) (2008)

What follows is a sub-section, minus footnotes, from an unpublished paper available online: The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited) (2008, co-authored with Danielle Varda). It updates the first paper I wrote on the topic in 1991, and the excerpt is from the 2008 update.

As with Appendix 1 above, I include the excerpt in order to document and provide elaboration about TIMN’s long-standing concern with monitoring roles that may increase as the network (+N) form takes hold.

Development of New Sensory Apparatuses Throughout Societies

Taking advantage of the information revolution, people and organizations in the advanced societies are building vast new sensory apparatuses for watching what is happening in their own societies and around the world. Of all the uses to which the new technologies are being put, this may become one of the most important for the future of the state and its relationship to society.

These sensory apparatuses are not entirely new. Government agencies, public utilities, science centers, corporate market-research offices, news media, and opinion-polling firms have long amassed data and tracked trends in selected areas of interest. What is new is the burgeoning scope and scale of these apparatuses: the deployment of new kinds of sensors by all kinds of actors; the increasing roles of NGOs and NPOs in this activity; and the internetting and sharing of information that is becoming possible across agency, sectoral, and national boundaries, both publicly and privately. 

Many of the new apparatuses reflect the perception of perils. Crime and terrorism are impelling new installations for watching cityscapes, monitoring communications, and mapping potential hotspots. But sensor networks are also being deployed for early warning and rapid response regarding many other concerns — disease outbreaks, forest protection, bird migration, and urban electricity spikes, to name a few. In addition, environmental, human-rights, and other social activists continue to develop new media — notably, IndyMedia — to keep watch and speed mobilization in case of a challenge or abuse somewhere, say against the Zapatista movement in Mexico. In a sense, the partisan blogospheres amount to a gigantic, reactive sensory apparatus in the American body politic.

Many technologies are involved. Indeed, the diversity of devices being deployed is impressive — such as cameras on satellites in earth orbit, moisture sensors embedded in trees in fire-risk zones, postings broadcast on public Web pages, and silent alarms for remote private monitors. Networked computers, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags play prominent roles today. But looming advances in nanotechnology, robotics, biometrics, and alternative energy sources will enhance the trend. Cell phones, smart cards, and other hand-held and embedded devices may become the key bearers of this new technology at the individual level.

Thus, technologists are fusing the decades-old goal of “ubiquitous computing” with the newer goal of “pervasive sensing.” Before long, what are called “anticipatory technologies” may become so widespread and effective that many surroundings are embedded with “ambient intelligence” — leading to so-called “smart buildings,” “sensible organizations,” and “sentient cities” set to autonomically monitor for everything from leaky pipes to lost children. Then, the sensor era will turn into a sensor/effector era, where devices not only detect but also can manipulate matters. Meanwhile, citizens’ concerns about top-down surveillance may be countered by bottom-up “sousveillance” (or inverse surveillance), particularly if individuals wear personal devices for detecting and recording what is occurring in their vicinity.

This is not to say that societies will increasingly resemble “organisms” that have a central nervous system and brain. That’s going too far. But something is taking shape for which sensory apparatus seems an appropriate term. A term like surveillance system is too limited (and biased). Far more than surveillance is occurring, and the diverse arrays comprising this apparatus are far from forming an integrated system. Bits and pieces have existed for decades — they are normal for complex modern societies — and more pieces are being emplaced. Yet most are scattered and task-specific. They exist to do people’s bidding — such as responding to a change in environmental conditions, or to a signal from a nearby actuator, transponder or microprocessor. Some pieces are networked, but not all. And no central master hub exists (and presumably never will).

The scope and scale of this apparatus are growing far beyond what government, business, and civil-society actors have ever had at their disposal or had to cope with. They will all be challenged to figure out proper designs for the kinds of sensory organizations and technologies they prefer — and proper ways to regulate them. Their growth has already sharpened issues about privacy and security, but it may also open new pathways for fostering transparency and accountability. How information is assembled and accessed, how issues and options are illuminated, how public and private forces are mobilized, and how oversight is achieved will all be affected.

It has become standard fare to speculate that such apparatuses mainly benefit government and corporate actors, for good and ill. Less noticed, but we think equally likely and significant, is that the apparatuses will aid the rise of civil-society actors, by providing networked NGOs and NPOs with new tools not only for checking on the behavior of government and corporate actors, but also for participating in collaborative governance schemes with them. New mechanisms for attracting and combining diverse viewpoints under the rubric of “collective intelligence” could help foster this. So could the continued advance of principles favoring freedom of information, the right to communicate, and open access.

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A thankful h/t to Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson for calling my attention to John Keane’s concept of monitory democracy.

Special thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and the Highlands Forum, for his overall interest and encouragement.

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[AMENDED — April 14, 2012: I added a few phrases and links here and there.]

Praise for “monitory democracy”: a concept attuned to TIMN (Part 1 of 2)

I’m always on lookout for concepts that may help show how the +N network part of TIMN may unfold in the future. John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy” is the best I’ve seen lately. It merits a lot more attention.

I first heard about it indirectly a year or two ago in posts by Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson at the P2P Foundation blog, and from Carson’s writings at his blog on The Desktop Regulatory State (specifically, Ch. 3). Lately, I’ve managed to read Keane’s own writings about his concept.

This Part-1 post summarizes the concept and provides preliminary review comments. A subsequent Part-2 post will assess the concept’s relevance to TIMN.

I’m interested in “monitory democracy” for its own merits. But I’m also trying to develop background for examining the concept’s implications for Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements in a future Part-IV post in my coterminous series on the causes, conduct, and consequences of those movements.

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John Keane’s concept of “monitory democracy”

To learn about monitory democracy, I’ve read parts of Keane’s book on The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), along with spin-off papers found online (2008a, 2008b, 2010), plus a few discussions I spotted. For this post, I’ve relied mostly on the paper (2008b) that I think offers the best summary of Keane’s analysis (and also because it’s easier to copy and paste quotes from it than from his hardcopy book). Readers who want access to more of his articles and essays should peruse his website at johnkeane.net.

In these writings about monitory democracy, Keane grounds his analysis on the following phenomenon: increases in monitoring roles played by NGOs and other actors representing civil society.

Keane is not among the first to observe this phenomenon. Analysts have been documenting and speculating about it for decades. A handy example, with a large annotated bibliography that extends back a decade or two, is Ann Florini’s The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (2000), which concluded that:

“[T]he growing attention to transnational civil society is not mere hoopla. It reflects a real and considerable increase in the number and effectiveness of transnational nongovernmental networks. The power of transnational civil society manifests itself at virtually every stage of policy making, from deciding what issues need attention to determining how problems will be solved to monitoring compliance with agreements.” (p. 211)

By now, there are myriad writings in this vein. Almost all relate the rising influence of civil society and its NGOs to the spread of network forms of organization, and to their enablement by new information technologies. And all this is said to be promising for the future of democracy, partly because monitoring roles are so greatly enhanced. (See Appendices 1 and 2, which I will include at the end of Part 2.)

Yet, Keane offers an innovative way to look at this phenomenon — as the rise of a new kind of democracy: monitory democracy. To my knowledge, that’s an insightful contribution; it moves thinking quite a few steps beyond the now-common notion that the information revolution is empowering and altering civil society in ways that will reshape democracy.

Keane provides a succinct summary statement about monitory democracy in the introductory chapter of his book (2009; chapter titled “Bad Moons, Little Dreams”):

“[T]he years since 1945 have seen the invention of about a hundred different types of power-monitoring devices that never before existed within the world of democracy. These watchdog and guide-dog and barking-dog inventions are changing both the political geography and the political dynamics of many democracies, which no longer bear much resemblance to textbook models of representative democracy, which supposed that citizens’ needs are best championed through elected parliamentary representatives chosen by political parties. From the perspective of this book, the emerging historical form of ‘monitory’ democracy is a ‘post-Westminster’ form of democracy in which power-monitoring and power-controlling devices have begun to extend sideways and downwards through the whole political order. They penetrate the corridors of government and occupy the nooks and crannies of civil society, and in so doing they greatly complicate, and sometimes wrong-foot, the lives of politicians, parties, legislatures and governments. These extra-parliamentary power-monitoring institutions include — to mention at random just a few — public integrity commissions, judicial activism, local courts, workplace tribunals, consensus conferences, parliaments for minorities, public interest litigation, citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies, independent public inquiries, think-tanks, experts’ reports, participatory budgeting, vigils, ‘blogging’ and other novel forms of media scrutiny.” (p. 14; online here and here)

In that first chapter, Keane makes clear that democracy’s proponents would be well-advised to start understanding and fostering monitory democracy, but he also shows that he is far from utopian about its prospects:

“In contrast to those policy makers, activists and scholars who suppose that the fundamental choice facing contemporary democracies is that between accepting the terms of Westminster-style electoral democracy and the embrace of more participatory forms of 'deep' and 'direct' democracy — in effect, a choice between embracing the present or returning to the imagined spirit of Athenian democracy — The Life and Death of Democracy carves out a third possibility, one that has much contemporary history on its side, an option, the growth of 'monitory democracy', that needs to be recognised for what it is: a brand-new historical form of democracy.” (pp. 15-16)

The Life and Death of Democracy does not suppose that monitory democracy is leading us to paradise on earth. It pays attention to the way that trends in its favour are to a varying degree subject everywhere to counter-trends.” (p. 17)

There’s a lot worth elaborating here. And I’m going to do so next, at some length. The quotes (and the concept) are so illuminating that I’d advise bearing with my extensive excerpts, for they bear on what I will eventually turn to say (in Part 2) about the overlaps with TIMN and implications for Occupy! and related pro-democracy movements.

Further elaboration of Keane’s concept of monitory democracy

To place monitory democracy in historical context, Keane divides the history of democracy, from ancient through modern times, into three grand ages: assembly democracy, representative democracy, and monitory democracy.

“My claim is that our world is now living through an historic sea change, one that is taking us away from the old world of representative democracy towards a form of democracy with entirely different contours and dynamics.

“My conjecture is that monitory democracy is a new historical type of democracy, one that is defined by the multiplication and dispersal of many different power-monitoring and power-contesting mechanisms, both within the ‘domestic’ fields of government and civil society and beyond, in cross-border settings that were once dominated by empires, states and business organisations.

“In terms of its contours and dynamics, monitory democracy is the most institutionally complex form of democracy yet. It is the tertium quid, the undefined and not fully formed successor of the earlier historical experiments with assembly-based and representative forms of democracy.” (2008a, pp. 2-3)

According to Keane, “the age of monitory democracy … began around 1945” — right after World War II. That’s a decades earlier than I expected, but he has good reasons for this date. It has to do with people’s reactions to war, including writings by Thomas Mann, Sidney Hook, Jacques Maritain, and especially Reinhold Niebuhr, that called for a new form of democracy to deal with “the devil of unaccountable power” (2009, p 731). It also has to do with “the birth of nearly one hundred new types of power-scrutinising institutions unknown to previous democrats” — inventions that “break the grip of the majority rule principle — the worship of numbers — associated with representative democracy” (2008b, pp. 4-5).

Keane specifies a large catalog of post-1945 organizational “inventions” that give voice to minority views, watch over government and corporate behaviors, publicize neglected policy positions, and even just “come on the scene, stir the pot, then move on like nomads, or dissolve into thin air.” (2008b, pp. 4-5)

“By making room for opinions and ways of life that people feel strongly about, despite their neglect or suppression by parties, parliaments and governments, these inventions have the combined effect of raising the level and quality of public monitoring of power, often for the first time in many areas of life, including power relationships ‘beneath’ and ‘beyond’ the institutions of territorial states. …

“The number and range of monitory institutions so greatly increase that they point to a world where the old rule of ‘one person, one vote, one representative’ — the central demand in the struggle for representative democracy — is replaced with the new principle of monitory democracy: ‘one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives’.” (2008b, pp. 5-6)

“[S]lowly and surely, the whole architecture of democracy has begun fundamentally to change. So too has the meaning of democracy. No longer synonymous with self-government by an assembly of male citizens (as in the Greek city states), or with party-based government guided by the will of a majority, democracy comes to mean a way of life and a mode of governing in which nobody rules.” (2008a, pp. 8-9; it’s clearer in his book (2009, pp. 856-859) where he writes “no body rules” rather than “nobody rules”)

Keane insists that monitory democracy does not spell a revival of assembly democracy, nor a replacement of representative democracy. Instances of both earlier forms will continue to exist, necessarily. Monitory democracy is still representational, but in new ways. For it’s a set of structures and processes that is being built outside, alongside, and throughout the old ones:

“What is distinctive about this new historical type of democracy is the way all fields of social and political life come to be scrutinised, not just by the standard machinery of representative democracy but by a whole host of non-party, extra-parliamentary and often unelected bodies operating within and underneath and beyond the boundaries of territorial states. In the era of monitory democracy, it is as if the principles of representative democracy — public openness, citizens’ equality, selecting representatives — are superimposed on representative democracy itself. This has many practical consequences, but one especially striking effect is to alter the patterns of interaction — political geography — of democratic institutions.” (2008b, p. 8, italics in original)

“Just as representative democracies preserved the spirit and form of ancient assemblies, so monitory democracies preserves legislatures, political parties and elections, … But such is the growing variety of interlaced, power-monitoring mechanisms that democrats from earlier times, if catapulted into the new world of monitory democracy, would find it hard to understand what is happening. (2008b, p. 9)

“Monitory mechanisms operate in different ways on several different fronts. Some scrutinise power primarily at the level of citizens’ inputs to government or civil society; others are preoccupied with monitoring and contesting policy throughputs; still others concentrate on scrutinising policy outputs produced by governmental or non-governmental organisations. Monitory mechanisms also come in many different shapes and sizes, and operate on various spatial scales, ranging from ‘just round the corner’ bodies with merely local footprints to global networks aimed at keeping tabs on those who exercise power over great distances. Given all this variability, it should not be surprising that a quick short list of inventions looks — at first sight, to the untrained eye — to be a higgledy-piggledy collection of different practices that resemble something of a magpie’s nest of randomly collected items.” (2008a, p. 11, italics in original)

For traditionalists who might reiterate old arguments that civil-society actors still don’t matter nearly as much as established political and market actors, he has a solid counter-argument — and I welcome his mention of “networks” as agencies of power-monitoring:

“It is sometimes said that the business of power scrutiny changes very little, that states and corporations are still the ‘real’ centres of power in deciding who gets what, when and how in this world. Evidence that this is not necessarily so is suggested by the fact that all of the big public issues that have erupted around the world since 1945, including civil rights for women and minorities, American military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq, nuclear weapons, poverty reduction and global warming, have been generated not by political parties, elections, legislatures and governments, but principally by power-monitoring networks that run ‘parallel’ to — and are often positioned against — the orthodox mechanisms of party-based representation.” (2008b, p. 19)

“The intense public concern with civil society and with publicly scrutinizing matters once thought to be non-political is unique to the age of monitory democracy.” (2009, p. 709)

Keane depicts representative democracy as belonging to an age of nations, hierarchies, and limited connections. In contrast, monitory democracy is for a new age of densely transnational, networked connections. His depiction of its dynamics — latticed, inter-laced, and often non-linear, viral, and chaotic — sounds straight out of recent complexity theory and network science, as well as older interdependence theory:

“One interesting thing about monitory democracy is that it begins to confront the wall of prejudice with a hammer. Its latticed patterns of power monitoring effectively fudge the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. Like other types of institutions, including business and universities, democracy too is caught up in a process of ‘glocalisation’. This is another way of saying that its monitory mechanisms are dynamically inter-related, to the point where each functions simultaneously as both part and whole of the overall system. In the system of monitory democracy, to put things a bit abstractly, parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist. Its units are better described as sub-wholes — ‘holons’ is the term famously coined by the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler — that function simultaneously as self-regarding and self-asserting entities that push and pull each other in a multi-lateral system in which all entities play a part.” (2008b, p. 17)

“The dynamics of monitory democracy are thus not describable using the simple spatial metaphors inherited from the age of representative democracy. Talk of the ‘sovereignty’ of parliament, or of ‘local’ versus ‘central’ government, or of tussles between ‘pressure groups’, political parties and governments, is just too simple. It is obsolete. In terms of political geometry, the system of monitory democracy is something other and different: a complex web of differently-sized and more or less interdependent monitory bodies that have the effect, thanks to communicative abundance, of continuously stirring up questions about who gets what, when and how, as well as holding publicly responsible those who exercise power, wherever they are situated. Monitory democracies are richly conflicted. Politics does not wither away. Everything is never straightforwardly ok.” (2008b, p. 27)

“Despite such weaknesses, the political dynamics and overall ‘feel’ of monitory democracies are very different from the era of representative democracy. Politics in the age of monitory democracy has a definite ‘viral’ quality about it. The power controversies stirred up by monitory mechanisms follow unexpected paths and reach surprising destinations. … In the world of monitory democracy, that kind of latticed — viral, networked — pattern is typical, not exceptional. It has profound implications for the state-framed institutions of the old representative democracy, which find themselves more and more enmeshed in ‘sticky’ webs of power-scrutinising institutions that often hit their target, sometimes from long distances, often by means of boomerang effects.” (2008b, pp. 28-29)

Lest this make monitory democracy seem too conflictive, too chaotic, during this early phase of its emergence, Keane insists otherwise, partly by pulling “networked governance” into the picture:

“[M]onitory democracy contains plenty of mechanisms for stitching and binding together individuals and groups and institutions. For all its public conflicts, monitory democracy is not ‘anarchy’. It contains plenty of bonding and bridging devices that bring a measure of coherence to political life. … [including] the new arts of what is called ‘networked governance’ — the knack of combining and co-ordinating complex decisions across a variety of potentially conflicting organisations.” (2008a, p. 25-26)

As a causal factor, Keane’s explanation for monitory democracy emphasizes the development of new media that create “communicative abundance”. Other factors are significant too — like the “trigger” of war, and the rise of civil-society NGOs and networks concerned with human rights (2009, pp. 729-731) — but he keeps returning to the roles of communications media, even associating each age of democracy with the rise of a different media technology:

“All these pressures have conspired to push actually existing democracies in the direction of monitory democracy. But one force is turning out to be the principal driver: the emergence of a new galaxy of communication media.

“No account of monitory democracy would be credible without taking into account the way that power and conflict are shaped by new media institutions. Think of it like this: assembly-based democracy in ancient Greek times belonged to an era dominated by the spoken word, backed up by laws written on papyrus and stone, and by messages dispatched by foot, or by donkey and horse. Representative democracy sprang up in the era of print culture — the book, pamphlet and newspaper, and telegraphed and mailed messages — and fell into crisis during the advent of early mass communication media, especially radio and cinema and (in its infancy) television. By contrast, monitory democracy is tied closely to the growth of multi-media-saturated societies — societies whose structures of power are continuously ‘bitten’ by monitory institutions operating within a new galaxy of media defined by the ethos of communicative abundance.” (2008b, p. 21)

From these considerations, Keane concludes that “monitory democracy is the deepest and widest system of democracy ever known” (2008a, p. 20, italics in original) — in part because “the new scrutiny mechanisms add checks and balances on the possible abuse of power by elected representatives” (2008b, p. 16). Indeed,

“In the era of monitory democracy, the constant public scrutiny of power by hosts of differently sized monitory bodies with footprints large and small makes it the most energetic, most dynamic form of democracy ever. … Various watchdogs and guide dogs and barking dogs are constantly on the job, pressing for greater public accountability of those who exercise power. The powerful consequently come to feel the constant pinch of the powerless. In the era of monitory democracy, those who make decisions are subject constantly to the ideal of public chastening, tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings of scrutiny (figure 4).” (2008b, pp. 27-28)

So much is changing that Keane disputes and refutes the influential “end of history” view whereby Francis Fukuyama (1992) praises liberal democracy as the endpoint of political evolution. Says Keane (2008b, p. 2), that view is “too limited to grasp the epochal change — too bound to the surface of things, too preoccupied with continuities and aggregate data to notice that political tides have begun to run in entirely new directions.” In contrast, Keane expects that monitory democracy will prove

“its superiority as a way of preventing and amending mistakes, as a self-reflexive mode of anticipating, defining and handling unexpected events and unforeseen consequences and reversing wrong-headed decisions and their unjust effects.” (2009, p. 14)

But much as Keane lauds ways in which monitory democracy may lead to radical changes and benefit peoples’ interests, enabling them to question and even prevail against those in power, he notes (2008a, p. 24) that “such monitoring is also often ineffective, or proves to be counterproductive.” Indeed, the very same communicative abundance that fosters monitory democracy has dark sides as well:

“There is admittedly nothing automatic or magical about any of this. In the era of monitory democracy, communication is constantly the subject of dissembling, negotiation, compromise and power conflicts, in a phrase, a matter of politics. Communicative abundance for that reason does not somehow automatically ensure the triumph of either the spirit or institutions of monitory democracy. Message-saturated societies can and do have effects that are harmful for democracy. …

“The coming age of IPTV (internet protocol television) is likely to deepen such disaffection and if that happens then something more worrying could happen: the spread of a culture of unthinking indifference. Monitory democracy certainly feeds upon communicative abundance, but one of its more perverse effects is to encourage individuals to escape the great complexity of the world by sticking their heads, like ostriches, into the sands of willful ignorance, or to float cynically upon the swirling tides and waves and eddies of fashion — to change their minds, to speak and act flippantly, to embrace or even celebrate opposites, to bid farewell to veracity, to slip into the arms of what some carefully call ‘bullshit’.” (2008b, pp. 30-31)

“Nothing is sacrosanct — not even the efforts of those who try to rebuild the sacrosanct. The art of making a public spectacle of private life for political purposes now happens on a geographic scale and with a democratic intensity that past generations could never have imagined, let alone grasped or accepted.” (2008a, p. 31)

Dark notes at the end — but bright ones too

After making these points, Keane turns to write in his book (2009; chapter titled “Memories from the Future”) as though an historian 50 years out were looking back on current times. The ensuing analysis is fraught with unease and pessimism about current conditions and future prospects for democracy. A dark critical eye is cast on today’s politicians, politics, parties, and party government; on popular malaise that voting does not matter much, but celebrities’ views do; on the abilities of market actors to elude scrutiny; on nationalisms that foster instability and “uncivil wars”; on cross-border actors who are anti-democratic; on a distortion he terms überdemocracy — and of course, on American imperialism. Monitory democracy, Keane implies, is being undermined by hypocrisy and hubris, fakery and fatalism, contempt and corruption — indeed, by “pathological reactions to monitory democracy” (p. 765).

I find the pessimism pervading this chapter of the book to be too contrived, too biased. Many if not most of the plaints seem quite ageless; many apply to, and arose during, earlier phases of democracy, not just the new monitory phase. Moreover, the plaints read much like an au courant litany of criticisms collected from partisans of Occupy! and related movements — not a bad thing, but very much part of our own times, more about the decline of representative democracy than the promise of monitory democracy, and far from representing a profound voice from the future.

Even so, Keane raises valid warnings with this quasi-futuristic chapter: One is that enemies of democracy may succeed at spreading (Chinese) concepts about “harmonious society” and “democratic centralism” that could destroy monitory democracy in the name of democracy (pp. 813, 831-833). Another is that monitory democracy will be harder to foster if democracy’s greatest power, the United States, wanes. Electoral and party reforms are needed in order to revitalize representative democracy there and elsewhere. As are efforts to strengthen monitory mechanisms, so that civil-society “bodies and networks” gain a greater voice in policymaking and in holding all sorts of actors publicly accountable (p. 825). Keane also uses his fictive future muse to raise an interesting concern about the lack of effective global institutions:

“She went on to say that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many representative democrats fought against monopolies of power, whereas monitory democrats were faced in many contexts with the opposite problem, the under-concentration of power. Monitory democracy, she said, was weakened by the lack of global driving seats and steering mechanisms, plus the ineffectiveness of many that did exist.” (pp. 777-778, italics in original)

Even so, Keane makes clear in his penultimate chapter (2009; titled “Why Democracy”) that he believes deeply in democracy, and that its monitory age can make democracy better than ever — in part because it promises “to democratise the ideal of democracy” (p. 847). He still worries that “The enemies of democracy are on the rise” (p. 841), and expresses his doubts about the universality of democracy. But he looks forward to seeing monitory democracy add to society’s checks and balances, and prove its worthiness “as a humble and humbling ideal that gathers strength from the vision that, although citizens and representatives require institutions to govern, no body should rule.” (p. 856, italics in original)

In favoring ways in which “[d]emocracy points to the equalization of power” (p. 861, italics in original), Keane even brings up people’s access to “the commons” — a matter of great importance to the Occupy movement. And he takes as far-reaching a view of the commons as many Occupiers do:

“Without equal access to ‘the commons’ — in matters as diverse as public transport, telecommunications and a sustainable biosphere — humble democracy in monitory form simply cannot survive, let alone thrive.” (p. 862)

And that strikes me as a good note on which to end this Part-1 post.

In sum, monitory democracy is an insightful forward-looking concept. As I step back, I notice that the book’s title and cover art seem overly dark; and so does a metaphor warning that rooting for democracy nowadays risks building “a campfire on ice” (2009, p. 18).  But no matter, for Keane’s key concept — monitory democracy — shines new light on ways for societies to reorganize and improve for decades to come. I’ve tried to lay out its particulars in detail, because I think monitory democracy has deep significance for TIMN, as well as for movements like Occupy!. I turn to that in the next post — Part 2 — where I will revisit many of the points summarized above.

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Many thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and Highlands Forum, for review comments on a pre-final draft of this post, as well as for his overall interest and encouragement.

A thankful h/t to Michel Bauwens and Kevin Carson for calling my attention to John Keane’s concept of monitory democracy.
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[AMENDED — March 24, 2012: I added a few more quotes from Keane’s book (2009, from pp. 15-16, p. 17, and p. 18).]