For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system. For Jon Katz, on the other hand, it marked the rise of postpolitics and the birth of the Digital Nation.
First stirrings
On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who - in jarring contrast to the offline world - line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.
I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.
I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation - the Digital Nation - and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy. This nascent ideology, fuzzy and difficult to define, suggests a blend of some of the best values rescued from the tired old dogmas - the humanism of liberalism, the economic opportunity of conservatism, plus a strong sense of personal responsibility and a passion for freedom.
I came across questions, some tenuously posed: Are we living in the middle of a great revolution, or are we just members of another arrogant élite talking to ourselves? Are we a powerful new kind of community or just a mass of people hooked up to machines? Do we share goals and ideals, or are we just another hot market ready for exploitation by America's ravenous corporations?
And perhaps the toughest questions of all: Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings? Or are we nothing more than a great, wired babble pissing into the digital wind?
Where freedom is rarely mentioned in mainstream media anymore, it is ferociously defended - and exercised daily - on the Net.
Where our existing information systems seek to choke the flow of information through taboos, costs, and restrictions, the new digital world celebrates the right of the individual to speak and be heard - one of the cornerstone ideas behind American media and democracy.
Where our existing political institutions are viewed as remote and unresponsive, this online culture offers the means for individuals to have a genuine say in the decisions that affect their lives.
Where conventional politics is suffused with ideology, the digital world is obsessed with facts.
Where our current political system is irrational, awash in hypocritical god-and-values talk, the Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics.
The world's information is being liberated, and so, as a consequence, are we. My journey
Early last year, writer John Heilemann and I set out on parallel media journeys for HotWired's The Netizen, originally created to explore political issues and the media during the election year. One concept behind The Netizen - a conceit, perhaps - was that we would watch the impact of the Web on the political process in the first wired election. Heilemann was to cover the candidates, the conventions, and the campaigns. I would write about the media covering them.
Things didn't turn out quite as we'd expected at The Netizen. The year of the Web was not 1996 - at least not in terms of mainstream politics. The new culture wasn't strong enough yet to really affect the political process. The candidates didn't turn to it as they had turned in 1992 to new media like cable, fax, and 800 numbers.
And the election was shallow from the beginning, with no view toward the new postindustrial economy erupting around us and no vision of a digital - or any other kind of - future. By spring '96, it seemed clear to me that this campaign was a metaphor for all that doesn't work in both journalism and politics. I couldn't bear The New York Times pundits, CNN's politico-sports talk, the whoring Washington talk shows, the network stand-ups.
Why attend to those tired institutions when what was happening on the monitor a foot from my nose seemed so much more interesting? Fresh ideas, fearsome debates, and a brand-new culture were rising out of the primordial digital muck, its politics teeming with energy. How could a medium like this new one have a major impact on a leaden old process like that one? By focusing so obsessively on Them, we were missing a much more dramatic political story - Us.
So I mostly abandoned Their campaign, focusing instead on the politics of Ours - especially interactivity and the digital culture. I was flamed, challenged, and stretched almost daily. The Web became my formidable teacher, whacking me on the palm with a ruler when I didn't do my homework or wasn't listening intently enough; comforting me when I got discouraged or felt lost.
I argued with technoanarchists about rules, flamers about civility, white kids about rap, black kids about police, journalists about media, evangelicals about sin. I was scolded by scholars and academics for flawed logic or incomplete research. I was shut down by "family values" email bombers outraged by my attacks on Wal-Mart's practice of sanitizing the music it sells.
I saw the strange new way in which information and opinion travel down the digital highway - linked to Web sites, passed on to newsgroups, mailing lists, and computer conferencing systems. I saw my columns transformed from conventional punditry to a series of almost-living organisms that got buttressed, challenged, and altered by the incredible volume of feedback suddenly available. I lost the ingrained journalistic ethic that taught me that I was right, and that my readers didn't know what was good for them. On the Web, I learned that I was rarely completely right, that I was only a transmitter of ideas waiting to be shaped and often improved upon by people who knew more than I did.
Ideas almost never remain static on the Web. They are launched like children into the world, where they are altered by the many different environments they pass through, almost never coming home in the same form in which they left.
All the while, I had the sense of Heilemann cranking along like the Energizer Bunny, responsibly slugging his way through the torturous ordeal of campaign coverage, guiding the increasingly-exasperated people who actually wanted to follow the election. What Heilemann learned and relayed was that the political system isn't functioning. It doesn't address serious problems, and the problems it does address are not confronted in a rational way. It doesn't present us with the information we need or steer us toward comprehension - let alone solution.
Over the course of 1996, the ideologies that shape our political culture seemed to collapse. Liberalism finally expired along with the welfare culture it had inadvertently spawned. Conservatism, reeling from the failure of the so-called Republican revolution, was exposed as heartless and rigid. The left and the right - even on issues as explosive as abortion and welfare - appeared spent. While they squabbled eternally with one another, the rest of us ached for something better. In l996, we didn't get it.
The candidates didn't raise a single significant issue, offer a solution to any major social problem, raise the nation's consciousness, or prod its conscience about any critical matter. The issues the candidates did debate were either false or manipulative, the tired imperatives of another time.
"Nineteen ninety-six was the year that Old Politics died," wrote Heilemann. "For outside this bizarre electoral system that's grown and mutated over the past 40 years - this strange, pseudo-meta-ritual that, experienced from the inside, feels like being trapped in an echo chamber lined with mirrors - there are profound, paradigm-shifting changes afoot."
There are paradigm-shifting changes afoot: the young people who form the heart of the digital world are creating a new political ideology. The machinery of the Internet is being wielded to create an environment in which the Digital Nation can become a political entity in its own right.
By avoiding the campaign most of the time, I ended up in another, unexpected place. I had wandered into the nexus between the past and the future, the transition from one political process to a very different one.
While Heilemann came to believe he was attending a wake, I began to feel I was witnessing a birth - the first stirrings of a powerful new political community. The nascent nation
All kinds of people of every age and background are online, but at the heart of the Digital Nation are the people who created the Net, work in it, and whose business, social, and cultural lives increasingly revolve around it.
The Digital Nation constitutes a new social class. Its citizens are young, educated, affluent. They inhabit wired institutions and industries - universities, computer and telecom companies, Wall Street and financial outfits, the media. They live everywhere, of course, but are most visible in forward-looking, technologically advanced communities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Austin, Raleigh. They are predominantly male, although female citizens are joining in enormous - and increasingly equal - numbers.
The members of the Digital Nation are not representative of the population as a whole: they are richer, better educated, and disproportionately white. They have disposable income and available time. Their educations are often unconventional and continuous, and they have almost unhindered access to much of the world's information. As a result, their values are constantly evolving. Unlike the rigid political ideologies that have ruled America for decades, the ideas of the postpolitical young remain fluid.
Still, some of their common values are clear: they tend to be libertarian, materialistic, tolerant, rational, technologically adept, disconnected from conventional political organizations - like the Republican or Democratic parties - and from narrow labels like liberal or conservative. They are not politically correct, rejecting dogma in favor of sorting through issues individually, preferring discussions to platforms.
The digital young are bright. They are not afraid to challenge authority. They take no one's word for anything. They embrace interactivity - the right to shape and participate in their media. They have little experience with passively reading newspapers or watching newscasts delivered by anchors.
They share a passion for popular culture - perhaps their most common shared value, and the one most misperceived and mishandled by politicians and journalists. On Monday mornings when they saunter into work, they are much more likely to be talking about the movies they saw over the weekend than about Washington's issue of the week. Music, movies, magazines, some television shows, and some books are elementally important to them - not merely forms of entertainment but means of identity.
As much as anything else, the reflexive contempt for popular culture shared by so many elders of journalism and politics has alienated this group, causing its members to view the world in two basic categories: those who get it, and those who don't. For much of their lives, these young people have been branded ignorant, their culture malevolent. The political leaders and pundits who malign them haven't begun to grasp how destructive these perpetual assaults have been, how huge a cultural gap they've created.
Although many would balk at defining themselves this way, the digital young are revolutionaries. Unlike the clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they're making one. This is a culture best judged by what it does, not what it says.
In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt wrote that two things are needed to generate great revolutions: the sudden experience of being free and the sense of creating something. The Net is revolutionary in precisely those ways. It liberates millions of people to do things they couldn't do before. Men and women can experiment with their sexual identities without being humiliated or arrested. Citizens can express themselves directly, without filtering their views through journalists or pollsters. Researchers can get the newest data in hours, free from the grinding rituals of scientific tradition. The young can explore their own notions of culture, safe from the stern scrutiny of parents and teachers.
There's also a sense of great novelty, of building something different. The online population of today has evolved dramatically from the hackers and academics who patched together primitive computer bulletin boards just a few years ago - but the sensation of discovery remains. People coming online still have the feeling of stepping across a threshold. Citizenship in this world requires patience, commitment, and determination - an investment of time and energy that often brings the sense of participating in something very new.
It's difficult to conceive of the digital world as a political entity. The existing political and journalistic structures hate the very thought, since that means relinquishing their own central place in political life. And the digital world itself - adolescent, self-absorbed - is almost equally reluctant to take itself seriously in a political context, since that invokes all sorts of responsibilities that seem too constraining and burdensome.
This is a culture founded on the ethos of individuality, not leadership. Information flows laterally, or from many to many - a structure that works against the creation of leaders.
Like it or not, however, this Digital Nation possesses all the traits of groups that, throughout history, have eventually taken power. It has the education, the affluence, and the privilege that will create a political force that ultimately must be reckoned with. Some postpolitical core values
Out of sight of the reporters, handlers, spin-masters, and politicians of the presidential campaign, a new political sensibility took shape in 1996. It brought fresh ideas. It brought real debates about real issues.
The postpolitical ideology draws from different elements of familiar politics. The term postpolitical gets tossed around in various circles, but here it refers to a new kind of politics beyond the traditional choices of left/right, liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat. Although still taking shape, this postpolitical ideology combines some of the better elements of both sides of the mainstream American political spectrum.
From liberals, this ideology adopts humanism. It is suspicious of law enforcement. It abhors censorship. It recoils from extreme governmental positions like the death penalty. From conservatives, the ideology takes notions of promoting economic opportunity, creating smaller government, and insisting on personal responsibility.
The digital young share liberals' suspicions of authority and concentration of power but have little of their visceral contempt for corporations or big business. They share the liberal analysis that social problems like poverty, rather than violence on TV, are at the root of crime. But, unlike liberals, they want the poor to take more responsibility for solving their own problems.
This amalgam of values reveals itself in seemingly odd ways. Many online had no trouble believing that the Los Angeles Police Department was racist or, conceivably, might have planted evidence in the O. J. Simpson murder case. There was no sympathy, though, for the idea that O. J. should have been acquitted as a result of such technicalities.
The postpoliticos can outdo liberals on some fronts. They don't merely embrace tolerance as an ideal; they are inherently tolerant. Theirs is the first generation for whom pluralism and diversity are neither controversial nor unusual. This group couldn't care less whether families take the traditional form or have two moms or two dads. They are nearly blind to the color and ethnic heritage of the people who enter their culture. This is the least likely group to bar someone from a club because he or she is Jewish or black, or to avoid marriage because of a person's religion or ethnicity.
On the other hand, the digital young's intuitive acceptance of tolerance and diversity doesn't prevent them from rejecting liberal notions like affirmative action. And they are largely impervious to victim-talk, or politically correct rhetoric, or the culture of complaint celebrated in the liberal media coverage of many minority issues.
This culture is no less averse to the cruel and suffocating dogma of the right. The postpolitical young embrace the notion of gender equality and are intrinsically hostile to any government or religious effort to dictate private personal behavior. While conservatism has become entwined with an evangelical religious agenda, the digital young are allergic to mixing religion and politics.
If liberals say, "Here's the tent: we have to get everyone inside," and conservatives say, "Here's the tent: we don't want it to get too crowded inside," the postpolitical young say, "Here's the tent: everyone is welcome - but everyone has to figure out how to get inside on his or her own."
One of the biggest ideas in the postpolitical world is that we have the means to shape our lives, and that we must take more responsibility for doing so. This ascending generation believes its members should and will control their destinies. A recent survey in American Demographics magazine studied young Americans and called them self-navigators."In a fast-changing and often hostile world, self-navigation means relying on oneself to be the captain of one's own ship and charting one's own course," wrote the Brain Waves Group, the survey's developers. Those characteristics also describe many citizens of the Digital Nation.
This group values competence and hard work, the survey found. Traditional formulas for success carry little weight since college degrees no longer guarantee jobs, getting a job doesn't guarantee you'll keep it, retirement may never be possible, and marriages can fail. Despite such caution, this group - in sharp contrast to its boomer parents - sees a future of great opportunity. The Digital Nation is optimistic about its own prospects.
Although these ideas work well for them now, as the postpolitical young of the digital world grow older, they will confront a new range of problems, from developing careers to raising children to preparing for old age. Their ideology will, of necessity, develop and change.
As they raise children, they will face issues such as neighborhood safety, maintaining parks, and improving the educational system. As they buy homes, they will encounter bread-and-butter political issues like taxation and zoning. Faced with developing a new political agenda in a radically different world, they will inevitably find themselves face-to-face with the ghosts of the old one. A new form of libertarianism
The closest thing the digital world has to dogma is its ingrained libertarianism, its wholehearted commitment to political and economic freedom, its fierce opposition to constraints on individual expression - from the chilling fanaticism of the politically correct to the growing movement to censor popular culture.
The online world is the freest community in American life. Its members can do things considered unacceptable elsewhere in our culture. They can curse freely, challenge the existence of god, explore their sexuality nearly at will, talk to radical thinkers from all over the world. They can even commit verbal treason.
The Internet is still a wild frontier. The hackers and geeks who founded and shaped it believed that there should be no obstacles between people and information, and there are still vibrant, almost outlaw communities that enforce this notion: cypherpunks who act as technoanarchists, flamers who challenge punditry, hackers who breech the barriers constantly being thrown up by government and business.
The single dominant ethic in this community is that information wants to be free. Many of those online know that this idea is antithetical to the history of media, to the nature of politics and capitalism. Corporations do not believe that information should be free - they believe they should control it and charge for it. Government doesn't believe that information should be free - witness the fiasco of the Communications Decency Act. Religious organizations, educators, and many parents don't believe information ought to be liberated, either. The realization that children have broken away from many societal constraints and now have access to a vast information universe is one of the most frightening ideas in contemporary America.
These new libertarian notions are often misunderstood. While some longstanding political groups associated with libertarianism are profoundly hostile to government, the digital young are not so much paranoid about government as frustrated by its lack of effectiveness. They don't see government conspiring to take over their lives as much as they consider it an outdated means of solving problems. It's widely acknowledged in online discussions, for example, that traditional drug policies have been catastrophic failures and that radical new ideas - legalization, perhaps - should be considered.
The digital young, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to college students, have a nearly universal contempt for government's ability to work; they think it's wasteful and clueless. On the Net, government is rarely seen as an instrument of positive change or social good. Politicians are assumed to be manipulative or ill-informed, unable to affect reform or find solutions, forced to lie to survive. The Digital Nation's disconnection from the conventional political process - and from the traditional media that mirror it - is profound.
Both politics and journalism tend to refer to this alienation as a civic disorder, brought on by new media and new culture and a decline in literacy and civilization. The young must be disinterested because they are distracted by music or coarsened by too much TV. But in their own way, the young are saying something different: the political system doesn't work, so why bother to pay attention to it?
This very sense of alienation has planted the seeds of more civil notions of politics and community. Although online culture is widely perceived as hostile and chaotic, the stereotype is superficial. Writing for The Netizen, I noticed a recurring phenomenon that speaks both to that sense of alienation and to the potential for community.
As anyone who writes on the Web knows, criticism comes fast and furious. Some of it is cruel - even vicious. But as an experiment, I began responding to angry email as if it were civil, addressing the point being made instead of the tone of the message. The pattern was clear: at least three-quarters of the time, the most hostile emailers responded with apologies, often picking up the discussion as if it had been perfectly polite. In hundreds of instances, flamers said things like, "Sorry, but I had no idea you would actually read this," or "I never expected to get a reply."
Months of these exchanges have convinced me that alienation online - and perhaps offline as well - is not ingrained, that it comes from a reflexive assumption that powerful political and media institutions don't care, won't listen, and will not respond. Proven wrong, many of the most hostile flamers became faithful correspondents, often continuing to disagree - but in a civil way. I found myself listening more to them as well.
We were forming a new sort of media culture. In small ways, over time, we were moving beyond the head-butting that characterizes too many online discussions (offline ones, too) and engaging in actual dialog, the cornerstone of any real political entity. We were finding that interactivity could bring a new kind of community, new ways of holding political conversations.
Of all the prospects raised by the evolution of digital culture, the most tantalizing is the possibility that technology could fuse with politics to create a more civil society. It's the possibility that we could end up with a media and political culture in which people could amass factual material, voice their perspectives, confront other points of view, and discuss issues in a rational way. A new rationalism
At the moment, the Internet and the Web are two of the most chaotic media ever - brawling and ill-defined. But they suggest new ways to gather and distribute facts, to make an end run around the dogma-driven discussions of conventional politics.
In our current system, all issues get presented in liberal or conservative terms. Liberals almost never support the death penalty; conservatives almost always do. Conservatives say police need to crack down on crime; liberals complain about police brutality. Journalists, reduced by their corporate owners to the role of social stenographers, report what one side says, then the other. Civic discussion becomes an irrational stalemate. The digital world offers real promise of a more enlightened way.
The concept of rationalism grew out of the Enlightenment, becoming crystallized in a formal philosophy espoused by a small group of 17th- and 18th-century philosophers - among them, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Its main principles were: reason can be the one and only means of determining a course of action; knowledge forms a single system and can be deduced; everything ultimately is explicable. Rationalism advances a primary commitment to reason, as opposed to faith or dogma or any other source of irrational conviction.
Enlightenment philosophies, wrote Peter Gay in The Enlightenment, "made up a clamorous chorus, but what is striking is their general harmony, not their occasional discord." They united on a profoundly ambitious program of secularism, humanism, cosmopolitanism, and, above all, writes Gay, freedom - "freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world."
None of these enormous ideas transformed the world at once. But they were great leaps forward in the service of freedom - at the time an unknown concept in most of the world. Out of the Enlightenment came the American and French Revolutions, which advanced the radical notion that individuals ought to have inalienable rights and govern themselves. The Enlightenment also fostered the great idea at the heart of today's digital world: information ought to be free.
Today, the idea that the Net offers a new sort of rationalism is a stretch. Newsgroups, Web sites, and online public discussions are disorganized. And along with online freedom comes its ugly offspring: the confrontation, misinformation, and insult that characterize many public forums on the Internet.
But in specialized areas - academic or scientific forums, for instance - the emergence of a new rationalism is easier to see. The Net brings information to remote researchers in hours, allows feedback in days that once took months, and generally democratizes the flow of information around the world. Since the Net was founded in part by scientific and academic communities, their use of it is more advanced - perhaps presaging what it can mean for the rest of us.
If this notion works for science, could it work for politics? Science focuses on facts and research, politics more on advancing beliefs or altering the beliefs of others. It's a big leap from a medium that moves facts around the world to one that influences values. But I've seen the process work; it can be done.
Time and again on The Netizen and elsewhere on the Web, facts have proven an antidote to unyielding doctrines. Debates have moved forward when factual information is cited; consensus is reached. In fact, one of the most enduring characteristics of online discussions is the frequent use of citations that the linkage of the Web makes possible. Arguments often are buttressed by information from Web sites, published research, and archived data.
The unprecedented ability of individuals to speak directly to one another advances the political discussion further than in the offline world. If neither party leaves a conversation completely transformed, each is able to do precisely what our existing system makes so difficult: fully understand the other person's position, absorb some of the other's values, and see the other as a complex person rather than a simplistic stereotype. Just the beginning
The Communications Decency Act of 1996, an effort to control the nature of speech on the Internet - making "indecent" language a federal crime - was the Net's own Stamp Act.
Like that 1765 law, the CDA stunned a community, one that from its inception had taken freedom for granted. It galvanized a diverse coalition of idiosyncratic individuals into a cohesive political force. Like the colonists, the online community saw the law as an arrogant act by an alien entity seeking to force its will on a new world that it had lost any moral right to control.
More than any single event, the CDA prompted people whose professional or personal lives center around the Internet to define a shared political ethic. It provided, for the first time, a common goal around which to coalesce. If the Stamp Act marked a turning point in the colonies' relationship with England, the CDA did the same for the digital world, giving credence to the notion of the birth of a Digital Nation.
The CDA's passage and the Digital Nation's reaction to it showed that the digital world was creating not a radically new value system, but that it was now the champion for a venerable old one: the notion of individual liberty. The Digital Nation demonstrated a willingness to fight for and expand upon those freedoms first articulated way back in the Enlightenment - freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom to determine one's own values and morals.
The gift of the CDA was the opportunity it presented the Digital Nation to fight for freedom all over again. It gave this ascending community a moral issue that all could believe in. It made them the heirs of a great tradition.
The digital world is often disconnected from many of the world's problems by virtue of its members' affluence and social standing. Founded in the bedrooms of suburban hackers and the classrooms of prestigious institutions, it has often been derided as self-absorbed. It has yet to respond to any political or social crisis that doesn't directly concern it.
The digital young do need to develop coherent philosophies for responding to the very problems that the exhausted current system fails to address: limited economic opportunity, endemic underclass problems, never-ending racial hostility. The Digital Revolution eventually needs to offer solutions for eradicating poverty, ignorance, and war in radical and hopeful ways.
Here is a growing élite in control of the most powerful communications infrastructure ever assembled. The people rushing toward the millennium with their fingers on the keyboards of the Information Age could become one of the most powerful political forces in history. Technology is power. Education is power. Communication is power. The digital young have all three. No other social group is as poised to dominate culture and politics in the 21st century.
It's not clear what they're going to make of such advantages, whether they will choose to remain a technologically obsessed subculture in pursuit of the Next Big Thing, or whether they will decide to meet the world head on and recognize their responsibilities as citizens of a new era.
The ascending young citizens of the Digital Nation can, if they wish, construct a more civil society, a new politics based on rationalism, shared information, the pursuit of truth, and new kinds of community.
If they choose to form a political movement, they could someday run the world. If they choose to develop a common value system, with a moral ideology and a humane agenda, they might even do the world some good.
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