CYBERSPACE AND EMERGENT BODY POLITIC: Tough Issues, Murky Structures and Unknowns of the "NetPolis"

By Chris C. Demchak, University of Arizona

In a gradual and enveloping tide, a worldwide complex of technologies, hardware, net protocols, human intentions and system interventions is altering the social systems around it. Called cyberspace1, worldwide web, the matrix, the net these emergent transnational networks of automated interconnected information systems will eventually mediate and configure "everything informational and important to the life of individuals and organizations ... [as] the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainment and alterhuman agency takes on form" (Benedikt, 1992).2

As socially critical activities migrate inside this worldwide web, the wider sociopolitical system, its notions of public space and collective goods, both perceived and real, will change.3 Shared daily practices and attendant belief systems essentials of organizational and national cultures will alter along with basic presumptions of political and economic life. Since any computer with a modem or a connection can roam cyberspace, inevitably more subtle barriers to entry, influence and power will evolve to determine the representativeness, leadership, decisionmaking modes, effectiveness, and the public face of government.

The emergent networked political system, labeled here a "netpolis", shifts public challenges into uncharted waters. The unprecedented social interdependence offers enormous benefits but also pernicious surprises. For example, critical longdistance communications are now transmitted through increasingly crowded satellite networks. Recently a military exercise required more retransmission power. As the commercial provider obligingly boosted the power directionally, it inadvertently overrode the satellite communications of five major U.S. banks for two and a half hours. The costs were enormous but not made public. Similarly, deliberate and illegal intrusions on the Internet threatened the privacy of up to fifteen million net users.4

Unfortunately, the wider academic community has been slow to appreciate the importance of this extraordinary mutual adaptation process creating the netpolis.5 In particular, the huge, largely promotional literature on information technology (IT) virtually ignores public agencies and processes. Scholarly review is critically needed in integrating the public policy implications at all levels of analysis with the developments in terminology, symbology, domain allocation and legitimacy, structures, constraints and opportunities of the emerging net- polis.

This essay is intended to help create a dialogue in the wider community about maintaining democratic values under these circumstances. Here the emerging net-polis is divided into four main areas needing critical and systematic work. The scheme6 is intentionally intuitive, moving from the greatest level of generality (general theoretic issues) through the basic structures of the polis (the nation-state or wider referent community) to public and private social hierarchies (organizations) to the experiences of the individual in the networked nation.7 The overarching goal is to discover those policy designs, organizing principles and structures that sensibly sustain traditional values such as equal access, responsibility, representativeness and public control while aiding the wider national and international communities in achieving the potential benefits of the worldwide web's speed, capacity, contact, calculation and comprehension.7

General Theoretic Issues

The challenge for theory is to explain the processes by which the relatively innocent designs often based on local requirements can ultimately induce crucial changes in the society's internal and external interactions, not to mention the values, goals and impedimentia of the social system. Often unrecognized in its influence, the IT design forces a configuration of the community's obligations, opportunities, resources, constraints, secrets and power. Advances in theory or concepts here must elegantly account for interactions within and between broad socially significant categories of phenomena and knowledge.How can the concepts and language of democratic and public space, policy selection and design, values, and goals be integrated with the physical demands of cyberspace and emerging theoretical constructs of complexity, chaos and diffusion? What are the necessary, sufficient and desirable attributes of a highly networked social universe? How can "technology" and its determining interactions with significant social phenomena be defined, explained and usefully construed to provide some value?What profound dilemmas emerge as these adapations loop over and over through the relevant social systems? For example, what is knowledge and who has a right to it when what is consciously known becomes merely an artifact of diverse cataloging systems. What databases and access modalities are inherently public, or private and what principles provide a balance?

Where are bias and power found in the new structures of knowledge and their human or physical manifestations? Do the concepts of class, cleavages, latent interests, and referent groups have greater or lesser meaning over the large numbers of inputs, throughput and downloads of the hypertexted, multiplexing rapidity of cyberspace? How are the concepts of justice, equity, efficiency and an informed public to be framed in this future of innumerable entry points, psychologically distant relations, unseen masses and instantaneous monitoring or transmission? Are intolerant social constructions more or less likely with corresponding and accelerating consequences for political processes and culture? Needed here are unifying concepts and models to explain the murky, fragmented but ever more rapid developments moving recursively through the surrounding social systems.

The Emergent Polis and National Policies

At the social and political community level, the rapidity, comprehensiveness and unaccountability of key decisions and transmissions will alter environmental reality and access for whole categories of citizens and publics. The advances in artificial intelligence, storage capacity and combinations, and processing speeds will sharply reduce the time available to recognize and respond to determining social interactions from weeks to hours to seconds. No longer will a large, dispersed, widely anonymous society necessarily have the automatic damping capabilities to limit the effects of locally disruptive social developments. Deleterious processes could be initiated, orchestrated or exacerbated before relevant civil responses can be stimulated.9

Not only is the time-horizon of these communities altering, what is known to be knowable will also be vulnerable to a myriad of rapid unmonitored and uncontrolled decisions. Countless unseen cataloguers will make choices of what information is to be sought, recorded and offered. Social cleavage control, extension, submersion or neglect can more easily occur by accident as well as intention. As they set the framework of information, their biases will channel social understandings, political discourse and, inevitably, political power. For example, input or sort decisions can invisibly include or exclude whole subsets of individuals, techniques, geographic areas or forms of interaction from key activities in the polis without the knowledge or appeal of the affected parties. Individuals, groups, and communities will be affected not only by how the choices are offered, but also the "choice of how the choices are to be made" (Rochlin, 1994).

At this level, needed are research and debate on design and operation of an "informated" political and economic system and, importantly, the transformational requirements. The interactive effects of broad or constrained information access, content, dispersion and influence in representative democracies need to be explored. What are the characteristics of the polity which exists around a cyberspacedependent society? While it seems inherently democratic to have the ability to vote from the computer monitor, what are the effects on electoral outcomes, the representative nature of public decisionmaking, the organizations of politics and their processes, the networks of government, the locus of expertise and influence and the role of minority interests and values? Do we achieve a virtual town meeting or merely extend the worst aspects of the referendum process, making effective governance nearly impossible at any level?

Furthermore, what are the domestic implications of the inherent powerful transnationalism of the net? What are the options for, and possible consequences of, national political responses to the likely inability to "cordon off" important national social activities such as industrial policies, trade arrangements, currency controls, and so on, from intrusive foreign events? What might or should define nationstate or cyberstate boundaries in cyberspace? Similarly, is the established response to diversity and size federalism still functional or fictional when, in principle, both state and national governments can be bypassed on the net.10 What emerges as the balance of sovereignty and power between state and national governments if the policy relevant environment becomes a confusion of relatively autonomous individual decisions initiated by local, state, national and international actors, each acting independently and comprehensively according to narrow interests with short recognition and response times?11

Issues of Organization Theory and Public Policies

Third, at the level of the organized purposive social grouping, organizations face enormous alterations in their interactions both with their task environments and internal components. At a minimum, both public and private organizations agencies face a dilemma of participation. Connecting to the matrix may be necessary to perform their public (monitoring, regulatory or informing) or private (profitmaximizing) missions. But, in this relatively anarchic frontier of social interactions, it could also expose internal organizational information to the probes of external players anxious to disrupt or divert their organizational actions. Hence, linking up may be unavoidable to stay competitive or relevant but it may also install dangerous exposure to external competitors.

Public agencies, however, confront a particularly difficult paradox in participation. Private agencies may chose to connect and then closely limit their openness through elaborate and expensive security regimes. Public accountability requires openness in public agencies, effectiveness requires security, and efficiency requires minimalist operations. Hence the public organization operating on the net free from dedicated disruption is likely to be perceived as both too expensive and secretive. More openness and less protection costs, however, may produce a captured or constantly disrupted organization, unable to buffer its internal operations and labeled inefficient or incompetent by key audiences. On the other hand, without an informed debate, proactive public agencies could be more perpetrator than victim by instituting poorly timed, disruptive or counterproductive policies. For example, new encoding software is too hard to break in the time allotted for legitimate criminal investigations. On February 4, 1994, Vicepresident Al Gore proposed a mandatory use of a communications chip which law enforcement agents could tap easily in the authorized pursuit of criminal behavior. Unfortunately the announcement enraged the relatively anarchic programming community and produced a surge in tough encoding software available at minimal costs on the Internet itself, a highly counterproductive outcome.

The questions at this level, then, address the internal and external topologies of public and private organizations along politically significant vectors and connections. What is likely to be required for public cybercrats to operate in and/or around the world of cyberorgs while neither disrupted or disruptive in those surroundings? Indeed, what will be the organizational tools, levels of effectiveness, and the avenues of accountability of these new public entities? How will an organization exercise but not expose public authority to unseen cripplers or transborder actors? What are the key gateways, indicators, or access points that would enable which kinds of agency to pursue public interests without diverting broader, ever diversifying interests of private individuals and groups?

Just as nationstates, what are the future manifestations of "institutions" going to resemble? To what extent does full or partial integration on the net alter the structure of necessary relationships and causeeffect beliefs of public agencies? Do public entities need to run the networks, or can they be effective while simply dipping in occasionally to check on the flows and pools of key information and other interactions? Are public agencies likely to act as gatekeepers, tracksweepers, winningstalliers or players? What will be the essential attributes of a public agency in a cyberspaced nation and how do they meet the public need for accountable, effective, equitable, efficient implementation?

Issues of Individual Experiences and the Emergent Networked Democracy

Fourth, in any system shift, there are traditional democratic concerns for the individual at stake. The multiplicity of modern access points, taken as a whole, could begin to take form as a virtual country, much as symbolic knowledge and statistics become the reality for market analysts and military leaders using battle maps. In that case, the individual not only has less privacy but less recourse when a demands for accuracy or privacy could be seen as vaguely illegitimate and not worth the time needed to correct massive databases.

For example, future meetings will be held electronically, but because they will be "virtual rooms, larger, face to electronic face ...the building knows where you are...and who" (Garson 1989). As it is, managers already can check how many key strokes employees make per minute and watching the speed at which editing is being done on reports. The marketing departments of a hundred firms can quickly access the files of a hundred municipalities and regions in accumulating otherwise private information to send information to, or compile profiles of, targeted individuals.

Furthermore, the actual experience of public life could develop in socially efficient but unpalatable directions. The transfer of administrative convenience so readily implemented by agencies in monopoly positions becomes easier in the netpolis. The sophisticated terminal program at dispersed points becomes the main source of clientagency interaction. The individual is more likely to experience the external world through gateways inflexibly formatted for handling large numbers quickly, not for compassionate appeals, the unusual needs or the ignorant mistakes.

These questions are perhaps most disturbing. Will individual inclusion or political activism become more or less difficult in the heavily networked social environment? How will individuals experience the social channeling inherent in the anonymous decisions of programmers and designers? Is social or political anomie more or less likely under varying regimes of censorship, privacy protections and allocation of network access? What levels of interdependence subject the individual to unnecessary levels of interference in the daily conduct of live and the exercise of wellestablished rights? Where does the human fit in at the other end of the net software?

Conclusion

The real difficulties will arrive when cyberspace use becomes reliably voice activated and as common as television. Public values, systems and goals are either to be sustained by careful design in advance or let emerge by a tyranny of millions of decisions whose sum may be greatly worse than the implications of any part. Systemic research, careful thought and much dialogue across disciplines and nations are necessary to obtain the conceptual and practical tools to narrow the possible variations of future paths.

Notes

1 William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 dark vision of a future electronic world and it has greatly influenced the language and anarchic imagery of the computer programming and bulletin board communities.

2 See the journal Wired for nontechnical articles on cyberspace.

3 See Rheingold (1993) for a useful discussion of how the notion of collective goods can provide ough measures of the advancement of community in electronic media.

4 On February 3, 1994, a warning was broadcast to 15 million people over the worldwide computer net, Internet, that intruders had planted secret "sniffer" software in a number of university nodes enabling them to steal hundreds or thousands of passwords.

5 Some scholars are working these issues but, this review is too brief to properly cite thewidely dispersed individuals. For a partial and introductory list, see the current works of Barley, S.R.; Braman, Sandra; Comfort, Louise; Demchak, Chris; Daneke, Gregory; Goldstein, Jeffrey; Grubler, Arnulf; Kiel, Douglas; Kraemer, Kenneth L.; Kronenberg, Philip; LaPorte, Todd L.; March, James; Rochlin, Gene I.; Sagan, Scott; Scott, W. Richard; Smith, David R.; Truex, Duane; Wilson, James (U. of Maine); Woodhouse, Ned; and Zimmerman, Brenda. For an interesting international perspective, see the new semiannual journal Technology Studies (editor Urs Gattiker, University of Lethbridge, Canada) as well as the initial work of a British group (PICT) started by William Dutton of Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK.

6 Partially borrowed from Demchak and LaPorte (forthcoming).

7 This essay is also intended to be a "net call" for potential collaborators on future projects now in the planning stages.

8 The term "informated" was coined by Zuboff (1984) to contrast creative, and cognitively flexible conditions from the more normal automated environment.

9 The deleterious social construction of the "other" may be much easier when all one needs is a modem, an access point and an active terminal by which to reach millions of citizens. See Schneider and Ingram (1993).

10 These nets differ structurally from telephones and faxes because the automatic bypassing of blocked segments designed by the US military in case of nuclear war means that controlling a net requires monitoring it along every conceivable path an intruder or activity might take a mammoth task.

11 Benny Hjern argues that too much power has been delegated to local communities in Sweden The result is an excess of democracy at the local level which subverts desired outcomes of the majority. See Hjern (1992).

References

Benedikt, Michael, (ed). 1992. Cyberspace: First Steps . 2nd ed. Boston, Massachusetts: the MIT Press.

Demchak, Chris C. and LaPorte, Todd M. (forthcoming). "Concentric Interdependence: Integrating Technology, Organization, and Politics Models and Concepts".

Garson, Barbara. 1989. The Electronic Sweatshop. New York: Penguin. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.

Hjern. Professor Bennie. 1992. "Sweden: the Current Structure of Public Administration". Course talk given October 14, University of Arizona. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community. New York: AddisonWesley.

Schneider, Anne L. and Ingram, Helen. 1993. "How the Social Construction of Target Populations Contributes to Problems in Policy Design." Policy Currents. III(I) February.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 1984. In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books.

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