Cherny I: Individuals, Networks, and the Next Deal

For more than a decade, the Internet has been discussed as a force that can and will revolutionize politics and government, with some writers claiming it makes possible/necessary a new kind of participatory democracy in the United States. In Part Two of CS009, we begin with such a claim in the form of Andrei Cherny's The Next Deal. Just as Part One forced us to think about what we regarded as essential to our humanity (or post-humanity), this set of readings will likely cause us to consider what we consider the most important qualities of democracy to be, as the nature of democracy is transformed by new technologies.

Before we begin our discussions of Cherny's book, however, we might consider the following questions:

• In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future, the critic Neil Postman wrote: "Democracy is not a thing, a process, or an idea. It is a word, and a word that has had a checkered career at that" (p. 136). Do you agree with the first and/or second sentiments/statements?
• In a recent review of Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future, in The American Prospect, George Scialabba wrote, "Markets and democracy may be the last word for the human nature of 2002, but what if human nature changes?" One can go further and add "...what if we become posthuman?" How do/could/should such changes affect our commitment to democracy?
• In Section IV, chapter 6, of his masterpiece Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

  Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

  By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.

  What do you think of this analysis, and how might computer technology create a more satisfactory political situation than the one de Tocqueville found in the 1830s?

The Next Deal, Introductions and Part I

Cherny's book includes two introductions, an uncommon rhetorical technique. Which of the two did you prefer, and what (if anything) did you think the combination of the two accomplished (rhetorically)? Similarly, which of the (many) quotations used by Cherny did you find most stimulating/provocative/surprising?

Cherny published this book in 2000, when he was 24, and a good place to start our discussion might be with questions about the ways you think he does/doesn't "speak for his generation" (which is yours too, non?). For example:

• What do you think of Cherny's choice of epigraph, and the use he makes of the words/actions of American Presidents generally?
• The title is a reference to Roosevelt's New Deal, of course. What is your understanding of The New Deal, and was there anything in Cherny's characterization of it that struck you as especially insightful and/or alarming?
• Our discussion of the "posthuman" might have lead to the conclusion that the notion of "individualism" that falls and rises, according to Cherny, is doomed to not so much fall again as evaporate before our (cyborgian?) eyes. Now that we're clear of Hayles and into Cherny, what do you think of the "new" individualism of which Cherny makes so much?
• How does Cherny's characterization of technology differ from that of Arendt or Hayles, and where do you place your own views about the "neutrality" of technology in the context of these positions?

The Next Deal, Part II

Cherny sets up a juxtaposition between Hamilton and one of "Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means," he argues that the "Next Deal" must pursue "Hamiltonian ends by Jeffersonian means." (102) What do you make of the different values he attributes to Hamilton and Jefferson, and the degree to which these "ends" and "means" promote the most important qualities of democratic politics?

For Wednesday:: Finish Andrei Cherny's The Next Deal.

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