Is a Democracy for, of, and by consumers possible?

Or is it an oxymoron?

Clearly, a democracy for, of and by corporations is an oxymoron.

How can we understand the Bush administration’s use of security agencies for internal spying, as well as the powers and rights they claim for the executive branch to create and enforce laws as they see fit, independent of the checks and balances of the other branches of government? One analysis is that it is an unintended result of their corporate view of the people as passive consumers, objects to be manipulated in an ethics free marketing zone, not as active citizens with Constitutional Rights. This view of the American people may be the consequence of a culture in the late stages of mass market consumerism.

The dominant market culture’s view of the people as fundamentally one dimensional consumers, not citizens, is also, sadly, deeply ingrained in the Democratic party as well. During the Clinton administration, the “Re-inventing Government” project focused on service to the “customer” [consumer].

Words matter. In the above analysis, the word “consumer” suggests a notion of a person reduced to the impoverished status of an passive and objectified target to be manipulated for power and profit. Targets clearly have less power, in any form, than the “shooters”. Further, such a view can create a relatively ethics free zone with respect to how that object is treated. Objects without power are ideal for an economy too dependent on mass market consumerism. Without the power of real choice, they are much more easily stimulated to behave as desired. In the end, how can a dynamic democracy be sustained and vigilantly maintained by passive targets?

For another view of persons who have been reduced to objects with diminished choice and power, watch the film “North Country”. Ask yourself how the men portrayed in the film could treat the women workers, who were members of their union, their culture and their community, literally their wives, sisters and daughters, so very badly? Now ask yourself how hard it would be for this abuse of objects to be extended, but with greater severity, to “other objects” who are of a different culture, skin color, religion, speaking a foreign language, and are also viewed as “enemy combatants”? Creating an ethics free zone around powerless objects is very dangerous indeed.

The word “Citizen”, however, conjures up a far different notion of a multi-dimensional person who has the power of choice to exercise a wide range of capabilities, some of which may even involve consumption, and who expects and demands fully ethical treatment. In return, a person is expected to be ethical in their behavior as well.

A curious question is whether corporations should be considered “people”? Should corporations be given all the legal rights and privileges of human beings? Or are corporations more accurately described as legal fictions, created by humans for their convenience, and thus subservient to humans? Since 1888, corporations have asserted claims to full personhood. In fact, late 20th century neoliberal trade treaties have forced all signatories to declare corporations legally people. Why? Is it to the advantage of we, the people, to make such grants of power, protection and privilege to corporations? Or should we, as we reassert our citizenship, also reassert our primacy over all corporations?

On a global scale, the conflict between the views of the nature of people, and their roles in society, economics, and governance, is made starkly manifest if we compare and contrast the corporate paradigm's annual World Economic Forum at Davos with the people paradigm's World Social Forum held in different cities around the world.

In the U.S., we can see this conflict between the views of the nature of we, the people, citizens vs consumers, playing out in a range of other domains. The short term consumer market metric of the 90 day time frame is inappropriately applied to many long term issues confronting people as citizens: healthcare, education, employment, retirement, and the environment all come to mind. Is this, in fact, a question of who has primacy, people or corporations?

We can also see this conflict in the birthing pains of the new communications model that is emerging as we switch from the old, centralized broadcast/telephony model to a new distributed communications solution based on internet technologies and architectures. If we, the people, use the power of the new IP Communication tools and model to reassert our natural power of communications, this will conflict with the claims of the legacy power structures in the center of the old networks. They have, after all, grown large, rich and powerful by controlling the power of communications to their benefit. Indeed, we have no further to look than American technology corporations who are at this very moment withholding the full and democratic power of communications from the people of China, but delivering it, in the name of profit, to the Chinese government.

This is exactly why President Bush’s domestic spying is such a bold grab for unlimited and unconstitutional power: it denies we, the people and citizens of America, the right to secure and unfettered free speech in our communications. President Bush would deny we, the people, the fundamental right that is required to secure and sustain democracy: Free Speech. President Bush’s illegal domestic spying, if allowed to stand, will reduce us to the status of the citizens of China with respect to their government. Is this what we want?

With respect to the democratic IP communications revolution emerging in America, three critical communication questions are:

1] Where is the power of choice located? In the nexus of centralized government and corporations or at the edges in we, the people?

2] Where is content produced and distributed? Only in the center by corporate entities or at the edges by we, the people for oursleves?

3] Are we Consumers or Citizens?

We can find hints of the new answers on, of all places, the .Mac home page on the web.

Clearly, Apple wants people, in their homes and offices, using their personal, ever lower cost and ever more powerful technology, to be full fledged producers of audio, video, text and graphic content, to be shared [distributed] over the internet to as few or as many other interested people as there may be.

If the message from Apple, and others such as DTV, the Sony Playstation Portable, and many others, wasn't clear enough last year, it is brain dead obvious this year. The home, the end point on the network, is the new locus of communications and rich multi-media productions for distribution on the internet. It is becoming a first mile out world. The power of choice will be in the home. The old 20th century last mile in from the center model is fading away, but not going gently into that good night either.

This is revolutionary. It turns the old media model upside down. And, from the point of view of the old model, it only get worse.

Take, for example, Apple’s 2005 deal with Disney to make broadcast TV programs available almost instantly on iTunes, advertisement free, for just two bucks, for convenient downloading and viewing on Apple’s mobile platform, the video iPod. This has triggered a value chain flattening tsunami that is the essence of a disruptive innovation.

The revolution will be mobile, wireless and broadcast by the people. It will give people the power of choice as to what they watch and when, where and how they watch it. The idea of having to be in a special place, sitting in front of a large, immobile object, at a fixed time, with a limited menu of choices is already becoming quaint. Unless we choose it for our own personal and social reasons.

The question is whether people with this level of power of choice, owning tools to be their own radio and TV producers / broadcasters will rediscover the meaning of being a full citizen as well as a consumer?

If we take a deeper look at this changing situation, we can see that the legacy cablecos and telecos will have great difficulty with at least these factors:

1] Wall Street's demand for compounded growth every quarter. -- Their capital base is so huge the compounding requirements are also ever higher barriers to meeting the Street's demands. Customer churn and defections to other options make this problem worse.

2] Customers who want it when, where, and how they want it will drive up the pressure to flatten the value chain in order to get closer to their goals. Middle Men are obstacles to customers.

3] Be closer to your customer than your competitor, or lose your customer. This forces suppliers to flatten the value chain to eliminate middlemen barriers that keep them distanced from their customers;

4] The mis-match between tax depreciation schedules and the Innovation cycle within the communications sector. How do you upgrade if you have not finished depreciating a huge capital plant? Lower cost and distributed 802.11n will trump Wi-Max with its high cost central nodes before it is even born, much less depreciated.

5] Only if you give the power of choice to the end user in a distributed and decentralized network can you benefit from the leverage of the end-user’s capital investments to create cooperative gain for the network. A centralized network, with its massive capital costs, but unable to make use of end user capital investments, simply can not compete with the more agile and radically more broadly capitalized new model.

6] Consumers want the power of choice to control their lives. Middle men want have the power of choice to maximize their profits. The customer will always win this fight in the end. This drive by the customer for the power of choice will also force the value chain to flatten.

This, then, is the powerful story of change driven by customers and suppliers. It is not driven by any particular technology. The incumbents are no more than old middle men obstructing the customers' wishes and putting barriers between the "content providers" and their customers. So it will be 2:1 against the middle man.

In the end, the real question facing us today is whether this IP communication revolution will revitalize our citizen driven democracy before we, the people, are reduced to the status of Chinese citizens. Will our fundamental human right to free speech, in the form of democratic and constitutionally protected rights of access to unfettered communications and unrestricted information, be denied to us? As we know, it is today being denied, with the complicity of American technology corporations, to the Chinese people. What must we do to escape the fate of the Chinese?

Posted by Jock Gill at January 25, 2006 1:02 PM | TrackBack