10 Big Pieces: Sclove, Democracy and Technology

Democracy and Technology
Richard E. Sclove
The Guilford Press, New York NY 1995

Summary

Sclove argues that “Insofar as (1) citizens ought to be empowered to participate in shaping their society’s basic circumstances and (2) technologies profoundly affect and partly constitute those circumstances, it follows that (3) technological design and practice should be democratized.” (ix) He states that currently “there are few institutions through which citizens can become critically engaged with choosing or designing technologies,” and that until we develop them, “there can be no democracy worthy of the name.” (9)  Our customary lack of scrutiny of technology “supports the false inference that because no particular person or group chose, the result is natural rather than a partly explicit, partly tacit social product.” (104) Such scrutiny should best take place in the research, development and design phase, and as vital that citizens participate in the development of technology as in the development of legislation. (181)

In a variant of the “code is law” argument, Sclove sees technologies as constituting a framework of politics and culture “by coercing physical compliance; prompting subconscious compliance; constituting systems of social relations; establishing opportunities and constraints for action and self realization; promoting the evolution of background conditions; affecting nonusers; shaping communication, psychological development, and culture generally; and constituting much of the world in which our lives unfold.” (16-17)

Sclove contrasts “strong” and “thin” democracy: “strong” holds that “as a matter of justice, people should be able to influence the basic social circumstances of their lives. This view implies organizing society along relatively egalitarian and participatory lines.” (25)  “Thin” democracy is representative rather than participatory and focused on competition among elites and power blocs.

Since technologies are “contingent social products,” it is possible to imagine alternative designs, and the design process “also reflects explicit or tacit social choices, including political negotiations or struggles.” (19) In order to imagine and construct strong democratic technological systems, democratic design criteria are necessary. A technology is democratic “if it has been designed and chosen with democratic participation or oversight and…is structurally compatible with strong democracy and with citizens’ other important common concerns.” (33) His design criteria are intended to support democratic community, democratic work, democratic politics and the security and perpetuation of a strong-democratic system. (98)

“Competent citizenship, moral development, self-esteem, and cultural maintenance all depend on extensive opportunities… to participate in producing, contesting, disseminating, and critically appropriating social knowledge, norms and cultural meaning.” (44)

He decries “initiatives to promote scientific and technological literacy” as “seriously incomplete,” preferring an “explicit discussion of democratic politics of technology as a standard topic in secondary school and college.” (199)

Critique and Analysis

Sclove makes a compelling case for the application of strong democracy to the design and development of technology, and to teaching and encouraging critical thinking about the role of technology in shaping society.

However, throughout the book he demonstrates a bizarre, illogical bias in favor of strong local communities, against globalization, and against information and communications technologies. While an article of Baby Boomer liberal faith, one would expect at least a bit of logical scrutiny devoted to the idea, but Sclove never gets past self-contradictory fundamentalist tub-thumping, somehow arguing that local communities should have the right to “protect themselves from inundation” by the culturally different (150), decrying local NIMBY-ism (120) and arguing for self-actualization as a primary value.

Sclove’s deep prejudices against electronically-mediated communities of affiliation, rather than physical communities of geographic tyranny display an ignorance of the situation of the minority member that marks a real failure of systematic thinking about what self-actualization means and the historical role of cosmopolitanism (the “freedom of city air”) in enabling it.

Utility

Sclove’s argument for strong democracy closely parallel’s Sicart’s case for ethical games. His core arguments form the basis for my claim that tools to teach the anticipatory governance of science and technology are possible and needed.

It would be an interesting exercise, and might make for a good dissertation in its own right, to use his design criteria as game design criteria: to develop a game specifically in accordance with his design process criteria. What I would like to do is take that one step farther: to democratically design a game to teach democratic design of socio-technical systems.