PdF11 Post-Mortem: What Rough Beast Slouches Our Way?

The scene at a Personal Democracy Forum 2011 cocktail party held in NYU's Kimmel Center. Photo: fabola / Flickr

It's difficult to sum up a two-day conference like Personal Democracy Forum in one blog post. We had about one hundred speakers at PdF11 last week, including nearly fifty plenary presentations and more than twenty breakout sessions. And everyone's experience is of course different. We're still sifting all the tweets, blog posts, survey responses, email and word-of-mouth feedback, too.

I'm also a little wary of writing a post that says: "These were our best talks--go watch them!" That's a little like telling someone who missed a baseball game that they can catch up on the whole experience by watching the highlight reel on the 11 o'clock news. Instead, you should watch this space for an unfurling series of posts and tweets as we move all the Livestream-recorded talks over to our YouTube channel. There were a lot of really great talks; whether you attended or not, the best way to get the most out of them would be to watch them one by one, over a span of days or weeks.

In this post, though, I'd like to zero in on some important themes of the conference, and take advantage of three really perceptive blog posts written by attendees that have enriched my sense of the whole event and sharpened some questions that got raised there, if not completely answered.

First, Tamara Straus of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, wrote a great round-up called "Personal Democracy Forum Gets Religious." In it, she riffs on Jim Gilliam's "The Internet is My Religion" talk and asks whether web technologies were indeed "tools for spiritual enlightenment." But then she answers her own question not by talking about God or the universe, but by citing more mundane things like political revolutions and governmental transformation. And there, I think, is where PdF's "spirit" (if not spirituality) lies: we are community of people who are focused on how you can do "god's work"--small "g"--like expanding democracy, small "d." This message was shot through many of our presenters' talks; in fact, if you are interested in figuring out how to use technology to hold onto illegitimate power or privilege, PdF11 was not the place to be.

That said, James Greenlee Borda, a blogger and ITP student who attended the conference, put his finger on one hidden question that we never quite resolved over the course of two days of talks on revolutions in the Middle East and reformations in government and civil society in the West. As he put it in "PdF11--The Elephants in the Room," the "great, galumphing creature, a huge heavy white beast that no one quite wanted to look at," was the question of whether the nation-state would still be in business in 50 years as the dominant form of political organization. Will the networked future be a better one, or just a place where government falls into disarray and some nasty war of all against all pervades? Borda writes:

All day, both days, we heard stories of how distributed processes and distributed software tools could do things better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently, could unlock more human potential, serve more human needs, and save more human lives than the lumbering government agencies they are trying to assist. We heard about how citizens making calls to open311 solved the mystery of the Maple Syrup Events that were rolling across Manhattan’s west side last summer. We heard how new software from companies owned by 20-somethings was able to distill the deluge of communications to Congressional offices into clear cross-sections of public opinion. We heard about a new plug-in from the Sunlight Foundation that will instantly highlight the monetary influence affecting any political figure or organization mentioned in your emails. We heard of projects for crowdsourcing air quality readings from smart phones and taking fine-scale aerial photography with a $200 kit dangling from a kite. And we heard, in the stunning words of some of its prime movers, how network tools helped fire a revolution which overthrew a brutal and entrenched thirty-year military dictatorship.

And yet. Here was Anne Marie Slaughter, a State Department veteran, concluding that America needs to be the ‘most connected nation in the world.’ How does that work, exactly? If a hundred million of us ‘connect’ to someone outside the U.S., doesn’t that also mean that there are 100 million people ‘out there’ who are connected to us? Will they only be connected to us? What policies are we going to enact to maintain our edge in ‘connectedness’?

The very idea is absurd. But it highlights an idea which I suspect was taken 4 granted (thanks, Larry Lessig) by most of the conference attendees: all of these tools are designed to improve the exercise of power as it inevitably flows through national governments.

Borda is right. We dodged this question. And we certainly avoided digging into the contradictions of U.S. policy, such as the fact that on the one hand the government has been funding and bolstering the Egyptian dictatorship for thirty years, while it is now also funding and cheering the efforts of democracy activists and hackers who will use the tools of today and tomorrow to challenge and hopefully defeat such regimes worldwide.

Go read Borda's whole post. I think he's smart to suggest that in a generation, we may well be living in an America that is a smarter and less arrogant power, and also a force for good in the world. That certainly seems to be the intention of people like Anne Marie Slaughter, who in her keynote on "DIY Foreign Policy" talked about how attending PdF changed her mind about the power of civic networks and caused her to reconsider and deepen the thinking that she has been doing, both inside and outside the State Department, about the role of the state in the networked world. Borda offers a valuable warning that we should all ponder, for it is a logical consequence of everything we were talking about at PdF11:

But the Internet is marching on, and the will of the people is getting louder. The will of all people is getting louder. If we Americans embrace this, we will find two things happening: our ‘government services’ will be delivered more efficiently, more effectively, and more justly by networked citizens working around our crumbling and increasingly corrupt government agencies; and America will no longer be the preeminent power on earth. If we don’t embrace it, we will get the latter without the former. That’s the real elephant in the room. The tools we saw demonstrated at PDF will flatten the world’s power differential. They will tip the balance from nations (and their governing elite) to ad hoc networks of like-minded people. And because the U.S. has a smaller percentage of the world’s people than the world’s power, they will erode the mountain we stand atop.

The third PdF11 post-mortem that I'm still savoring is Morra Aarons Mele's round-up for Blogher, which she titled, "Personal Democracy Forum 2011: Women Out in Front." In it, she discusses how it "felt different" to be at a conference that was fifty percent women. She argues that the role of women in the uprisings of the Middle East inspired the diversity at PdF this year, which I'd put a different way--we are inspired by how women are using networked technologies across the world and have wanted PdF to reflect that, for some time.

Morra (who I should admit is a friend, along with her husband Nicco Mele, co-founder of EchoDitto), noticed two other things that PdF11 exemplified. First, the beginnings of the generational shift, with older baby boomers being displaced by younger leaders like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who keynoted during the first day. Morra writes:

Gillibrand is 44, not quite a Digital Native but of the generation that recognizes digital issues are paramount to American competitiveness and that Internet facility and access are key. It’s a far cry from a highlight of the conference in 2008, when digital strategist Tracy Russo asked of then presidential-candidate John McCain “how can a person who doesn’t know how to operate a computer be the kind of leader we need to move us forward and fulfill the potential all of our tomorrows hold?” Three years later, in the aftermath of the economic collapse, the revolutions in the Middle East and social media’s role in each, I can’t imagine a viable U.S. leader admitting, as McCain did, that he doesn’t “really do computers.”

And Morra puts her finger on the other question that hovered over PdF11: "Why no revolution in the U.S.?" She argued that women were likely going to play a big role in making politics more accountable here, and at a time when so many male politicians seem to be imploding on contact with our hypernetworked world, she has a point.

Me, I'd like to believe that we're not just slouching towards Bethlehem, about to discover some rough beast born, but actually networking towards something that will mean a better life for everyone--in the United States and around the world.