Samizdata

A democracy is a form of government in which the people, either directly or indirectly, take part in governing. The word democracy originates from Greek, and means rule of the people.
– From Wikipedia

In my recent trip to the FACT centre in Liverpool to evangelise for the blogosphere, it was suggested to me by a young lady that one of the great things about blogs is that in contrast to the established media, they are inherently democratic.

She was somewhat surprised when I disagreed. The young lady then suggested that as blogging empowers the common man by allowing them to express their views to the world without big business media owners or the government getting in the way, that it must surely be democratic. I agreed that blogs do indeed give people an unprecedented means to express themselves directly by disintermediating both the established media and the state, but there was nothing democratic about that whatsoever.

Democracy is about politics, and politics is about the use of the collective means of coercion. Democratic politics thus refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be ‘democratic’ therefore, it must be amenable to ‘politics’. Therefore for a blog to be ‘democratic’ that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved.

But you, the reader, do not get a vote on what get written in the articles on Samizdata.net. You may agree with what an article says or you may utterly disagree, but what gets written does not depend on how popular those sentiments are. We write what we want to write.

Where you do get to choose is whether or not you decide to come back and read us again. Much as in an open market, I might decide to try and sell my fruits and meats to those who pass by, yet I cannot force them actually purchase any of my goods if they do not wish to. They cannot stop me offering for sale those things I think makes economic sense but if I am wrong about what the market wants or if others make a better offer, then the passers by will choose to shop with someone else.

Where potential clients do get a vote, albeit indirectly, rather than a ‘market choice’ regarding what I sell, is when the polity regulates what can or cannot be sold. For example it may be up to me if I wish to try and sell veal or chickens or bananas, but I may be prohibited from selling crack cocaine or flamethrowers. So to that extent a market can be made more subject to politics and less to several choice.

And so it is with blogging, at least to a point. But to the extent that if Samizdata.net was to suddenly and highly improbably start advocating Nazi politics (such suggestions are illegal in Germany) or rather more plausibly call for the overthrow of Islamic law wherever it pertains (such suggestions are illegal in Saudi Arabia) then the very fact it is so extraordinarily difficult to prevent such sentiments being proffered by us makes us the very antithesis of ‘democratic’. You can do the ‘equivalent of refusing to buy’ in a market, i.e. you can just stop reading what we write, but you cannot actually stop us from writing. You, the reader, do not get a vote on that.

Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place… a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are ‘selling’ interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that… and long may it be so.