On February 7th 2023, the European Studies Centre hosted Tony Barber (Financial Times), Gavin Jacobson (New Statesman), and Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) to launch Jan Zielonka’s new book The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It (Yale University Press, 2023). The panel was chaired by ESC Director Othon Anastasakis.
The panel started with Professor Zielonka, from our college, introducing his main argument: democracy is myopic, no matter who is in charge. In terms of space, democracy is myopic because it is confined to the borders of nation-states although most current problems are local or transnational. In terms of time, democracy is short-sighted because it is a prisoner of current voters and when tough decisions are to be made, the future is being sacrificed. The internet revolution plays an important role here because it changed dramatically the notion of time and space, but democracy hardly took notice. We need to empower public actors that benefited from the digital revolution most or else democracy will falter. In essence, we need to gradually move from the world of states to world of networks, local, national and transnational.
In Jacobson’s interpretation, the book’s argument can be read as a response to the unresolved problems of democracy from the 1990s. Of course, the question of how to solve the problem of time began in the second century at least. Polybius, for example, wrote that all governments seemed to collapse due to an eternal cycle of monarch, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mob rule, Caeserism, and chaos. Then, during the French Revolution, the acceleration of industry, culture, and technology was recognized as the tool to stabilize society and prevent its collapse. Acceleration reached its climax in the 1990s during the Cold War because, here, change was the only part of politics that was permanent and certain. The era created circulations of capitalism, confining life to repetitions in the grocery store, at work, and in other everyday aspects of industrial privilege. Here, time and space conflated together because there was an eternal present moment with no “elsewhere” to seek.
Scholarship from the 1990s to today has tried to understand the implications of this conflation. Alleviating the climate change crisis, for example, would require a transformation of our current notions of time. Jacobson used the example of fossil fuels: Reducing our reliance on them now would fail to address the future effects of global warming that have already been actualized by the past. Although climate change activists suggest that the current generation is affecting the future, the issue should actually be about reconciling the past with the present.
Barber, on the other hand, questioned the book’s notion that time has been allocated unfairly to certain social groups like the rich who have the luxury to choose when to rest and go on holiday. In France, for example, protests against the 40-hour week in the 1930s led to 35-hour week by 1997, showing that time has indeed been a matter of contestation and change. Then, Barber notes that the inability of nation states to control time and space leads to questions about international cooperative efforts. How exactly can NGOs and other international networks do this? The book acknowledges that it is naïve to think they will replace nation-states. Instead, there should be collaboration between networks and nation states, transforming networks as a fifth pillar of democracy, alongside courts, parliaments, the civil service, and the media. But to what extent can this vision become real and, particularly, what are the citizens’ roles in orchestrating change?
Through the lens of her expertise in technology, Margetts praised the book’s attempts to show why technology can ensure a thriving democracy. Technology can also transcend social isolation, as the recent pandemic has showed us. Technology merges time and space by allowing everyone to engage in politics during their day. For example, with their phones in bed, teenagers in the United States have advocated for gun reform. Furthermore, technology offers autonomy since people can choose how to schedule their days, such as choosing whether or not to have meetings over Zoom or in-person. And although there may be echo chambers, technology widens the intellect because research shows that the more people use social media, the more news they will encounter, inviting them to experience diverse echo chambers at the same time.
In conclusion, Margetts raised two areas of focus for solutions. Firstly, technology needs to be democratized. In the early days of the internet, ideas like Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu would have linked data together to reveal the source of information. Chat GPT and AI today, on the other hand, disperse information in despotic way because users have no way to verify sources: they must blindly trust the “heroes of Silicon Valley” for truth. But conversely, democracy also needs to be technologized in order to adjust their processes to the speed of everyday life. For example, election regulators are technologically incompetent, and it’s arguable that they do not ensure fair regulations.
In response to these comments, Zielonka shared two
challenges from his writing process. Firstly, the literature on the topic of
democracy and technology is vast and quickly growing. How does one know where
to start and stop research? Secondly, Zielonka tried to illustrate his complex
academic points with the reference to popular movies, fiction books and pop
songs. This was for him a new and often daunting learning process. While
commentators seem to suggest that the book proposes courageous and perhaps
utopian solutions for handling the crisis of democracy, it does the opposite, according
to Zielonka. He simply collected and presented some of the solutions discussed
in the literature for some time already, but ignored for a variety of reasons
by politicians and the media. This may be another illustration of his claim
that democracy is indeed myopic.
Ryan Nazari, ESC Research Assistant
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