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Votes, Dollars, & Bots: Enumeration, Amplification & Democratic Representation

Thu, September 10, 10:00 to 11:30am MDT (10:00 to 11:30am MDT), TBA

Abstract

Equality is a central—perhaps the central—principle of democracy. Democratic equality arguably finds its purest expression in the notion of ‘one person, one vote,’ the ideal that all citizens should be equally represented in processes of collective decision-making. And yet, in reality, counting the people has never been “as easy as one, two, three.” From institutional arrangements like the electoral college, to technical issues like the infamous hanging chad, the use of aggregation to represent “the people” has generated a range of incredibly fraught practices that work to destabilize our assumptions about democratic representation. These complexities increase, moreover, once we move from voting to public discourse and opinion formation, where disagreement rages over how to manage the many factors—from money in politics, to the power of rhetoric—that attenuate simple arithmetic equality by amplifying certain voices over others.

This paper will examine the digital public sphere as yet another site for contestation over processes of representation—over who counts, and how—in democratic politics. Digital technologies are revealing longstanding tensions in the relationship between representation, equality, enumeration, and amplification. On the one hand, techno-utopians imagine digital technologies as an equalizing force, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and thus making it easier for citizens to contribute to public discourse on an equal footing. On the other hand, however, the use of botnets for DDoS attacks and the rise of ‘sockpuppets’ on Twitter, for example, have been criticized for destabilizing fundamental democratic practices by inauthentically amplifying certain messages and distorting—misrepresenting—public opinion in ways that are harmful for democracy.

Yet these are not new problems; indeed, debates over how to count “the people” long predate digital public spaces. Thus, far from posing a sui generis challenge to well-established democratic practices of counting the people, botnets and other digital phenomena are only the most recent entry in a history of controversial enumerative technologies that include the census, crowd estimation, and opinion polling. In this paper, we therefore propose that a productive way to think about digital technologies is as another instance of the limits of our understanding of enumeration as a political problem specifically, and, democratic representation more generally.

To that end, the paper makes two claims. First, that re-framing mounting anxiety about, for example, bots and fake Twitter accounts in terms of an older tension between enumeration and representation helps clarify why these ‘fake’ digital players are so disruptive to the public sphere. Second, in clarifying the contemporary problems with Twitter and other digital technologies, this new case also illuminates a more longstanding challenge for democratic theory: the perplexing relationship between enumeration and representation in democratic politics.

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