Online Activists as a New Political Elite

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 are Yana Breindl and Nils Gustafsson, whose interest is in networked digital activism. Such activism is not necessarily more or less inclusive or democratic than conventional activism. In democratic theory, there are the three strands of competitive, participatory, and deliberative democracy, and activism is often perceived through the lens of the latter two; online activism is seen as encouraging participatory or deliberative features in the democratic system.

Reality is perhaps more on the competitive side, where most people are seen as passive participants in a political system that is otherwise run by a small ruling elite that is legitimised and made accountable in elections, but left to its own devices between them. Factors which do influence the political process are other elites (business, political, social, and otherwise) – and in the Internet age, new elites (which are seen as less hierarchically organised) are emerging.

These new elites can be understood as temporal elites, which have limited (issue-specific) influence on certain fields and whose success in influencing political outcomes is unpredictable. They adopt a viral politics approach to promote the rapid sharing of information across Internet spaces and promote political mobilisation.

This can be seen in the case of La Quadrature du Net, which engaged in a protracted campaign against the French HADOPI three-strikes Internet anti-piracy law, and for net neutrality and an open, free Internet. The site is part of a wider digital rights movement, and can be seen as a new type of Internet based activism. The key drivers of this site are young urban men with high levels of education, who have been able to attract a range of active contributors; around them, a further group of more occasional contributors and largely passive followers also gathered.

The group has developed a range of open source tools to orchestrate its effort – for example a law tracker tool that enables the group to track the legal revisioning processes for the various relevant legal documents in France, other European countries, and the EU itself. The tool is also used for outsourcing this legal analysis process to the wider community.

Additionally, the group also engages in some more traditional lobbying (including face-to-face efforts), which require the investment of time, energy, and resources. This further demonstrates their elite positioning in society. Such temporary elites can be considered as a new form of intermediaries between politics and the wider population, both egalitarian (providing new forms of access for the people) and elitarian (requiring elite skills and resources), and operating in a both non-hierarchical and hierarchical fashion at times. This is not the emergence of an altogether different power structure that challenges democracy overall, but a new configuration of power within the established system.