xxii • Introduction
as the destabilizing effects of networked information technologies also
destabilize the very presumptions of democratic action.
Given the wide range of theoretical engagement with the transforma-
tions brought about by the networked society, one would expect attune
ment to technological migration, informational mobility, reflexivity,
mutable assemblages, and contingent effects to inform thinking about
global communications networks. With few exceptions, this has not been
the case.
13
Many theorists and activists continue to rely on the old terms.
They extend the political topography of the nation-state (in a very particu-
lar European form!) to the global arena, construing the space of politics as
“global civil society.”
14
In so doing, they reduce the mutable assemblages of
globally networked issues, scandals, struggles, and interests to the subject
forms of organizations, thereby installing suppositions of intentionality,
accountability, and predictability at odds with the protean reflexivity of
information flow. The political concept of rights, for example, is a power-
ful ideal, vital to many political struggles. N evertheless, insofar as rights
remain tied to (recognized and enforced by) nation-states, arguments for
rights—to communication, to free speech, to information, to access—are
appeals made to those who can and will uphold these rights. A s such, they
efface the ways that networked communications exceed top-down modes
of governance. T o this extent, such appeals fail to acknowledge the post-
democratic character of networked communications.
Linked to the emphasis on global civil society as the primary political
arena has been an increase in the prominence of NGOs. NGOs adopt an
international remit and permission, often self-permission, to interact with
intergovernmental organizations. These groups do not represent constitu -
encies, although they may mobilize them. They stake legitimacies—indeed,
their very existence as players at tables where decisions are made—on mixes
of universal values (human rights, religion), technical expertise, ideolo-
gies of “multistakeholderism,” and reputation management. T o an extent,
representation per se has no meaning; instead, interactions performatively
produce and reproduce a morphing set of expectations for participants.
Within today’s postdemocratic governmentality, the sites and subjects of
political practice morph and migrate. S uch shifts have implications for the
notions of legitimacy and accountability through which democratic gover-
nance has been justified and assessed. What, for example, is the proper way
to think about constituency in network politics? Communication crosses
multiple boundaries, linking concerns from divergent sites into larger
issues, and enabling issues to migrate from one domain to another. More-
over, if legitimacy cannot be understood in terms of the consent of the gov-
erned—if, in other words, mass forms of entertainment, consumption, and
dissimulation have broken the presumptive link between popularity and
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