Two Cheers for Politics by Jedediah Purdy

Author:Jedediah Purdy [Purdy, Jedediah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

7

DEMOCRACY AND/OR CAPITALISM

In 2020, the gamified day-trading app Robinhood announced that its mission was “to democratize finance for all.” “Democratize,” in this case, meant opening the doors to a stock-market casino. Six years earlier, promoters were talking about crypto-trading as “democratizing Wall Street.” Cryptocurrency Bitcoin “seeks to democratize currency and payments.” In 2011, the résumé-matching site Monster promised to “democratize recruiting” by letting more kinds of job seekers link up with employers. Start looking, and you will see it everywhere: promises to “democratize” advertising, design, direct marketing, medicine, whatever. Some of these barrier-lowering changes do increase users’ powers in real ways. Many just intensify the vulnerability of life in the marketplace, speeding up the already relentless press of speculative bets, pushy ads, and precarious jobs, dressed up to make market vulnerability look like freedom’s fun new frontier.1

It isn’t surprising that touts would debauch a charismatic word. In twenty-first-century America, whatever you care about will be used to try to sell you something. But marketers weren’t leading the charge to change the meaning of democracy. In 2010, the Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School explained in the Harvard Business Review that Apple cofounder Steve Jobs “set out to democratize computing” by making it “available conveniently to the masses.” In the same year, Robert Zoellick, then the president of the World Bank and previously George W. Bush’s trade ambassador, promised to democratize development economics by providing open access to the bank’s databases, which included loan records and analyses of economic policies throughout the developing world. Already in 2009, the New York Times was referring to Robinhood’s precursors as “democratiz[ing] investment,” and in 2007 the Times explained the trend of “democratizing plastic surgery,” which meant that people with household incomes under $30,000, who often lacked health insurance, were financing their cosmetic procedures with loans. After all, the paper of record pointed out, earning power follows attractiveness. “I financed my car,” the Times reported one patient saying in an emblematic reflection. “Why shouldn’t I finance my face?”2

These are not random abuses of a word. The professional explainers, like the professional marketers, are using democracy in a way that, when you link the points on the scatter plot, adds up to “universal market participation plus some transparency.” It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley icon Steve Jobs pops up here, along with the Apple empire that he helped to build. The meaning of democracy that these uses trace is basically the one that the internet optimists of the 1990s and early 2000s popularized: universal access and transparency would democratize software (through open, unencrypted code), democratize knowledge (through sites such as Wikipedia, which, it became briefly fashionable to say, was better than Encyclopaedia Britannica), democratize the news through blogs and amateur reporting, and democratize democracy itself by enabling citizens to organize online. We now know (and there were warnings at the time, if eyes were open) that actual results would include the largest monopolies in world history, a vile bloom of conspiracy theories and other “alternative” knowledge, and an online Hobbesian dystopia of warring multitudes.

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