Design & Democracy. Activist Thoughts and Examples for Political Empowerment

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Sandra Groll Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

Michael Erlhoff Maziar Rezai (Eds.)

Design and ­Democracy Activist Thoughts and Practical Examples for Sociopolitical Empowerment

Birkhäuser Basel

CONTENTS Foreword BIRD

007

Introduction Underneath the Pavement

009

Michael Erlhoff and Maziar Rezai

Acknowledgments 011 1 Design (Govern)mentalities: Implications of Design and/as ­G overnance in Cape Town

013

Ramia Mazé

2 Design for Policy: Looking for the Next Step Design for Policy: The Time of Maturity

028

Laura Pandelle, Julien Defait, Stéphane Vincent (The 27e Région)

3 Democracy by Design

035

Agustin Pereyra Decara

4 Democracy by Making – A Failed ­ Rendezvous of Design and Pragmatism?

044

Laura Popplow

5 Designing Democracy or Muddling Through? – A Cautious Plea for Reflection and Moral Disarmament in Social/Transformative Design 058 Wolfgang Jonas

6 Design and the Politics of the Everyday

073

Tom Bieling

7 Desocracy – Contradictions and ­P ossibilities within and between ­D emocracy and Design

085

Michael Erlhoff

8 How to Act? Saskia Hebert and Andreas Unteidig

004 DESIGN AND DEMOCRACY

095

9 Office for Design of Democracy – ­ Conclusions from a Field Trip

104

Friedrich von Borries

10 Agonistic Events to Remember

110

Carl DiSalvo and Amanda Meng

11 Design Activism, Democracy, and the Crisis of Social Networks

119

Maziar Rezai

12 Democracy Under Construction, ­ Construction as Regime: Design, Time, and Imaginaries of Publicness in mid-2010s’ Turkey

135

Eray Çaylı

The Authors

151

CONTENTS 005

FOREWORD BIRD Design is political, by now we can all concede to such a certitude – but what kind of political, and whose politics? As design ventures steadily more into the politics of itself, endeavouring into a practice positioned as an aware politicized act, questions of power and production intercede to elicit modes of design as/through/of democracy.

While the democratisation of design incites civic movements from citizen f­ orensics to critical cartography, revealing bias and calling into question the hierarchies of knowledge and production, critical makers use open-source software, hardware, and wetware to critique and propose alternatives in a do-it-yourself and do-it-together manner.

Meanwhile, designers transmute into public practitioners, expanding the role of design in society through engaging with governments to devise and draft administrations, bureaucracies, and policies. These are modes of design that negotiate, facilitate, advocate – provoke and evoke – incite, and experiment with putting civic-led commons-based values into practice. They are tactics of a field that increasingly takes on the challenge of mediating power relations between states and their people, between local and global citizens, between the wielding of latent power through systems and things and the oppositions that they induce. And never have we seen, it seems, so many design students and graduates zealous to employ their abilities to critique social injustice and engage in constructive societal transformation. And so, critical civic designers engage in the politics of spaceship earth as the ground on which design research and theory transpire, and design academia seems to be undergoing yet another proliferate metamorphosis.

Notwithstanding such a paramount drive, however, we must operate with the utmost consideration, taking considerable care to not merely materialise ideology, nor manufacture democracy as a stable object or a fashionable phrase. The art of design in its indiscipline is to never yield to stability, but rather to indulge in the intersections of incongruities, uncertainties, and complexities. Negotiating novel ground by seeking out theoretical and practical blind spots whilst engaging head-on with jittery research objects.

This book takes the convergence of design and democracy as an intermedial space for discussion. It does not propose a definition of their relationship, but rather, it ­engages in untangling knots and weaving new relations. And even as it extends the borders of design, it critically discusses not just the abilities, but also the possible boundaries of the field – and of its theoretical foundations and academic curricula, should this expansion continue. As an intervention, it endeavours into the incomplete and hesitant, engendering possible pathways to engage in the tension space of design and democracy.

Michelle Christensen Board of International Research in Design (BIRD)

FOREWORD BIRD 007

INTRODUCTION UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT Michael Erlhoff and Maziar Rezai

An extremely complicated and, therefore, a very inspiring and exciting subject: ­democracy and design. This is so because both democracy and design get permanently entangled in contradictions. They are a promise of social and peaceful development and, at the same time, of inventions and new perspectives. However, these promises are habitually converted into banal strategies of marketing and domination. A fact that, on the other hand, turns both democracy and design into, literally, highly interesting concepts for theoretical analysis as the point is to comprehend and, possibly, to benefit from the ‘in-between’, the internal relationships and the potential of democracy and design.

Be realistic, demand the impossible!

(Che Guevara)

Democracy as the dream of assertive subjects and as an option for those subjects to co-determine everything is obviously based on permanent emancipation and, hence, on the necessity to actively enforce this. For various reasons, this is undoubtedly exceedingly difficult: on the one hand, authoritarian regimes always seek to seize power and to suppress the voices of their subjects; on the other hand, governments are elected at regular intervals, but, between elections, they often develop ruthless independence and create such bureaucratic structures, which had by no means been elected, but which are de facto extremely powerful and determine everyday life – also by using the force of the police and the army. Democracy also fails at a decisive point, namely when it comes to accepting minorities. The latter sometimes speak up but will never be able to succeed: democracy, at least democracy as we know it, is always determined by the majority – although this majority is actually composed of diverse minorities with their respective individual concepts of convivial life.

Finally, if democracy branches out into the market, it is driven, in particular during elections, by marketing and advertising strategies. At times, the question arises as to what, exactly, is the difference between democracy and a supermarket – the only difference may be that even minorities will have at least a fictitious chance of making themselves heard at a supermarket. It is no coincidence that, in England, when speaking of merchandise, these items are called ‘goods’, something ‘good’ – suggesting that morality is an agent in the market.

Public initiatives and protests, in which the tangible problems of systems and regimes are attacked, reveal a shimmer of hope that there might be a possibility to

INTRODUCTION UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT 009

experience true democracy and the social options that it implies. But one has to admit that, unfortunately, reactionary and authoritarian activities have also produced, and still produce, such protests, both in the past and in the present day. However, these are usually very quickly seen for what they really are: undemocratic. Just as democracy itself is a question of form, so are the activities against it and those supporting it. A fact that is again both an experience and, necessarily, a subject of analysis.

But, when raising the question of form, we inevitably talk about design – because design shapes everything, establishes the norms of normality, and creates, both obscurely and manifestly, the processes of social interaction and social life. A fact that urgently needs to be investigated – and this is what shall be attempted in this book in many different ways.

Certainly, design is an agent at the heart of capitalism and an essential instrument of industrialization. It thus also co-creates the market strategies that the ruling powers aim to occupy within democracy. Hence, design is understandably ­regarded as being opportunist and conformist.

On the other hand, we have to admit that any kind of protest, including protests against the market and against societal depression through industrialization, also has a substantial connection to design, or is, indeed, shaped by design. This is true for the forms of discourse that lead to protests and, as a matter of course, for their public articulation. In other words: for posters, banners, or pamphlets, and for the organization of protests; even for the respective attire and, altogether, for the form of appearance including sounds and specific types of campaigns.

Admittedly, those who, in the service of governments, wish to or have been assigned to prevent protests, are also deeply affected by design: just think of the uniforms, the weapons, the vehicles and water cannons, the loudspeakers, the rallies, and so on. All this has also been designed, is a product of design, including the military formations and the respective gestures.

This shows that design is inevitably a political action, either an affirmative or critical one or at least a subversive one. This becomes obvious in the manner of the respective design: the ruling powers, their protagonists, or apologists, usually appear in uniform or in uniform ways, they are always better funded, have better equipment and more advanced technologies, they demonstrate authority and ruthlessness. Designers are always involved in this process. Truly social and lively protest often uses design to compensate for its lack of financial resources, and, in so doing, it tends to be especially characterized by creativity. This kind of protest opens up possibilities; it moves in the social space and unfolds conviviality. It is critical and in a peculiar way forceful; it negotiates with options.

The essays in this book attempt to discuss and explain these contexts and contradictions, these rebellious perspectives in democracy and design, and they do so in an open form. They provide examples and reflections. They do not despair.

Instead, they invite democracy and design to unfold the umbrellas, to use headscarves as banners, and to discover the beach underneath the pavement.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Numerous people have contributed to this volume. We would like to thank U ­ lrich Schmidt and the Birkhäuser Verlag team, and all the contributing authors for tirelessly working with us. The writers, who work as designers, educators, and researchers, bring their valuable insights on design and democracy matter from all over the world. We are grateful to be able to publish the thoughts coming from Argentina, France, Germany, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Also, we are thankful for the support from the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD), Uta Brandes, Alain Findeli, and Michelle Christensen. As ­ lireza ­Ajdari, Virginia Tassinari, Harald Welzer, and Damian White, scholwell as A ars who were interested in contributing to this book, but each one couldn’t for various reasons. Finally, we acknowledge the designers, thinkers, politicians, writers, and ­researchers who have inspired us to pursue this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 011

1 DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES: IMPLICATIONS OF DESIGN AND/AS ­GOVERNANCE IN CAPE TOWN Ramia Mazé

Introduction Design is enmeshed in power relations and hegemonies, political regimes, and ideologies. These political dimensions are more explicit in architecture and its histories of service to states and empires, democracies, and dictators. In architecture, the politics of form has been widely theorized in terms of the ‘panopticon,’ a building type conceived two centuries ago by the social theorist Jeremy Bentham. A panopticon prison, for example, distributes cells around a central guard-tower, such that inmates are both physically separated from one another and subject to a centralized surveillance mechanism. The philosopher Michel Foucault (1995 [1975]) elaborated on the panopticon prison not only as a building but as a mechanism of power. For Foucault, it articulated the shift from one paradigm of governance to another: from top-down rule by a sovereign over territory through physical force to modern forms of control over social relations through a variety of mechanisms.

Modern government, thus, takes form on an everyday and ongoing basis through ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991 [1978]), which includes hard urban and architectural forms that physically contain and control a populace as well as less tangible mechanisms, such as surveillance, that steer people’s perceptions and behaviors.

Political analysis has also entered into design through concepts such as ‘governmentality.’ Langdon Winner (1980) points at Robert Moses’ urban plan for New York, which, among other choices to similar effect, included height limits to highway overpasses that prohibited public buses and thus access to beaches and parks for some social groups. Elaborating his concept of ‘political ergonomics,’ Winner (1995) argues that different design choices result in ‘different social contracts’ between a user, civil society, and the state. In terms of ‘the tangibility of governance,’ Dori Tunstall (2007) elaborates how national design standards for voting ballots and voter information directly affect whether or how individuals or groups of people vote. Mahmoud Keshavarz (2016) examines passports, camps, and borders as designed things deployed by the state as instruments of migration policy, as well as the use of these as forms of resistance by migrants against state violence. This vein of Foucauldian thought in design scholarship exposes and unfolds how government and policy literally touch and control people through designed forms of governmentality in everyday life.

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES 013

Today, design as a service profession for the government is rapidly expanding. ‘Design to drive renewal in the public sector’ and ‘modernization of public ­administration’ is proclaimed in the European Commission’s (EC 2013) Action Plan for Design-Driven Innovation. The EC plan implemented by ‘Design for Europe’ highlights examples of employed designers and entire design units in national and municipal government as well as the master’s course ‘Design for ­Government,’ for which I’m responsible, in collaboration with ministries in ­Finland. In my context, design has been an integral part of the Finnish government’s 2016 Strategic Program and written into the City of Helsinki strategy. Design has thrived and expanded within political economies of governmental (neo-)liberalization, redistribution of governmental services, and rationales of renewal and innovation (­Julier 2016). This is evident in Finland but also far beyond, as such rationales are perpetuated through the UN and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Eliadis, Hill and Howlett 2007b) – and through international ­design organizations.

The rapid expansion of design within the government is rapidly outpacing political analysis of its forms and implications. Further, the forms of design expanding within government – namely, design thinking, co-design, and service design – are not those previously interrogated in the Foucauldian vein. When Christian Bason (2016), currently chief executive of the Danish Design Center and formerly head of the cross-governmental MindLab, argues for ‘policymaking as designing,’ he is advocating for the design of processes and strategies rather than the design of forms that physically contain and control.

The expansion of design in government can be argued as part of a larger political-­economic shift. As Foucault argued, previous forms of ‘hard’ state power through military and physical means have gradually been displaced within ­modern and liberal governance by more subtle and less tangible forms. Here, the double-­ meaning of the panopticon is indicative. The panopticon prison does control through physical separation and containment but, more profoundly, it is the ‘soft,’ psychological power of surveillance that operates invisibly to instill individual self-governance and social order. A relevant parallel in design, articulated by ­Keshavarz and myself (2013), is the management and direction of people’s experiences and subjectivities within consensus-driven participatory and co-design processes.

As it expands in conjunction with the emergence of modern forms of governance, design within and upstream in government is overdue for political analysis.

Public administration scholars, such as Pearl Eliadis, Margaret Hill, and Michael Howlett in their book Designing Government (2007a), examine the expanding range of political instruments used in governance. They articulate the shift from ‘government’ per se to processes of ‘governance,’ that is, from hierarchical and centralized institutions and top-down enactment of power and policy to more ‘networked’ arrangements and ‘interactive’ mechanisms. This includes, I argue, designed forms and forums, which must also be interrogated.

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Within my research, I am interested in how design operates in terms of ­ overnance and governmentality, by which I mean the regulation and steering of g ­conduct. For example, I study how design provides new understandings of – and capacities to manipulate – the interface between the personal and the state. In this article, and in order to explore this in action, I turn to some examples highlighted through the World Design Organization.

Design within government and the World Design Capital® The expanding forms and roles of design in government are evident in the phenomena and content of the World Design Capital (WDC). This is a title awarded biannually to one city around the world, following a bidding process to the World Design Organization (WDO)™. The WDO as an organization and the WDC phenomenon are manifestations of design as an instrument of national policy. ‘Design as an essential component in national strategies to stimulate the development of sustainable economic, social, and cultural growth’ (WDO 2019) was the premise of a WDO-organized international conference at the inaugural WDC in Torino, ­Italy, in 2008. Behind each WDC city is a powerful lobby assembled for the competitive bid process and implementation – 2012 WDC Helsinki was backed by the national and municipal government, an array of business and cultural actors, and widespread popular support, ‘one of the most extensive cooperation projects ever implemented in Finland’ (Icsid, now named WDO, quoted in Berglund 2013). Thus, each WDC can be seen as an instantiation of how governments frame and instrumentalize design as part of the policy.

A WDC, furthermore, spotlights how government can use design. Each WDC selects and promotes a particular design profile and examples through communication materials and a program of events. For example, WDC Helsinki included sustainable design and design activism within a profile of citizen engagement.

This, alongside the promotion of mainstream design innovation and creative industry, entailed a complicated profile ‘as activism at the margins shades into design policy and commercial opportunities’ (Berglund 2013: 209). Eeva Berglund argues the WDC Helsinki perpetuated a Finnish historical strategy of governmentality through technocratic mainstreaming and consensus-building: ‘In fact what [WDC Helsinki] promotes is less the design of objects or even services and more the design of the right kinds of citizens’ (Berglund 2013: 207–208). Thus, by drawing a parallel to Foucault’s ‘governmentality,’ she articulates how such profiling becomes a way of forming and steering a populace in particular ways.

As such a spotlight, the designation of Cape Town, South Africa, as the subsequent WDC in 2014 was particularly significant. For one thing, 2014 marked the 20-year anniversary of the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. For another,

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES 015

this first and still sole WDC in the Global South, amplifies Cape Town’s ‘world city syndrome’ (McDonald 2012). As described by David McDonald, this denotes a persistent fixation of governmental and other interests in Cape Town on being a ‘world city’ in the normative mold set out by UN-Habitat (2001). He further describes how neoliberalism is part and parcel of the world city formation process and outcome, including the homogenization and commodification of lifeworld, ‘(de)­Africanization’, and strategies for containing dissent and marginalizing opposition. Thus, and for the purposes of this article, 2014 WDC Cape Town spotlights some problematics of (post-apartheid) policy as manifested in and through design.

To a great extent, the design profile of WDC Cape Town continued that of other WDCs. Many among the hundreds of examples (especially those within the theme ‘Beautiful Spaces, Beautiful Things’) were those recognizable spatial and material forms readily photographed and featured in the Financial Times (f.ex. van der Post, 2014). Less tangible, but familiar forms of design within government, were two, unconnected projects including a series of high-profile ‘pioneer workshops’ and the VPUU project.

The pioneer workshops were explicit instruments of government, created to fulfill the target of Cape Town’s mayor to engage with every one of the city’s 111 wards. As captured in a polished video (WDO 2019), designers had multiple roles, for example, in identifying and selecting participants, framing the agenda, and preparing ward councilors, as well as facilitating the workshop to generate a proposal that could thereafter be visualized and put forward for city council allocation of funding. Design roles went well beyond mere facilitation, including tutoring (f.ex. framing four possible definitions of ‘design thinking’ for participants to choose among), prioritizing (coaching participants to ‘critically assess own ideas’), and decision-making (a voting procedure to progressively narrow and ­select proposals). Thus, a politics of consensus that is typical within participatory design (­Keshavarz and Mazé 2013) is also evident here, including the use of design to frame, select, and steer competing and even conflicting interests and voices toward a particular end.

A more visible example is the VPUU project. This was the first of only three examples (out of the hundreds eventually included) in the bid prepared by the City of Cape Town for the WDO (Cape Town Partnership 2011). Images from the VPUU project, branded within the highly visible yellow WDC branding and banners, met everyone passing through the arrival gate at Cape Town International Airport during 2013–2014, including myself. Yet, the significance – and political dimensions – of VPUU are much more profound than these widespread but superficial ­depictions.

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The case of VPUU (Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading) VPUU stands for ‘Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading’, which is simulta-

neously the name of a non-profit company, a project in Khayelitsha and other locations, and a South African-German Development Cooperation program initiated in 2001 by the German Development Bank (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or KfW). ­ frican KfW provided 10.5M Euro (Graham et al. 2011) pooled with other South A governmental funds and, with Cape Town as the executing agency of the program, Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township was selected as a site for implementation in 2005. The three-pillar model for implanting VPUU is a general model following UN-Habitat and also implemented in two South American countries by KfW (Bauer 2010). The VPUU model has since been rolled out in five municipalities of the Western Cape Province (Cassidy 2015). This setup illustrates the global and multi-level political-economic dimensions of VPUU, which underpins its organizational, operating, and political logics.

VPUU is a case that reveals several layers of design in the context of governance today. First, as spotlighted within WDC Cape Town, it can be understood as part of ‘design policy,’ that is, as illustrating a claim or directive about South African and Cape Town government and policy for a local and global audience. Secondly, it is an example of modern forms of governance – in this case, security policy conducted in a ‘networked’ and ‘interactive’ way through an assemblage of stakeholders, local and global financing, models, and (govern)mentalities – in which design is increasingly instrumental. Lastly, and in focus for the remainder of this article, VPUU is an example of the varied, designed, and politically-loaded forms and forums through which governance is conducted in and beyond government today.

Research standpoint(s) My interest in VPUU started with a two-week research visit to Cape Town during WDC preparations in 2013. This included a visit to the African Center for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and limited qualitative research including a visit to VPUU in Khayelitsha and an informal interview with Kathryn Ewing, PhD in urban design and architecture, a VPUU founding director and former Worksteam leader of ‘situational crime prevention.’ This article should be understood as a critical essay, drawing primarily and retrospectively upon a proliferating body of literature since my own visit.

Subsequent to my visit, I have followed the development and studies of VPUU at a distance, which has been possible because of its ongoing and obligatory self-­ evaluation (required of development projects funded by KfW and other foundations). It’s important to note that VPUU is privileged and likely d ­ isproportionately

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES 017

­ ighlighted among the many projects in Cape Town and Africa because of its fundh ing situation and global affiliations (KfW, UN-Habitat, WDC, etc.). It has been the ­focus of several research studies, including those unaffiliated with VPUU by ­Vanessa ­Barolsky (funded by the Canada-based International Development Research Centre), Leon Schreiber, and Michael Barry. While the Schreiber and Barry study was conducted through their affiliations with North American universities, it can be relevant to note that Schreiber is currently a member of parliament in South ­Africa for the Democratic Alliance party. VPUU is described and discussed here primarily on the basis of existent research about the project, including that of the scholars mentioned above and others associated with ACC (f.ex. Mercy Brown-Luthango, Liza Rose Cirolia, Mntungwa Gubevu, Elena Reyes, and Ruth Massey) and their collaborators such as Ash Amin.

VPUU: Governance and governmentality Governance in Cape Town, as elsewhere, has shifted from policy created and enacted top-down from a singular authority to more ‘networked’ and ‘interactive’ forms distributed across a variety of stakeholders with different interests, (inter) dependencies, and agency. The lack (or withdrawal) of direct government and complexity of governmental arrangements is particularly evident within Cape Town’s 450 ‘informal settlement pockets’. In a city of 3.8 million people (continuously inflated by urban land invasions by homeless and landless people, new and illegal land occupations), over 20% of households live in such settlements (Amin and ­Cirolia 2018). By default and by intent, VPUU has become a key intermediary between the state and the populace in Khayelitsha, instrumentalizing, creating, and regulating policy, functions more traditionally performed by formal institutions of government.

Literally doing governance in Khayelitsha, VPUU organizes and regulates security. A primary instrument, and one of three pillars in the VPUU model, is physical safety. This is addressed (and depicted in WDC imagery) through interventions in the built environment including architecture, lighting, and common spaces, as well as organizational forms such as community patrols to support the police service. Thus, VPUU creates a variety of tangible interfaces between the state and populace. VPUU’s operations also extend beyond and upstream, aiming at ­preventing violence in the first place by affecting public health (Lloyd and Matzopoulos 2018), social cohesion (Barolsky 2016), and civic enfranchisement (Schreiber and Barry 2017). VPUU is thus a case of the ‘pluralisation of the governance of security’ (Shearing and Wood 2003: 403).

Security, safe spaces, and prevention are, however, not only delivered topdown, by government or even through intermediaries such as VPUU, but also evolve

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naturally and out of necessity. In terms of ‘governance from below’. Amin and ­ irolia elaborate local and bottom-up ‘planning rules and practices, deep-rooted C cartographic knowledge, established decision-making processes, controlling parties, social battles, hidden rules and rituals of access and allocation’ (2018: 277).

These may be unknown, ignored, or marginalized within formal governance interventions, Amin and Cirolia argue, which may unwittingly produce low morale, inertia, resentment, and opposition. Yet, the social contract between the state and populace is inevitably lived out through direct interactions with and through intermediaries and interfaces. Thus, examining these and some relevant political tensions and dynamics therein can also suggest wider implications for design.

Forms of governmentality VPUU is situated within the apartheid legacy of governance and social-spatial

­ olicy. Khayelitsha (‘new home’ in isiXhosa) was established 25 km from the city p center in 1930 by the apartheid state. Apartheid implemented the national social policy of segregation in spatial terms, dividing people into four racial groups and zoning land on a racial basis. The 1950 Group Areas Act zoned municipalities for mutually exclusive and racialized land ownership and occupation. The act was instrumentalized through large-scale property expropriation and forced relocation of 1.7 million people. Principles of European modernism were referenced in defense of the ‘hard’ divisions, clearances and borders between areas: ‘follow­ orbusier’s lead, named the Surgical method … through surgery we must ing Le C create ­order,’ states the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the ­Colored ­Population Group (Republic of South Africa 1976). The ‘hard’ legacy of spatial segregation remains – patterns of post-apartheid urban development and settlement have largely taken place within, and thereby reinforced, the inherited apartheid spatial framework (Amin and Cirolia 2018).

VPUU does not aim to solve this political legacy. Within Khayelitscha, VPUU operates in the evolving aftermath of apartheid and post-apartheid policy, in which the pledged housing, infrastructures, and public services have not been fully delivered nor evenly distributed. The informal settlements, largely consisting of shacks, that were previously considered as temporary have become established and are ­increasingly treated by the government as permanent (and thus subject to upgrading).

Within Khayelitsha, VPUU aims at violence prevention through a three-pillar operational model (Graham et al. 2011): ‘social crime prevention’ through community patrols, education, legal, health, and social services aimed to prevent or ­support victims of violence; ‘institutional crime prevention,’ in the form of job training, economic development and facilities, and ‘situational crime prevention’.

DESIGN (GOVERN)MENTALITIES 019

‘Situational crime prevention’ refers specifically to interventions intended to upgrade the built environment. This includes a series of public walkways through the informal settlement and areas for sport and gardening. ‘Active boxes’ are the hallmark of this part of the model – regularly spaced, lit, and staffed structures that multi-function as watchtowers, safehouses, commercial spaces, and community centers. Though widespread in WDC imagery, these forms are hardly ­spectacular.

Fabricated from shipping containers, locally-sourced, and inexpensive m ­ aterials, it’s not necessarily evident what is designed and what is merely found or improvised. There are also immaterial infrastructures such as a mobile phone-based GPS systems operated by designated locals (primarily women) to register perceived safety and incidents of violence. In contrast to the imposing road, wall, and lighting systems that divided and separated areas under apartheid planning, VPUU infrastructures connect light up and make common paths, spaces, and data. These are nonetheless forms of ‘governing matter’, to borrow a concept from Amin and Cirolia, which control and steer access, mobility, and visibility. Belief (perceived safety) and behavior (community oversight, peer-monitoring, and self-control) are governed in a quasi-panoptic sense.

As spotlighted by the WDC, it is these forms of ‘situational crime prevention’ that may conform to traditional expectations of design. Less evident in WDC, the other two pillars of VPUU could also be understood and analyzed as design. Indeed, these parts of the VPUU model include processes and strategies akin to those in design within government and ‘policymaking as designing’. For example, the composition and procedures of decision-making bodies is one of the strategic and ­determining mechanisms within policy-making. Furthermore, how specific relations are regulated, for example through legal and social contracts, is part of policy implementation. Beyond the ‘hard’ elements indicated above, these are also relevant and partly unfolded below.

Governance forums Governance through shaping particular organizational forms is evident in how VPUU’s Safe Node Area Committee (SNAC) is set up and conducted (cf. Cassidy 2015; Schreiber and Barry 2017). Preceding action within a particular area, VPUU sets up a SNAC through a process that includes an audit and interviews within rel-

evant l­ocal organizations; a ‘social compact’ developed during the consultation process, and; election of SNAC members by consulted stakeholders. Half of the 16-member SNAC are stakeholders from local government structures, the other half are from community- and task-based organizations (f.ex. early childhood development or health forums), NGOs, and faith-based organizations. Following the setup of the SNAC, VPUU provides an eight-week leadership training course for

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members, and then a community planning process begins with a baseline household survey and a series of community workshops, which culminates in a community action plan. VPUU consults SNAC on a monthly basis, and SNAC also acts as a recruitment/training body for the local security patrol and other activities. The main decision-­making forum for VPUU locally, SNAC selects the issues to be addressed and is a key to many community activities.

The setup and conduct of SNACs can be criticized. Barolsky and Doriam Borges (2019: 113) argue: ‘the objective of the consultative processes that do take place appears to be largely instrumental and designed to ensure the efficient implementation of the intervention through the selection and socialisation of a cohort of ‘responsible’ leaders who are tutored, through training, in the practices, norms, and ethics of the economic rational actor.’ Lawrence Piper (2012, quoted in Barolsky and Borges: 112) has called the form of VPUU community consultation and the forums it creates, ‘“designed” in ways that allow for a very limited form of direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making.’ Barolsky and Borges argue (2019: 112) that community meetings are held ‘largely as forums for the endorsement of decisions already taken’, since the key issues are primarily debated and decided within the SNAC itself. Wider consultation is thus primarily focused on how an intervention will be implemented, rather than its substantive grounds.

Since the community action plan is signed by the mayor at the end of a ‘consultative’ meeting, Piper suggests (2012: 7), ‘the process is largely a symbolic one.’

Such critiques highlight the ways in which governance mechanisms are, indeed, designed. Who is invited is one of the primary mechanisms of governance, as Peter Sloterdijk (2005) argues in relation to Athenian democracy, for example, and the invitation is a powerful steering mechanism within participatory design (Keshavarz and Mazé 2013). Membership could be perceived as political in VPUU: ‘Due to politics, we were removed from that [SNAC]. People wanted to bring in their people and so forth’ (former VPUU member interviewed by Barolsky and Borges 2019: 113). Yet, criteria used in the setup of VPUU and SNAC were intended as ­‘apolitical’ (Barolsky 2016; Uğur 2014 cf. Ley 2009). VPUU’s choice of 50% non-­ politically affiliated membership is explained by a VPUU leader, Michael Krause, as ‘a conscious and participatory one’ (quoted in Schreiber and Barry 2017: 7). ­Schreiber and Barry explain the complex landscape and legacy of civic groups that emerged as a form of alternative government to the state during the apartheid era.

Some civic groups, for example, belong to the South African National Civic Organization (SANCO) aligned with the political party African National Congress (ANC).

Tensions between political parties can lead to tense power dynamics and violence in townships as well as attempts to grab power within governance processes. In this context, VPUU has designed the setup of SNAC to diffuse and balance party-­ political stakes.

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Governmental arrangements VPUU and other such intermediaries operate precariously in between the state and

populace. The post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa promises housing and public services such as water, electricity, and sanitation for all, yet millions still await such provision. Early models of centralized and top-down ‘government provision’ has shifted to a complex set of ‘governmental arrangements’, while the same social groups continue to struggle, leading Amin and Cirolia (2018: 291) to argue that the ‘state violence of apartheid has given way to the violence of a neoliberal democracy.’ In this context, and foreshadowing Cape Town’s recent plan (2012– 2017), VPUU’s approach is incremental and in situ, i.e. step-by-step upgrading of infrastructures and services where people live rather than large-scale relocation and new build. However, and characteristic of incrementalism, the gap between promise and delivery can persist – for example, in Khayelitsha, the main water pipes stop short. Distant communal water taps have necessarily become a destination and default meeting place for women, a physical and symbolic site of state shortcomings.

Stepping into this gap, as VPUU does, is risky, particularly given historical distrust and solidarity built up in opposition. Indeed, according to Brown-Luthango, Reyes, and Gubevu (2016: 490), delays have affected community participation in VPUU, ‘creating despondency and the feeling of failed delivery.’

The gap was lengthened by underestimation of tenure certification as a key step. VPUU was tasked with this in 2009 due to its ‘community-based design’, in the words of municipal department director Noahmaan Hendricks (quoted in ­Schreiber and Barry 2017: 5). In tenure certification, the city remains the sole landowner, but certificates of occupancy for shack tenants serve several functions. For residents, certificates strengthen protection against eviction and serve as proof of address for phone contracts, furniture store accounts, school enrollment, etc. For the electricity company that invests in building infrastructure, certificates provide security that service fees will eventually be paid by residents (or by the municipality in the case of indigent households). For the city, certificates signify participation in the upgrade and, as attached to specific geographic sites, enable the environmental assessment and zoning decision necessary prior to upgrading. Certificates thus function as a kind of social contract among diverse and potentially conflicting stakeholders within necessarily long-term ‘governmental arrangements.’ By 2013, 85–90% residents of the target area had acquired certificates, which reportedly had already increased trust and perception of safety amongst residents (Brown-­ Luthango, Reyes and Gubevu 2016).

Mediating certification, however, is politically-charged work, and VPUU decisions unavoidably wielded power over different parts of the community, as unfolded in the study by Schreiber and Barry (2017). One starting point, the so-called ‘Book of Life’ informal register previously created by SANCO, a party-political association, raised questions about bias and equity. VPUU initiated an additional pro-

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cess, which was carried out by 30 field-workers recruited and trained through SNAC to use GPS devices and door-to-door surveys, to map 6,470 structures and their occupants. Further obstacles emerged in handling and interpreting the data, and occupancy evolved quickly: ‘People are born there, people die, people move, and people marry. We’re still struggling with causing the city to understand it’s not a static system’ (Krause in Schreiber and Barry 2017:12). Certificates are registered to the head of household, and VPUU made a decision to co-register women living in male-headed households, which changed the balance of power within the community (Brown and Gubevu 2014). Conflicts arose over intrafamily claims on the same structure. Along the way, the VPUU office was converted into a registry office with staff trained in conflict resolution, further cementing VPUU as a semi-governmental organization.

The interactive and evolving process was one of several factors that caused delays and contributed to an impasse in 2013 when it became apparent that technical implementation of infrastructures that respected tenancy patterns in situ were prohibitively expensive. VPUU was caught in between, and city planner Marco ­Geretto (quoted in Schreiber and Barry 2017: 17) concluded that ‘the softer, social engagement process had gotten ahead of the harder, rezoning and physical-­developmentplanning process.’

Discussion and conclusions Spotlighted by the 2014 WDC Cape Town, VPUU signals several of the issues for design today. Design is embedded in national and municipal strategy and profiling policies. Increasingly employed and institutionalized within formal government, design is moving upstream in policymaking processes. In addition to more traditional and tangible forms of design, recognized as part of strategies to control and steer people and populations, design within government and doing governance beyond government also includes less tangible and as yet less scrutinized forms and forums. Tracing this expansion of design, concepts such as ‘governmentality’ can also be expanded for analytic purposes in order to better understand the role and agency of design in government and governance. Physically and politically functioning as ‘governing matter’, design policy, workshops, environments, infrastructures, organizations, and processes should be understood and studied not (or not only) as objects but as instruments or, in the terms of Amin and Cirolia (2018: 287), ‘agents of government.’

The term ‘agent’ elicits the dimensions of power latent within and wielded by design forms and forums that function as intermediaries or interfaces between the state and the people. As unfolded above, VPUU was set up and conducted in ways that recognized and responded to a specific and politically-loaded ­history and

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4 DEMOCRACY BY MAKING – A FAILED ­RENDEZVOUS OF DESIGN AND PRAGMATISM? Laura Popplow

Designers, along with other makers creating artifacts, have used an intriguingly simple formula to connect what they do with democracy: ‘[D]emocracy means doing things together.’ This quote is from the Black Mountain College Bulletin (1941).

The liberal art college founded in 1933 and closed in 1958 has become famous after all as an – if not maybe the – American avant-garde community (Duberman 2009).

It has been framed as a successor of the Bauhaus, which closed the same year it was founded, but also as one of the first colleges to apply John Dewey’s educational and democratic philosophy in practice, connecting it directly to artistic and designerly practices which were taught at Black Mountain by nobody less than Anni and ­Josef Albers. Along with some other of the most influential creative personas of the 20th century like Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Walter Gropius as regular visitors of the college, Black Mountain College became a unique melting pot of European and American avant-garde thinking and making in the arts and beyond, dedicated to serving the project of democracy in times of political crisis and (financial) loss – a quality many of the émigré teachers experienced quite literally.

One project conducted by all Black Mountain faculty and students exemplifies the above mentioned democratic program of the college may be like no other: the Studies Building. In 1940, shortly after the US went into war, the faculty was confronted with a difficult situation: The college was not able to renew the lease of the complex it had rented, neither was it able to finance the building of a college on a nearby site that had been acquired in 1937. The planning of the new buildings had been commissioned to the architectural partnership of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer – but their plan turned out to be too ambitious and costly at the same time. The faculty had a difficult decision to make, confronted with the forthcoming move out of their former campus, and the reality of lacking funding, a condition the college suffered its whole existence, sharply increased now due to war times. ‘[W]e realized that we would either have to build ourselves an adequate college plant quickly […] or must give up the College because there was no other place where we could go’ (Dreier 1946). The only option was to build with whatever resource they had at their disposal: timber and stones from the grounds and labor from everyone, faculty, administration, and students.

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Fig. 1 Brochure for fundraising, advertising the building project at Black Mountain College, summer 1941 (Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina)

The Building Project: A study in community building The Building Project was an ambitious and risky undertaking and a solitary experience: What would have happened if the community would not have succeeded with the Studies Building? It was not allowed to fail, not only because the college would have had no space otherwise, but also because the college had to prove its educational concept of a practice-based, democratic education: the brochures advertising the work-camps emphasize the coherence of the building project with Dewey’s educational approach of learning by doing. Although the ‘Work Program’ at Black Mountain College put physical work at the heart of the educational program of the college from the beginning, the uniqueness of the Building Project and its symbolic gesture of a Studies Building, built by the whole college as a study, is still ­significant.

The close connection of physical work, learning through artistic and ­material experiments (e.g. Albers teaching), and the community as a place to learn democracy was present in all of the colleges’ publications, but the brochures advertising work-camps for external students emphasized the physical workout: Men are working shirtless, shoveling earth in wheelbarrows; women in shorts are hammering

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timbers (Figure 1). This heroization of workmanship was not without frictions especially during the period of the building project, when students and faculty were supposed to spend one to three afternoons each week at the building site: The jolly folk songs to and from the work site, the communion of the committed, angered two of the disaffected to the point where they tacked up a notice on the bulletin board one night, reading “WANTED: ZOMBIES FOR THE WORK PROGRAMM” – an act that produced much clicking tongues and “frothing at the mouth” (Duberman 2009, 158).

This anecdote from the Building Project reveals friction inherent to collaborative making-practice in general, but especially if set in a community where collaboration is both a (financial) necessity and part of a democratic experiment – what if not everyone is happy to participate? We will leave these questions unanswered here to connect them to another, actual anecdote of making framed as democratic ­practice.

DIY democracy – pragmatism revisited?

During the last fifteen years, we have witnessed a revival of making. No longer only a leisure time activity, making became framed as a critique of the global production industry, mixing counter-hegemonic practices like hacking, crafting, and tinkering with digital fabrication technologies. While this revival has developed fast into a niche-market of suppliers, professional YouTube-channels, and magazines, it has also triggered reflection of the political potential in ‘Doing-it-Together’. Practices like DesignBuilt (Lepik 2013), architects and designers not only designing and planning but also building with the community of future inhabitants, have become a more common part of academic education, and have been also become more common in cities in which the global financial crisis of 2008 hindered public infrastructure building, like Madrid (Rubio and Fogué 2015). Citizens there started to create their own community gardens and meeting places while asking also for more open governance structures and procedures. Simultaneously practices stemming from engineering and hacker communities have become part of politics: Hackathons for Open Governance or HackDays for Sustainability apply tinkering and the production of demos to issues of a broader political agenda.

This arguably not new, but still different agenda of making beyond hobbyist practice has gained public interest – and was synchronized with a new academic interest in pragmatism and forms of ‘material participation’ (Marres 2012). The exhibition ‘Making Things Public’, curated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (2005), marked this material turn, answering the question ‘Do artifacts have politics?’

(Winner 1980). Things were reframed from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’

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(Latour 2008), to gatherings forming around issues. This debate was adapted in design research through the notion of design things (Binder et al. 2011), and a renewed interest in the Dewey-Lippmann debate, which emphasized the role of material making not only as an epistemological project (Ratto 2011; Knorr-Cetina 2009) but a political project of ‘publics-in-the-making’ (Lindström and Stahl 2014).

But, this renewed political agenda of making and design, of a ‘DIY citizenship’ also raises new questions: Is it okay not to participate (Blauvelt 2011, 101; Miessen 2010)? What if not everyone is a maker? Is everyone equally skilled to make as a citizen? I will, therefore, introduce another vignette from my own research that was challenged by these very questions and also raised the more general question of how to think through these experiences with Dewey’s pragmatism.

When CycleHack becomes ‘CycleFrack’: A staging of making In 2015, I organized a Hackathon with the students of my interaction design class in Wuppertal (Figure 2). As part of my PhD research (Popplow 2020), I was interested in the difference between activist and designerly political practices. So, we worked with the approach of the CycleHack (We are Snook 2016). The aim of this 48h design event, which runs at the same weekend in cities around the globe, is to collaboratively work on the question: ‘How can we reduce the barriers to cycling?’. The barriers in Wuppertal seemed to be many: A hilly geography, rain, a car-centered infrastructure, and a financially tense city household. For some years, ­Wuppertal was awarded as the least bike-friendly city in Germany. But since 2013, these issues had been addressed both by cycling activists and the city council ­itself. The event was therefore conceptualized as a co-making platform for these different stakeholders.

When I invited the cycling activists to the first seminar meeting (via social media), I hoped that these groups would be willing to introduce their projects to the students and could even become part of organizing the event. Their response suggested that this seemed to be a rather idiotic proposal to them (Popplow and Duque 2017). They warned us not to go on with the organization of the event: ‘We are already working on the most pressing issues regarding cycling in the local context’ and ‘it would harm our and your own ambitions to work on parallel issues’ (personal message on Facebook, translation by the author). The main argument from the opposition was that most of the students were not cyclists. As non-experts to the issue of cycling our endeavor as designers was framed as ‘naïve’. Although in the end, the students organized a collaboration with the local Fablab, the murmurings of the activists group went on. They never really appeared in person to discuss the issue, but shared their disagreement in talks with the collaborating members of the Fablab or online – also during the CycleHack weekend itself (Figure 3).

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Fig. 2 Participants during the CycleHack 2015 in Wuppertal (Laura Popplow/Anne Bönemann)

It was never clear who and how many persons were behind it, but this non-manifest absence clearly led us to Other ‘them’ (Law 2004, 84–85). They became an entity that constructed the ‘us’. I was bothered as a designer and organizer of the CycleHack because they clearly aimed at making us look incompetent.

I was intrigued as a researcher by their framing of us as naïve non-experts, interfering in ‘their’ problem space. It made ‘us’ think about our roles as designers and at some point, we accepted the framing of being outsiders to the consensual way the issue of cycling was presented. It made us focus more consciously on our expertise as Non- or Not-anymore-Cyclists and the group of other Not-Yet-Cyclists in the city.

Democratic participation by making together?

One could frame the reaction of the invited cyclists as a ‘misbehavior’ of participants (Michael 2013, 76) or simply ignore their interactions – also because they were hardly traceable or recordable and even not influential for the general success of the CycleHack. But their reactions and the murmurs stuck with me and made me reconsider my role as a researcher, as someone who consciously or unconsciously

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Fig. 3 Tweets commenting on the CycleHack 2015 in Wuppertal (Twitter, anonymized by the author)

sets certain parameters for ‘good’ participation. To think the CycleHack along the lines of Dewey’s publics as a gathering through issues helped me frame the event not as a necessarily collaborative making of solutions, but as a staging of the ‘­articulation of issues’ (DiSalvo et al. 2011; Stahl and Lindström 2016). The making helped to invite for other articulations of barriers to cycling – articulations which were probably normally silenced in the local discourse through those who were acclaimed experts for the issue. Still, the dissensus we encountered, the construction of antagonism between expert activists and non-expert designers was also a resistance contra the event, creating frictions outside the event-space. How to frame non-participation in the design event? Why did the proposal of a Hackathon create such a fuzz? And – why did I assume that participation by making is necessarily more democratic?

First of all, we could say that the invitation to a civic Hackathon is ‘by no means innocent’ (Stahl and Lindström 2016), but invites for a very distinctive form of action, which could be framed as a ‘rehearsing of entrepreneurial citizenship’ (Irani 2015). Hackathons do not only favor a certain type of collaborative, workhard, sleep-less attitude known in the IT industry but establish also a very rigid temporal regime, excluding participants who for example have to care for relatives or have another job they need to attend (ibid.). Apart from that specific characteristic of Hackathons, I assumed that everyone would not only be willing to spend the time but also that the making activities would open participation to other groups of participants, creating a more diverse, more democratic public.

But I was challenged not only through the frictions of the outsider-participants but also through the differentiated consideration expressed by one of the

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co-organizing members of the local Fablab, who had also been a member of the r­ egional parliament for some years: I think the current generation simply wants, uh, to participate more in society, they want to participate in the design, no matter in what form and, uh, there it becomes in my opinion very political, because this freedom to design, to give form must also be ensured. You can ensure that by having a city that is broke, then the city as administration cannot design things itself and then there is freedom for each individual to design, but that is very undemocratic, because then the individual also has much more power to participate, to design in that area, without necessarily having democratic legitimacy to do so (Interview R., 22.07.2015).

This aspect of legitimation through making, especially in fields which have been probably neglected by party politics is a very powerful, but seldomly criticized, narrative of design practices especially in arenas where politics are not able to handle a situation, due to austerity politics or simply because an issue has not yet been ­articulated to become part of an official agenda. Here, my interview partner questioned a matter of politics inherent to design and making – a matter of design-­ politics (Keshavarz 2016). If designers and other makers make public things happen, the legitimation of such projects is not necessarily gained through a democratic process with democratic decisions, but is often dominated through hidden agendas like funding agencies or project-time, placing much power on the shoulders of the facilitating designers (cf. Bratteteig and Wagner 2014).

Necessity, locally adapted solutions, or democratic legitimation?

At this point, we need to take participation in and through design as an issue. We will need to set aside here the discourse of Participatory Design, which has found a distinct way to mix both participation in design and through design, in the argument of creating simultaneously situated solutions and democratic empowerment. But if we regard the above examples only as matters of participation through design, as matters of a democratic project, we will have to ask: How did the Black Mountain faculty frame the collective building of their college as a democratic endeavor? Why did I assume that the making or hacking activities at the CycleHack would invite participants to articulate political issues? The first impulse is probably to say: There is simply no other democratic way to solve an issue despite involving the community that is affected.

An effect of conceptualizing legitimate participation by a community of affected (Marres 2012, 34) is the often unexpressed assumption in design that participation is not needed as a necessary democratic legitimation of certain designs and design

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decisions, but that participation, mediated by the designer-facilitator, helps the community of affected to solve the communities problems by themselves. By making the communities problems ideally become ‘fixed’, rendering an involvement of (formal) politics less necessary, or even obsolete: the citizen becomes an entrepreneur, solving formerly public issues through often privately funded and organized activities. In my opinion, this is an adaptation of Dewey’s pragmatism in design, which significantly reduces his central political argument of the democratic ­necessity of experience.

There is a need to rethink participation through design especially in times of austerity politics and a neoliberal tendency to outsource services to competent ­social entrepreneurs and unpaid labor, covered as voluntarism. Only if we read pragmatism as modes of acting despite, but aware of the complexities of political practice – especially in times of crisis – will we be able to grasp the two frictions which I have introduced above: the disaffected community members at Black Mountain, resisting to work as ‘Zombies’ and the CycleHack’s outsider-participants, resisting the proposal of the design event, declaring it a ‘CycleFrack’.

How to deal with conflict and contingency: The political difference Both anecdotes could be interpreted as difficulties to deal with conflict and contingency, two characteristics of what has been described in political theory through the distinction of the political from politics (Marchart 2007). Introduced originally

by Carl Schmitt, whose political philosophy became infamous through his direct involvement with the NS party in Germany, the distinction is not only still one of the most discussed issues of political philosophy, but has influenced also planners and designers practice, especially those concerned with questions of participation.

Here, the notion of agonistic pluralism introduced by Chantal Mouffe (cf. 2013) has been most influential as an alternative to the consensual deliberative approach based on Habermas’ communicative theory. Consequently, the notion of participatory design projects as agonistic design things has been coined (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012).

The point I want to make here is that Mouffe’s concept does not help to think with the frictions I introduced with the anecdotes, but that her concept advocates ’a taming of antagonism in agonism’ (Roskamm 2015), which is based in her specific reading of the distinction between politics and the political. I argue along the lines of Roskamm here, who does not only critically review Mouffe’s reading of Schmitt but also proposes an alternative: the antagonistic thinking of her long-term partner and collaborator Ernesto Laclau. While Mouffe follows Schmitt in his problematic definition of the political through the antagonism of friend and enemy, Laclau has developed another way to frame experiences of conflict and contingency. His

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argument is based in the thesis that all relations are contingent power relations, not determined through any objective reason: ‘If social relations are contingent, it means they can be radically transformed by struggle [ … ]’ (Laclau 1990, 35).

But struggle, conflict, antagonism there is because contingency is nothing other than the impossibility to fix any identity: think of the students calling for zombie workers, disaffected from their identity as ‘democratic makers’. But would it not be for the disaffected to create frictions, the identity of the others as an affected community solving their own problem would not be affirmed either. The contingency is ‘nothing other than this connection between prevention and affirmation of identity’ (Roskamm 2015, 9), a contrast to what Laclau criticized in modern thought, the elimination of all contingency by necessity (Laclau 1990, 20) – a thought which became most famously subsumed in the so-called TINA doctrine: ‘there is no alternative’ (introduced by Margret Thatcher).

Laclau’s antagonism, in contrast, calls for a ‘constitutive outside’ (ibid. 26), a necessary or ‘radical other’ (Marchart 2010a, 193). We could say: there is necessarily an alternative. To think of antagonism as a principle, if not the principle of the difference between ‘sedimented practices’ of politics and the happening of the political as ‘event’ (Laclau 1990, 35ff, 84), helps to understand how students at Black Mountain are calling for a necessary but still impossible alternative to their own labor for the community: zombies. A wish for a fictional, radical other to challenge the sedimented politics of necessary participation in the college’s work program; a call for contingency in a setting where the necessity to build a college and a community was ruling the game.

The example of the tweets of cycling activists commenting on the CycleHack and questioning the legitimation of us as designers handling issues of ‘cycling, ­advocacy, and mobility’ (Figure 3) is different because here there are two lines of antagonism that can be drawn and that had been emphasized throughout the process. First is the line drawn between us (the designers) as non-experts on the issue of c­ ycling and them (the activists) as issue-experts. Second is the distinction between participation inside the designed event of the CycleHack and outside through social media and untraceable talks and interactions. Laclau’s notion of the constitutive outside becomes especially helpful here because it prevents us from the shortcut of Schmitt to construct a personalized antagonism and the consequentially tamed agonistic pluralism of Mouffe (Roskamm 2015). If we look closely, the antagonism here is a difference of practices and their political argumentation, an antagonism that is both producing political subjects as well as it is a ‘mutual subversion’ (Laclau 1990, 27).

Our position as designers became through that antagonism: We produced contingent articulations of the local issue of cycling, as outsiders to the local cycling community and non-experts on the issue of cycling. This was provocative to the cycling activists insofar as we used our designerly expert skills to stage the Hackathon as a public event. This triggered both the identification of some activ-

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ists with their practice as a form of skilled expert practice as well as it challenged their ways of articulating the issue and creating public.

The second level of that antagonism was a difference of temporal qualities or characteristics: The activist’s long-term engagement and ongoing responsibility to deal with the local issue were set in contrast to our short-term, designerly intervention. While our form of design activism was arguably able to involve a public of mediated outsiders in the local issue, designerly activism (ours included) seldomly aims to involve in the lengthy negotiations of Realpolitik. Laclau’s distinction of politics as sedimented practices, not necessarily institutionalized politics, versus the political as the unplannable happening of antagonism, producing and displacing identities, helps to not shortcut to the conclusion that we as designers actually produced a political event by organizing the CycleHack.

Here, as the comment of my interview partner revealed, the assumption that making would inherently allow a broader, more democratic participation was idealistic, hoping for a consensus in making, an alternative mode of material issue-articulations. It reveals a flaw (not only) in Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism: If we conceptualize the political as an alternative to democratic politics aiming at legitimation, if we perceive political practice as plannable, manageable activities, our participatory practices are reduced to a matter of procedures – and the political turns into politics (Roskamm 2015). The political as a difference to politics, in contrast, is a happening, not something that can be designed or ‘workshopped’ (Keshavarz 2016, 105).

The antagonism of different temporal qualities, between sedimented practices – the activists as skilled practitioners articulating the issue of cycling, we as designers as skilled practitioners mediating and staging making – and the moment of antagonism which displaced or disrupted the ongoing production of identities through these practices was a happening of the political difference, possible only through the relation between politics and the political as necessarily different qualities (cf. Marchart 2007). Our designerly, interventionist approach was the necessary outside of the long-term engagement of activists’ practice and their dissent with our practice of designing a mediated making event interrupted simultaneously by our own conception as problem-solvers. This mutual disruption of ongoing practices revealed the politics inherent in every sedimented field of practice, a political moment emerging in difference to my assumption of co-making as a necessarily more democratic issue-articulation.

Pragmatism and the political difference The entanglement of the political difference, of politics as sedimented practices and the political as an event, a happening that cannot be intentionally designed (Popplow 2020), is the reason to critically review the current use of pragmatic

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­ onceiving and appraising these aesthetics and effects is critical work to be done if C we are to continue to participate in and contribute to varied modes of democratic action.

Part of our commitment as activist-researchers is to developing perspectives and vocabularies that we can use to describe diverse practices of both design and democracy. Here we take inspiration (again) from work on diverse economies, which calls for new ways of talking about and imagining labor, exchange, and markets if we want to take seriously other economic possibilities (Gibson-Graham 2006). Likewise, there is a need for new ways of talking about and imagining the work of design in enabling and participating in agonistic pluralism. The move towards events; towards appreciating events as a means to construct happenings that we can recall and those recollections as evidence of contestation and models of different ways of doing politics; towards recovering a notion of experience; towards an aesthetics and effects agonistic interaction – these are moves to develop new imaginaries of what the roles of design might be in contributing to an agonistic pluralism.

References Arendt, Hannah (2013). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

Binder, Thomas, Giorgio De Michelis, Pelle Ehn, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner (2011). Design Things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press.

Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren (2012). ‘Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements.’ CoDesign 8, no. 2–3: 127–144.

Connolly, William E (1993). The Terms of Political Discourse. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dewey, John (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, and Company.

Gibson-Graham, and Julie Katherine (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. U of Minnesota Press.

Hillgren, Per-Anders, Anna Seravalli, and Mette Agger Eriksen (2016). ‘Counter-hegemonic practices; dynamic interplay between agonism, commoning and strategic design.’ Strategic Design Research Journal, 9 (2) May-August 2016: 89–99.

Honig, Bonnie (2016). Political Theory And The Displacement Of Politics. Cornell University Press.

Jönsson, Li (2014). ‘Design Events: On Explorations Of A Non-Anthropocentric Framework In Design.’ PhD diss., The Royal DanishAcademy of Fine Arts, School of Design.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud, and Ramia Mazé (2013). ‘Design and dissensus: framing and staging participation in design research.’ Design Philosophy Papers 11, no. 1: 7–29.

Manzini, Ezio (2016). ‘Design Culture and Dialogic Design.’ Design Issues 32, no. 1: 52–59.

Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London, New York City: Verso Books.

Powell, J., and A. Kelly (2017). ‘Accomplices in the academy in the age of Black Lives Matter.’ Journal of ­Critical Thought and Praxis, 6 (2). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31274/jctp-180810-73 Rancière, Jacques (2015). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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11 DESIGN ACTIVISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS Maziar Rezai

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

What we now call science fiction and also what we know as the digital world have miraculously crossed a passage under the influence of two leading women in the 19th century, Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). What is interesting here is the relation between these two and the influence of a man on both of them: Lord Byron. Byron (1788–1824) was an English poet and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence and is considered as one of the leading figures of the Romantic Movement. He was the father of Ada Lovelace, a woman who was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely regarded as one of the first computer programmers (The Guardian, 2012). At the same time, Byron was a close friend and companion of Mary Shelley, an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and the lover of Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister (­McGann 2013). Perhaps it was the impacts of Byron’s character, the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ romantic poet that somehow reinforces the features of digital technology and the sci-fi world, which are both amazing, dangerous, even romantic areas, and also crazy.

The madness of technology, in the last three centuries, has always been one of the matters of humankind, and one of the big madnesses is technology possession by dictatorship powers that harm humans and mutilate the spirit of democracy.

Social media (including social networks), obviously is one of the technological symbols that had been imagined could increase social participation, impact social and political issues, and deploy democracy in societies during past years.

As a decade before, social networking and media-sharing websites, in addition to the­­increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, have made citizen journalism1 or democratic journalism phenomena more accessible to people worldwide. Notable examples of citizen journalism reporting through social networks from major world events are the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2013 protests in Turkey, the Euromaidan events in Ukraine, the Syrian Civil War, and ­ erguson unrest. But the controversial presidential election in Iran in the 2014 F 2009 was an impressive happening in this regard. Twitter played an i­ mportant role during these election protests after foreign journalists had effectively been ‘barred

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from reporting’. Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance during the protests that could shut down coverage in Iran due to the role it played in public communication (Landler and Stelter 2009). Another example, ten years later, which shows the influence of social media again in supporting democracy, was the use of Hong Kong protesters from social media like AirDrop and Telegram channels to share their demonstration posters and announcements in 2019.

The emergence of the citizen journalism phenomenon is a case which shows the power and ability of a social network and its impacts on social and political changes in the world, but the social network’s coin has the other side too.

Social networks: Frankenstein’s monster Technology alone can’t save democracy. When technology is designed and used well, it can make it easier for people to participate in elections and other activities of civic life; but when it’s not, technology that promises to help ends up being harmful (Quesenbery 2017).

Social networks as a technology and their relation to democracy have been under the magnifier recently. But here, one of the main questions is whether ‘this virtual world is really democratic’? And, why these digital products were designed in this form?

The fact is when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates at Harvard launched Facebook, for example, they wouldn’t have imagined the next years of this new platform and dimensions of violence, ethical challenges, its impacts on people’s lives and businesses and also, democracy. This is true about other entrepreneurs, developers, and technology leaders, too. Zuckerberg and his friends have just targeted the lack of emotions in 21st-century life and the weakness of human connections; as humanity means somewhere there are human r­ elations and they made this virtual location. Thus, the social network was an answer to the need, but almost nobody had an estimation of the future problems that social networks could make for people. However, what is meant by social network problems here?

Recently, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, ‘have all been subjected to intense scrutiny because of the negative externalities that their services create. A focus of concern has been the abuse of social-media channels as part of efforts to influence the outcome of major political events, including the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the US presidential election later that year’ (Deibert 2019). In both cases, studies and show, nation-states and nonstate actors exploited, abused social media as a tool of their ‘information operations’ (Rosenberg and Confessore and Cadwalladr 2018). So that in 2017, political scientist Thomas Rid wrote that Twitter, ‘has become a threat to open and liberal democracy’ (Rid 2017).

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Hence, growing numbers of people are coming to believe that social media have too much influence on important social and political conversations and naturally it makes concerns about social networks based on these recent happenings.

For instance, according to a New York Times investigation, Facebook has data-sharing deals with at least 60 device makers – including Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. After installing an application from one of them, this app was able to gain access to unique identifiers and other personal information of hundreds of his Facebook friends, and close to three hundred thousand online ‘friends of friends’ (J.X. Dance, Confessore, and LaForgia 2018). Moreover, in research in 2014, Pew Internet discovered that apps can seek up to 235 different kinds of permissions from Android smartphone users, with the average app asking for five (Olmstead and Atkinson 2015).

Accordingly, it seems social networks, social media, and our cellphones are changed to professional spy instruments that not only can find our location, our contacts, notes, comments, personal information, and even family photos but also have access to our mind and thoughts. It can estimate based on our Google searches and our clicks, or even a pause in a second on an image, what are our current ideas, what are our favorites, and what will be our future needs. Also, it can choose the photos, the advertisements, and the videos we have to see and guide us to vote for its favorite candidate in the next election if it wants. It means that these new big systems are bigger than the KGB or CIA2 or other spy organizations in the world and can abuse people in every form they need.

Now, this volume of capabilities, more than ever, especially after the coronavirus crisis and the government’s use of social networks and applications to crisis management, is available to populist politicians and it is feared that it will later become a pervasive threat to democracy.

Overall if we want to summarize some of the most important harms of social networks, especially with the emphasis on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as three of the most popular social networks3, without priority, we can mention these titles in two groups:

1) The crises that harm democracy and human rights Data privacy and digital human rights: On 5 July 2019 Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia, in an interview with CNBC said he’s not happy with how the internet has evolved in the nearly two decades since then. Sanger’s main gripe was with big social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter. These companies, he said, exploit users’ personal data to make profits, at the expense of ‘massive violations’ of privacy and security: ‘They can shape your experience, they can control what you see when you see it and you become essentially a cog in their machine’. Sanger who is advocating ‘decentralized’ social networks, criticized executives in Silicon Valley

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like Mark Zuckerberg for being ‘too controlling’ in this interview4. Don’t forget that when the Sanger interview was published while some months later, personal information of 267 million accounts on Facebook was exposed.5 Fake accounts: One study estimates that between 9 and 15 percent of Twitter’s ­active ‘users’ are in fact bots (Varol 2017). Also, in September 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told a US Senate committee that from October 2017 to March 2018, her company had deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts (Vaidhyanathan 2018). All these fake accounts/identities in future elections can be the most helpful to populist leaders and help to change the direction of the minds and strike a blow at democratic processes.

False information and authoritarian inclinations: Another problem of social media companies is ‘the actions (or inactions) of them that appear unwilling or unable to weed out malicious or false information/disinformation’ (Deibert 2019). A 2018 study found that ‘more than 80 percent of accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation during the 2016 election campaign are still active, and they continue to publish more than a million tweets on a typical day’ (Knight Foundation 2018).

Also, ‘a recent survey by the Oxford Internet Institute found that 48 countries have at least one government agency or political party engaging in shaping public opinion through social media. It shows authoritarian-minded leaders routinely lambaste ‘fake news’ while at the same time shamelessly pushing patent falsehoods’ (­Deibert 2019). On an individual scale, to give just one example, a German study found that when otherwise-similar municipalities are compared, the ones where Facebook usage is higher also tend to have a higher incidence of violence against refugees (Müller and Schwarz 2019). It can be concluded, people with authoritarian inclinations are actively taking advantage of the propitious environment that social media offers (Gunitsky 2015) and this is one of the main challenges. For e­ xample, Donald Trump, who was made a big part of his hegemony by using ­Twitter, after a fact-checking row by this platform, signed an executive order targeting s­ ocial networks and also urged Twitter users to join Parler.6 The dimensions of authoritarian inclinations are more than this, of course.

2) The crises that harm people/users Making money through social networks: It’s a big opportunity and at the same time, a great threat. Social networks are a fantastic platform for advertising businesses without spending a lot of money by using some instruments including copywriting, using hashtags, sharing advertising photos and videos, and new business players called ‘influencers’. At the same time, social networks like Instagram or Face-

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book are the best place for buying and selling everything, including illegal goods like pistols, drugs, and even pornography videos and prostitution. Controlling this big marketplace is one of the most important duties of platforms, without the restrictions of companies and the possibility of advertising. Also, selling pages and fake followers are a new monetization in social networks especially on Instagram that helps to fund illegal activities and fraud. Therefore, to become safe and democratic, it seems necessary to review the economic and moral system of social networks, while respecting the principles of freedom of expression.

Producing violence: The social network, now, is not only the place of human networking, information development, and growth of knowledge but also the ideal media for publishing thousands of bullying and hate in daily comments and a fantastic media for terrorist groups. Therefore, one of the other crises of the social network, today, is the generating of violence. This aspect, unfortunately, grows day by day, and companies are forced to spend a lot of money to control it; the control sometimes works as a kind of censorship. Facebook leads three great and popular networks (Whats App, Instagram, and Facebook) and is spending millions of dollars per year for decreasing violence and its consequences on these platforms. The method Facebook uses for decreasing verbal violence crisis is to read comments and examine the posts, and if the rules are violated, remove the post or comment from the platform.

Facebook, as a case, does all this control as an American company under the US regulations, and this makes some problems for a platform that can have effects worldwide. For example, after the presidency of Donald Trump, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is a branch of Iran’s Armed Forces, since 15 April 2019, is considered a terrorist organization (Brice 2019). This designation was criticized by a number of governments including Turkey, Iraq, and China as well as the Islamic Consultative Assembly, Iran’s parliament. Anyway, instantly Facebook designated the IRGC as a terrorist group and started to eliminate each post which supports or praises the IRGC. While it was the political decision of the US government under the leadership of Donald Trump and maybe will not continue after the return of the two countries to the negotiating table or finishing the mission of the US president. It seems the social network, unlike the last decade, is at the service of political power, and more than ever, there is a need for a free and safe platform with global dimensions and a worldwide function under United ­Nations protocols and a international covenants.

Addictive machines: According to a study, ‘most students from [ten] countries failed to go the full 24 hours without media, and they, all used virtually the same words to describe their reactions, including: Fretful, Confused, Anxious, ­Irritable, Insecure, Nervous, Restless, Crazy, Addicted, Panicked, Jealous, Angry, Lonely, ­Dependent, Depressed, Jittery and Paranoid’ (Prof 2011). One of the reasons for

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these reactions I think returns to the importance of a presence in social networks for consolidation of a social position; as it is, it seems without activity in social networks, you are not in real life.

Moreover, ‘social media stimulates us in a powerfully subconscious and hormonal way’ (Deibert 2019). It affects the human brain in the same way that falling in love does (Penenberg 2010). Levels of oxytocin or ‘love hormone’ rise as much as 13 percent when people use social media for as little as ten minutes (Seiter 2017).

People addicted to social media ‘experience symptoms similar to those experienced by individuals who suffer from addictions to substances or other behaviors’ – such as withdrawal symptoms, relapse, and mood modification (Griffiths 2013).

Thus, it seems social media has the power to become addiction machines.

Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, described how features such as the ‘like’ button were designed – remember the role of decision makers/designers here – to give users ‘a little dopamine hit.’ He explained: ‘It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like me would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’ (Solon 2017). Indeed, how can we control these addiction machines with their psycho effects and ‘like’ crisis in our lives?

Creation of irrelevance caste in societies: Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli ­historian, believes with the progress of technology especially in AI and biotechnology, in 2050 we will encounter people who have many things to do, but they are ‘useless’ and ‘inefficient’.7 It is true about social networks also, as these people will do many things in the social network but generate nothing and what they do will have no value, while it takes many hours. Digital social networking is one of the most important things that this irrelevance caste has to do. Solving the social and economic problems of these people is one of the next years’ challenges related to ­social networks.

‘A change through design’ or ‘Why we have this chapter in this book’ Obviously, social network as technology would be a great source at the service of democracy, if the mentioned crises of it can be solved. Here, design can be a fantastic tool to help in this regard.

Herbert A. Simon has stated that design is always about ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1969). The ability of change is still the most important duty that design can do for societies and users, from my point of view. Therefore, problem solving, as the biggest imaginable claim for design, is a way to change toward a preferred situation. Now, the social network needs to change, but how about democracy?

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In March 2017, Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin (RIP), two design thinkers, in an open letter to the design community, asked them to take action and respond to the crisis that democracy is undergoing: ‘We [designers] are in difficult and dangerous times. For many years, we lived in a world that, despite its problems, was nevertheless committed to principles of democracy in which human rights, fundamental freedoms, and opportunities for personal development, were increasing. Today, this picture has changed profoundly. There are attacks on democracy in several countries – including those where democracy had seemed to be unshakable’. They asked the design community to take action, because ‘normal’ ways of designing were not enough, and the role of designer in confronting the lack of democracy in the world needed to be changed (Manzini/Margolin 2017). In truth, it was an invitation to designers for intervention in changing to improve democracy and its tools.

Although considering social issues in design is not a new phenomenon – as footmark of waves of social consciousness through design history can be found from the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century to Bauhaus and ater the Ulm school, up to now – but intervention in big systems such as social networks and talk about design and democracy relation needs a new disposition in design.

This new disposition is about awareness of existing power relationships, and at the same time, confidence regarding new skills and capabilities in design. From this point of view, today, design activism is the same new tendency for designers, I can say. An activist designer is a designer who observes, analyzes and then does an act by its design. Activist design is more sensitive to its surroundings, especially to social issues that affect society and thinks fundamentally and out of the box. In ­design activism what is most important is questioning and criticism, deep observation, and making change for people, not just being a cog in the capitalism machine.

In design activism, there is no method that is recommended and all methods are just instruments to do any positive change, even a small one. Here, design and activism are two hands joined together; but there is a point. This river started from design and falls into activism, therefore I believe just being ‘activist’ cannot be enough because we, designers, can’t be more ‘active’ than activists. We, as designers, should think deeply and design correct – this correctness is not only about form and function, but also is about consideration of user needs and the moral consequences of our design – and then can use the help of people or activists to implement our ideas, or vice versa, our ability to implement people’s ideas.

In this regard, the social network is a great challenge for activist designers as a big project with different aspects of system design, strategy, behavioral design, customer experience, and so on. However, it’s clear that running a new platform, as a new player in social networks contest, is not so easy. It’s a big production and now can't be an ordinary platform, especially when a platform in the presence of other players like Facebook and Twitter make claims about safety, high security, and being democratic, which looks like grand gambling. Also, we know social ­networks

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today are not only a website on the internet but also a political and security matter.

But really, if social networks are going to change based on what has been said, what will these changes be?

Next generation social networks In this stage, the first step is the problem of the user’s identity. Randi Zuckerberg, the former director of market development, Facebook spokesperson, and sister of Mark Zuckerberg, in 2011 and in one of her last public appearances as Facebook marketing boss about the end of anonymity on the internet and in order to protect especially children and young people who can be bullied via the internet, has said, ‘Then people just behave better. If they stay anonymous, they think they can say anything they want’8. What she said is true, because anonymous accounts are the best way of making different violence and also illegal activities and disinformation.

In fact, in many social networks, you can easily make a fake account with an allonym by just an email. For example, Twitter does not require real-name registration, and there is no limit on how many accounts may be created. Account owners can easily delete accounts and content, and the service is highly automated – circumstances that have made the platform easy to exploit (Deibert 2019). Therefore, in an ideal safe network, the user can create just one account with its own real identity. For each account, an email should be presented that shows you or your company real name. Also, for identifying the user, a safe network can identify a website or other social networks of a user like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram page.

And for a person who has no other social network, online profile, or website, a safe platform can use methods like the same procedure which Google uses for the claim of its knowledge panels or Instagram uses for recovering passwords and/or other current methods that other platforms use. As well as this idea – each person or company can make an account once; each email should be the same with the name and etc. – can decrease the violence and possibility of crimes, as obviously no one for doing an illegal activity would use their real identity.

Although it’s not the absolute way of solving this big problem, as it seems we can’t delete all violence on the platform or close all windows of fraud, we can decrease the huge amount of violence and crime by designing the strategy. Most users, because of their culture, social norms, and also the possibility of prosecution, usually don’t use their real name and information and they prefer to use the allonym. But approaching the virtual identity of users to their real identity helps to increase r­ esponsibility in a society that is the first step of democracy, and in the long term to increase the freedom of speech capacity in society by social networks. Even in authoritarian regimes, although a poster or commenter should be more careful about what he/she publishes or writes/talks metaphorically, but in the long term,

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this will be the authoritarian regime that unintentionally will expand its capacities in freedom of expression, because these regimes cannot control all these people in the scale of society and fortunately the same experience of using social networks for more than a decade has helped to increase social awareness and make thoughts easier to express. Consider that we are talking about an examinable alternative social platform in the presence of all other social networks that are active now.

Thus, it was conventional wisdom to assume that social networks would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, empower civil society, and help democracy to develop as the social network was conceived as democracy of the third kind (the sovereignty of the majority over the majority) but this was not the whole story. In other meaning, one big weakness in social networks that was imagined before, which is a positive aspect and now has changed to a big threat to democracy, is reducing the concept of democracy to an instrument of making the opportunity for everyone to comment and talk about everything ­ ossibility without expertise. Something now, after some years of experience, this p has changed the social network concept to a controlling tool for populist leaders/­ dictators.

It seems we need a kind of aristocracy or even technocracy in social networks; something like the electoral college experience in the US democracy and removing the possibility of creating anonymous accounts that help to change users’ behavior is an endeavor in this area. In fact, the presence of users with recognized identities could decrease populistic statements and not-thoughtful comments. Also, a change in ‘commenting’ and ‘posting’ is felt, and that is by showing all comments and/or posts of a user to their followers. Clearly this simple change will decrease verbal violence because the experience of the first generation of social networks shows users have more responsibility in their posts in comparison with their comments (which their followers usually don’t see them) and/or their stories (their temporary posts), which are less important for the poster.

This idea reminds me of the the famous Dewey–Lippmann debate in the US about a century ago. In 1922, Walter Lippmann published an influential book ­entitled Public Opinion and in this book, he was very suspicious and critical of any model of democracy. From his point of view, ‘the most feasible alternative to such democracy consisted of a technocracy in which government leaders are guided by experts whose objectives and disinterested knowledge go beyond the narrow views and the parochial self-­interests of the average citizens organized in local communities’ (Schugurensky 2001) and (Lippmann 1922 and 1925). In his response to Lipp­ mann, John Dewey, first in a review published in The New Republic (1922), and later in his book The Public and its Problems (1927), argued that democracy should not be limited ‘to the enlightenment of administrators or to insiders like industrial ­leaders, and highlighted the importance of public deliberation in p ­ olitical decision-­ making. However, he was not an advocate of any type of deliberation’ (­Schugurensky 2001). He expressed that just letting discussion go, without eliciting facts of any

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