The US is no longer a democracy, but Government by Hallucinating Mob. Take heart- tomorrow's Senate will be as relevant as today's House of Lords.

The US is no longer a democracy, but Government by Hallucinating Mob,driven mad by television. Little wonder then that this year's election feels like a choice between cancers. Take heart, because by the timewe can elect enough of our own to make a difference,the Net will have changed society so much that the US Senate will seem about as relevant as the House of Lords.

By John Perry Barlow Recently, I found myself appearing on a panel called "Presidential Campaigning from 1960-1996: From Televised Debates to the Internet and Beyond."

I expected the title to be optimistic, and it was. Not only did we not press boldly on to those unimaginable hustings "beyond the Internet," we didn't quite make it past television. Which was fine, I suppose - neither has politics in America. Whether or not it ever will, at least before the United States of America ceases to be a clearly definable political entity, is the question. But does this matter much to the development of society in Cyberspace? Should the netizen bother to vote? And if so, for whom and on what basis?

I was an oddity at the gathering, which was held at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on the fallen president's birthday. (I sat there imagining the tachometer reading on my buried father, a cowshit-on-his-boots Wyoming politician who, had he ever heard of virtual reality, would surely have thought the Kennedys came from there.) The others on the panel clearly belonged to the first part of its title. There was veteran TV newsman Sander Vanocur, one of the questioners in the Kennedy-Nixon debates; Kiki Moore, a former press secretary for Tipper Gore and now a regular commentator on CNN; Lisa McCormack, who is the publications and "online communications" director for the Republican National Committee and who you could tell with one eye was no nerd. And me. I was the token geek.

The program began with long cuts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates, a spectacle I had last watched through 12-year-old eyes and murkily re-remembered subsequently. Seeing them again, I realized that the debates had been important not because they decided the contest for the telegenic young Senator Kennedy - as was pronounced by most observers at the time and has been canonically held since - but because they had fundamentally changed the nature of the office itself. From that point forward, the president became more movie star than leader, more myth than manager, more affect than intellect. From that point forward, it was more important that the candidate not have a five o'clock shadow than that he have ideas that could suffer scrutiny.

Not to defend the genuinely vile Nixon nor to defame the genuinely dashing Kennedy, but I was surprised by the clarity and persuasiveness of Nixon's actual content. Kennedy, on the other hand, said some things that were not very thoughtful, such as his assertion that it was more important for a country to have good missile technology than abundant color televisions. But his appearance, the visual semiotics of his virtual self, was as smooth as Nixon's was lumpy. I was looking at the first decisive national instance in which what a politician said was less penetrating and prehensile than his ability to look like he meant it.

And I have had my own confirmation of this principle. Thanks to C-Span (which, as it happened, carried the Kennedy School panel live) and PBS specials, my own talking head occasionally floats around Televisionland in repurposed snippets of videotape, so if people tell me they've seen me on TV, I don't know the context. Trying to determine it, I ask what I was talking about. They never remember. Though sometimes they say they thought I was convincing. Of what? I wonder.

The most striking realization that came to me as I watched the tapes was that Kennedy was not so much elected president by television as he was elected president of television - that strange projection from which most Americans have since derived their map of reality.

He also, in some sense, participated in a process whereby television became president. Since then, this medium has defined the national agenda in ways that were often at odds with what might have been dictated by either sense or experience with unmediated reality, until we are left today with what I call Government by Hallucinating Mob.

As I watched the shiny old kinescopes, it seemed the transformation to this malignant new governmental form was taking place before my eyes. During several sequences, it was clear that the most important debater was neither Kennedy nor Nixon but the unnominated Sander Vanocur, as when he sprung on Nixon that his boss, President Eisenhower, had said that he couldn't think of any policy decision in which Nixon had played a deciding role. It was a harder and more damaging shot than any taken by Kennedy. I knew that never before had a mere reporter been able to exercise such power in real time before an entire nation.

Afterward, as the line of speakers proceeded till my turn came (the geek speaks last), I heard the bland encomiums that are generally larded upon the Net by meatspace politicos whose knowledge of it, as of other things, descends mostly from what they've learned from traditional media; there were no tales of any real adventures in cyberspace. (Though it must be noted that none of them called it the Information Superhighway.) They talked about the Net as though it were the '90s version of the space program, a wonderful and huge government project that America should undertake for reasons that were not entirely clear. They talked about it as though it might have a role in the upcoming elections similar to that played so decisively by the first televised debates.

I don't think so. And neither, I suspect, did they.

If any large number of our elected American leaders thought that our virtual precincts could affect an election outcome in their world, they never would have inflicted on us the Communications Decency Act nor most of the Digital Telephony Bill. Nor would they be contemplating other such depredations as the bill currently proceeding through Congress that would abolish fair use of copyrighted material in cyberspace, declaring a licensable copy to be made every time a copyrighted work is written into computer memory.

If they thought the hundreds of thousands of angry email messages they've gotten from us over the last few years actually came from bodies likely to walk into a voting booth anywhere in their own districts, they wouldn't still be answering electronic input with such automatic responses as:

Dear Friend:Thank you for your recent email message to my office.

Please accept this response as acknowledgment that we have received your message and will note your comments. Most of you will also receive an email response that addresses your concern. Given that the postal service may sometimes be the best way to get back to you, please also include a regular mailing address in your email.

This is what I received after Senator Edward Kennedy challenged my assertion that no one in Congress was online. "I'm online," he said.

"Write me an email and see."

In fairness, I'm not sure I want Senator Kennedy - or any other senator - reading and responding directly to his own email. Most of Congress is in profound datashock already. Hardly any of them has an attention span longer than an elevator ride. They are located at a level in the informational ecosystem that has become too rich for reason.

Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has studied "complexity catastrophe," in which an organism or natural system is forced by its context to process more information than it can. A frequent symptom of this kind of connection crash is fibrillation - a purposeless, resource-expensive quivering that usually culminates in system collapse. It could easily be said that Congress, indeed the entire government of the United States of America, has already reached this state. But however useless and wasteful I think it has become, there are enough Americans who believe in the comforting myth that their government still works, that its continued institutional existence probably contributes to a calm, however delusionary, among the People.

So I'm not sure it would be a good idea to further inflict the riotous informational fertility of cyberspace upon an organism that evolved in the more temperate zones of the late 18th century. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most prolific letter writers of his time, and he generally produced five or six pieces of correspondence a day. He would have considered it mad to attempt 50 or 60, as I often do, or hundreds, as Senator Kennedy would have to. But therein lies the rub, or at least part of it. The political system we've got is too tangled in the parasitic undergrowth of the last two centuries to process or understand what is being created for the century to come.

Certainly, the powers that were want to understand cyberspace. They can tell it's important, or at least that it will be, and, as they would like to go on ruling, they have been setting about in various ways - some terrifying, some hilarious - to rule the virtual world as well. But for the present, there are many factors diminishing their acuity on the subject. For one thing, democracy really does work in America. It works in that politicians are extremely sensitive to their market, the people who actually vote. And people who vote have bodies that dwell in precincts. A politician can grab the return addresses from letters he or she receives and give them to canvassing volunteers who will hustle the votes of the senders on their very doorsteps.

No one has yet tried to canvass cyberspace. The email a politician receives can understandably seem to appear from the ether. It might have been generated by a machine. It certainly might have been generated by someone who can't actually vote, because he or she doesn't even live on the same continent.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're not working on it. Lisa McCormack, the panelist from the Republican National Committee (and a smart operative if, well, a bit of a Stepford wife), talked about how proud they were of Republican Main Street, the virtual village that is www.rnc.org/.

McCormack had some reason to be proud. The site is state of the art. From it, you can order GOP golf shirts or grab, in QuickTime, "The Best of GOP-TV Download" and watch memorable moments from the Republican revolution. They even link to MCI's Net Vote '96 site: there, they hope to electronically register Republicans using the Uniform Voter Registration Form that was created, ironically, by Bill Clinton's Motor Voter bill. ("In two to three weeks, your official completed voter registration application card will be sent back to you. Read through it, check for mistakes, SIGN IT, and stick it in the mail. We have already addressed it to your state elections official. We even cover the postage!")

But as much as I genuinely admired the work she was describing, I wondered how much good it would do them. Because I'm not at all sure there is a significant cybervote to curry. I think most voters come from a culture that has been created by mass media - a culture quite different from the one now gelling in The Great Conversation that is cyberspace.

No one knows much about the civic habits of the wired world. Not everyone even agrees that "we" exist as a society. I do believe, however, that there is a discernible cultural flavor to cyberspace, that whether we're jacking in from Sunnyvale or Uzbekistan, we tend to be libertarian, opinionated, and generally devoted to the free flow of information. Whether or not one comes to cyberspace with any greater mission than emailing one's boss from the road, there is something about this environment that seems to gradually induce a larger sense of purpose. And any large sense of purpose has political implications.

It is my perception that much of the online world is already about pursuing those political implications, by constructing new systems of governance better adapted to a global information economy than those of a 19th-century industrial nation-state. I don't think most of us pay much attention to Washington unless Washington is actively trying to attack the Net. And I suspect that, in America, even fewer of us vote than do among the general populace, where suffrage has been in steep decline for years.

That subset of Americans who still exercise their franchise - The Market, if you will - tends to be much older, whiter, and more socially conservative than the population in general. They live mostly in the suburbs, shop in malls, work for large organizations, and go to church on Sunday. Creatures of a mass society, living in a culture created by mass media. Genericans. Not a bad lot, really. Decent people, most of them, with good judgment - if that judgment were well informed.

And that's the problem. For most of The Market, reality is, as I say, almost entirely based on The World According to Television. This has been the case since the Kennedy-Nixon debates and will continue to be the case for some time. The World According to Television is not a reality that arises from direct experience with events or phenomena. It is a processed world, both eviscerated of context and artificially fortified toward no greater purpose than entrancing the audience.

But politics, as practiced, is pretty tedious fare. Not much of it can get through a machine that runs on the sensational. Thus, the political realities of Televisionland are not about monetary policies and tax reform - or, indeed, any of the governmental issues that count - since these are all subjects that diminish the attention of the audience, and selling the attention of the audience to advertisers is all that television does. In the time since the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the organism of television has learned a lot about which elements of the political process keep people locked in even through the ads. It learned a lot during Watergate and has been busily offering up "-gates" of one sort or another ever since. It has also learned that fear, violence, and sex all fertilize attention marvelously, so it continually churns up virtual demons and scandals that not only jolt the audience into paying attention, but completely transform the political debate. Voters are now more concerned with imaginary threats than real ones, and so they elect representatives who will address these "problems" without regard to their existence.

It's become a hung loop. Consider the process behind the following familiar example. Looking to raise share and beat back the future, the media raise an imaginary problem, say, a cyber-tsunami of online kiddie porn. Out in Televisionland, parents who have already been driven into a state of omniphobia by TV depictions of kidnappers, child molesters, and Calvin Klein commercials, freak out and call their congressperson.

Of course, the congressperson doesn't actually know whether or not there's a flood of kiddie porn online. He (or she) has never been online and isn't about to go there. But he does know that his constituents have seized on An Issue that they are truly passionate about. Under such circumstances, it takes a brave man to do nothing. So he gets together with his colleagues and passes a law that effectively addresses a problem almost no one has ever actually experienced, while issuing forth a whole new set of real ones.

This is democracy in the Television Age, working with hideous efficiency. It is, as I say, Government by Hallucinating Mob. A push-me, pull-you that is self-contained and almost completely detached from anything I would call "real." The US government has broken, the victim of television and of connection crash in general.

So this is an election year. What's a voter to do? By the time you read these words, San Diego and Chicago will be aswarm with sweating party regulars, blowing plastic horns and driven by the mysterious belief that their efforts will Make a Difference. Might they?

Personally, I rather doubt it, at least from the perspective of a netizen.

Let's just take a look at the Big Prize here, the presidency. Who would better serve the Net, Dole or Clinton?

Apart from the fact that Dole is of a generation to whom the telephone is suspiciously newfangled, he has, to the best of my knowledge, only once given evidence that he even knows the Net exists, and that only recently when he agreed to co-sponsor a bill that would relax the crypto export embargo. I'm not flatly stating that he doesn't know anything about it, but it's important to remember that he comes from the heart of the United States Congress, a powerful reality- distortion field that has left the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants not only clueless about the Net but dynamically anticlueful. There is in Congress a profound cultural resistance to digital awareness. I've spent a lot of time on the Hill over the last five years, and I can count on two hands the number of congresspersons and senators who understand the Net - a much lower percentage than the populace in general.

I have a friend in Washington, Kimberly Jenkins, who for two years has been operating an admirable project called Highway 1. The main purpose of this nonprofit, well-funded (by companies like Apple, AT&T, and IBM) and slickly professional outfit is to show cyberspace to Congress. Easy opportunities are afforded for congresspersons to get a Web demo and learn about all that tricky stuff like email. Is it working? Not yet. "They send their staffers, but they can always find a reason not to come themselves, even when it's right down the hall," Jenkins says.

Why is this? Because Congress represents Televisionland. That's who elected them. I believe that the fundamentally different media environments of television and the Net create world-views that are naturally inimical to each other. Thus, the intransigent not-getting-it-ness of Congress is actually a cultural immune response to something that might eventually overcome the Generican society they were elected to serve. They don't want to get any of it on them. And you can't blame 'em.

Now Clinton. He and especially Al "Information Superhighway" Gore ought to be the candidates to support. They've got some great people working on these issues for them, people like Mike Nelson and Tom Kalil, who clearly do get it. But it doesn't seem to matter. The system is bigger than the people who purportedly run it.

Despite knowing better, the Clinton administration has spent the last three and half years talking about how important the Net is while trying hard to kill it with truly terrible policies regarding cryptography, pornography, and copyright.

In private conversation, White House staffers will tell you their hands are tied. Regarding crypto, one of them once told me he agreed that the embargo should go, but, "It's like this, John Perry - we're more afraid of the NSA than we are of you." That's a chilling thought up front, but I think it goes deeper than that. Like Senator James Exon, they're really just obeying The Market, even when they know The Market is having a television-induced nightmare.

The strongest argument anyone in the White House ever made to me for crypto controls - the one they actually believe - was this from Mike Nelson: "Imagine the reaction of the American public if a terrorist set off a nuclear device in New York after concealing the plot with encryption we couldn't penetrate." In other words, the policy driver here is not the serious damage that insecure data systems are already causing our economy, but the Nuclear Terrorist, a creature that is more media virus than demonstrated threat.

The administration's willingness to pander to Generican delusions, even against its own better judgment, also resulted in the president's continued support for the Communications Decency Act, even after it was struck down by a three-judge panel in Philadelphia in early June.

Now, I grant that they were backed into a corner. As Mike Nelson said to me in their defense, "Unfortunately, we were not able to get the bill fixed, and now we are having to defend the provisions in court. That's the way the system works - Congress writes the laws and we implement them." True enough, but there are cooler levels of support that could be manifested than Clinton's public statement following the decision: "I remain convinced, as I was when I signed the bill, that our Constitution allows us to help parents by enforcing this Act to prevent children from being exposed to objectionable material transmitted through computer networks...." Unlike the judges, the president didn't bother to look too closely at how the Act actually mocks the Constitution. His people are still in the same cowardly mode that prevented them from engaging in a full-court press to stop the CDA at the many earlier points they might have done so. Since they don't want anyone from The Market to start talking about how they're soft on kiddie porn, they'd sack the future of liberty to prevent it.

There you have it. From the netizen's point of view, it comes down to a choice of enemies. In Dole, we have someone who probably doesn't understand us at all and wouldn't like us much if he did. In Clinton, we have someone who understands us in some dimensions but is too cowardly to turn that understanding into a hard policy commitment.

I feel funny about blaming them for this. They are, after all, serving the wishes of the electorate. In a democratic society, it's dangerous for elected officials to ignore the body politic. But what if it has been driven mad by television? What if the duties of citizenry have been abandoned by most of those who are still sane? Thomas Jefferson never imagined the conduct of democracy in the thrall of a mass medium.

We behold here the opening phase of a deep conflict between two societies. One, still in power, was born not only of television but of the entire Industrial Era. The second, far more heterogeneous in every dimension, is emerging into all the tiny possibility spaces of the virtual world.

As a percentage of the whole, the great white Party of the Past has been declining since its golden era under Reagan. It is now a shrinking minority, and its increasingly aggressive impositions - whether the War on Some Drugs or the gathering War on the Net, of which the CDA was only the beginning - are evidence that it knows its own morbidity and is trying to erect a fortress of control while it still has an army to do so with. That which can no longer be held by popular consensus must soon be held by force.

But that the society in decline no longer has the numbers doesn't mean that it no longer has the votes. We of the society on the rise don't vote like they do. Even if we did, we are such a fractious lot that we would be like all the splinter parties of Italy trying to form a coalition against the Fascists. Organizing the Party of the Future is the ultimate exercise in cat-herding.

The bottom line: We still have to bide our time. By the time we could elect enough of our own to make a difference, the Net will have so completely altered the structure of everything around it that the US Senate will seem about as relevant as the House of Lords.

This doesn't mean we should turn our backs on it. I do think we should vote, and, while I wouldn't make this a sole criterion, I will be looking for Net-savvy candidates to vote for. (Since I don't expect to find very many in my neighborhood, I'm donating money to distant others that I can't vote for.) Over the long run I'm deliriously confident, but I certainly don't have my short-term hopes up.

I think the best we can do for the next few years is to focus on that pillar of American government that is not so democratically responsive, the judiciary. While it's open to enormous influence from the presidency through the system of judicial appointments, it nevertheless remains our best hope. Look at what happened in Philadelphia. The reason the judges were able to come out with their recent CDA verdict upholding the rights and freedoms of the Internet was that none of them is running for office. It wasn't their job to serve The People. It was only their job to serve the truth.