Republican House Whip Eric Cantor recently launched an online political campaign, YouCut,
for people to vote on federal budget cuts. According to an interview with Fox News anchor, Gretchen Van Susteren, Cantor promises to propose the budget cut with the most votes for “an up-or-down vote on the House floor the following week.” Cantor’s YouCut website claims that YouCut “allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact.” If this is true, then YouCut would be an enormous advancement for participatory budgeting and direct democracy in America. But it’s not true because while YouCut is somewhat participatory, it is not democratic. YouCut is not designed for you to make decisions about what to cut; it’s designed for Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite to decide what to cut. In other words, YouCut is really TheyCut.

There are two main reasons why YouCut is really TheyCut. Firstly, YouCut does not allow you to propose budget cuts. The agenda is set by Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite. This means that the majority of Americans – including ordinary Republicans, Independents, Democrats, and others – cannot directly propose budget cut items for the YouCut community to vote on. Instead, budget cut items are privately culled, filtered, and vetted by Cantor and the Republican Party elite, and then put on the website. While many ordinary people may agree with Cantor’s selection of budget cut items on the ballot, the process systematically prevents the inclusion of budget cut items that go against the interests of Cantor and the Republican Party elite. Ordinary Republicans, Independents, Democrats, and others may approve of prudent budget cuts that conflict with the political and economic interests of Eric Cantor and the Republican elite. If Eric Cantor and the Republican elite censor these budget items from the ballot, we would never know it because there is no publicly available data to show rejected proposals. Clearly, Cantor’s YouCut has the potential to provide a very distorted image of American budget cut preferences.

The second main reason why YouCut is really TheyCut is that YouCut is vague and not legally binding. Cantor’s proposals are vague. They do not include the specific language he would propose as legislation. Moreover, even though Cantor promises to propose legislation that addresses a democratically selected budget cut, he is not legally obligated to do so. This wiggle room is afforded by the vagueness of the proposed budget cut item. While he suggests otherwise, Cantor has not entered into a contract with the American people to propose specific legislation because, in part, he is not asking people to vote on specific legislation.

There are other systematic problems with YouCut’s seemingly democratic design. It does not allow people to attach comments to the proposed budget cut items, thereby silencing useful criticism. It is also hosted on a seemingly Republican controlled website, thereby discouraging input from non-Republicans, and potentially biasing the sample of voters to Republican voters.

All of my criticism of YouCut may be written off as a misunderstanding of partisan politics – that I am expecting too much direct democracy from the Republican House Minority Whip. He is a professional partisan politician after all, and one who directly benefits from the status quo of indirect democracy. Some might ask why I am so surprised to discover another partisan ploy to rally political support with populist rhetoric, even sophisticated populist rhetoric, like the use of online voting that pretends to give political power to ordinary people about how to balance the federal budget.

The problem with this line of criticism is not that it assumes a tendency for political corruption, but that it accepts it without considering creative alternatives, alternatives like allowing the public to propose and vote on all proposed budget cut items, or allowing the public to post comments on any proposed budget cut item. These creative alternatives are not that difficult to imagine or implement, but they do move us closer to systematically rejecting political corruption in the legislative process.

On YouCut, Eric Cantor and the Republican elite ask us to “vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.” I am asking us to seriously re-examine whether YouCut actually allows us to democratically decide on our budget priorities, or whether YouCut allows Eric Cantor and the Republican elite to use us to provide a veneer of democracy for their budget priorities.

Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite are not only generating media buzz and populist excitement about their campaign, but they also get your email address or phone number, depending on how you vote. You may be thinking that you are merely voting for a budget cut, that government is finally listening to you. Actually, you are adding yourself to a political list that might be used for other partisan purposes.

While YouCut is not designed for democratic decision-making, it demonstrates how easy it would be to design a democratic decision-making website, one that gathers votes from the public and connects those votes to legislative action. Ironically, while YouCut may be designed to manipulate the public for private interests, it gives us reason to think that we could design a website that actually overcomes those private interests by democratically voting on public interests. Currently, YouCut is really TheyCut, but in the not so distant future, we could really have a YouCut.

is not something that has been and always will be. It is neither universal nor an abstraction. Rather, for Dewey, the public is a specifiable and discernible entity that is inextricable from its conditions of origin. More precisely, for Dewey, the public is an entity brought into being through issues for the purpose of contending with these issues in their current state and in anticipation of the future consequences of these issues. (DiSalvo, p.49)

DiSalvo emphasizes that Deweyan publics are “situated” around experienced issues, “multiple”, and “not exclusive to a particular class or social milieu” (DiSalvo, p.50)

He identifies two characteristic tactics for constructing a Deweyan public, namely tracing and projecting. According to DiSalvo, tracing “is the activity of revealing, of exposing the underlying structures, arguments, and assumptions of an issue” and involves making marks that “follow and record the presence and movement of an artifact, event, or idea” (DiSalvo, p.55). Projecting, on the other hand, “can be defined as the representation of a possible set of future consequences associated with an issue”, and involves making “apparent the possible consequences of an issue” (DiSalvo, p.52-53).

DiSalvo stresses that the tactic of projection is predictive, but not prescriptive. In this sense, projecting is about what will probably happen – not what should happen. If this notion of projection as prediction-without-prescription aligns with Dewey’s construction of the public, it is somewhat misaligned with the rhetorical dimensions of predictions. Rhetorically, predictions are all about prescriptions. For example, weather reports are often used to suggest or prescribe behavior changes, such as stay off the icy roads. Similarly, political election predictions, rhetorically serve as prescriptive voting signals (people don’t like to “waste” their votes on those predicted to lose). So while I understand the apparent emphasis on prediction-as-description and not prediction-as-prescription, I think that our conceptualization of the tactic of projection should be widened to include prediction-as-prescription.

One of DiSalvo’s most useful interpretations of Deweyan publics, is how he teleologically relates tracing and projecting to history and forecasting. According to DiSalvo, “tracing” and “projecting” are, in part, distinguished from “history” and “forecasting”, on the grounds that tracing and projecting are oriented toward the present – they are in some sense for-the-present, whereas the purpose of history and forecasting is oriented for-the-past and for-the-future, respectively. (DiSalvo, p. 58) So tracing is not just about digging up the past for a more comprehensive retrospective; it is an attempt to clarify the living present.

Many historians, especially progressive ones, think that their work is relevant to present issues, that their pursuit for explanation illuminates the present, but I wonder if an intellectual bias for historical comprehension points away from present issues. Tracing does not seem to share this intellectual bias for comprehension.

In my view, tracing, unlike history, is intellectually biased for helping to address a present issue. For example, a history about an issue would be bad if it did not mention any major event that helped cause that issue. However, it is possible that a good trace of an issue does not mention any major event causing the issue, if what it does mention about the history of an issue proves useful to the public in dealing with that issue. In this sense, the tactic of tracing is judged on the concrete utility of the information it provides in helping the public address the issue, and not judged on whether the information helps the public fully understand the progression of the issue. In other words, knowing all the causes of an issue does not imply knowing how to address the causes in a useful way. History is biased for a more comprehensive explanation, whereas tracing is biased for a more useful explanation.

DiSalvo’s tactics provide a useful conceptual framework for designers in the digital humanities, especially those that deal with digital archives, to consider whether they are designing Deweyan publics or historical archives.

There is a definite tension with what a digital archive is – is it a public or private space, and if it is a public space, can it also be a Deweyan public? In other words, can a digital archive, not only be a public place to store and organize historical references, but also be a place useful to and situated within personal political issues? I tried to design the Petition Archives so that it was not just a public space for political history or a private place for prompting political results, but a public space situated in personal political issues.

In my view, the politicization of the digital archive seems quite natural, since it is a form of socially networked digital media. For many archivists, allowing the public to trace or project their issues into a digital archive is a dangerous proposition. From this perspective, orienting the archive toward the present may disrupt or corrupt the interpretation of the past or the future. For example, adding comments or public tags to a digital archive, while of serious interest to many curators, is also seen as a threat to the educational value of the archive. Perhaps those comments will distract or misinterpret the artifact on display, or perhaps the user-contributed tags will overwhelm the archive with navigational noise.

Exhibits – not archives – are supposed to offer safe places for tracing and projecting. The exhibit can take digital copies of items from the archive, and manipulate them without corrupting the archive. From a data preservation perspective, one can build multiple exhibits around the same archival data without staining the past with the present. However, from an educational perspective, exhibits with user generated content that attempt to trace the past or project the future still threaten to misinterpret the past, present, and future. It is assumed that curators, historians, and archivists are somehow supposed to protect the public from misinterpreting the data. They are supposed to filter out the non-sense, authorize the good stuff, and keep it around in case someone needs it. However, protecting the public from the archive and the archive from the public is not solely motivated by an interest in preserving public education. It is also motivated by a need to preserve and accrue political power.

The state has a tremendous political and economic interest in filtering the archive and its exhibits so that it can continue to promote and benefit from nationalism and patriotism. Organs of the state often do this by sugar-coating the past and the future with curated propaganda. For example, consider the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center at Mount Vernon, which spends much of its time propping up the image of the slave-owner George Washington as a “man of character”. What would be the psychological and economic impacts if the majority of Americans stopped sucking on the sugar and started to seriously re-interpret our first president as a greedy slave-owner? What would be the meaning of the dollar bill or the State of Washington or Washington D.C. if the people of America suddenly believed that George Washington was not simply “a man of character” who privately despised slavery and then “lead by example” through the freeing of his slaves, as Mount Vernon would have us believe, but that Washington was a cruel man who, for the vast majority of his life economically profited from slavery and who at the end of his life only freed some of his slaves to protect his posterity (Martha’s slaves were practically his slaves too). What would happen if Americans began to believe that Washington was the politician who tried to bribe Joseph Whipple, Portsmouth’s Custom’s Collector, to kidnap Ona Judge Staines, one of his wife’s former slaves who had escaped to New Hampshire, and ship her back to him. The state would suffer if it helped the people trace the issue of slavery in the digital museum and archive space.

But tools like Omeka are beginning to challenge this notion that archives are just a place for history by offering some means for tracing and projection. Firstly, Omeka is free and open to any public to create their own digital archives. Individuals, and not just authorized cultural institutions, have access to Omeka. People can start an Omeka archive, as I did with the Petition Archives, to trace or project political issues.

Secondly, Omeka has a plugin architecture which allows users to create social plugins based on external web services, such as IntenseDebate, which allow the public to discuss, rate, and review individual archive items. Omeka also offers a Contribution plugin, which allows users to contribute items to the archive, thereby helping to trace their own connection to politically charged historical events.

In conclusion, DiSalvo provides us with some of the theoretical framework to analyze digital humanities tools, such as Omeka. Designers now have an opportunity to ask: How do digital humanities tools trace and project the past and the future? How can we use the tactics of tracing and projecting to rethink, redesign, and reconstruct digital archives as Deweyan publics? And we are left with bigger questions. Are their other tactics for creating Deweyan publics? Are there any general best practices or conventions for tracing and projecting?

Sources:

• "Design and the Construction of Publics." Design Issues Vol. 25, No 1., 2009: 48-63.
• Omeka, http://omeka.org
• The Petition Archives, http://petitionarchives.org
• Ona Judge Staines: Escape from Washington, Evelyn Gerson, http://www.seacoastnh.com/blackhistory/ona.html