Democracy on the Five Star Movement’s Rousseau platform

Abstract

The Five Star Movement, or M5S, is a popular anti-establishment, populist political party in Italy. One of its key features is the Rousseau platform, an online space designed to enable direct democracy. Named after the eighteenth century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it banks on the idea that the traditional state is corrupt, while the people's will can be more directly polled and executed as a governing force. However, Rousseau has also been critiqued for defending despotism and characterised as the enemy of liberty. This paper takes a closer look at Rousseau's 'Emile' and 'The Social Contract', and points out how a critical reading could raise questions about the platform's true meaning. The analysis focuses specifically on the illusion of autonomous choice and covert authoritarianism. The platform becomes a powerful tool of both preventive as well as repressive social control. As an anti-modern public sphere, it holds inherent threats to democracy itself.

To Be or Not to Be ‘Rousseauian’. The Rise and Fall of ‘Digital Utopianism’ in the Five Star Movement

“…The fourth analogy, pointed out by Stockman and Scalia (2020), is linked to the previous one, and relates to the pedagogy. In Rousseau's book, Emile (1762b), an orphan is educated by his tutor.…”

Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making

“…Overall, a tension can be observed between the ideals that the platform is supposed to embody and the way it functions in practice, which is "more as a forum for discussion and evaluation than as a real online decision-making tool" (Mosca, 2018, 15). This tension is noted also by Stockman and Scalia (2020), who discuss additional problematic aspects of the Rousseau platform, such as the fact that (in contrast to the decidim platform in Barcelona, for example, discussed in Section 4.2) it runs on proprietary instead of open source code and that it seems designed to prevent transparency and direct, horizontal communication among members.…”

Surveilling the Surveillants: From Relational Surveillance to WikiLeaks

“…Tony Blair's lies about the Gulf War, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the news about financial and environmental crimes leaked by WikiLeaks, reveal the real aspects of power and, at the same time, show its weak spots, by empowering the public with the resource of information. Moreover, WikiLeaks and Assange suggest making a fluid, democratic, open use of the web, unlike some other attempts, such as the Rousseau platform adopted by the Italian populist five Star Movement (Stockman & Scalia, 2020), for using the web to produce a plebiscitarian form of politics. The American government considers Assange, Manning and Snowden as criminals because they revealed state secrets in violation of the web.…”