Why the Internet Must Become More Like a City

Human societies have recently become much more interconnected through processes of urbanization, globalization and the fast expansion of communication and information technologies. These ongoing transformations are not only expanding but also rearranging the socioeconomic fabric of our societies, emphasizing newer and less local communities and businesses as the main orchestrators of collective action, to the detriment of traditional local organizations more dedicated to the public good. Consequently, these new forms of more extensive socioeconomic connectivity are at once liberating and profoundly destabilizing of existing social, economic and political arrangements. This confluence of factors entails a deep crisis of democracy in an age of urbanization and technological progress, an apparent contradiction requiring urgent resolution. Here, I propose that confronting these challenges benefits from understanding transformational processes in cities, where collective action problems are the norm and where politics has been historically reinvented many times. The main point of analogy is functional, as both cities and cyberspace are large, dynamical, and heterogeneous networks expressing strong network effects. Connecting both cities and cyberspace are concepts of multi-level group affiliation, subcultural dynamics and the economics of information, which provide analytical frames of reference for understanding both. This perspective helps explain how cities have had to evolve mechanisms of free entry, social support, conflict resolution, factual communication, resource redistribution and group identity protection that are still largely absent from cyberspace.