Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

quality
of the information generated, the 
speed
at which it is generated, and the 
flexibility
with which actors can respond to new or 
changing information. That the quality of information is improved through inclusive and 
decentralized processes is broadly recognized, from many different perspectives. For example, 
Benhabib (1996, 71, citing Bernard Manin) partly defends deliberative democracy on the basis 
that it improves the quality of information because: 
1) no single individual can anticipate and foresee all the variety of perspectives 
through which matters of ethics and politics would be perceived by different 
individuals; and 2) no single individual can possess all the information deemed 
relevant to a certain decision affecting all.
From a very different theoretical perspective, Hayek (2007, 95) argues that… 
…decentralization has become necessary because nobody can consciously 
balance all the considerations bearing on the decisions of so many individuals, the 
coordination can clearly be effected not by ‘conscious control’ but only by 
arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in 
order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. 
The core benefit of decentralization, on this account, is that it collects and conveys information 
more effectively than any single entity ever could, even if that entity was specifically aiming at 
collecting and conveying information. 
In addition to collecting high quality information, the decentralized communication that 
characterizes non-hierarchical coordination enhances the speed at which information is 
generated, as well as the flexibility with which actors can respond to that information. Indeed, 

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informational advantages associated with speed and flexibility, enabled by decentralized modes 
of communication, have become even stronger with technology such as Twitter. This 
technology allows instant communication between individuals (linked by some common interest 
or issue) that do not even know each other in order to provide updates and new information in an 
incredibly timely manner. Consider, for example the June 2009 demonstrations in Iran that were 
effectively coordinated using Twitter. While the Iranian government exercises significant 
control over the mass media, tens of thousands of Iranians were able to coordinate a sustained 
uprising against the regime. A 
Time
magazine article (Grossman 2009) nicely summarizes what 
made Twitter such an effective mode of coordination: 
It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and 
fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to 
their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially 
interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other 
Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is 
promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, 
the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and 
read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection. 
This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy 
for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. 
The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. 
They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. While the front pages of Iranian 
newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, 
Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time:
Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents,