Value Judgements on two kinds of networks...
I don't have the expertise or the discipline to dive into this as fully as I would like, so I'm just going to sketch out a few thoughts which maybe someone else would like to pick up and run with.
There are two articles currently doing the rounds that both talk about the value and utility of being part of the networked world, and what it means to participate within it. The first is about the internet - it's called World of Ends and it's by the inspired Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The second is about international politics and it's called The Pentagon's New Map and it's by Thomas PM Barnett.
The first article - Doc Searls and David Weinberger's - was immediately something I felt a desire to rally behind. It's states what we have come to perceive as the obvious facts about the internet: that it can't be controlled, that it should exist without governance, without regulation, that it routes around 'damage', that the internet consists of an agreement, that no one owns it, that everyone can use it, that everyone can add to it, that trying to deform the network lessens its power - lessens its democratising utility. I agree with all of this stuff.
The second article filled me with immediate distrust and discomfort. It's about countries which are disconnected from the 'network' of globalisation. Here's a quote:
"That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence."
This is a paean to the power and value of globalisation as a force for good. He continues:
Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.
There seem to be some significant parallels that could be drawn between these two models of global scale-free networks that call into question the appropriateness of our (my) judgements about both globalisation as a democratic / capitalist process and the internet as a communications / publishing process. There's a collision here that I feel the need to investigate.
For me, the freedom and lack of regulation of the internet was an obvious goal - inevitably positive - while the spread of globalisation represented something tremendously powerful, but also threatening, difficult and dangerous. While the internet seemed to dismantle hegemony, globalisation also seemed to support it - promote it. But by seeing them in parallel, depicted simply as analogous networks that operate on protocols, some of my value judgements about each of them seem to be spreading to infect the other.
My anxiety about globalisation as a hegemonising power is now spreading into my feelings about the internet - could the power-law aspect of the internet that I've not previously had issue with actually not be analogous with multinational corporations doing terrible soulless inhuman things across the world. Rather than being analogous, could they in fact be the same thing? Could the infiltration of globalisation's spread through the world be the same 'liberating', equalising, opportunity-producing phenomenon that I've believed the internet to be?
There are other weird connections or analogies that can be drawn between the two articles / systems - some of which seem to collide with my argument or rephrase it or push it in a different direction. But each one of them seems to be to point towards something out of my reach at the moment. One analogy seems weirdly to be between disconnected states that constitute a threat to the network and to the very organisations that seem to be behind globalisation - large corporations who push for proprietorial behaviours in an interconnected space. Compare and contrast:
Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap—in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take “off line” from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia). If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country’s potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity.
"Remember, though, that if you come up with a new agreement, for it to generate value as quickly as the Internet itself did, it needs to be open, unowned, and for everyone. That’s exactly why Instant Messaging has failed to achieve its potential: The leading IM systems of today — AOL's AIM and ICQ and Microsoft's MSN Messenger — are private territories that may run on the Net, but they are not part of the Net. When AOL and Microsoft decide they should run their IM systems using a stupid protocol that nobody owns and everybody can use, they will have improved the Net enormously. Until then, they're just being stupid, and not in the good sense."
In this model, a fundamentalist state is kind of like a Microsoft or an AOL trying to spread propriety in the interconnected, protocol-based space. In trying to defy or censor or 'improve' the architecture to fulfil their needs they simply threaten the existence of the network in the first place. Except that the network is too huge and too integral to everything to be threatened. Terrifyingly / wonderfully / confusingly the network routes around it. Or does it? Am I losing my mind?
I'm far too close to my own mental collision at the moment to know if I'm hallucinating connections that don't exist or if I'm merely stating the obvious. It seems to me that I'm not - it seems to me that there has been clear lines drawn between them and us through books like Naomi Klein's No Logo that I think are probably at least more problematic now. If only to me. Anyone got any thoughts? Can anyone shoot me down? Or push it further?
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I do need to sit down and think about this some more, but on the fly, it seems to me that the connection between the two pieces you discuss is more coincidental, or complimentary, rather than anything else - especially regarding the concept of globalisation.
In the pages of 'Fences and Windows' Naomi Klein herself talks about the difference between the (positive) globalisation of society (activism via the internet as one example) and the Big Bad Wolf that globalised capitalism appears to be.
→ Posted by: Mac at March 8, 2003 2:56 PM
It's a straightforward distinction between the cultures of top-down and bottom-up connectivity. Barnett's 'Core' comes as a tentacular incursion, binding all that it touches to a rule set that may allow for 'strictly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty', but does so by exerting classic ideological control: dissent is framed and often denuded within dialectic. (Consider the response of the US media to the anti-war protests.)
Also, Barnett is engaging in a fair amount of 'correlation-equals-causation' thinking. It doesn't sit well with a couple of critiques: the one noting that the conditions of his 'Core' actually create the 'Gap' as a necessary antithesis(and as a kind of mirror image) because markets function on a principle of friction, arbitrage opportunities. The other noting that what he's proposing is not so much emergent 'network space', but the fabrication of emergence, which is nothing of the kind. It's a false dichotomy: or, at best, a crude attempt to separate conjoined twins.
Anyway, Deleuze and Guattari are your friends here, in their talk of 'smooth' and 'striated' spaces.
→ Posted by: nick at March 8, 2003 3:39 PM
The Pentagon's New Map is nothing less than a hugely rationalized blueprint for the American Empire. It articulates, in the lucid language of a single author, what the committee that wrote The National Security Strategy of the United States of America could only mumble in fuzzy bureaucratese. And for that we should be grateful. It lays out very clearly our country's agenda in the world today.
That agenda operates on what George Lakoff calls Strict Father morality:
The use of the word ?evil? in the administration?s discourse works in the following way. In conservative, strict father morality (see my Moral Politics, Chapter 5), evil is a palpable thing, a force in the world. To stand up to evil you have to be morally strong. If you're weak, you let evil triumph, so that weakness is a form of evil in itself, as is promoting weakness. Evil is inherent, an essential trait, that determines how you will act in the world. Evil people do evil things. No further explanation is necessary. There can be no social causes of evil, no religious rationale for evil, no reasons or arguments for evil. The enemy of evil is good. If our enemy is evil, we are inherently good. Good is our essentially nature and what we do in the battle against evil is good. Good and evil are locked in a battle, which is conceptualized metaphorically as a physical fight in which the stronger wins. Only superior strength can defeat evil, and only a show of strength can keep evil at bay.
In the strict father model, which constitutes the conceptual underpinnings of conservatism, Lakoff says,
Life is seen as fundamentally difficult and the world as fundamentally dangerous. Evil is conceptualized as a force in the world, and it is the father's job to support his family and protect it from evils -- both external and internal. External evils include enemies, hardships, and temptations. Internal evils come in the form of uncontrolled desires and are as threatening as external ones. The father embodies the values needed to make one's way in the world and to support a family: he is morally strong, self-disciplined, frugal, temperate, and restrained. He sets an example by holding himself to high standards. He insists on his moral authority, commands obedience, and when he doesn't get it, metes out retribution as fairly and justly as he knows how. It is his job to protect and support his family, and he believes that safety comes out of strength.
In other words, this model is predicated on the fact (not just the idea) that the world is a dangerous place (which it is). It is somebody's responsibility to make the world safe. The Bush Doctrine is a direct expressoin strict father morality, felt keenly by the administration of the only government in a position to exercize it.
Look at the White House web page, and you see Strict Fatherhood all over the place. There's Our Dad himself, George W., playing the part, sincerely, even convincingly. The top concern is national security. This plays out in executive orders and proclamations about homeland security, the Iraqi threat and the rest of it. It's all there, more vivid than it ever was under Ronald Reagan.
Lakoff says the liberal counterpart of the conservative Strict Father model is the Nurturant Parent model. Like conservatism, liberalism and its concerns proceed from a model of the family, though quite a different one:
The primal experience behind this model is one of being cared for and cared about, having one's desires for loving interactions met, living as happily as possible, and deriving meaning from one's community and from caring for and about others. People are realized in and through their "secure attachments": through their positive relationships to others, through their contribution to their community, and through the ways in which they develop their potential and find joy in life. Work is a means toward these ends, and it is through work that these forms of meaning are realized. All of this requires strength and self-discipline, which are fostered by the constant support of, and attachment to, those who love and care about you.
The key difference is that the liberal model, the Nurturant Parent model, proceeds from the fact (not just the idea) that the world is a good place (which it is).
I point all this out more to make sense out of the Pentagon Map than to explain World of Ends. It seems both David Weinberger and I subscribe to Nurturant Parent morality, which I guess means we're liberals (though I think of myself as an odd species of nurturant libertarian). That nurturant streak, I think, suits us tempermentally to understanding the Good Place nature of the World of Ends we call the Net.
But World of Ends is not a political statement, but rather it's a technical and economic one that folks from both political wings should find agreeable.
→ Posted by: Doc Searls at March 8, 2003 8:32 PM
With respect, Doc, "World of Ends" is more a political statement than a technical one, because it severely misstates the nature of the Internet, as all your critics have pointed out.
On your other point, most of the world is really not a Good Place, because most of the world's people like in poverty, privation, and oppression. The best path to a better life for the majority of the world is the adoption of American-style capitalism and secular, representative democracy. In the Cold War era, America supported dictators if they served our needs in the fight against Marxist authoritarianism. Now that the Cold War is over, American influence can be used - and should be used - to promote the dissemination of America's liberal values throughout the world.
Believers in your Nurturant Parent (really Nurturant Mother, because it's feminist ideology you seek to propagate) model have to admit that the United States is the prime example of a feminized society. By bringing other nations into this orbit, the Bush Doctrine increases and enhances nurturant values, it doesn't stunt them. If you really believe in these values, and value consistency, you have to support the Bush Doctrine.
→ Posted by: Richard Bennett at March 8, 2003 9:21 PM
The best path to a better life for the majority of the world is the adoption of American-style capitalism and secular, representative democracy.
One would hope, indeed, that the USA might adopt a version of capitalism that's not 'American-style': that is, one without its Enrons, corporate welfare and federal pork, all of which currently must make Adam Smith spin in his under-tended grave. And also that it might adopt a secular, representative democracy that abandons the influence of the religious right, and such undemocratic obsolescences as the electoral college: which was, after all, set in place in an era when the political class was white, middle-class property owning males, and the masses could not be trusted with a hand in the process?
Isn't it a truism that nurturing parents should want their children to do things better than they themselves did? Or that nurturing parents should be able to guide their children away from the mistakes that they made, and continue to make because they're old and set in their ways? Isn't an aspect of the American dream that the next generation should succeed where the current generation failed? In fact, Doc is right: the US has too often played Dickensian Father rather than Nurturing Mother.
Now that the Cold War is over, American influence can be used - and should be used - to promote the dissemination of America's liberal values throughout the world.
Again, they might well be best promoted in the USA itself. Unless you mean such dissemination as the selective funding of community health organisations in the developing world based upon whether or not their have any involvement in the provision of abortions.
By bringing other nations into this orbit, the Bush Doctrine increases and enhances nurturant values, it doesn't stunt them.
As we shall see by the nurturing power of high-explosive over Iraq.
If you really believe in these values, and value consistency, you have to support the Bush Doctrine.
If you really think that, you can only be a supporter of the Bush administration.
→ Posted by: nick sweeney at March 9, 2003 6:56 AM
Thanks, Doc. Your statements about the familial models of American politics really have helped me get a better grasp on the way the US is being run at the moment. But to bring this discussion right back to first principles again, I'd like to take issue a bit with your line: But World of Ends is not a political statement, but rather it's a technical and economic one that folks from both political wings should find agreeable.
The problem is that the argument you present states that these are facts of life inbuilt into the very architecture of the internet - and that to fight against that architecture for whatever reasons (however couched - morally, ethically, politically, financially) is foolish, doomed and also (to an extent) a bit wrong. The problem I have is that the same arguments are made about the global financial markets - that there's no place for regulation, that pure laissez faire economics and the pure spread of interconnected international capitalism represents an unfettered good. Now I don't know your politics - you may also believe in the power of the completely unfettered market. But that clearly is a political decision, and I think - to an extent - those politics are reflected back onto your view of the internet.
Certainly that's the position I find myself in - believing one thing with relation to the global network of the internet and another with regards to the glocal network of the market. I suppose, to bastardise my 'pain' slightly - I'm looking for someone who can explain to me why it's OK to hold such different opinions, or where the qualitative difference exists that would allow me to reconcile them...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 9, 2003 11:10 AM
I'll admit to a political agenda for World of Ends, to the extent that we do want it to influence legislation and regulation (in a mostly libertarian direction, fwiw).
A question: Who among us here likes the DMCA? Who wants to see Hollywood tell Intel how to make its chips and Dell how to make its PCs? Who wants the telcos and cable companies to keep building out the "last mile" of the Net as an asymmetrical plumbing system biassed for entertainment? Who wants companies like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to continue making non-interoperable instant messaging systems (or longs for the days when email systems couldn't send messages to each other)? Who wants to see the feds continue protecting the telcos, the record companies and other walking fossils from the new facts of market life in the far more connected world the Net has made? Who wants to see more, rather than less, federal regulation of wireless networking such as wi-fi? Who wants to see fewer frequency bands made available for free and open wireless networking?
Probably none of us.
Are we going to sit on our hands and watch quietly while Hollywood, the telcos, the cable companies, the media giants, Congress and regulators continue to treat the Net like something that needs more limitation, more regulation, more industrial protection? That's what we're up against here. And that's what World of Ends is about.
I'm sure Dr. Weinberger and I made mistakes with it. (Hey, it's still a draft.) But if it contributes to a better understanding of the Net, especially by those whose misunderstanding causes the most damage, it will have had some measure of success.
→ Posted by: Doc Searls at March 9, 2003 2:49 PM
Well none of us want those things. But then again, I don't like the idea of companies employing sweatshop labour in the Far East. My question remains - is regulation of the freedoms of the global economy analogous in any way to regulation of the freedoms of internet?
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 9, 2003 3:40 PM
Some of us do want some of those things.
The Telcos will sell you symmetric DSL for a certain price, and they will sell you asymmetric DSL for a lower price. This is because the Telcos are businesses, not charities, and it costs them more to provide you with symmetric service. If you aren't going to use the symmetric service, and most people aren't, why pay for it?
The "World of Ends" would deprive people of their choices in how they spend their connectivity dollars, and that's unacceptable.
As a technical description of the Internet, how it works and how it got the way it is, The "World of Ends" is flat wrong in almost every respect. It appears that you've decided to employ the Big Lie technique in order to advance your agenda regarding all these political issues. That may not be the best way to go.
→ Posted by: Richard Bennett at March 9, 2003 9:54 PM
At this stage I think it's only appropriate to start warning people that I've only got a limited interest in being the host to a discussion about the legitimacy of the "World of Ends" document. Nor do I have a particular interest in being the host to a debate between "hippies" and "the right". What I have put up for discussion is simple - is there any value in the analogy between the internet and global capitalism. If there is value in it, then let's unpack it. If there isn't - show me why there isn't...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 9, 2003 10:24 PM
The Internet is like Global Capitalism in one significant respect: they're both good things that promote progress and freedom. Of course, the fact that they're good things isn't to say that they're perfect things, or that certain aspects of both shouldn't be regulated.
The Internet has a problem with spam, and it has a problem with enabling terrorist and other illegal organzations. These problems need to be addressed somehow.
Global capitalism probably spreads the junk aspects of American and European culture to the far reaches of the planet, and it's probably not good that kids in Borneo wear Arrowsmith tee-shirts, listen to Brittany Spears, or find support in Jacques Chirac's anti-American droolings.
That being said, there certainly are some similarities between attempts to regulate the Internet and attempts to regulate global commerce - both tend to be misguided, because they're undertaken by people who don't genuinely understand what they're dealing with. But isn't this the nature of regulation in all of its forms? Somehow we muddle through.
→ Posted by: Richard Bennett at March 10, 2003 4:01 AM
To return to Tom's question directly (and to gingerly step into one of the best comments threads I've seen for ages on a blog) then there are strong analogies between the internet and global capitalism, but they are not as immediately and clearly divisible as we seem to be arguing here.
The best analogy is the one you make earlier, where you make the connection between the internet and free markets. Both are unrestrained system, but systems that rely upon understood protocols to function.
The internet, as Doc et. al. point out, is not in itself politicised. But, the minute Doc put pen to paper, it became politicised in the way that he frames and describes it.
The internet is not libertarian. The internet is not despotic either. But, the uses that the internet is put to can make it either - Microsoft and AOL successfully use its protocols to create walled garden nation states, whereas other software uses the internet as a global commons.
In the same way, the railway systems of the world have performed a similar function. Whilst, on the one hand, early railways brought connectivity and work to rural communities, the tracks were also used to export a political message deep into those communities themselves. The network, in the hands of the crap private rail companies in the UK, becomes dysfunctional and despotic. But, in the hands of the wonderful French or Japanese libertarian, public companies, the railway becomes a wonderful public service.
Chris.
→ Posted by: chrislunch at March 10, 2003 4:20 PM
I'm looking for someone who can explain to me why it's OK to hold such different opinions, or where the qualitative difference exists that would allow me to reconcile them...
For me the difference is this. On the internet we only care about the overall, statistic properties of the system. If a packet gets lost, no problem, send it again. Packets are dispensible. The global economy is different because we care that the individuals have rights and dignities which we must respect. If a kid goes hungry, that may be a good thing from an overall perspective. But we have a moral obligation to treat this as a failure of the system.
→ Posted by: phil jones at March 11, 2003 9:57 AM
Good show, Tom. It is glad to see another digerati, fully inculcated in the myth of 'the value neutral internet' finally come of age.
Global capitalism and the internet have lots of things in common.
a) They're both networks that do rather more good than harm - but they still do plenty of harm.
b) They both manifest classical liberal values, but (crucially) these have evolved from very different sources. In the case of the internet these were a side-effect of the technical requirement of getting it up and running. In the case of capitalism they evolved more directly from political philosophies of governance.
c) Regulation can be beneficial for each, and too much regulation will definitely be harmful to either. Doc would disagree with the first part of this, but I would posit that WC3 standards are a form of light touch regulation from a non-governmental source. They're certainly analagous to lots of non-compulsory standards designed by all sorts of offline government regulators.
What I'm saying here isn't rocket science. It is just to point out that a big, powerful network of any kind is going to embed certain values, and have negative effects as well as positive ones. But saying this still sometimes seems to come across as a kind of herecy. It's almost as bad as suggesting that perhaps the blogosphere isn't actually that good at filtering really important ideas (shock!). But that's for another day...
→ Posted by: Tom Steinberg at March 12, 2003 12:00 AM