(cross post with FLEFF’s Dissassembled Spaces blog)

Most people assume that if you Google something in the US and you do the same in another country, you will get the same results. It’s called the World Wide Web, right? Not so. Countries can and do exert influence on search engine companies to control the results that their citizens can access. Which is why there’s been a lot of talk recently about whether Google will pull out of China. Apparently, the Internet giant whose code of conduct is “Don’t be evil” has finally gotten tired of the Chinese Communist Party stipulating the kind of search results it can or cannot provide. Competing for a share of one of the world’s largest markets is good and well, but after it was revealed that the attacks that compromised the private information of thousands of Google users came from China, the company decided that enough was enough. Although no final decision has been made, the mere mention that Google was considering leaving China was major news.

In the West, the move has been celebrated as a slap in the face of internet censorship. At the same time, there have been concerns that the withdrawal of Google from the Chinese market will make things worse for people there. The assumption is that Google’s services do provide a little bit of freedom inside the great firewall of China (one theory behind the cause of the cyber attacks on Google is that the Chinese government was interested in spying on dissidents’ Gmail accounts). This would seem to suggest, to put it plainly, that Google and the rest of the big Web companies are important tools in the struggle to spread freedom and democracy in China and elsewhere in the world (recall the recent hubbub about Twitter saving Iran, Facebook liberating Moldova, etc.).

To build momentum for this idea, Google’s announcement was followed a couple of days later by a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The topic was Internet Freedom. Because of its importance in facilitating communication and dialogue across various divides, Secretary Clinton argued that the US government is interested in ensuring that the Internet remains Free. “We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” she said.

But what does this “single Internet” that the US government is interested in promoting look like? We need to take a closer look and ask questions. Simply sticking the word Free in front of something and saying it’s good for world democracy is not enough. Remember a little something called the Free Market? Just as that particular contraption was an important instrument in creating more global inequality, my fear is that the Free Internet –as envisioned by corporations and promoted by the US– will only allow the rich to get richer.

For one thing, is the US in a position to champion freedoms it itself is not willing to respect? During her speech, Clinton remarked: “As it stands, Americans can consider information presented by foreign governments. We do not block your attempts to communicate with the people in the United States. But citizens in societies that practice censorship lack exposure to outside views.” So what about the role of the US in preventing people in those countries from being exposed to certain views? I guess the Secretary of State had not been briefed on a recent bill approved by Congress that imposes sanctions on Arab satellite channels deemed hostile to the United States. If you want to block people from tuning in to the Hezbollah channel, at least don’t pretend that you are above using censorship to achieve your political ends.

Besides, does anyone really believe that ever-expanding corporate conglomerates are the best champions of democracy? Global capitalism’s track record seems to suggest otherwise. Just ask the people of the world what companies like Union Carbide, Dow, Shell, United Fruit, DuPont, Monsanto and so on and so on have done for their democracies. Given that history, companies that believe in Not Being Evil represent a complete and welcomed change, but I’m still not convinced that we should completely surrender our online public spaces and cultural products to corporations, specially when those spaces and products are important platforms for challenging authority. Secretary Clinton herself said that “…the internet can help humanity push back against those who promote violence and crime and extremism. In Iran and Moldova and other countries, online organizing has been a critical tool for advancing democracy and enabling citizens to protest suspicious election results.” But as Evgeny Morozov argues, the losses in online privacy that come from using “free” corporate-controlled social media tools may not be worth the gains in online mobilization.

Just don’t tell that to the State Department. At a 2009 Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City, where the supposed goal was to figure out ways to reduce drug-related violence, the co-sponsors (along with the US State Department) included Facebook, MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch), Google, YouTube, Pepsi and MTV. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to feel a bit troubled by what seemed like the perfect marriage of US foreign policy and for-profit interests, cloaked in the language of liberal democracy and its purported promotion of human rights and freedom. In an age when social network analysis is becoming an increasingly important tool for securing the homeland, what better way to keep an eye on the ‘volatile’ youth of the developing world than to have them voluntarily fill out detailed profiles of themselves and their friends? And if they can do that while drinking AMP Energy and watching Jersey Shore, so much the better, it seems.

Resources:

Authority, Meet Technology: Slate/New America Foundation discussion about China, Google, and Internet freedom.
http://www.slate.com/id/2241755/workarea/3/

Arab ministers slam US congress satellite decision
http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/arab-ministers-slam-us-congress-satellite-decision

Clinton urges Internet freedom, condemns cyber attacks
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K1V220100121?type=technologyNews

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks on Internet Freedom
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm

Evgeny Morozov, Testimony to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1526

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html?_r=1

Can you help a bunch of ghosts wage topological war, one Google Map at a time?

Welcome to Open Space, the Alternate Reality Game hosted by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive, multiplayer Web-based exercise in collective storytelling and distributed inquiry. Everyone can play, and participants can shape the actions of the characters and the outcome of the story.

The theme for this year’s FLEFF is Open Space. This ARG is intended to help us explore how exactly space is opened — not just physical space, but conceptual and political space as well.

How the Game Works

• Each month or so, we provide a street-view Google Map, a little window into our modern world.
• Then we ask our rival teams of dead or imaginary characters (including intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan, revolutionaries like Commander Ramona, or even mythical creatures like Jingwei) to explore the myriad forms and meanings of ‘open space.’
• Waging a discursive battle (a high-brow flame war), they fight to defend or liberate the Google Map.
• What does it mean to defend or liberate a Google Map? Well, that’s up to you! Go to our website, get more information, and start playing!

Play the Game

http://openspace.ulisesmejias.com/

More on Alternate Reality Games (ARGS):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/

Net Neutrality started as a call from idealist cybernauts to keep the government off the Internet (wait… wasn’t the Internet a government invention to begin with?). The goal was to resist any attempt at censorship, taxes or bureaucratic regulations. Information, after all, wanted to be free! This position was popularized by academics and now, in the Obama age when it is cool to trust the government again, has been transformed into the belief that the real threat comes not from government, but from greedy corporations. Thus, we have the FCC issuing not only a defense of Net Neutrality, but hinting of regulations that would ensure transparency and corporate accountability.

This would indeed be laudable if not for the modern history of the FCC under both Democratic and Republican leadership, which is a history of promoting deregulation in order to make sure that media corporations can become bigger and more profitable monopolies, which in turn gives them unprecedented political power (cf. Bagdikian, Croteau and Hoynes, etc). So in this FCC-approved version of Net Neutrality, you will notice no talk about actually curtailing the power of media conglomerates or empowering citizens to create corporate-free online public spaces. The rhetoric of ‘neutrality’ and ‘transparency’ is there only to guarantee fair competition between monopolies, if by ‘fair’ we mean favorable to the interests of the monopoly with the most effective lobbyists (for instance, at one point the FCC thought it was ‘fair’ to prevent the spread of cable TV, just as later it thought it was ‘fair’ to allow it–funny how they changed their minds!).

Still, this is not enough for the other side (see for instance this or this), the free market techno-libertarians who, in the name of what makes the internet ‘free,’ believe that corporations should not be regulated by the government in any way. These are the people who see capitalism “as the fountainhead of technological innovation and a force for betterment of the human condition” (but wait… wasn’t the government/military the ‘fountainhead’ of the invention known as the Internet?). To them, Net Neutrality–and government regulation in general–is anathema to competition, and we need free market competition to keep those big greedy internet companies in check (except when those companies become ‘too big to fail,’ of course). Interestingly, the end result is the same: more power for the media companies, and less for the citizens, although in this scenario the political class has been cut off altogether.

From the Left, then, the regulation that Net Neutrality proposes simply provides us with a front seat to the battle of the media giants, while not really giving us any power to intervene in the process. From the Right, deregulation is seen as the only way to guarantee competition, even though deregulation creates monopolies which are… well… anti-competitive. In both cases we are positioned as passive consumers, and in both cases corporate interests are well protected. We have created a system where neither regulation nor deregulation interfere with the corporate status quo.

Some might be asking: What right do we have to demand that the Internet not become utterly corporatized? It is, after all, a product of military research and capitalist entrepreneurship! All I’m saying is that as digital networks become–for better or worse–important public spaces, it makes sense to ensure that a substantial part of them remains free of corporate interests, so that we don’t have to hand over our entire social and cultural production to a few corporations. Failing to achieve that, does it makes sense to imagine ways to unthink the network?

Disassembled Spaces:
Opening spaces through the disruption of networks

Networks are powerful determinants. They condition the ways we think and interact with the world. I’m not talking about the network just as a material structure, but as a way of thinking. From the design of living spaces to the design of information spaces, the network episteme has emerged as the dominant model for assembling the social, organizing knowledge, and mapping reality.

As with all dominant structures, the network episteme needs be questioned. The network has become a template actualized and enforced by code, by the circuitry of electronic devices. Everything can be connected, we are told. But as Kothari and Metha remind us, total inclusion allows for total exclusion.

In my work, I am interested in exploring the network as a machine for increasing participation while simultaneously widening the gap between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nodes. Networks produce inequality. The larger the scale, the more efficient the network will need to be at creating and managing disparity.

So I guess this blog will be about open space as an un-thinking of the digital network. Obstruction, defection and disassembly will be explored as opportunities for transcending the network as technological determinant. This theorizing is in itself ‘open,’ so I hope you join me in this inquiry.

cc photo credit: wauter de tuinkabouter