<nettime> siva vaidhyanathan: the new information ecosystem

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<nettime> siva vaidhyanathan: the new information ecosystem

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< www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1319 >

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the forthcoming The Anarchist in the
Library and a true scholar of the internet age, presents a compelling,
five-part panorama of the implications of electronic peer-to-peer
networks for culture, science, security, and globalisation. His
provocative argument registers peer-to-peer as a key site of contest
over freedom and control of information. Bill Thompson of
openDemocracy responds to Siva in a sparkling exchange of powerful,
lucid intelligence.

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Part 1: Its a peer-to-peer world

The rise of electronic [55]peer-to-peer networks has thrown global
entertainment industries into panic mode. They have been clamouring
for more expansive controls over personal computers and corporate and
university networks. They have proposed radical re-engineering of
basic and generally open communicative technologies. And they have
complained quite loudly often with specious data and harsh tones that
have had counterproductive public relations results about the extent
of their plight.

But the future of entertainment is only a small part of the story. In
many areas of communication, social relations, cultural regulation,
and political activity, peer-to-peer models of communication have
grown in influence and altered the terms of exchange.

What is at stake?

This is the story of clashing ideologies: information anarchy and
information [56]oligarchy. They feed off of each other dialectically.
Oligarchy justifies itself through moral panics over the potential
effects of anarchy. And anarchy justifies itself by reacting to the
trends toward oligarchy.

The actors who are promoting information anarchy include libertarians,
librarians, hackers, terrorists, religious zealots, and
anti-globalisation activists. The actors who push information
oligarchy include major transnational corporations, the [57]World
Trade Organisation, and the governments of the United States of
America and the Peoples Republic of China.

Rapidly, these ideologies are remaking our information ecosystem. And
those of us uncomfortable with either vision, and who value what we
might call information justice, increasingly find fault and
frustration with the ways our media, cultural, information and
political systems are changing.

The most interesting thing about these challenges and battles is that
we can observe how ideologies alter our worlds. Ideologies are, to use
a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, structuring structures. Ideologies are
lenses, ways of thinking and seeing, that guide our perceptions and
habits. They are permeable and malleable. They are not determinative.
But they make a difference in the judgments we make and the habits we
develop.

In recent years we have seen the rise of anarchy as a relevant
ideology in many areas of life. Our ideologies affect the technologies
we choose to adopt. And using certain technologies can alter our
ideologies. Anarchy is not just a function of small political groups
and marginal information technologies any more. Anarchy matters.

This is more than a battle of ideologies. It is also the story of
specific battles. There are dozens of examples of recent and current
conflicts that arose out of efforts to control the flows of
information:

* The story of the Locust Man, an imprisoned dissident democratic
activist in China who distributed political messages by attaching
them to the backs of locusts.
* The ordeal of the public library in Arlington, Virginia, at which
two of the hijackers of 11 September 2001 used public terminals in
the days preceding their attack. An increasing number of American
librarians have had to [58]endure federal law enforcement agencies
asking them to violate their code of ethics and their patrons
privacy since this incident.
* The [59]controversy over the complaint that some Canadian women
can no longer get tested for genes that indicate a predisposition
for breast cancer because an American company has patented those
genes and charges too much for the test.

Through such incidents, we can examine the following issues:
* The battle to control democratic sources of information such as
public libraries, which are suddenly considered dens of terrorism
and pornography. Libraries are under attack through technological
mandates and legal restrictions.
* [60]Efforts to radically re-engineer the personal computers and
networks to eliminate the very power and adaptability that makes
these machines valuable.
* The cultural implications of allowing fans and creators worldwide
sample cultural products at no marginal costs through peer-to-peer
computer networks.
* Futile attempts to [61]restrict the use and distribution of
powerful encryption technology out of fear that criminals and
terrorists will evade surveillance.
* Commercial and governmental efforts to regulate science and
mathematics, including [62]control over the human genome.
* Attempts to stifle the activities of political dissidents and
religious groups.
* The information policy implications of recent United States
policies including the [63]USA Patriot Act, [64]Total Information
Awareness, and the [65]Department of Homeland Security.

This essay is the first of a series for openDemocracy that will
consider these battles for control of information. This introductory
piece will examine the proliferation of peer-to-peer systems.

The nature of peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer electronic networks such as Napster, KaZaa, and Gnutella,
solve two communicative problems and create two more.

The first problem is somewhat trivial. Where do we find a convenient
index to files on other peoples hard drives? Or, in the case of
Napster founder Sean Fanning, a Boston-area university student, how
can I find music on other peoples computers without asking them to
expose themselves to threats by copyright holders?

The second problem is more substantial. How do we exploit two of the
great underused resources of the digital age: surplus storage space
and surplus processing power? More significantly, how do we do this in
a way that is effectively anonymous and simple?

Fundamentally, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems such as KaZaa,
Gnutella, Freenet, and the dearly-departed Napster attempt to
recapture or at least simulate the structure and function of the
original internet, when all clients were servers and all servers were
clients.

This original vision of the internet, call it Internet 1.0, arose in
the 1970s and devolved around 1994 with the rise of ISPs and dynamic
Internet Protocol (IP) numbers. The handful of netizens of Internet
1.0 worked with mainframe computers linked to each other through the
Domain Name System (DNS), which helped direct packets of data to the
proper destination. Each sender and each destination had a discreet
and constant IP number that identified it to the network hubs.

But as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) proliferated in the mid-1990s
and connected millions of personal computers to networks for only
several minutes or hours at a time, it became clear that rotating and
re-using [66]IP numbers would allow many more users to share the
internet.

Thus began Internet 2.0, in which increasingly personal computers
allowed their users to receive and consume information, but allowed
limited ability to donate to the system. This extension of the network
cut off personal computers from the server business. Most users
donated information only through e-mail. And it became clear that
while the internet once seemed like a grand bazaar of homemade goods
and interesting (albeit often frightening) texts generated through
community dynamics, it would soon seem more like a shopping mall than
a library or bazaar.

Two new problems

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is a set of protocols that allow
users to open up part of their private content to public inspection,
and thus, copying. In the digital world, one cannot access a file
without making a copy of it. From this fact arose the first
peer-to-peer problem: there is no way to enforce scarcity on these
systems. The popularity and common uses of these protocols produce
massive anxiety within the industries that rely on artificial scarcity
to generate market predictability.

The second problem is less well understood because there is no special
interest constituency complaining about it. So states have stepped up
to take the lead in confronting it. That problem is irresponsibility.
Because most of what happens over peer-to-peer networks is relatively
anonymous, servers and clients are not responsible for the
ramifications of their communicative acts. Using widely available
forms of encryption or networks that assure privacy, one may traffic
in illicit material such as child pornography with almost no fear. In
many places in the world, the availability of adult pornography or
racist speech through peer-to-peer systems undermines a decade of
efforts to cleanse the more visible and therefore vulnerable World
Wide Web.

This second problem is actually a solution to another communicative
problem that exists primarily in illiberal communicative contexts.
Many of the same states that hope to quash pornography also want to
quash the speech and organisational communications of democratic
activists. So the very existence of these communicative technologies
creates moral panics throughout the illiberal world as well as the
liberal world. While some worry about the erosion of commerce, others
worry about the erosion of power. And the same technologies that
liberal societies would use to protect commerce might find more
effective uses in Burma or China.

Listening to Napster

But most of the popular discussion about the rise and effects of
peer-to-peer technology has read like a sports story: who is winning
and who is losing? Some has read like a crime story: how do we stop
this thievery? I am more interested in looking at peer-to-peer
communication in its most general sense. How do we explain the
peer-to-peer phenomenon? How do we get beyond the sports story or the
crime story?

Peer-to-peer communication is unmediated, uncensorable, and virtually
direct. It might occur between two computers sitting on different
continents. It might occur across a fence in a neighborhood in Harare,
Zimbabwe. What we are hearing when we listen to peer-to-peer systems
are bruits publics, or public noises not the reasonable, responsible
give and take of the bourgeois public sphere.

This is very old. What we call p2p communicative networks actually
reflect and amplify revise and extend an old ideology or cultural
habit. Electronic peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella merely simulates
other, more familiar forms of unmediated, uncensorable, irresponsible,
troublesome speech; for example, anti-royal gossip before the French
Revolution, trading cassette tapes among youth subcultures such as
punk or rap, or the distribution of illicit Islamist cassette tapes
through the streets and bazaars of Cairo.

Certain sectors of modern society have evolved with and through the
ideology of peer-to-peer. Academic culture and science rely on an
ideal of raw, open criticism: peer-to-peer review, one might call it.
The difference, of course, is that academia and science generally
require a [67]licensing procedure to achieve admission to the system.
The [68]Free Software movement is the best example of what legal
theorist [69]Yochai Benkler calls [70]peer production, but what we
might as well, for the sake of cuteness and consistency, call
peer-to-peer production.

This form of speech has value. But it has different value in different
contexts. And while peer-to-peer communication has an ancient and
important, although under-documented, role, we are clearly seeing both
an amplification and a globalisation of these processes.

That means that what used to occur only across fences or on park
benches now happens between and among members of the Chinese diaspora
who might be in Vancouver and Singapore, Shanghai and Barcelona. As
cultural groups disperse and reify their identities, they rely more
and more on the portable elements of their collective culture which
are widely available through electronic means.

The clampdown strategy

Several technological innovations have enabled this amplification and
globalisation of peer-to-peer communication:
* The protocols that makeup the internet (i.e. TCP/IP) and the
relative openness of networks that make up the internet.
* The modularity, customisability, portability, and inexpense of the
personal computer.
* The openness, customisability, and insecurity of the major
personal computer operating systems.
* The openness, insecurity, and portability of the digital content
itself.

Understandably, states and corporations that wish to impede
peer-to-peer communication have been focusing on these factors. These
are, of course, the very characteristics of computers and the internet
that have driven this remarkable almost revolutionary adoption of them
in the past decade.

These are the sites of the battle. States and media corporations wish
to:
* Monitor and regulate every detail of communication and shift
liability and regulatory [71]responsibility to the Internet
Service Providers.
* Redesign the protocols that run the internet.
* Neuter the customisability of the personal computer and other
digital devices.
* Impose security on the operating systems so that they might enable
[72]trust between a content company and its otherwise
untrustworthy users.

These efforts involve both public and private intervention, standard
setting by states and private actors. The United States Congress, the
Federal Communication Commission, the Motion Picture Association of
America, Microsoft and Intel have all been involved in [73]efforts to
radically redesign our communicative technologies along these lines.
And they are appealing for complementary legal and technical
interventions by the European Union and the World Trade Organisation.

These moves would create Internet 3.0, although it would not actually
look like the internet at all. It would not be open and customisable.
Content and thus culture - would not be adaptable and malleable. And
what small measures of privacy these networks now afford would
evaporate. These are the dangers that [74]Lawrence Lessig warned us
about in 1998 in his seminal work [75]Code and Other Laws of
Cyberspace. Only now are we coming to understand that Lessig was
right.

These regulatory efforts have sparked an arms race. The very
suggestion of such radical solutions generated immediate reactions by
those who support anarchistic electronic communication. Every time a
regime rolls out a new form of technological control, some group of
hackers or hacktivists break through it or evade it in a matter of
weeks. The only people who really adhere to these controls are those
not technologically proficient: most of the world.

It might surprise casual observers of these battles that the important
conflicts are not happening in court. The Napster case had some
interesting rhetorical nuggets. But basically this was classic
contributory infringement by a commercial service. KaZaa is a bit more
interesting because it is a distributed company with assets under a
series of jurisdictions and a technology that limits its ability to
regulate what its clients do. KaZaa might collapse and only fully
distributed, voluntary networks might remain: namely, Gnutella and
Freenet.

The real conflicts will be in the devices, the networks, and the media
products themselves. And there seems to be few areas of healthy public
discussion or critique about the relationships between technology and
culture.

Meanwhile, the strategies and structures that limit peer-to-peer
communication also quash dissent, activism, and organisation in
illiberal contexts that is, oppressive, totalitarian and authoritarian
states. And for this reason, p2p systems like Freenet encrypted,
completely anonymous, and unquenchable are essential tools for
democratic activists in places like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Zimbabwe,
Burma and China.

The lessons for the public sphere

Where there is no rich, healthy public sphere we should support
anarchistic communicative techniques. Where there is a rich, healthy
public sphere, we must take an honest, unromantic account of the costs
of such anarchy. And through public spheres we should correct for the
excesses of communicative anarchy.

Still, we must recognise that poor, sickly, fragile public spheres are
more common than rich, healthy public spheres. And the battles at play
over privacy, security, surveillance, censorship and intellectual
property in the United States right now will determine whether we will
count the worlds oldest democracy as sickly or healthy.

Anarchy is radical democracy. But it is not the best form of
democracy. But as a set of tools, anarchy can be an essential antidote
to tyranny.

55. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer
56. http://www.bartleby.com/65/ol/oligarch.html
57. http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm#copyright
58. http://www.arl.org/info/frn/other/antiter2.html
59. http://www.organicconsumers.org/Patent/010903_patent.cfm
60. http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,54153,00.html
61. http://www.epic.org/crypto/
62. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=407
63. http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.php
64. http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/
65. http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/
66. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
67. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=336
68. http://www.free-soft.org/
69. http://www.benkler.org/
70. http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
71. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57326,00.html
72. http://www.trustedcomputing.org/tcpaasp4/index.asp
73. http://news.com.com/2100-1009-997223.html?tag=nl
74. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/
75. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/code/

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Part 2: Pro-gumbo: culture as anarchy

In much of the American South before the Civil War, drums were
illegal. Slaveholders were aware of the West African traditions of
talking instruments and tried everything within their means to stifle
free, open, unmediated communication across distances. Drums could
signal insurrection. And drums could conjure collective memories of a
time of freedom.

Mostly, slaveholders realised that to subjugate masses of people, they
had to alienate them from their culture as much as possible. They had
to strand them in a strange land and try to make that land seem
stranger than it was. They had to strictly regulate slave culture.
They had to outlaw slave literacy. They had to commit social and
cultural homicide to keep otherwise free people from rising up and
taking charge of their own bodies.

That the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean still set the time for
American culture speaks to the determination and courage of African
American slaves. The slaveholders outlawed the tools. But they could
not stop the beat (see Eileen Southern, [55]The Music of Black
Americans and Christopher Small, [56]Music of the Common Tongue)

As oligarchic forces such as global entertainment [57]conglomerates
strive to restrict certain tools that they assume threaten their
livelihood, they should consider that throughout the history of
communication, people have managed to use and adapt technologies in
surprising and resilient ways.

Once in a while, a set of communicative technologies offers
revolutionary potential: [58]peer-to-peer networks do just that. They
are part of a collection of technologies including cassette audio
tapes, video tapes, recordable compact discs, video discs, home
computers, the internet, and jet airplanes that link [59]diasporic
communities and remake nations. They empower artists in new ways and
connect communities of fans.

The battle to control these cultural flows says much about the
anxieties and unsteadiness of the power structures that had hoped to
exploit cultural globalisation. It also teaches us much about the
nature of culture itself.

Global culture by the download

A couple of years ago, a journalist friend of mine put me in contact
with a gentleman who does consulting work for the World Bank. This
gentleman called me to see if I was interested in participating in a
meeting in New York that June which would enable cultural ministers
from a handful of African countries including Nigeria, Ghana, and
South Africa to meet leaders from the American music industry. The
goal was to brainstorm about how African musicians might exploit
digital music distribution systems to market and deliver their songs
directly to diasporic communities.

He had no way of knowing what I thought of this idea. I had yet to
publish anything on the subject. So my opinions were not widely known.
So he was not quite prepared for my reaction.

Why do they need record companies? I asked. The artists can do it all
themselves for less than $10,000.

He was stunned. Having a World Bank perspective on development, he
assumed that the artists of the developing world would need and
welcome the giant helping hand of Bertelsmann or AOL Time Warner. So
he responded with an appeal to technological expertise. The artists
would need the major labels, he said, because the labels are working
on incorporating digital rights management [60]software into digital
music files. Without watermarking or copy-protection features, the
artists would just be giving their music away.

Then I explained to him that it was too late for all that. The power
of digitisation and networking had beaten him and the record companies
to it. I didn't even touch the subject of the complications inherent
in asking African musicians who are often [61]dissidents to work with
government culture ministers. I just made it seem like he had missed a
technological moment. He had the best of intentions. But he had not
considered that certain technological changes had fostered a new
ideological movement as well. And that these trends might change the
nature of global music and creativity.

All music will be world music

One of the great unanswered questions is how file sharing and MP3
compression will affect the distribution of what music corporations
call [62]world music, tunes from non-English-speaking nations,
offering rhythms that seem fresh to Europeans and Americans who have
grown up and old on the driving four-four beat of rock-and-roll.

Now, rhymes and rhythms from all corners of the Earth are available in
malleable form at low cost to curious artists everywhere. Peer-to-peer
has gone global. Of course, there are some big economic and
technological hurdles to overcome before it can affect all cultural
traditions equally. As the differences narrow, how will the
availability of a vast and already stunningly diverse library of
sounds change creativity and commerce? Wont all music be world music?

The riches of ephemera

On any given day, on any peer-to-peer file sharing system, one can
find the most obscure and rare items. I have downloaded some of
Malcolm Xs speeches, Reggae remixes of [63]Biggie Smalls hits, various
club dance mixes of Queens Bohemian Rhapsody, and long lost
[64]Richard Pryor comedy bits that were only released on vinyl by a
long-defunct company. Through nation-specific and general world music
chat rooms on the now-defunct Napster, I had been able to find Tamil
film songs, [65]Carnatic classical music, and pop stuff from [66]Asian
Dub Foundation, [67]Ali Farka Toure, [68]Orisha, and [69]Youssou
NDour. The most interesting and entertaining phenomena of the
MP3-peerto-peer is the availability of mashes new compositions created
by combining the rhythm tracks of one song and the vocal track of
another. (The best example of a popular mash, currently, is Genies
Revenge, a combination of vocals by Christina Aguilera and a guitar
riff by the Strokes).

Anxious ethnomusicology

This is a phenomenon that ethnomusicologists are just starting to
consider. During the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologist Steven Feld
raised some serious questions about the future of global cultural
diversity as world music gained market share and generated interest
among western producers and labels.

Feld published some of his thoughts as an [70]article called A Sweet
Lullaby for World Music. The article traces the development of
marketing efforts for this new genre of world music, which meant
anything from drum beats from Mali to the ambient sounds of lemurs in
Madagascar.

Feld expressed concern early on the very term world music made some
forms of music distinct from what academics and music industry figures
call music. Since the rise of the world music genre as a commercial
factor, music scholarship has been asking the question, how has
difference fared in the new gumbo? Feld wrote that recent world music
scholarship has revealed the uneven rewards, unsettling
representations, and complexly entangled desires that lie underneath
the commercial rhetoric of global connection, that is, the rhetoric of
free flow and greater access.

Free flow is a buzzword in north-south communication policy debates.
Stemming from 1970s arguments in [71]Unesco forums, the United States
argued that the world community should establish standards that would
encourage the free flow of information across borders, ostensibly to
spread democracy and ensure civil rights.

Many oppressive states chiefly India under Indira Gandhi argued that
the doctrine of free flow was merely a cover for what we now call the
neoliberal agenda: sweetening American corporate expansion by dusting
it with the sugar of [72]enlightenment principles.

The free-flow vs. [73]cultural imperialism argument (which has since
been supplemented by another approach that emphasises the complex uses
to which all audiences put cultural elements) has unfortunately
limited our vision and stifled discussions about what we might do to
encourage freedom and the positive externalities of cultural flow
while limiting the oppressive and exploitative externalities of the
spread of American and European modes of cultural production and
distribution.

Feld also outlined the reaction to scholarship that embraced this
cultural imperialism model. In contrast to those who raise concerns
about the spread of new loud noises, celebratory scholarship
emphasised the use and re-use of elements of American and European
musical forms in the emerging pop sounds flowing from the developing
world. It also celebrated the new market success that artists from the
developing world were achieving. This scholarship emphasised fluid
cultural identities and predicted an eventual equilibrium of the power
differences in the world music industry.

This school, which I subscribe to, downplays the influence of
[74]hegemony and underlines the potential creative and democratic
power of sharing. Instead of celebratory, I prefer the term
pro-[75]gumbo.

Steven Feld, who belongs to that group of scholars who utilise what he
calls anxious narratives, sees little possibility for resisting the
[76]commodification of ethnicity and musical styles. For the anxious,
global becomes displaced; emerging become exploited; cultural
conversations become white noise. To make his point that we should not
ignore the effects of the cultural violence that is [77]primitivism,
Feld writes, The advertisement of this democratic and liberal vision
for world music embodies an idealism about free-flows, sharing, and
choice. But it masks the reality that visibility in product choice is
directly related to sales volume, profitability, and stardom.

Even though I celebrate sharing, free flows, and gumbo, I must concede
the gravity of Felds concerns. But my question now is: how does
peer-to-peer change these issues?

Feld is really writing about the anxieties of ethnomusicologists. He
is not so concerned with the effects on the actual music and how it
works in the lives of musicians and fans:

In the end, no matter how inspiring the musical creation, no matter
how affirming its participatory dimension, the existence and
success of world music returns to one of globalizations basic
economic clich�s: the drive for more and more markets and market
niches. In the cases here, we see how the worlds of small (UNESCO
and Auvidis) and large (Sony) and major independent (ECM) music
owners and distributors can come into unexpected interaction. We
see how production can proceed from the acquisition of a faraway
cheap inspiration and labor. We see how exotic Euromorphs can be
marketed through newly layered tropes, like green
enviroprimitivism, or spiritual new age avant-garde romanticism. We
see how what is produced has a place in a larger industrial music
zone of commodity intensification, in this case artistic encounters
with indigeneity, as made over in popular Western styles. In all,
we see how world music participates in shaping a kind of
consumer-friendly multiculturalism, one that follows the market
logic of expansion and consolidation.

The peer-to-peer solution

Perhaps the spread of peer-to-peer libraries should allay the concerns
of anxious critics. Peer-to-peer music distribution so far has been
all about decorporatisation and deregulation. Music corporations do
not control the flow, prices, or terms of access anymore. Music
distribution has lower barriers of entry than ever before, and offers
the potential of direct, communal marketing and [78]creolisation.

We should acknowledge some key concepts about cultural globalisation:
* Its happening, but its rolling out in ways that are alarming to
those who hoped to profit the most from it.
* The prices and profits of globalisation are falling unevenly and
unpredictably.
* Culture is not zero-sum. Using something does not prevent someone
else from using it, and does not degrade its value. In fact, it
might enhance it.

Culture is anarchistic

[79]Culture is anarchistic if it is alive at all. It grows up from the
common, everyday interactions among humans who share a condition or a
set of common symbols and experiences.

We often mistake the collection of end-products of culture the
symphonies and operas, novels and poems that have survived the
rigorous peer review of markets and critics as the culture itself.
Culture is not the sum of its products. It is the process that
generates those products. And if it is working properly, culture is
radically democratic, vibrant, malleable, surprising, and fun.

These two different visions of culture explain much of the difference
between the assumptions behind information anarchy and information
oligarchy. Anarchists and many less radical democrats believe that
culture should flow with minimal impediments. Oligarchs, even if they
seem politically liberal, favor a top-down approach to culture with
massive intervention from powerful institutions such as the state,
corporations, universities, or museums. All of these institutions may
be used to construct and preserve free flows of culture and
information. But all too often they are harnessed to the oligarchic
cause, making winners into bigger winners, and thus rigging the
cultural market.

What Matthew Arnold thinks of P2P

In 1867 the English critic [80]Matthew Arnold published a treatise
called [81]Culture and Anarchy. The book was an extended argument with
the cultural implications of [82]John Stuart Mills 1859 book On
Liberty. Arnold took Mill to task for endorsing a low level of
cultural regulation. Culture, to Arnold, was all the good stuff that
cultural authorities such as himself said it was. And culture, in the
Arnoldian sense, was preferable was in fact and antidote to anarchy.

[83]Samuel Huntington expresses this same oligarchic theory of culture
in his simplistic yet influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order. Huntington sees cultures as grounded on
certain immutable foundations. He sees the emphasis on cultural
transmission, fluidity, and hybridity as trivial when compared to the
deep, essential texts and beliefs of a culture. Huntington affirms the
role of the Bible in what he calls western civilization and the role
of the [84]Analects of Confucius in what he calls Confucian
civilization.

In this way, Huntington disregards how people who live in these
cultures actually use the texts and symbols around them. The essence
of Western Civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac,
Huntington writes, despite the fact that most residents of the nations
he labels western have no idea of the history or significance of the
[85]Magna Carta, yet no one can underestimate the cultural power of
the [86]Big Mac. Huntington is arguing against cultural globalisation,
against fostering flows and exchanges of ideas and information. He
looks at a dangerous and angry world and prescribes walls instead of
paths.

Huntingtons preferred world might be quieter, but it would also be
darker and dumber. The fact is, cultures change, grow, and revise
themselves over time if they are allowed to. And cultural life is
healthier when cultures are allowed to grow and revise themselves.
Only during the European [87]Dark Ages (5th to 12th centuries CE) have
we seen a large portion of the world sever its cultural arteries and
rely on internal and local signs and symbols. Europe was stuck in a
time of crippling cultural stasis while the rest of the world, led by
Persian and Arab traders, moved on. The Dark Ages in Europe were a
time of mass illiteracy and not-coincidental concentrations of power
among local elites.

Every area of the world becomes more diverse in the local sense as
long as people are free to borrow pieces of cultural expressions and
re-use them in interesting ways.
[9cc_bot.gif]

As [88]Tyler Cowen explains in his book Creative Destruction: How
Globalization Is Changing the Worlds Cultures, cultural exchange
generates cultural change. Exchange might make disparate cultures more
like each other, but it also infuses each culture with new choices,
new ideas, and new languages. Every area of the world becomes more
diverse in the local sense as long as people are free to borrow pieces
of cultural expressions and re-use them in interesting ways.

Culture as process

This idea of culture as temporal, contingent, dynamic, and Creolised
best describes how culture actually works in peoples lives. No one
lives in [89]Matthew Arnolds culture; and few would want to live in
Samuel Huntingtons. The fact is, most of us dont have a clue why the
Magna Carta as a document is important to us, if it is at all any
more. Many more of us can wax about how Madonna is important to us.
And she is important to our culture in different ways to different
people at different times.

[90]Madonna, like the culture that rewards and follows her, is
temporal, contingent, and dynamic. As [91]Lawrence Levine explains in
Black Culture and Black Consciousness, culture is not a fixed
condition but a process: the product of interaction between the past
and the present. Its toughness and resiliency are determined not by a
cultures ability to withstand change, which indeed may be a sign of
stagnation not life, but by its ability to react creatively and
responsively to the realities of a new situation.

If we use some instrument of technology or law to dampen that
vibrancy, malleability, or dynamics, of culture, we risk cultural
stasis. Deployed carelessly, such instruments can freeze-in winners
and chill losers or those merely waiting to play.

55. http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall96/music.htm
56. http://www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/0-8195-6357-9.html
57. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/issue-8-24.jsp
58. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer
59. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=diasporic&go=Go
60. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=digital+rights+&go=Go
61. http://africanmusic.org/artists/felakuti.html
62. http://www.worldmusic.net/
63. http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/10/16/biggie/index.html
64. http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/specialevents/marktwain/pryor_bio.html
65. http://www.carnatic.com/
66. http://www.asiandubfoundation.com/adf_home_fs.htm
67. http://africanmusic.org/artists/alifarka.html
68. http://www.orisha.com.au/index1.htm
69. http://africanmusic.org/artists/youssou.html
70. http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-pub-cult/backissues/pc30/feld.html
71. http://www.unesco.org/
72. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enlightenment
73. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=cultural+imperialism&go=Go
74. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html
75. http://www.gumbopages.com/food/gumbo.html
76. http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/pagescapital/commodification.html
77. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=primitivism&go=Go
78. http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/creole.html
79. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=Culture&go=Go
80. http://65.107.211.206/authors/arnold/bio.html
81. http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/arnoldm_ca/ca_titlepage.htm
82. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/milljs.htm
83. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/january97/order_1-10.html
84. http://www.human.toyogakuen-u.ac.jp/~acmuller/contao/analects.htm
85. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1400/magna.htm
86. http://www.mcdonalds.com/corporate/info/history/history3/index.html
87. http://cfcc.net/dutch/DarkAges.htm
88. http://www.aworldconnected.org/people.php/21.html
89. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_westminster_hour/archive/3018799.stm
90. http://www.madonna.com/madonna/
91. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/levine.htm

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Part 3: The anarchy and oligarchy of science

During the cold war, scientists behind the [55]iron curtain yearned
for life in the United States. Not only were basic needs and
conveniences better met in the free world, the principles of open
dialogue and frank examination created fulfilling intellectual
communities. Because Soviet scientists were among the few citizens
allowed to travel frequently to Western Europe, North America, and
India, they were among the first to see through the lies and
exaggeration of Soviet tyranny.

In early 2001 Russian scientist [56]Elena Bonner gave a speech about
the recent lurch back toward authoritarianism in Russia under
President Vladimir Putin. In the speech, she pointed out that if not
for Soviet scientists in the 1960s, anti-Soviet dissidents would not
have had a sense of the shell of lies in which the government had
encased Soviet society. Soviet scientists had communicated with the
outside world. They had the power to let a little light and a little
air into an otherwise blind and suffocating nation.

Science is the most successful, open and distributed communicative
system human beings have ever created and maintained. The cultural
norms of science, and by extension academia in general, are
anarchistic in the best sense of the word. Science and academia should
be radically democratic. Although membership in these communities is
effectively closed to a select few, the papers and books that come out
of these communities are more often than not open to public perusal
and commentary. And the traditions of blind peer-review do allow for
motivated [57]amateurs to participate occasionally in discourse and
discovery, even if they cant get past the guards protecting labs and
libraries.

Science is a culture. Its also a method. And its an ideology that
supports the method and maintains the culture. But its also an
industry (or set of industries) through which billions of public and
private dollars flow every year. The stakes of science have never been
higher nor its justifications clearer. The second world war, we are
told, was won because one side had a group of well-funded immigrant
scientists who developed better radar than the other side did. And,
ultimately, it developed a better bomb as well. The challenges of the
21st century poverty, security, and disease -- can all be addressed
with advances that start in the laboratory or computer and flow out to
the market, the farm, the school, or the clinic.

The great river of science

[58]Scientific knowledge often moves from a spring of open discourse
into a stream of adoption and exploitation. The stream often moves
from the public arena to the private sector. We have developed complex
rules that guide this process. And each step embodies a tangle of
values and ideologies. The rules and terms of discussion evolve from
consensus-seeking processes within scientific communities. They then
consider the demands of market forces to create and enforce scarcity
and state demands for security.

Different ideologies, habits, and rules govern the upstream source of
knowledge and the downstream deployment of it. But the first step, the
action in the lab and the library, depends very much on the academic
devotion to radical democracy and openness. The essential question in
this matrix of rules and norms is this: at what point in the knowledge
stream should we install controls and restrict access to generate
incentives and protect people from bad actors who would exploit
dangerous knowledge?

and its dams

Within scientific communities, of course, members face significant
real-world barriers to true and ideal openness and equality. The first
is the relatively soft barrier of expertise. The rare amateur in
theoretical physics must spend years mastering the body of work that
preceded her or his curiosity. Without such mastery and the luxury of
the time spent pursuing it, a potential contributor would not know
where the gaps in knowledge lay or which questions are particularly
interesting.

Such time-intensive immersion, of course, would prevent someone from
pursuing work that would pay the rent. So while scientific discourse
is open to experts only, becoming an expert demands such an investment
of time and money that it tempers the potential excesses of
information anarchy: the persistence of rumour and error, and the cult
of personality.

The second, harder barrier is one of credentials. In a messy, crowded,
busy world, degrees and titles serve as imperfect proxies for
knowledge and connections. You might not know whether it is worth your
time listening to a dissertation on the virtues of genetic engineering
given by the person seated next to you on the train. But if she
introduces herself as a professor of molecular biology at Rockefeller
University, you might decide to listen.

Of course, [59]credentialism is inherently oligarchic. Admission to
the academy of credentials is severely restricted, as its members
prefer to limit competition for jobs and resources. Credentialism can
be self-fulfilling. A board of credentialed experts reviewing grant
applications is likely to dismiss applicants who lack the same basic
credentials they have earned and reward those who went to the right
schools, regardless of more subtle measures of knowledge or expertise.

Credentialism embodies all the potential excesses of oligarchy. That
professor on the train could be full of crap, as many professors
generally are. Even very bright, educated, licensed professionals can
be wrong. The chief problem with credentialism comes from the synergy
of status anxiety and arrogance: such professionals might be less
willing to admit error than an amateur or novice might. Fortunately
for scientific progress, any group of credentialed experts is likely
to contain significant disagreement on the burning questions of the
day.

So credentialism trumps credentialism and real debate can occur. Its
impossible to know which conversations and debates dont happen because
of the inherent conservativism of communities of the credentialed.
Despite some elements of oligarchy, science as a practice succeeds
because of, not despite, its ideology of relative openness.
Credentialism is more an imperfection rather than a corruption of
science.

A community of amateurs

Science, as an ideology and culture, is supposed to be open to
contributions from the non-licensed. Unlike the humanities, where
credentialism is a much bigger problem and necessity, science can be
somewhat free from the tyranny of credentials. Its supposed to be
disinterested in questions of nationalism or commercial gain.

While the public hails legends like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein
who have broken open scientific fields and rewritten textbooks, the
truth about science is that it is most often done within and among
teams of researchers, collaborating among even larger communities
across borders and oceans. Science has always been global,
cosmopolitan, messy, inefficient, and troublesome. And with the rise
of global communicative technologies and more sophisticated methods of
computer modeling within areas as diverse as cell biology and nuclear
physics, the barriers of entry should be lower than ever and
collaboration and criticism should be easier and cheaper than ever.

Significantly, one community of researchers and creators the [60]Open
Source or Free Software movement, has adopted radically democratic
academic principles to its guiding philosophy. While professional and
degreed computer scientists make significant and notable contributions
to the evolution of free software, the amateur matters greatly. Its
more often the community of amateurs that de-bugs and improves a piece
of code, or finds a new way of using it in the new context.

Computer science is new enough and its tools are cheap enough that
thousands of amateurs who lack credentials are able to gain expertise
through trial, error, experimentation, collaboration, and
communication. Its the ideal scientific community, one [61]Francis
Bacon would have envied and Aristotle could not have even imagined.
And recently it has emerged as a place-holding metaphor for values and
habits that have much older currency in the sciences. Open source has
become a model and an argument, yet its principles used to be
unarticulated because they were the default within science.

As in so many other areas of life from music to political action just
as communicative technology has allowed the flowering of a new
scientific revolution, the oligarchic concerns of commerce and
national security have crowded out these democratic values at their
sources the university and laboratory.

Government against enlightenment

Now, more than a decade after Elena Bonner and her husband [62]Andrei
Sakharov helped end the cold war, we must start questioning how much
of a scientific haven United States will be in the future. Citing
legal threats against encryption researchers and the criminal
prosecution of Russian computer scientist [63]Dmitry Sklyarov and
nuclear scientist [64]Wen Ho Lee, and increasingly strict visa
restrictions governing students and researchers, many scientist and
mathematicians have been frightened away from traveling to or working
in the United States.

And scientists are finding it harder to do their jobs in the new
security environment since 11 September 2001 and the still-mysterious
anthrax attacks that quickly followed. Over the past two years, the US
government has severed important links on federal World Wide Web
sites, deleted information from other government websites, and even
required librarians to destroy a CD-ROM on public water supplies.
University of Michigan researchers lost access to an Environmental
Protection Agency database with information they were using to study
hazardous waste facilities. Unclassified technical reports have
disappeared from the [65]Los Alamos National Laboratory website.

Rules regulating the use of dangerous materials or the distribution of
information potentially open to abuse traditionally evolve slowly
through the scientific process. Groups of scientists, in concert with
government officials, will examine risks and propose restrictive
protocols. Some are encoded in law. Others remain part of the
self-regulating culture of science. But since 2001, the US government
has taken to dictating the new security rules, regardless of the
scientific merit of the restrictions.

Many of these rules have generated criticism among scientists who fear
a chill on certain essential research (on bioterrorism, for instance)
and on the review process that requires other researchers to replicate
previous experiments. If some data or conclusions are kept secret,
then science cannot proceed in a self-correcting fashion.

Most alarming, the US government has decided to restrict and monitor
contacts with non-US scientists and graduate students. The global,
cosmopolitan nature of science is at stake if the worlds largest
source of basic research explicitly favors its own citizens instead of
letting the best American scientists collaborate with the best
non-American scientists (see Peg Brickley, New antiterrorism tenets
trouble scientists, [66]The Scientist, 28 October 2002).

Yet even before the attacks of 2001, something serious was changing in
the relationship between science and the United States government.
Since the early 1980s, increasing emphasis on the potential
profitability of publicly funded basic research and concern for the
perceived security risks that open networks, open journals, and open
discussion afford have pushed scientists to re-assert their principles
and defend their peers.

There have been battles over the content of journal articles, the
control that journal publishers exercise over material, the role of
foreign-born and ethnically suspect scientists, and the ethics of
privatising basic information about the world and the human body. In
other words, scientists are having to argue for the enlightenment all
over again.

The copyright economy: commerce and control

As molecular biologist [67]Roger Tatoud has written, It is widely
accepted that science should be an open field of knowledge and that
communication between scientists is crucial to its progress. In
practice, however, everything seems to be done to restrict access to
scientific information and to promote commercial profit over
intellectual benefits.

Tatoud is most concerned with the increasing influence of two systems
of regulation on the culture of science: copyrights and patents.
Copyrights directly affect the price of scientific journals and thus
their availability to researchers in developing nations, at poorer
institutions, or those unaffiliated with a company or university.

The absurd copyright economy forces scientists to assign all rights to
a major commercial journal publisher for no remuneration, then buy
back the work through monopolistic subscriptions. As a result, many
scientists are forming free and open collaborations to distribute
[68]peer-reviewed scientific literature outside the traditional
commercial journal system.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is sponsoring the public library
of science and the George Soros foundation funds the [69]Budapest Open
Access Initiative. The website for the Budapest project declares:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make
possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the
willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of
their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake
of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The
public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic
distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely
free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars,
teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access
barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich
education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the
poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be,
and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common
intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

While the copyright system benefits the publishing oligarchs at the
expense of scientific openness, it has not had nearly the restrictive
effects that the patent system has had on science. Since 1980, when
the United States Congress passed the [70]Bayh-Dole Act, which
encourages universities to patent work generated with public funds,
and the US Patent Office approved the patenting of living things and
the genes that operate in them, there has been a mad rush to control
information that might be medically relevant.

An American company, Myriad Genetics Inc., that has managed to wrest
control of two mutant genes that influence breast cancer in a small
number of women has been able to reap immense monopoly rents from
medical care providers who must pay the company $2,500 each time they
screen a woman for these mutations.

As British biologist John Sulston has [71]written, By claiming
proprietary rights to the diagnostic tests for the two BRCA genes and
charging for the tests Myriad is adding to total health-care costs.
Even worse, once scientists really understand how the BRCA 1 and 2
mutations cause tumors to grow, they might be able to devise new
therapies. But because of these patents, Myriad has exclusive
marketing rights.

In other words, researchers have a financial disincentive to act as
free agents when developing new tests and therapies for these
mutations. And throughout the world, these tests remain beyond the
financial reach of billions of women (see also Sultston's [72]the
heritage of humanity).

The privatisation of science

While favouring centralised information control and efficient
short-term commercial gain over openness and the long-term
accumulation of knowledge is the major theme of this story, its not
the only one. In fact, in many of the battles between openness and
control of processes and information, over-control has had a perverse
effect on commerce.

Proprietary control of databases of essential genetic information, for
instance, raised the specter of redundant, imperfect, competitive
private databases that would simultaneously lower the profits for
companies that maintain them and raise transaction costs for companies
that wish to use the information to develop drugs or therapies.

For this reason, several pharmaceutical companies have joined with the
Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom to form a free, public database
for SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), the markers of difference
among individuals who share a genome. By identifying the location of
SNPs, researchers can pinpoint factors that might signal
susceptibility to specific diseases that have genetic influences.

Before the public SNP database obviated the gold rush to identify and
patent hundreds of SNPs, lone companies were trying to hoard the
information and patent the SNPs. Had they succeeded, research on
particular SNPs would have been more expensive and potentially
monopolistic. So the public SNP database is an example of companies
heavily invested in a healthy and reliable patent system overtly
avoiding the abuse of the system and investing in public domain
information. They realised that [73]too much control was bad for
business.

The United States government had nothing to do with the open public
database, besides funding some of the research on SNPs. US science
policies heavily encourage universities, public sector researchers,
and private companies to file for patent protection on every step of
the knowledge-producing process, upstream and downstream. These
policies have generated an exponential increase in the number of
patents owned by universities for work done with public funds.

In 1979 American universities received 264 patents. By 1997, that
number had increased tenfold, to 2,436. In that same time, the total
number of US patents issues per year only doubled. US science policies
have also erased any functional difference in the ways universities
regulate and license basic science and commercially exploitable
technology. Perhaps most importantly, the American people are paying
at least twice for any research that generates a marketable technology
or treatment through the grant and through the market price of the
procedure or drug).

What if during the second world war the United States had considered
scientists of German, Italian, or even Danish descent too suspicious
or untrustworthy to be involved in code-breaking, radar development,
or weapons research? What if during the cold war the United States had
restricted instead of encouraging scientific communication between its
scientists and those behind the iron curtain? What if Leibniz had had
to ask Newton for permission to work on the calculus?
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55. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain
56. http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/sakharov/h_description.html#Bonner_bio
57. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=15870
58. http://www.powells.com/psection/HistoryofScience.html
59. http://www.bartleby.com/61/51/C0735100.html
60. http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/07/13/2040241.shtml?tid=126&tid=156&tid=98&tid=99
61. http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/bacon/
62. http://asf.wdn.com/
63. http://www.freesklyarov.org/
64. http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/nation/2881175.htm
65. http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/
66. http://www.the-scientist.com/homepage.htm
67. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=336
68. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/willinsky/index.html
69. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
70. http://www.crf.cornell.edu/bayh-dole.html
71. http://www.forbesbookclub.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=I1O9M
72. http://mondediplo.com/2002/12/15genome
73. http://www.law.upenn.edu/alumni/alumnijournal/fall2001/feature1/health7.html
74. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate.jsp?debateId=101&id=8
75. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1378
76. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1378
77. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1378
78. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1378
79. http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=72
80. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1378
81. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1378
82. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1378

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Part 4: The nation-state vs. networks

In the last decade, the nation-state has survived three challenges to
its hegemony from the Washington Consensus, the California Ideology,
and Anarchy. The promise of a borderless globalisation unified by
markets and new technology has been buried. The fourth part of Siva
Vaidhyanathans compelling series asks: what then remains of the
utopian vision of global peer-to-peer networks that would bypass
traditional structures of power?

Part 4: The nation-state vs. networks

Just yesterday, it seems, influential thinkers were imagining a world
in which the nation-state would wither, and many decisions that affect
everyday life would be shifted up to multilateral institutions or down
to market actors. Technologies were to play a leading part in that
change linking cosmopolitan citizens and transnational markets in a
way that would enable more direct forms of governance, cultural
[55]creolisation, and efficient commercial transactions. Human beings
were on the verge of finding new and exciting ways of relating to each
other. Arbitrary barriers of ethnicity and geography would shrivel.
Through technology, we were in the process of mastering the dynamics
of, and therefore controlling, our cultural evolution.

This vision was informed by a sort of soft anarchism and
techno-fundamentalism. It assumed that the state would slough away
eventually. But in the mean time, we would have to push and prod it to
relinquish centralised control over daily matters.

The tautology worked as follows. This sort of radical globalisation is
going to happen anyway. The technology would determine it, so we might
as well make personal and policy choices that would guarantee it. In
the meantime, if those outside the global, technocratic, educated
elite suffered a bit, that would be the price of cultural evolution.
We could wire their villages and gently inform them of the impending
changes.

Of course, in practice, the instruments of this particular form of
globalisation did not actually serve the softly anarchistic vision of
a decentralised species acting in concert. Like a Soviet-era
ideologues permanent deferral of rule by the working class until it
was ready, this approach required a centralisation of authority within
corporate boardrooms and multilateral confederacies until all the
villages were wired.

Of course, now we see that the [56]nation-state is not going anywhere.
And ethnicity and geography still matter quite a bit within and among
states. We might even be experiencing some sort of cultural
devolution. If anything, the nation-state has capitalised on the mania
of globalisation and information to reinforce its powers and
jurisdictions. We might have had a moment of techno-globo-utopian
idealism in the 1990s. But it should be clear by now that the
nation-state is back with thunderous fury. And the dominant form of
globalisation is [57]oligarchic, not anarchistic. So the most
pronounced forms of opposition to that dominant model are
understandably informed by anarchism.

Thats not to say that the nation-state is what it was, or that it will
behave the same ways in the future. The pressures on state
sovereignty, identity, and security are significant. People,
currencies, culture, and information are more portable and malleable
than ever, and this has increased the [58]anxieties that nation-states
endure concerning identity and security.

These pressures come from inside and outside: reactions to and from
immigrant groups that retain interest in the politics and culture of
their homeland, and expatriate communities dispersed around the globe,
willingly funding and enabling new challenges to state security and
integrity.

Different pressures on sovereignty also come from above and below:
from multilateral governing institutions and from teeming mobs of
techno-libertarians and disgruntled rebels. The triple forces at work
here are the Washington Consensus and a strange synergy between the
[59]California Ideology and the [60]Zapatista Swarm.

Soft oligarchy: the Washington Consensus

The [61]Washington Consensus is a form of market fundamentalism
complicated by some serious bad faith. Although its advocates claim to
champion free trade and open markets, there is nothing free or open
about the Washington Consensus. Its more Washingtonian than
consensual. Its a consensus among major institutions located in
Washington, D.C., and represents the vested interests of developed
nations. While it intends to empower market forces, it depends on
coercion by institutions that resemble super-states, yet have no
direct democratic accountability.

In practice, increasingly powerful multilateral institutions such as
the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and the World Bank determine policies for many nation-states.
And clearly the multilateral institutions that enforce the Washington
Consensus are only serving the interests of a handful of already rich
and powerful states, chiefly in North America and western Europe.

Techno-libertarianism: the California Ideology

From roughly 1981 to 2000, the Washington Consensus represented the
potential of a new political order: a weakened, less relevant
nation-state in the 21st century. Meanwhile, on the left coast of the
United States, a revolution was brewing that encouraged the passive
erosion of state influence on markets and peoples lives. At least,
everyone involved thought it was a revolution, declared it a
revolution, and acted as if it were a revolution.

It turned out to be less revolutionary in real terms than many hoped.
Yet its ideological influence was undeniable. Political economist
Christopher May has called it the California Ideology, but it might
more properly be called the [62]Northern California Ideology.

The California Ideology predicted that the new communicative
technologies that linked consumers directly to producers (without
middlemen) and allowed consumers more and faster information with
which they might make decisions that would radically alter global
capitalism. Transaction costs would fall. Consumers would demand
better quality and service at lower prices. The smartest firms would
offer them just that. Workers would no longer be tied to offices and
plants. Managers would slough away as corporate hierarchies collapsed.
Employees would find greater satisfaction working contract-to-contract
for a variety of firms on individual projects rather than latching
their fortunes and reputations on one firm. Firms would outsource much
of their work, from printing to data storage, to shipping, to
research, to accounting.

At every level consumers, labour, management, and the firm itself
everyone would be a free agent. Firms that worked better with their
minds than their muscles would win. Work would be flexible and workers
would be free. Social needs would be better served through private
ventures that capitalise on quick applications of knowledge and
networks of experts. The nation-state would not only [63]wither in
importance because private firms would serve consumers, (what used to
be called citizens) better, it would be actively dismantled because
its interventions in many areas of life perverted the flows of
information that would fuel this revolution in the first place. Every
transaction would be a lot like shopping on [64]eBay.

The rise of caffeinated anarchy

Anarchy in some ways growing directly out of the new communicative
technologies fostered by the California ideology, in other ways
brewing up from the disgruntled subalterns in developing nations burst
into relevance and importance in 1999.

It filled the streets of Seattle and [65]shut down a round of
negotiations at a meeting of the WTO. Taking inspiration from the
1994-1995 [66]Zapatista uprising in the southern state of Chiapas in
Mexico, activists from all corners of the earth had been communicating
about ways to challenge the Washington Consensus.

Using the slogan, The Revolution will be Digitised, activists all over
the globe took direct inspiration from the issues and success that the
[67]Zapatistas generated. Anti-Washington Consensus parties in
Venezuela and [68]Brazil won elections in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile
Mexican voters, many of whom have benefited from increased trade with
the United States, elected a conservative [69]president who had once
worked for Coca-Cola and lived in the United States.

European anarchists and activists helped Zapatistas organise the
[70]First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism in Chiapas in 1996. Through that and subsequent meetings
in 1997 and 1998, the movement spread to include several important
trade unions in Europe and Canada.

These activists sought true and complete [71]globalisation. Partial,
rigged globalisation, as promulgated by the Washington Consensus,
served only to bind workers to one place. The Washington Consensus
encouraged the movement of money, resources, and goods. Yet it did not
allow for the free flow of people and ideas (unless these ideas were
encased in Hollywood films and music, and then only under strict
market, legal, and technological controls).

If there were such a free flow of people and ideas, then authoritarian
states would sense deep threats grumbling up from their subjects and
multinational corporations could not exploit wage differences
effectively enough to undermine unions. These diverse groups forged a
movement with a coherent message: that the appearance of incoherence
was in fact coherent because it reflected the diversity of concerns
and methods.

We declare, the founding document of the movement read, that we will
make a collective network of all our particular struggles and
resistances, an intercontinental network of resistance against
neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity.
The sociologist [72]David Graeber, an anarchist activist working
against the Washington Consensus, wrote that this new global anarchism
is not only pro-globalisation in the sense that it hopes to erode
borders and allow people to seek fulfilment wherever and however they
might imagine it; it is the first major social and ideological
movement to spread from the south to the north, from the developing to
developed nation-states, in many decades. And, in this effort to
define in their first principles a bond with humanity over nation,
these activists were echoing a sense of [73]Diogenic cynicism.

The Zapatista swarm hits Seattle

[74]Diogenes found an ideal playground in Seattle, whose economic
success in the 1990s made it the ideal showcase for the Washington
Consensus.

The home of Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks was also a node of global
communication and the flow of tourists and workers. But its proximity
to Native American communities and old-growth forests made it a symbol
of all that the Washington Consensus threatened. Moreover, the very
technologies that the WTO celebrated in Seattle intercontinental air
travel, large quantities of cheaply grown caffeine, and unmediated
global digital communication undermined the institutions that supplied
them.

When anarchists, environmentalists, labour union members, farm
workers, and general critics of the Washington Consensus shut down a
meeting of the WTO in Seattle in the fall of 1999, the ruling
institutions of the world were shocked and found themselves completely
unprepared. They had read anti-Washington Consensus [75]activists as
fragmented, unsophisticated, and unable to tap into widespread public
support. Most immediate accounts of the protests falsely labeled the
protest movements as anti-globalisation instead of pro-globalisation.
And they were falsely labeled violent uprisings when they were most
definitely anti-violent.

As in Chiapas, the government actually perpetrated the violence once
the activists tactics overwhelmed their abilities to make sense of the
situation. For the most part, the Seattle activists practiced direct
democracy. The loosely-affiliated groups were themselves composed of
loosely-affiliated members. They ruled themselves through protocols.

When a member proposed an action, she or he invited participation and
criticism. After deliberation and debate, members who still opposed
the revised proposal could still opt out of the action. In response to
extreme proposals that violate the core principles of the group,
members could propose a veto. And the group would then consider the
validity of the concerns and decide whether to act.

Such loose consensus could degenerate into organisational paralysis.
But the more urgent the issue and more reasonable the action, the more
effective these organisations would be. Once these movements shifted
from the conference and seminar rooms and chat rooms and web pages to
the streets of Seattle, they were much more diverse, flexible,
impressive, and effective than anyone in power (or in universities)
could have predicted.

The Seattle activists were mostly, in Graebers term, small a
anarchists, as opposed to the more overtly ideologically-inspired
Anarchists. Like the Zapatistas, they dabbled in anarchistic tactics
and methods without overtly endorsing a stateless world vision.

A bend in the river

Efforts since 1999 to replicate the triumphs of Seattle have been
frustrated by events outside the activists control. The protests in
Quebec in the summer of 2001, intended to stop progress on a western
hemispheric trade treaty on the model of the North American Free Trade
Agreement ([76]Nafta), were impressive. But those in New York who met
up to protest the World Economic Forum meeting in early 2002 when New
Yorkers were in no mood for more chaos were largely unimpressive and
ineffective. Between these two events, of course, the World Trade
Center fell and citizens and states around the world shifted their
immediate concerns from freedom to security.

In Genoa in July 2001, an Italian policeman shot and killed a young
man named [77]Carlo Giuliani who was protesting the meeting of the G8,
the leaders of the eight most powerful nation-states in the world.
Amid 80,000 protesters who were calling for cancellation of third
world debt, a police vehicle ran through crowds of mostly peaceful
protesters, chasing and beating many, to strike back against a handful
of violent protesters. In [78]Genoa, the idealised vision of
anarchists with a small a evaporated as more extreme and
uncompromising anarchists reverted to violence against Italian
security forces and world leaders, lobbing Molotov cocktails over
barricades.

These violent anarchists did not seem to be part of the global
movement inspired by the Zapatistas. Yet their actions and the
blowback by the conservative Italian government have become part of
the governing mythology of the battle over globalisation. The
protesters basked in glory after Seattle. And Italian authorities had
no interest in seeming as overwhelmed, surprised, or incompetent as
Seattle police had.

This combination of hubris and militant defensiveness had fatal
consequences for progressive forces in general, and Carlo Giuliani
particularly. As global activist Nathan Newman [79]explains, There
was, I think, a somewhat un-strategic overconfidence that developed
among protesters post-Seattle. The Seattle cops were unprepared and
played into the propaganda goals of the protesters. As Philadelphia
and now Genoa showed, the cops are no longer unprepared and are
developing both the repressive technology and propaganda to crush the
Black Bloc-style protesters and the rest of the movement if we dont
develop some new strategies to control the escalation of violence.

No future beyond the nation-state?

By 2003, these three ideological challenges to the power of the
nation-state seemed stalled if not dead. Under the leadership of two
very different powerful nation-states, the United States of America
and the Peoples Republic of China, the 21st century would open with a
clear call to think nationally first, and globally only if such
strategies offered a clear and direct payoff to the nation-state. The
ideologies and networks that seemed to threaten the nation-state all
through the 1980s and 1990s faced challenges far greater than the
nation-state ever did.

55. http://www.cajunculture.com/Other/creolization.htm
56. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=895
57. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=1400
58. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=1193
59. http://www.arpnet.it/chaos/barbrook.htm
60. http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:sRXZRLsFxBoJ:www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR880/MR880.ch16.pdf+Zapatista+Swarm&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
61. http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidtrade/issues/washington.html
62. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg/635
63. http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/guehenno_endpb.html
64. http://www.ebay.com/
65. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/11/99/battle_for_free_trade/534014.stm
66. http://www.ezln.org/
67. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=1208
68. http://www.nhh.no/geo/114/lula.htm
69. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/from_our_own_correspondent/945199.stm
70. http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/andrew/encounter1_report.html
71. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=637
72. http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml
73. http://www.learn.co.uk/yvote/glearning/cynicism.htm
74. http://www.learn.co.uk/yvote/glearning/cynicism2.htm
75. http://la.indymedia.org/print.php?id=3496
76. http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/nafta-alena/over-en.asp
77. http://www.carlo-giuliani.com/
78. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=1221
79. http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/role/globdem/globprot/2001/0802kill.htm
80. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate.jsp?debateId=101&id=8
81. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1459.jsp
82. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1459
83. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1459
84. http://www.opendemocracy.net/servlet/net.opendemocracy.cms.cda.utils.PDFDownload?id=1459
85. http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=72
86. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1459.jsp
87. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1459.jsp
88. http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1459.jsp

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