carlo von lynX on Wed, 1 Feb 2017 22:49:30 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Protocols and Crises |
On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 09:43:28PM +0100, André Rebentisch wrote: > The more common match term for "protocol power" as coined by the > abstract seems to be the anglo-saxon "multistakeholderism" governance > model. It is deeply embedded in their political culture. I assume it > stems from a more corporatist past. Yes, the Internet Governance Forum was all about "multistakeholderism". By having representatives of all backgrounds participate it is supposed to turn out more democratic than before. Still, with representation and reduction to some few individuals, great biases are introduced. The "protocol power" I see in this is how even the best intended politicians keep resorting to Matroska style committee constructs in order to pragmatically organize the voices that are talking to their heads.. so, instead of having the parliament decide on an issue, the power may end up in a multistakeholder committee that few even know about. I think I'm making the same point that Varoufakis makes about the eurogroup, filled with bankers and ministers of which *none* has been elected directly by their respective populations. When the representatives of a worldwide Internet movement met in Prague in 2012, they were burdened with the "protocol power" of forming a representational organization for Europe. What I then experienced was what I called the "Brussels effect" - a series of distortions by people that were afraid of representing their own country, others that did not mind to have their personal opinion represent their country, and ultimately when putting all the pieces together, ending up with a least common denominator that was so harmless, it could have been the whitewashed output of any other political party or institution. In other words, the innovation that was foundational for the Pirate movement, was drowned in the dependency of needing a protocol. A "protocol power" that hurts even if nobody is controlling it. But it isn't my style to just denounce a structural, organizational problem of humankind, without also offering a perspective on resolution. As we participated in the Internet Ungovernance Forum, we denounced the apparent fairness of the multistakeholder approach - without criticizing the promoters, since the method that we suggest for what we termed... *allstakeholderism* ... had not existed before 2010, so it's nobody's fault for not having known better. But now they are told, so now it is their fault if they don't change the method. Allstakeholderism can be achieved by, you guessed it, setting up a worldwide liquid democracy platform, as hinted at in the other thread, by which it can structurally be met that nobody is cut out, everybody is heard, and yet reasonable choices are made. Of course this method is terrible for lobbyism, as there are no elected representatives to lobby. Special interest must make the effort of convincing the entire electorate, which is a much harder challenge: if your argumentation is based on subtle falsehoods, as lobby argumentation usually is, then somebody will always be there to debunk it in flight before it even reaches the ground. -- E-mail is public! Talk to me in private using encryption: http://loupsycedyglgamf.onion/LynX/ irc://loupsycedyglgamf.onion:67/lynX https://psyced.org:34443/LynX/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: