I followed the Madrid Conference on Democracy, Terrorism and Security over the weekend via the blogs of
Joi Ito,
Rebecca MacKinnon and
Ethan Zuckerman, the madridopendemocracy IRC chat channel and the
Global Voices wiki. Joi, Rebecca and Ethan are all founding members of Global Voices, and they and Martin Varsavsky (and perhaps some anonymous others?) have produced
a draft of a joint recommendation on "The Infrastructure of Democracy: Strengthening the Internet for a Safer World" on the Global Voices wiki.
I agree with pretty much all the conclusions of the recommendation, as applied to the
underlying fabric of the net. Also, Global Voices is a great initiative which I am very supportive of. Finally, I understand from talking with Joi on IRC that the recommendation was drafted under considerable time pressure and in the context of a degree of hostility from some other conference participants, which couldn't have been very easy to contend with. In a way, then, what follows represent my comments on the recommendation in the context of the conference as a whole—and the media and political landscape beyond that.
Nevertheless, I feel it could be interesting and useful to unpack and examine three aspects of the recommendation.
Firstly, what exactly is the "terrorism" the recommendation alludes to? In a piece on his blog, Ethan
paraphrases Kofi Annan's definition as follows: "Any action is terrorism if it causes death or bodily harm to noncombattants while intimidating citizens or attempting to force a government to act."
As such, the meaning of terrorism would seem to subsume the state-sponsored killing and torture that the U.K. and U.S. military have engaged in in Iraq. And yet the normative use of the term in the mainstream media refers exclusively to those who act against the interests of certain nations and their administrations. This usage reflects a particular set of cultural values that justifies violence in service of the imposition of those values on others who do not share them, and the protection of the interests that serve those values.
Indeed, Joi Ito
writes on his blog:
It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism. Kenneth Roth [of Human Rights Watch] points out that the US has a terrible position on human rights in the name of the war on terror. He pointed out that Alberto Gonzales told the Senate committee the Senate Convention Against Torture treaty doesn't prohibit the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" tactics, which makes the US the only country which is not upholding the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as a matter of official policy. How can a country which is not upholding basic human rights expect to be respected and supported internationally?
It's a great point. Yet the term "terrorism" unavoidably brings a whole lot of cultural baggage along with it, particularly when used without framing discussion such as Kenneth's. The net's greatest strength is indeed—as the recommendation says—its ability to embrace multifarious points of view. But I believe we can only come to an understanding of how best to foster the net's growth if we use language that is abstracted from any specific political or cultural point of view, focusing rather on the wholistic nature of net that embraces diversity within itself. A common overarching objective we can unite around is, perhaps, the development of a healthy net that serves humanity as well as possible. My vision of such a net is one that encourages the development of trust-based communities that nevertheless tend towards transparency and openness—not ideal conditions for would be purveyors of "terror", whether they be government intelligence services or Al-Khaida operative cells.
Secondly, the recommendation alludes briefly to the concept of "truth". This would seem to imply the existence of a singularly valid point of view, which acts to collapse the quantum-state like multiplicity of the net into a singularity. Wikis might be held up as a counter-example here, facilitating as they do the convergence of many individuals' points of view into a unitary, albeit ever evolving, neutral point of view, or "NPV". Wikis are undeniably great collaborative tools. Nevertheless, I would argue that wikis simply express one possible point of view that is at worst tolerable to and at best completely representative of the opinions of each member of a certain group of people. People whose point of view lies outside that range—that is sufficiently different from the wiki's consensus point of view—are effectively excluded from the process, as their edits and additions will probably be reversed by other members.
The Global Voices wiki is a good example: I agree with almost all of what is currently on the wiki, and would feel comfortable editing and adding to these pieces (and have done so). However, the opinions I express in this piece seem to me to be sufficiently distinct from the recommendation's current substance for it to feel inappropriate to express them in an edit to the wiki, as that would entail a radical restructuring of the recommendation—hence this blog piece representing my individual point of view. Groups tend to lock into certain consensus belief systems and behaviours, and in doing so must inevitably exclude other, potentially equally-valid points of view from the groups version of "truth". Perhaps, then, talking about a singular truth—something that is objectively-knowable and universally-applicable—might be best avoided in favour of "truths" plural? : )
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to talk about an "open" net? The technical issues involved are too complex to discuss here, but in essence I feel the opposition of "open" and "closed" approaches to the net in some ways sets up a false dichotomy. Can we not rather agree on the imperative for maintaining the openness of the underlying infrastructure or fabric of the net—the physical and IP layers—whilst at the same time facilitating the building of communities within that fabric which, by their nature, will be semi-closed?
Without a degree of closure in community structures, there can be no intimacy or trust. I must be able too assert the facts that I am reliably identifiable as me and you are not, that I live in one physical community and you in another, that my family and social group is not the same as yours (although the latter may overlap)—and so on—in order build trust relationships with individuals and communities within the network. These trust relationships are necessarily at least semi-closed, in that only the people who can reliably assert identities relevant to those relationships are party to them. And it is surely in promoting the development of trust-based relationships that our best long-term hope of allaying "terror" lies.
At the moment, representations of identity on the net are at best piecemeal, fragmented across applications and technologies. Is not the real challenge facing us, as we ponder the net's evolution, that of facilitating the organic integration of closed and semi-closed community structures into a net whose fabric is fundamentally open and deregulated? To allow people to reach out from their digital cultural and social comfort zones to Others in their own way and their own time? It seems to me that the best way to incentivise openness and transparency is to embrace its opposite whole-heartedly. And while this contention might seem paradoxical on the face of it, it is a paradox that is resolved once the fabric of the net and the structures within it are understood as occupying discrete yet inter-dependent digital dimensions...
topics:
internet_reform democracy identity
