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11. Ideologies and Visions
- The MIT Press
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11 The World Summit on the Information Society was just the most public symptom of the Internet’s profound impact on the global politics of communication and information. While it was the management of critical Internet resources that provided the flashpoint for WSIS, we have seen how the regulation of Internet content, the protection of copyrights and trademarks , and issues of communicative privacy and security are all being transformed by similar forces. We also have seen how new forms of networked governance and peer production have emerged across these policy domains. Yet even as an Internet-enabled world challenges the state as the preeminent institution for the making of communication and information policy, it also generates strenuous reassertions of national authority. States lay claim to geographic names and the representation of linguistic scripts in cyberspace; they scale up their surveillance capabilities; they make plans to weaponize cyberspace and “secure” their part of it; they try to set themselves up as gatekeepers who can censor content. Most of these assertions of power constitute radically new forms of governmentality rather than a reversion to an old order. It is clear that nation-states—including the United States of America, not just undemocratic ones—constitute some of the biggest threats to the global character and freedom of networked communications. At the same time, the communication-information sector may need state-like powers to prosecute and incarcerate criminals, ensure due process of law, counter harmful private aggregations of power, or formalize individual rights and sanction violations of them by states or other actors. How to harness power to secure freedom? This is a hard problem. Ideologies and Visions 254 Chapter 11 Ideologies, Old and New Disruptive technologies shuffle the deck in the short term, but it is only a matter of time before things settle down into a more stable pattern of interaction. While we know that the problems of Internet governance challenge the institutional capacity of nation-states, a core assumption of this book is that there is no deterministic progression to any new form of governance. Those who projected that the state will automatically wither away in this sphere were clearly wrong. Those who rationalize as inevitable a reversion to a bordered and controlled Internet dominated by states are also wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Whatever happens, we will make happen. When societies are confronted with problems of this level of complexity and novelty, ideas and analysis become especially critical. To make sense of our environment we must be able to name phenomena, come up with explanations, and develop guidelines about how to respond. In such an environment it is not only discrete ideas, but also ideologies that become important. Ideologies are systems of ideas that strive to provide coherent explanations across a wide range of social, economic, and political phenomena . Political ideologies tend to fuse the normative and the positive; they provide a framework for analyzing events and evaluating or recommending specific courses of action in line with a set of values. Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century faced changes as farreaching as today’s. The combination of industrialism, economic depression, nationalism, and war generated political turmoil and structural transformations . In this process, collectivist ideologies such as communism and fascism evolved as critiques of the individualist liberal market order. These distinct worldviews led to different diagnoses of social ills and clashing approaches to the construction of policies and political institutions. After decades of contestation among adherents of these competing ideologies, Western Europe reached equilibrium around social democracy.1 In the evolution of Internet governance one can see a similar grappling with the interaction of ideas, interests, and institutions. The global transformation of information and communication is producing its own set of competing ideologies. The term ideology has a negative connotation, sometimes justifiably so. It can mean a dogmatic or religious adherence to a set of precepts and predictions regardless of their pragmatic utility or correspondence to 1. Ideologies “played an important role in driving events down paths they would not otherwise have taken,” linking “people who would not otherwise have been linked” and motivating them to “pursue political goals they would not otherwise have pursued.” Berman 2006, 9. [54.166.223.204] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:36 GMT) Ideologies and Visions 255 reality. While it is true that ideologies bring those risks, it is also true that any good-faith effort to understand and cope with unprecedented societal developments requires something akin to what...