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Chapter 4: “Freedom to Communicate": Ideology and the Global in the Iridium Satellite Venture
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4 @ “Freedom to Communicate” Ideology and the Global in the Iridium Satellite Venture martin collins To wander onto the terrain of the 1990s global is to invite disorientation. Its media expressions and literature seem a jumble of outlooks—of promotion and critique, of declamations of control and unruly realities, and of totalizing visions and their limitations in an ever locally grounded world. For a taste of these jostling perspectives, consider these two nearly contemporaneous quotes:1 Freedom to communicate, anytime, anywhere For the first time, Iridium shrinks the size of instant, reliable, truly worldwide communication to fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. And with a single telephone number, it follows you from isolated regions to international capitals, across borders, oceans, time zones. . . . [S]imply stated, there is nothing like Iridium. And for someone like you—who sees the world as one—there will be nothing in your way. The half-century since the end of World War II has been a period of unprecedented American hegemony over the rest of the planet. The confident mobility and the implicit threat that go with an aerial perspective have helped give a face to that hegemony. . . . [T]he United States has demanded, as a sort of natural right, that its citizens and media be able to pass unhindered across the borders of nations and continents. For fifty years, the assumed mobility of the view from above has been a virtually unavoidable component in a sort of unconscious popular cosmopolitanism, a set of expectations about the openness and submissiveness of the world that are shared widely even among Americans who never leave their country. The first quote highlights the confident entitlement of business-class travelers living in a capitalist world tailored to their needs. Techno-enthusiasm and a “master of the universe” vibe seem to promise smooth transit across the global stage. Yet hints of disorder come through in the acknowledgment of “isolated regions.” Unpredictability and risk seem to shadow the exhilaration of global motion “for those with nothing in their way.” In “seeing the world as one,” the text implies an alternate world that is not-one, of stratification between haves and have-nots, of a reality of locally grounded differences and opposition. The second quote lays out a classic and germane critique, suggesting the post–World War II lines of power that have helped make that business-class vision seem natural. The handy organizing lens of hegemony resolves the churning of the global into neat familiar patterns of dominance and accommodation , of center and periphery.2 But such critique itself was part of the intellectual field that composed the global. In particular, the transcendent ideals of the Enlightenment coexisted with the realization that such ideals were not “above history” but an accompaniment to the particularities of pre–World War II European expansionism.3 Iridium, the historical example at the center of this essay, offers good empirical meat for the hegemonic assessment and for its limitations. Iridium was a transnational business venture conceived by Motorola, a Fortune 500 corporation, which received encouragement from a range of U.S. governmental entities.4 Its core idea, first sketched in 1987, involved placing a network of sixty-six satellites in low Earth orbit to provide cellular telephony service over the entire surface of the planet.5 The project achieved a number of “firsts”—in technology, in manufacturing, in business organization, and in having the market rather than the state undertake a vast space project. Its planet-embracing technological envelope (a communications first) made the global an actuality rather than an evocative metaphor—an important way in which the 1990s differed from earlier eras of the global.6 There was now congruence in extent between human action and Enlightenment ideals. Iridium epitomized the period’s entanglement of global action and ideals. In the post-1989, post–Cold War years, the U.S.-led venture drew in more than a dozen investors representing a diverse sampling of countries and corporations around the world. These included, notably, state-derived investments from former Cold War adversary Russia, the Peoples Republic of China, and India, as well as seed money from companies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Brazil—each of which then placed a director on the new company’s board. Through a single project, the consortium planned to create a fully global technical infrastructure and a fully global market. It did: during the 1990s, the system was designed, funded, placed into...