Showing posts with label governance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label governance. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Net.control, climate politics and a defense of angels
Isn't it wonderful what goverments can do when they set their minds to it? The UK govenrment (Tory wing) are stumbling over their dif for net surveillance while the BRICK countries move once more to get the ITU to take over the running of the internet (ITU being a UN body is responsible to nation-states; but given the deregulation of telecoms is now also subject to the will of corporate members). For some details check New Scientist, the daring if clumsily named WCITleaks and internet governance consultants nxt who have published the restricted documents from the discussions. Avaaz have also started a petition, and there are more links from their site.
So there is always the possibility of getting political movement when enough power is brokered through UN agencies. But what about issues where nation states don't want top change?
The Doha meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just broke up with almost nothing to show for istelf: a pitifully small fund, marked by foot-dragging in actual payments, for poor regions devastated by weather whose probabilities are reckoned to be increased through emissions from the welthy. And, er, that's about it. The Irish Times has a suitably downbeat account from one campaigner: “We lobby and campaign so hard to move things forward, but all we get are crumbs from the table.”
Apparently more US citizens believe in the existence of angels than accept the reality of climate change. They may have something there. The internet may not be the engine of wisdom we once hoped it might be; but an internet censored by the Saudis will be an engine of stupidity. We might need some angels: our politicians are clearly failing at anythng useful, wise or good.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
New problems of internet governance
As Ned Rosster (2009: 37) argues in a study of e-waste industries in Southern China,
In the case of the global logistics industries, the rise of secondary resource flows accompanying the economy of electronic waste is coextensive with the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. I suggest that the relation between these entities constitutes new regional formations that hold a range of implications for biopolitical technologies of control.
Writing in the same publication, one of the editors notes
The idea of nature as an aesthetic and normative exteriority appears to offer a safe position of ethico-epistemological privilege from which to condemn various aspects of information-technological modernization. But it is perhaps only by acknowledging that the contradictory consequences of the spread of electronics cannot be easily mapped onto an antagonism of nature versus technology that the idea of network ecologies becomes comprehensible (Zehle 2009: 4).
The non-governable of nature is then produced in the contemporary world as a network effect: this would explain why ecologies and networks are employed as metaphors in systems analysis and environmental science alike. Regionality might suggest a partition of the world between the urban or nega-urban and the preserved and conserved nature park, or at least the gap between lanes on the highway where wildflowers bloom and which in New Zealand is called 'the nature strip'. But it must also evoke divisions, especially the division of labour, a network form which predates and founds digital network logic. The ecology of the poor emerges, as pointed out above, in the interstices of networks: by rail tracks, under the fences of factories, on perilous slopes where gullies carve a path of green into the city. The term 'pristine' which is almost invariably attached to the word 'wilderness' does not recognise the evolutionary genius of organic life,human or otherwise, that proliferates between paving stones and in the shit-piles of the slum. Rodents, insects, amoeba and bacteria do not usually figure in the cartography of the megacities' settlement with natural phenomena, yet they are as integral as urban foxes or the uncanny spectacle of zoo animals.
The emergence instead of 'ungovernable subjectivities' and the consequent need for a biopolitical management of material, energetic and informatic flows which Rossiter points us to, should evoke subjectivities which are no longer purely human. Some of these have been familiar to sociology since its birth: the crowd, the tribe, the family and the factory. In contemporary media formations, corporations constitute actually existing cyborgs comprising complex technical assemblages onto which are plugged, Matrix-like, the human biochips on which they feed. Increasingly, the meta-assemblage which is the megacity requires a third term, the organic life which seeps in, as aesthetic (pets, gardens) , as functional (parks, waterfronts) but also as Nigel Clark suggests as the ungoverned and unwanted weeds, pests and bugs which contaminate the ostensibly clean distinctions between parts (Clark 2000). In a network, the divisions are also media of translation between nodes, human, technical and organic. Smart objects, the internet of things is one response to this problematic explosion of unexpected subjectivities: indeed, a biopolitical recognition that our devices have indeed evolved a life of their own.
In the case of the global logistics industries, the rise of secondary resource flows accompanying the economy of electronic waste is coextensive with the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. I suggest that the relation between these entities constitutes new regional formations that hold a range of implications for biopolitical technologies of control.
Writing in the same publication, one of the editors notes
The idea of nature as an aesthetic and normative exteriority appears to offer a safe position of ethico-epistemological privilege from which to condemn various aspects of information-technological modernization. But it is perhaps only by acknowledging that the contradictory consequences of the spread of electronics cannot be easily mapped onto an antagonism of nature versus technology that the idea of network ecologies becomes comprehensible (Zehle 2009: 4).
The non-governable of nature is then produced in the contemporary world as a network effect: this would explain why ecologies and networks are employed as metaphors in systems analysis and environmental science alike. Regionality might suggest a partition of the world between the urban or nega-urban and the preserved and conserved nature park, or at least the gap between lanes on the highway where wildflowers bloom and which in New Zealand is called 'the nature strip'. But it must also evoke divisions, especially the division of labour, a network form which predates and founds digital network logic. The ecology of the poor emerges, as pointed out above, in the interstices of networks: by rail tracks, under the fences of factories, on perilous slopes where gullies carve a path of green into the city. The term 'pristine' which is almost invariably attached to the word 'wilderness' does not recognise the evolutionary genius of organic life,human or otherwise, that proliferates between paving stones and in the shit-piles of the slum. Rodents, insects, amoeba and bacteria do not usually figure in the cartography of the megacities' settlement with natural phenomena, yet they are as integral as urban foxes or the uncanny spectacle of zoo animals.
The emergence instead of 'ungovernable subjectivities' and the consequent need for a biopolitical management of material, energetic and informatic flows which Rossiter points us to, should evoke subjectivities which are no longer purely human. Some of these have been familiar to sociology since its birth: the crowd, the tribe, the family and the factory. In contemporary media formations, corporations constitute actually existing cyborgs comprising complex technical assemblages onto which are plugged, Matrix-like, the human biochips on which they feed. Increasingly, the meta-assemblage which is the megacity requires a third term, the organic life which seeps in, as aesthetic (pets, gardens) , as functional (parks, waterfronts) but also as Nigel Clark suggests as the ungoverned and unwanted weeds, pests and bugs which contaminate the ostensibly clean distinctions between parts (Clark 2000). In a network, the divisions are also media of translation between nodes, human, technical and organic. Smart objects, the internet of things is one response to this problematic explosion of unexpected subjectivities: indeed, a biopolitical recognition that our devices have indeed evolved a life of their own.
Problems with Bennett's Vibrant Matter
In the actor-network perspective adopted and updated by Jane Bennett, electricity grid failures in megacities – she discusses the Northeastern blackout affecting the Boston-New York and Great Lakes conurbations in August 2003 – can be traced to the chaotic behaviour of electrical flows in complex grids. Like Virilio (2007), she sees the very existence of the power grid as the intimation of its collapse (Bennett 2010: 27), and argues that the energy trading corporation on whose lines the disaster began, FirstEnergy, was not responsible for what happened, suggesting that humans should not be regarded as privileged by their capacity for action apart from 'the order of material nature'. Instead, comparing her attitude to that of FirstEnergy's board, Bennett argues that 'Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice . . . individuals [are] simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects' (Bennet 2010: 28). While undoubtedly naïve claims of causality, and any claim to individualism, are unhelpful in the context of electric power outages, or indeed any network situation, it is equally naïve to omit the interconnection of this network with another, the deregulated energy market of the USA in the 2000s.
It is illuminating to compare the 2003 blackout with another case of megacity outage in the USA. The now shamed Enron corporation had used campaign funds to pressure California legislators to deregulate the state's energy market. Before deregulation, there had been only one serious rolling blackout: from the deregulation of December 200 to its re-regulation in June 2001, there were 38 (Public Citizen 2002). In August that year, Enron share price began to tumble, resulting in its filing for bankruptcy in November. There is no clear connection between the collapses of California's energy market and that of Enron. It is true however that ascribing the collapse of both to human greed, is inadequate. Equally, however, Bennett is correct in saying that the electrical network, the medium through which these crises occurred, provided the affordances necessary to drive them into collapse. The collapse, however, was driven by changing network goals. Missing in Bennett's analysis is the interaction between two systems, the public utility and the market. It is this interaction which created the new network behaviours which caused the crises (Healy and Palepu 2003; see also Fox 2003, Eichenwald 2005)). FirstEnergy, like Enron close to the Bush administration (CEO, H. Peter Burg had a seat on Bush's energy transition team), had quite a record. It owns GPU, the New Jersey generating company which ran Three Mile Island, and in February 2002 had its own Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio shut down at the brink of another nuclear disaster. The investigation into the blackout found FirstEnergy at the heart of the four causes (a term they find suitably problematic) of the disaster: FE's systemic failure to address problems in its network, specifically of voltage levels; its inadequate situational awareness; its failure to manage trees under its powerlines; and persuading its public oversight body not to inspect its systems and practices . While it is difficult to demonstrate that FirstEnergy was shifting power in and out of the region affected by the blackout, as Enron had done in California, the combination of software bugs and a flashover caused by overheating powerlines sparking against untrimmed trees do demonstrate the argument that when share price is the only value, energy companies abandon safe, clean and reliable supply (Bratton 2002).
This is not an example of emergent properties in a chaotic network: it clearly arises when one value – .the provision of light – conflicts with another – the extraction of profit, in the Californian instance not from retail sale but from speculative trading in real-time energy futures, in the North eastern from taking immediate profit even at the expense of the long-term profitability or even feasibility of the operation. These outcomes of clashes betwen service and profiot are even more visible in the developing world. Thus in Lagos under auspices of the World Bank and IMF during the Babangida régime in the 1980s, the national electricity provider was privatised at knock-down prices, enriching the elite while discouraging investment in the service. The absence of public utilities leads to widespread tapping into private electrical lines, resulting in widespread blackouts and frequent fires (Packer 2006: 6-7). According to Francisco Bolaji Abosede, Lagos Commissioner for Town Planning and Urbanisation, 'By 2015 Lagos will be the third largest city in the world but it has less infrastructure than any of the world’s other largest cities' (IRIN 2006). The National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), recently renamed the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), is accused of long-standing corruption. The World Bank has however provided 100 million dollars to aid in its privatisation, despite vigorous opposition from power unions and others. NEPA was also signatory to a contract with Enron which locked it into a guaranteed purchasing agreement that had become unsustainable by 2005. Unions implied that Enron's successor, AES, was not supplying the agreed amounts of power, and the whole contract was embroiled in a legal battle alongside the political batte over splitting NEPA into eleven smaller companies prior to privatisation and deregulation (Hall 2006: 12). As Bennett suggests, such intricate networks are subject to chaotic storms and sudden, violent collapse; but such emergent behaviours cannot be understood apart from the political economy of capital, and the specific ideologies of neo-liberalism that power them
There's a permanent risk that ANT retains Latour's patrician aloofness towards political engagement The full argument is in a piece submitted to the NEP volume of Theory Culture and Society
It is illuminating to compare the 2003 blackout with another case of megacity outage in the USA. The now shamed Enron corporation had used campaign funds to pressure California legislators to deregulate the state's energy market. Before deregulation, there had been only one serious rolling blackout: from the deregulation of December 200 to its re-regulation in June 2001, there were 38 (Public Citizen 2002). In August that year, Enron share price began to tumble, resulting in its filing for bankruptcy in November. There is no clear connection between the collapses of California's energy market and that of Enron. It is true however that ascribing the collapse of both to human greed, is inadequate. Equally, however, Bennett is correct in saying that the electrical network, the medium through which these crises occurred, provided the affordances necessary to drive them into collapse. The collapse, however, was driven by changing network goals. Missing in Bennett's analysis is the interaction between two systems, the public utility and the market. It is this interaction which created the new network behaviours which caused the crises (Healy and Palepu 2003; see also Fox 2003, Eichenwald 2005)). FirstEnergy, like Enron close to the Bush administration (CEO, H. Peter Burg had a seat on Bush's energy transition team), had quite a record. It owns GPU, the New Jersey generating company which ran Three Mile Island, and in February 2002 had its own Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio shut down at the brink of another nuclear disaster. The investigation into the blackout found FirstEnergy at the heart of the four causes (a term they find suitably problematic) of the disaster: FE's systemic failure to address problems in its network, specifically of voltage levels; its inadequate situational awareness; its failure to manage trees under its powerlines; and persuading its public oversight body not to inspect its systems and practices . While it is difficult to demonstrate that FirstEnergy was shifting power in and out of the region affected by the blackout, as Enron had done in California, the combination of software bugs and a flashover caused by overheating powerlines sparking against untrimmed trees do demonstrate the argument that when share price is the only value, energy companies abandon safe, clean and reliable supply (Bratton 2002).
This is not an example of emergent properties in a chaotic network: it clearly arises when one value – .the provision of light – conflicts with another – the extraction of profit, in the Californian instance not from retail sale but from speculative trading in real-time energy futures, in the North eastern from taking immediate profit even at the expense of the long-term profitability or even feasibility of the operation. These outcomes of clashes betwen service and profiot are even more visible in the developing world. Thus in Lagos under auspices of the World Bank and IMF during the Babangida régime in the 1980s, the national electricity provider was privatised at knock-down prices, enriching the elite while discouraging investment in the service. The absence of public utilities leads to widespread tapping into private electrical lines, resulting in widespread blackouts and frequent fires (Packer 2006: 6-7). According to Francisco Bolaji Abosede, Lagos Commissioner for Town Planning and Urbanisation, 'By 2015 Lagos will be the third largest city in the world but it has less infrastructure than any of the world’s other largest cities' (IRIN 2006). The National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), recently renamed the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), is accused of long-standing corruption. The World Bank has however provided 100 million dollars to aid in its privatisation, despite vigorous opposition from power unions and others. NEPA was also signatory to a contract with Enron which locked it into a guaranteed purchasing agreement that had become unsustainable by 2005. Unions implied that Enron's successor, AES, was not supplying the agreed amounts of power, and the whole contract was embroiled in a legal battle alongside the political batte over splitting NEPA into eleven smaller companies prior to privatisation and deregulation (Hall 2006: 12). As Bennett suggests, such intricate networks are subject to chaotic storms and sudden, violent collapse; but such emergent behaviours cannot be understood apart from the political economy of capital, and the specific ideologies of neo-liberalism that power them
There's a permanent risk that ANT retains Latour's patrician aloofness towards political engagement The full argument is in a piece submitted to the NEP volume of Theory Culture and Society
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
"Mouse events in Java"
The phrase threw me entirely. It appeared as a book title or genre: I imagined a community of scholars, perhaps zoologists and ethologists, devoting their lives to transcribing the worlds of small rodents on that exotic Indonesian island beloved of Gertz. Even when I realised that the real object of study was human-computer interface design, specifically scripting mouse-clicks in the computer language Java, the whimsy didn't wholly evaporate. The smile it brought, like so much humour, derived from the mismatch of two discursive universes. It also demonstrates a simple truth: that increasing specialisation leads us away from a common speech towards increasingly fragmented dialects, each associated with an individual discipline, each surrounded by the rituals and enclosures of institutions, and the power of institutional discourses to create and define orders of truth. It didn't help that the institution was not exclusively that of HCI design, but of cultural theory, where translations of Alain Badiou (2006) have endowed the word 'event' with a host of new meanings. One of those concerns the decreasingly likelihood that events will actually occur.
During 2009 and 2010, a number of countries returned either hung parliaments or governments without sufficient mandate to i9ntroduce major change. The joke going round was that the people had spoken but that it would take some time to find out what they'd said. Actually they had said something very clearly: no change. Campaigns based on vilification and fear, on accusations that the other party would do terrible things, produced a state of anxiety where people voted for nothing to happen. In many respects this was the desired outcome of at least some players. There would be no reform to financial markets in the wake of the 2008 crash. It would be extremely difficult to reform medical provision. The question of the event occurs however not only in special states of impasse such as this. It occurs as the question whether it is possible to change at all. It is a truism by now that we can far more easily imagine the extinction of life on Earth than we can a change in capitalist consumerism. Those who do imagine such a change imagine that it must be effected through the economic sticks and carrots of market mechanisms like emission trading schemes and carbon taxes. In place of public debate on how we are supposed to live, they propose no change: only the use of the existing system of markets (or technical innovation) to resolve the current crisis. Politics is in the sense of public debate over values is no longer conducted at all: the management of desire through pubic relations and fiscal instruments has taken the place of discussions concerning what constitutes the good life, and how we are to achieve it. This reduction of political life to population management is what makes the event so rare and, in Badiou's philosophy, so precioous. Yet as the authors of a recent activist text argue, the problem with Badiou's events is that they all seem to be in the past (Papadopoulos et al 2008). The question of new media dynamics, when posed in the historically radical context of media studies, becomes the question "How are we to encourage the creation of events?" How are we to turn the actualities of our lives into the potentialities of our futures? How are we, in fact, to create a future for ourselves that is in any sense worthy of the name 'future', that is, something which is other than a mere continuation of the present?
If we are men and not mice, or if we are humans who are ready to 'become mouse', we may yet find ways to make events occur again -- in complex digital networks like those powered by Java, or in the complex social centres of emergent polities like Indonesia. New meamnings for old in the mouse events in java.
During 2009 and 2010, a number of countries returned either hung parliaments or governments without sufficient mandate to i9ntroduce major change. The joke going round was that the people had spoken but that it would take some time to find out what they'd said. Actually they had said something very clearly: no change. Campaigns based on vilification and fear, on accusations that the other party would do terrible things, produced a state of anxiety where people voted for nothing to happen. In many respects this was the desired outcome of at least some players. There would be no reform to financial markets in the wake of the 2008 crash. It would be extremely difficult to reform medical provision. The question of the event occurs however not only in special states of impasse such as this. It occurs as the question whether it is possible to change at all. It is a truism by now that we can far more easily imagine the extinction of life on Earth than we can a change in capitalist consumerism. Those who do imagine such a change imagine that it must be effected through the economic sticks and carrots of market mechanisms like emission trading schemes and carbon taxes. In place of public debate on how we are supposed to live, they propose no change: only the use of the existing system of markets (or technical innovation) to resolve the current crisis. Politics is in the sense of public debate over values is no longer conducted at all: the management of desire through pubic relations and fiscal instruments has taken the place of discussions concerning what constitutes the good life, and how we are to achieve it. This reduction of political life to population management is what makes the event so rare and, in Badiou's philosophy, so precioous. Yet as the authors of a recent activist text argue, the problem with Badiou's events is that they all seem to be in the past (Papadopoulos et al 2008). The question of new media dynamics, when posed in the historically radical context of media studies, becomes the question "How are we to encourage the creation of events?" How are we to turn the actualities of our lives into the potentialities of our futures? How are we, in fact, to create a future for ourselves that is in any sense worthy of the name 'future', that is, something which is other than a mere continuation of the present?
If we are men and not mice, or if we are humans who are ready to 'become mouse', we may yet find ways to make events occur again -- in complex digital networks like those powered by Java, or in the complex social centres of emergent polities like Indonesia. New meamnings for old in the mouse events in java.
Friday, March 5, 2010
DECE and the cloud
The cloud adds mobility and interactivity to thin client computing, making it more energy and resource efficient to maintain than expensive software and document libraries on personal hard-drives. In theory at least, we should all be able to access a single copy of a book or movie, dramatically reducing the spiralling costs of proliferating, transporting and storing them locally. Even at high bandwidth, streaming is cheaper than downloading, and downloading media-rich files is the biggest drain on net resources.
Unfortunately, the cloud is also open to copyright, and in many respects makes it simpler. The recent DECE initiative shows why. A key problem has been the vast variety of formats and platforms on which consumers want to access movies, games, TV, sports and music, from tiny mobile phone screens to 1280 domestic high-definition and 3D. DECE, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, provides a solution. With a membership including Adobe, Microsoft, Comcast, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, Netflix, Panasonic, Paramount, Sony, and \Warner Bros. alongside most of the major chip, home entertainment and mobile phone manufacturers, DECE is a one-stop shop for all formats. Servers will deliver streaming video in the appropriate codecs for any platform for a single license payment. Not quite a monopoly – Disney is holding out for its own KeyChest alternative, possibly in alliance with Apple (whose Steve Jobs is also Disney's largest shareholder thanks to his involvement in Pixar) – DECE removes the risks associated with ownership of hardcopies, entrenching the limitation on rights purchasers of video have compared to other goods. It also provides tracking of users' viewing habits for commercial onselling. As long as we remain entrenched in the individualist ethos of the old disciplinary capital, we will be concerned with privacy; only when we learn to mistrust the database economy of the network will we learn to question the crowdsourcing that DECE, in this sense like Google, commercialises.
The likely upshot? DECE is an attempt to counter an unusual phenomenon in file-sharing: even when free downloads like Radiohead's In Rainbows is available, interactors still prefer to use Limewire and BitTorrent. Free still outsells cheap, and anonymous still outbids tracked. Just as the IPv6 transition threatens the universal internet, so the cloud, while offering the platform capable of delivering a universal library, is likely to split the internet between legitimate and illegitimate distribution. Meanwhile the sheer volatility of the hardware market, reluctance to pay twice for the same product (the vinyl I bought in 1980), anger at badly designed DRM restrictions (like DVD regional formatting and smartphones tied to unpopular service suppliers), the pleasures of sharing among peers, and the threat of legislation allowing searches of hard discs will lead more people to store more media-rich files on more clouds. Result: increased storage and transmission demands, lower efficiency, more format wars and hacker escalations. Ideally the cloud should lead to greater efficiency, but in conditions of the struggle between market and network, it will not. In the process it may terminally damage the future of the internet.
Unfortunately, the cloud is also open to copyright, and in many respects makes it simpler. The recent DECE initiative shows why. A key problem has been the vast variety of formats and platforms on which consumers want to access movies, games, TV, sports and music, from tiny mobile phone screens to 1280 domestic high-definition and 3D. DECE, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, provides a solution. With a membership including Adobe, Microsoft, Comcast, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, Netflix, Panasonic, Paramount, Sony, and \Warner Bros. alongside most of the major chip, home entertainment and mobile phone manufacturers, DECE is a one-stop shop for all formats. Servers will deliver streaming video in the appropriate codecs for any platform for a single license payment. Not quite a monopoly – Disney is holding out for its own KeyChest alternative, possibly in alliance with Apple (whose Steve Jobs is also Disney's largest shareholder thanks to his involvement in Pixar) – DECE removes the risks associated with ownership of hardcopies, entrenching the limitation on rights purchasers of video have compared to other goods. It also provides tracking of users' viewing habits for commercial onselling. As long as we remain entrenched in the individualist ethos of the old disciplinary capital, we will be concerned with privacy; only when we learn to mistrust the database economy of the network will we learn to question the crowdsourcing that DECE, in this sense like Google, commercialises.
The likely upshot? DECE is an attempt to counter an unusual phenomenon in file-sharing: even when free downloads like Radiohead's In Rainbows is available, interactors still prefer to use Limewire and BitTorrent. Free still outsells cheap, and anonymous still outbids tracked. Just as the IPv6 transition threatens the universal internet, so the cloud, while offering the platform capable of delivering a universal library, is likely to split the internet between legitimate and illegitimate distribution. Meanwhile the sheer volatility of the hardware market, reluctance to pay twice for the same product (the vinyl I bought in 1980), anger at badly designed DRM restrictions (like DVD regional formatting and smartphones tied to unpopular service suppliers), the pleasures of sharing among peers, and the threat of legislation allowing searches of hard discs will lead more people to store more media-rich files on more clouds. Result: increased storage and transmission demands, lower efficiency, more format wars and hacker escalations. Ideally the cloud should lead to greater efficiency, but in conditions of the struggle between market and network, it will not. In the process it may terminally damage the future of the internet.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
The Old and the New
Apple launch the iPad with fanfared agreements with publishers, and a buzz as to whether this will be the saving of the news and magazine trades. And they sign up with the DECE Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, designed to harmonise digital rights management across multiplatform downloads using cloud servers. Old school IP corporate business. Google meanwhile use advertising revenue to support expensive, loss-making ventures like Books and YouTube so they can give away services in return for information. New school P2P network business.
January 2010: new decade in an old century
An essay in Periodisation
Before all this began, cutting the long story short. there was the Sovereign, the alphabet and the manuscript.
In the era of the Nation, there was printing, the republic, discipline and capital version 1. In the era of the Market, photomechanical and broadcast media shared their diagram with representational democracy, biopolitical management of populations, and the globalisation of capital version 2. In the era of the network which is coming (and in many respects already here), telecommunications align with government by control (Deleuze) or protocol (Galloway). But we do not yet know what political or which economic forms are emerging. The choices would appear to be between Sassen's TAR (territory-authority-rights) model, and Hardt and Negri's multitude as polity, and Bauwens' peer-to-peer or a harder and deeper capital as economy.
Form of government, principle of power, and mode of economy are relatively autonomous, in the sense that they evolve according to their internal logics, but informed by relations with the other spheres. The media forms are slightly different, autonomous but at the same time integral to both the internal functioning of each sphere and the relations between them.
The ethics of "Don't be Evil"
In the matter of Google vs China, three players meet: Nation, Market and State. China sees the market as servant of the nation. The market sees nations as infrastructure, providing the legal and physical systems it needs to run. The network sees the market as a way of getting money to secure the free flow of information. Nations want to protect their people against these flows; markets want to control them. Networks want to extend the logic of "free" from free-from-worry (national goal) and free-to-compete (market goal) to free as in borderless and cashless: free as in flow, free as in beer.
Google doesn't embrace free beer, even though it dispenses it. It wants to be innocent.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Google in China
The gmail hack on dissidents is a sideshow. So is the censorhsip row.
The major story is the Aurora hack. Using a hole in Internet explorer (and possibly a similar one in Adobe Reader), the hackers, almost certainly guns for hire (maybe volunteers, probably operating out of China via taiwanese servers, and perhaps but still unproven working for an agency not a million miles from government), got into
Google
Symantec (online security)
Juniper (routers and hardware security)
Rackspace (cloud computing -- tho seems to have been only used as a staging post, perhaps)
Adobe (who blogged that they'd been raided, admitted comprommised files, but may possibly have been of concern as a vehicle for the attack rather than a victim)
Dow Chemical
Northrop Grumman
And up to a total of 34, most of whom are staying quiet, very probably because a lot of them are defense contractors and security specialists.
US appointed a new 'cyber czar' recently: no sign of action - but in the House, Rep C Smith (Rep) is trying to reinvigorate the Global Online Freedom Act - look out for a new definition of 'axis of evil', this time based on property rights to information -- there's going to be big fallout in governance, esp now ICANN is no longer a US agency - the hack also used a DNS exploit which is ICANN's domain. China has been pushing for an end to the Internet Governance Forum and a move back to the national representation offered by the ITU. Now the US may well add its voice - in an ironic alliance.
Meanwhile, Google, entirely vulnerable as a corporation heading into the cloud big time, has managed a) to get the great press about standing up to censorship and defending human rights b) made Microsoft carry the can for the Aurora hack just when they are about to launch a rival cloud Docs application and c) divert attention from the fact that they just got stiffed in the biggest industrial espionage exploit of recent times.
The major story is the Aurora hack. Using a hole in Internet explorer (and possibly a similar one in Adobe Reader), the hackers, almost certainly guns for hire (maybe volunteers, probably operating out of China via taiwanese servers, and perhaps but still unproven working for an agency not a million miles from government), got into
Symantec (online security)
Juniper (routers and hardware security)
Rackspace (cloud computing -- tho seems to have been only used as a staging post, perhaps)
Adobe (who blogged that they'd been raided, admitted comprommised files, but may possibly have been of concern as a vehicle for the attack rather than a victim)
Dow Chemical
Northrop Grumman
And up to a total of 34, most of whom are staying quiet, very probably because a lot of them are defense contractors and security specialists.
US appointed a new 'cyber czar' recently: no sign of action - but in the House, Rep C Smith (Rep) is trying to reinvigorate the Global Online Freedom Act - look out for a new definition of 'axis of evil', this time based on property rights to information -- there's going to be big fallout in governance, esp now ICANN is no longer a US agency - the hack also used a DNS exploit which is ICANN's domain. China has been pushing for an end to the Internet Governance Forum and a move back to the national representation offered by the ITU. Now the US may well add its voice - in an ironic alliance.
Meanwhile, Google, entirely vulnerable as a corporation heading into the cloud big time, has managed a) to get the great press about standing up to censorship and defending human rights b) made Microsoft carry the can for the Aurora hack just when they are about to launch a rival cloud Docs application and c) divert attention from the fact that they just got stiffed in the biggest industrial espionage exploit of recent times.
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