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It is now a generally accepted position in social science that artefacts have politics [1]. However, although this might seem obvious, we cannot forget that artefacts are inanimate, and whatever politics they have are there because they have been encoded into them by their designers and users. It seems fair to state, then, that technologies may take different forms depending on the assumptions and motivations which drove their creation.
The aim of this paper is to explore a particular conception of democracy; one that emphasises individual activism aimed at building what have been called radical infrastructures. It identifies certain points, particularly in the 1970s, at which the emerging Internet absorbed relatively democratic values, which remain in place today. However, I also suggest that despite these democratic moments, the IT community as a whole has not generally helped with the construction of radical infrastructures. I therefore explore why this might be before offering some very tentative solutions (here see also this month's other feature essay and the links page.
For a long period, ending roughly in the 1960s, democratic theory adopted a ‘top-down’ approach, epitomised by theorists such as Michels and Schumpeter [2]. Their interest lay with large and essentially stable state institutions, self-perpetuating elites, and a highly limited definition of participation which effectively reduced legitimate political action to the vote. Other political activities, such as social movements, were either ignored or considered interruptions into the otherwise stable world of states and other large bureaucratic organisations which were the de facto solution to the problem of political organisation.
In the 1960s, however, these assumptions were directly challenged via both theory and practice. These new politics were based around processes of free and fair deliberation, active citizenship, and a broad-ranging critique of existing values. The moral cores of democracy -— autonomy and self-motivated participation -- were reasserted through social movements and the small, micropolitical groups and organisations of which they were constituted [3]. The object of interest was no longer what political actors ought to be doing to maintain the stability of large bureaucratic organisations, but what they were actually doing to challenge them through forming their own decision-making fora. [Editor's note: for more detail on the interrelated ideas of autonomy and authority see this month's supplementary essay.]
Like sex, each generation thinks it has discovered protest and dissent for itself. But democracy has a 2,500-year history, which throughout features grass-roots, ‘popular’ movements directly challenging entrenched elites and ways of thinking about organisation and institutionalised power. In ancient Greece, 17th century England (with the Diggers and Quakers) 1970s Poland (Solidarity) and dozens of other locations and times, there have been 'outbreaks of democracy’ within which new values have been asserted, self-rule practised, and challenges posed. The very act of spontaneously organising in decentralised ways to promote autonomy is a challenge to institutionalised organisational forms. This is one reason why these institutions treat democratic outbreaks with such seriousness.
Students of democracy should also note that it is less the origin of the critique which determines its impact than the means by which it is perpetuated. Acting politically does not involve the formation of an opinion, stance or critique as much as it involves sharing it and motivating others through communication and the formation of networks. These matter strongly, as people are more likely to take political action if they have access to such networks. Acting democratically is (an) experience in both senses of the word: one can learn where pressure is best applied, and in what ways, to help achieve given ends. Such knowledge is valuable when faced with a sense of frustration, or even futility, that are understandable when up against huge bureaucratic/legalistic structures which provoked anger in the first place. Social networks constitute reservoirs of social and political capital on which groups can draw in order to act democratically. [4].
External and internal pressures can serve to debilitate such outbreaks, however. States and other institutional locations for power resort to a variety of strategies from simply ignoring outbreaks, denying them resources and allowing them to peter out, through buying off supporters or activists, up to and including legislative or violent repression. An analogy is with flood defence. The destructive power of the flood cannot simply be made to vanish, but barriers can be built to block the single, initial, direct assault, and through further engineering, allow it to reduce to a trickle through many small channels. Just as significant, however, are internal pressures. When and if their initial energy begins to fade, there may be a re-emergence of old power structures which were dampened in the outbreak’s formation. Engaging with institutionalised power may require the outbreak to find delegates, spokespersons and ‘media stars’. If these interlocutors’ activities are not themselves democratically validated, conflicts may divide the movement. Groups which believed themselves free of hierarchy may realise that it remains, now based on one’s media profile, skills or access to funds [5]. They may crystallise into less anarchic, more formalised organisational structures, or their protests are aped but watered down by mainstream organisations or politicians.
Some have suggested that these problems stem from the inevitability of hierarchy and oligarchy [6]. I think that a more useful analysis of these tendencies is that of Antonio Gramsci, with his idea of hegemony [7]. Gramsci observed that institutionalised power maintained itself not only through direct control but also through their influence over interlocking systems of culture, employment, the media, etcetera. These helped manufacture consent to the existing order, and all worked to draw off the energy of democratic outbreaks. Gramsci suggested that constructing an alternative network which he called a counterhegemony was therefore a necessary element of social change. Through this broad network, a ‘subordinate culture’ may gradually strengthen itself and spread its sphere of influence until it becomes the ‘common sense’ of the culture. Landry et al [8] call such a network a radical infrastructure.
A radical infrastructure could be considered one practical step on the way to a counterhegemony. In the first place it would act as a supplier of political resources such as financial support, technical expertise and so on, reducing the need to engage directly with the hegemonic ‘system’ to acquire these, as that invariably increases the likelihood of the co-option or corruption of the original democratic ideals. However, the best radical infrastructures also serve to disseminate new cultural norms. They lead by example as well as being sources of knowledge and expertise. They do not only offer services, but publicise their beliefs, critiques and organisational forms. The ‘fear’ of the democratic outbreak is pervasive, and not only amongst those threatened by it. Unfamiliarity with autonomous action is often exploited to cast doubt on the desirability of democracy. But participation in an outbreak, frustrating though it may be, is also empowering and educational. By bringing people into contact with them, a radical infrastructure makes autonomy and alternative organisational forms viable possibilities, not idealistic dreams.
This might seem a utopian approach to politics. However Landry et al point out that some elements of a radical infrastructure are quite well developed: alternative media and publishing, for instance [9]. But others are not, such as networks supplying legal expertise or funding. I suggest later that from the late 1960s radical infrastructures also struggled to encompass IT expertise. Nevertheless, the possibility and potential benefits of radical infrastructures are the first important insights to be drawn here. Democracy may emerge spontaneously; but it requires a sympathetic environment to perpetuate and spread. A radical infrastructure may constitute a structural or material environment from which tangible and intangible resources can be drawn in order that democratic outbreaks can be sustained.
Though ‘IT’ and ‘the Internet’ are not synonymous, there is some justification for treating the Internet as the most significant and, for our purposes, representative application of IT. One problem faced by early computing scientists (1950s-1960s) was the duplication of work, as there had developed a multitude of different systems with ‘one-of-a-kind’ software programs akin to ‘original works of art’ [10]. Demands on computing resources were increasing rapidly and the continued isolation of systems was not sustainable. Therefore, without some form of networking, IT could not have continued to evolve.
When seeking to link disparate entities, solutions tend to converge towards one of two poles. The first is to create a central body in which authority is invested. Backed up by legal, financial or moral sanctions and possibly the use of force, this executive body or steering committee imposes particular processes and standards to which all the network’s nodes have to conform. Contrast this with the more dynamic, less centralised solution, where no such core is present (or created) and different individuals, organisations or systems try and reach consensus over the methods by which they will interact in an atmosphere of free and fair deliberation and uncoerced agreement. Networking is both a technical and sociopolitical activity. Linking computers is habitually considered a technical problem, but one must still ask, ‘who has access to the network?’ ‘What can people do when they have access?’ ‘Who makes policy decisions around the location and design of interfaces, and who defines valid usages of the network?’ ‘Who participated in these decisions?’ All the answers can be judged against democratic credentials.
Of course, one may consider the 'need' to continue the growth of IT as representative of its interconnections with capitalism and centralised bureaucracy, and there is a great deal of evidence to support this view. Like all technologies, IT was primarily designed not to challenge existing institutional structures but to preserve them [11]. Few authors suggest that IT achieved its dominant position as a result of social movements and/or democratic change. Indeed IT is often applied in the sort of co-option and repression of democratic movements mentioned above, with surveillance being perhaps the most obvious example. More indirectly, but certainly more significantly, IT preserves and enhances the conditions under which capital (more precisely, rapidly-moving, hard-to-control ‘venture capital’) strengthens its domination over modern life. Rather than being a ‘new frontier’, the ‘space’ opened up by IT is used primarily to lubricate global capital flows [12]. Even where pockets of ‘cyberspace’ appear democratic, IT simultaneously opens up the possibility of their colonisation. Barlow observes how the large institutions which claim ‘hegemony’ over this virtual sphere will use ‘historically familiar’ tactics in order to assert this claim, securing the resources of the sphere into their possession, establishing tariffs and defining cyberculture ‘strictly in terms of economy’ [13]. It is doubtful that these processes will be of much benefit to the autonomous individuals of the future.
Institutionalised locations for power sometimes acknowledge their deleterious effects such as unemployment, material poverty, informational poverty, patriarchy or environmental crisis. When solutions are tried, however, they are often centralised technical fixes. Examples include: introducing ‘electronic voting’ to combat ‘apathy’, or Newt Gingrich’s crass proposal to give ‘laptops to the unemployed of America’ (International Herald Tribune, Jan. 7/8 1995: p. 3). It seems that for institutionalised power, IT’s main benefit is its potential to remove unpredictable and diverse ‘human factors’ and impose standardised fixes [14]. However, such solutions can be, and have been, resisted. In such resistance we can see alternative methods of coping with diversity. Here diversity is not repressed (directly, or through an implicit belief that the centralised, standardised solution has to be the best or most efficient one) but embraced and indeed used as the basis for the chosen technical solution.
Internet pioneers faced one such moment in the early 1980s when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) sought to impose standards known as OSI upon the fledgling network. As Hafner and Lyon (1996: p.247) say: ‘[o]n the OSI side stood entrenched bureaucracy, with a strong we-know-best attitude…’. [15]. Despite backing from governments in both America and Europe the TCP/IP protocol prevailed. TCP/IP had been developed in a more collaborative fashion, via the Request for Comments (RFC) system. RFC was a semi-formal manifestation of the collaborative decision-making model. Individuals proposed protocols, software, systems and other solutions to particular problems. Via e-mail or Usenet newsgroups, any interested party was then free to criticise, augment or otherwise comment upon the proposal. In contrast, OSI was considered an untried, abstract design dreamt up by what the Net community considered an exclusionary group of bureaucrats who lacked genuine experience with the Net. TCP/IP had the advantage of incumbency, with users having both experience of it and a sense of ownership of it. As one (unnamed) scientist said, ‘Standards should be discovered, not decreed’ [16].
RFC was also used in defining the later set of protocols for the WWW and the related domain name system. After contributors had agreed on the structure and names of ‘top-level’ domains such as .com or .org, the assignment of domain names was turned over to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Berners-Lee [17] observes that this ‘organisation’ was basically one man, the late Jon Postel. This may seem undemocratic, but Berners-Lee is not the only one to draw attention to Postel’s benevolence here, and resistance to the commercialisation of the system. It was only after Postel’s death that IANA was privatised and a free market in domain names was allowed to emerge. Political theory has never been comfortable with the ‘benign dictatorship’ as an organisational solution, but perhaps Postel was close to being such. Nevertheless he did not act alone, but within the overall moral sensibility of a community which at the time was resistant to commercial exploitation of the Internet.
The WWW too arose as one man’s vision. But Tim Berners-Lee developed it within a dynamic environment containing multiple beliefs and disparate systems: CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Physics. To get his creation accepted and used Berners-Lee had to acommodate the needs of others, rather than impose standards upon them. In fact, Berners-Lee explicitly observes that CERN’s organisational form (a social network) influenced his solution to a technical networking problem [18]. As the WWW spread exponentially, Berners-Lee then helped create the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to oversee it and administer standards. This was also viewed as not a dictatorial body but ‘a place for people to come and reach consensus’ [19].
The open model of decision-making embraces different approaches and opinions rather than treating them as problems in need of a technical fix or centrally imposed standards. With Linux, the open source operating system, users are treated as ‘co-developers’ and testers of innovations. Coding solutions to particular problems are still created by individuals; it is very difficult for groups as a whole to be creative and to develop solutions from scratch. But these spontaneous moments of creative innovation will, if tested and approved, be perpetuated within the Linux community as a whole.
None of the above events or models should be considered uncritically and the following section will describe problems with some. But they do suggest that some moments in the development of IT and the Internet (on which IT depends for its dominant position) could be judged favourably against democratic principles. Even a crude understanding of democracy should suggest that the W3C is a more democratic way to shape the WWW than, say, allowing Microsoft to do so (directly or by default). Or that the RFC model is closer to democratic software creation than a system of patents granted only to large companies which can afford them. Yet at the same time it is difficult to see, in the above events, any direct contributions to a radical infrastructure? I suggest it is because of the absence of such contributions that the seeds planted by these relatively democratic moments have proven difficult to cultivate.
To state that there were no links between Internet pioneers and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s is to oversimplify matters. It also does an injustice to men such as Jon Postel, or Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (designers of the operating system UNIX). Nevertheless, despite some postings to the Human-Nets discussion group in the 1970s advocating political action to expand the Net’s openness and accessibility, there was little outright political activism on the developing network. (References from the CYHIST archives at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/cyhist.html.) The democratic moments mentioned above remained relatively exclusive, taking place not within countercultural movements or actual outbreaks of democracy, but in computer labs and research symposia, inaccessible to the ‘general public’. To an extent, the ‘hacker’ culture compensated for this, but this remained a rather individualised world, with a sense that hacking took place merely for the fun of it—or for profit—rather than to some political end. In any case this was a mainly US phenomenon. In Europe, the IT subculture made almost no inroads into the radical infrastructures which existed at the time. Even when popular political ‘manuals’ of the period were sympathetic towards technology, IT’s impact (for good or bad) was not specifically mentioned [20]. Significant decisions were being taken to shape the current form of IT and the Net as early as the mid-1960s. Why were they considered of little import by activism and political analysis?
There are several possible reasons. First, computers were (and remain) expensive to acquire and demand non-intuitive skills from users. These skills are transient, requiring frequent updates to cope with new hardware or software. Radical groups would be less likely to have the time or funds to repeatedly invest in equipment and skills and especially in IT’s earlier days, people with such skills were in high demand from business. Landry et al note how the radical sector is often used as an ‘…unpaid “Research and Development” department for the major commercial companies—who then siphon off the “best”, thus continually draining the sector of those elements which could otherwise provide the financial return which would strengthen its own development.’ [21].
Absorption of key personnel from democratic outbreaks, whether because of skills or a high media profile, is common. This can also happen if and when the ‘outbreak’ achieves some kind of political or commercial success. Linux, mentioned earlier as an example of democratic action, teeters on the edge of co-option. Partly, this is due to its impressive growth; a system adopted by large, bureaucratic organisations the size of the government of München, Germany is a commercial force to be reckoned with. But there are other reasons. An interview with the originator of Linux, Linus Torvalds (Wired Nov. 2003) leaves one in little doubt that he views Linux not as an element in a radical infrastructure, but a direct competitor to Microsoft, albeit with a different approach to systems development. It may seem idealistic, even dictatorial, to state that the Linux community should simply reject commercialisation. If the history of democracy suggests anything it is that such pressures are almost inevitable. Nevertheless if the ‘open source’ model of software development (whether with Linux as a standard-bearer, or some other system) disappears altogether, then an important aspect of democracy may disappear along with it —- the ability of the users of a network or system to collaborate on an egalitarian basis in its construction.
The second potential reason for the lack of a radical IT infrastructure is a history of mistrust of or disdain for IT. Radical politics has often identified technology with control or oppression and IT is no different [22]. US Government involvement in the early Internet did not help. For example, Hafner and Lyon [23] mention the public outcry in 1975 when it was suggested that ARPANET had been used to store files on US anti-war activists in defiance of agreements to destroy them. Although the accusation was false, it did not dispel Orwellian fears of the early Internet. As mentioned, the systems were obscure. Any group or network may close up behind boundaries based not on ideology but obscuring jargon, social or academic credentials and qualifications. Rather than productively contributing to a network, the subculture may constitute a clique, a block on the transfer of information or skills. The IT community cannot avoid such criticisms.
Computing technology has become both more affordable and accessible in the last twenty years. But I do not believe that these developments have removed the third and last suggested reason why IT and activism struggled to connect. That is the prevalent, but false, belief that with the Internet a public space has been created. The following [24] displays some of the confusions here:
‘…although the internet has been viewed as a public space, [as] for much of the time it was funded and controlled by government, university and research entities, it was actually in effect a private network of networks with public aspirations and public-good characteristics. Until the mid-1990s, the general, non-technically literate public was not involved in policy-making about the internet and the internet itself, for all its public significance and use, did not feature in public debate on communications policy as an important infrastructure alongside other media. Before this time, the public had a latent stake in the internet, but in reality much decision-making on the internet took place in specialized forums, albeit in reasonably democratic, decentralized and innovative ways.’
Goggin correctly notes that Internet-related decision making was exclusive at the same time as being democratic, on its own terms. But it is not the case that something’s being ‘funded and controlled by government, university and research entities’ constitutes the creation of ‘public’ space. And what happened in the mid-1990s to make Goggin suggest that at that time the ‘non-technically literate public’ became involved in IT policy-making? Increased access to the technology is not the same as increased access to decisions taken about the use of that technology.
Habermas’s ‘public sphere’ [25] is often cited here but unfortunately it is rare to see proper discussion of Habermas’s central thesis. Precisely because of the activities of centralised, bureaucratic state/corporate institutions, the public sphere is under threat as a place where the activities of such organisations can be subjected to public scrutiny. Governments do have policies to improve ‘access’ to the technologies and products of the information age . But thinking only in terms of ‘access’ will lead IT’s development in ways akin to television’s. Few now suggest that TV retains real potential to democratise. Despite near-universal access TV has become a means by which information, decided upon by others and usually with commercial intent, is pumped indiscriminately into homes. Governments may publish information online, but this is far from constituting an improvement in their ‘democratic’ credentials as this is the same sort of information that might once have been supplied to public and university libraries for free. Even if fees are not directly levied, one still needs access to the expensive consumer good that is the computer to see the information (see Roszak 1994: chapter 9). Observing that an increasing proportion of the population has home Internet access misses the point; the Internet does not represent an expansion of the public information sphere, but its privatisation. [26]
We have already suggested that spontaneous communication, education and organisation at the grass-roots level is threatening to institutionalised power. Why then should government or business have an interest in maintaining the Internet as a space where such activities freely occur? Exerting control over the Net is difficult for such organisations, true—but not impossible, as the recent arrest of webmaster Sherman Austin demonstrates (http://www.hipforums.com/thread-2-118743.html).
Al Gore was more responsible than any other politician for popularising the Internet after becoming US Vice-President. In a speech to the International Telecommunications Union (http://clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/telunion.html) he suggested that the ‘Global Information Infrastructure’ would ‘spread participatory democracy’ by allowing universal access to relevant information. It would also add to world economic growth through providing new commercial opportunities. The latter has occurred: we still await the former. Reasons why may lie in Gore’s suggestion that this new sphere be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Familiarity with the history of ‘free radio’ movements in the US suggests that the FCC’s remit is to ‘silence all the small voices’ to restore ‘order to what they called ‘chaos of the airwaves’ [27]. McChesney [28] is in little doubt that the FCC is merely the tip of an ingrained will-to-control under which genuine ‘free speech’ struggles to survive:
‘The extent to which there is non-elite participation into communication policymaking may be a barometer for the level of democracy in a society. As a rule of thumb, if certain forces thoroughly dominate a society’s political economy they will thoroughly dominate its communication system, and the fundamental questions of how the communication system should be organized and for what purposes are not even subject to debate.’
I believe that quote succinctly summarises this paper's key arguments. To what extent is there genuine, grass-roots participation in the construction of computer networks? Democrats should be fully aware of the long series of compromises and outright battles they will face if and when commercial and bureaucratic interests are permitted ‘free and equal’ access to any network [29] and decisions which underpin the construction of that network. Familiarity with democratic theory sheds light on how institutions like these innately work against environments where genuinely autonomous, activist democracy can be practiced. Grass-roots participation in communications networks is never something granted ‘from above’ by bureaucratic institutions, and it is naïve to imagine that with the Internet this no longer applies.
These conclusions strengthen the case for a radical infrastructure to be built alongside mainstream networks. Very briefly, I now discuss ways in which IT could be accommodated within such an infrastructure. These should be read in conjunction with Winstanley's more detailed suggestions (see this month's other feature essay) and this month's links page.
The key role of radical infrastructures is to provide resources. These resources may be tangible, and supplied directly: money being the most obvious (credit unions are important institutions here). The most obvious tangible IT resource is hardware. The extremely rapid turnover of hardware is both an environmental problem in its own right, and a social scandal; although it is true that most schools in the UK now have access to computer hardware there are many other groups in need of it which cannot afford it and/or lack the technical skills to set up a system or network. (These problems are even more pronounced at the global scale.) Recycling old computers; setting up LANs; installing alternative operating systems; enhancing open source software; and creating accessible web sites and other such ICT skills; all can be drawn from a radical IT infrastructure.
Networks accentuate social and political capital precisely because it is often impractical for individuals or organisations to possess all the technical skills required for effective political action. Nevertheless, a balance must be found between this aspect of networks (the direct supply of resources) and the more indirect, but equally important educational benefits of radical infrastructures. For Gramsci, the whole of society was a "school" [30]. Jordan also notes that in online spheres, expertise is a form of power [31]. Supplying one's expertise to another organisation or group is one thing: but actively sharing that expertise is even better. This way, power is diffused. Information is a remarkable form of resource in that one can give all that one owns to someone else, yet retain full access to it. IT is such a fast-moving field that work done in the summer (say, on a web site) will more than likely need updating before the year is out. If all that the activist has done is done the work but kept the skills to him/herself, this is of little benefit. Far better is to teach the beneficiaries learnt the skills required to make updates and revisions themselves.
Activists should recognise the crossover between computer networks and social networks. Existing social networks, based on a distributed, weblike structure, will be strengthened the more there are similar (collaboratively-constructed) technological networks intertwined with them; and vice versa.
Anyone who has contributed code to the Linux kernel, or collaboratively constructed a Usenet newsgroup, or even written their own web site in HTML, has been acting in democratic ways. These may seem very minor examples of ‘activism’, but activism they remain. It is by drawing connections between these small autonomous moments and the deeper political issues such as increasing corporate control over software (which will only be exacerbated by the full commercialisation of Linux) or government violations of privacy through the monitoring of web browsing that public awareness of IT as a political issue may grow. We did not see protest against, say, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill at the same level as those against the Criminal Justice Bill in the early 1990s, but that is not to say that movements may not arise against similar legislation in the future. It is when connections are drawn between disparate groups—making connections beyond those viewpoints that one has become familiar with—that politics spreads, posing challenges to the justificatory discourses of elites.
What is therefore needed in both theory and practice is the rejection of remnant philosophies or practice which isolate IT from other political concerns. IT must not be ignored by activism because it is obscure, difficult or associated with bureaucracy. Similarly, the IT-literate wing of activism (the free software movement, for instance) cannot expect its goals to be achieved (or sustained) if it fails to connect with other activists. Nor can academic analysis of IT continue to ignore political theory.
Some limitations of this paper must be acknowledged. ‘IT community’ and ‘Net community’ have been used here in a rather cavalier fashion. Space also precludes a discussion of ontological foundations for linking the ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’ worlds—and their politics—through the network model (here see the March 2004 issue of Tangentium). Finally there is a lack of research into the emergence of IT and the Internet as political events. Histories such as Hafner and Lyon’s are useful, but technical. More detail here would strengthen this paper’s conclusions.
The IT/democracy relationship is rarely reduced to their shared foundation in the network. There are many potential organisational solutions to (technical and social) problems. One can distribute nodes into a weblike structure, or centralise; allow for and encourage diversity, or try and remove or repress it; facilitate a consensus involving the maximum number of participants, or impose a decision/solution decided upon in private. In each case, the first option is more democratic. From the participants’ perspective, democracy is not a catch-all term, often applied inappropriately when describing large bureaucratic, centralised organisations. It is a process, a lived experience, that can be judged against certain standards.
The ‘decentralised’ nature of the Web is not often recognised for what it is—a consequence of prior decisions. Many decisions taken by IT and Internet pioneers were democratic. For that, they deserve credit: they may easily have developed other, non-democratic solutions for the problems they faced. But these moments were not genuine ‘outbreaks’ of democracy. For various reasons (lack of funds and skills; disdain or mistrust of the technology; and a false hope that governments had a policy interest in maintaining the Net as a democratic space), they failed to expand from the relatively closed, technical community into a wider radical infrastructure. Net pioneers may have adhered to the moral foundations of democracy as represented by the principle of preservation. But the perpetuation of democratic outbreaks requires not only moral support but tangible aid in the form of funds, skill-sharing, alternative economic structures and so on: in short, a radical infrastructure. Criticising this approach by calculating the investment of time, money and energy which building such an infrastructure would require is a moot point. The history of democratic outbreaks suggests that investments made here are far more likely to repay in the long run than efforts directed against existing infrastructures which, by definition, are efficient ‘flood defences’ designed to drain away concerted movements for change.
1. Winner, L. (1985) "Do artefacts have politics?" in Mackenzie, D. and Wajcman, J., eds., The social shaping of technology, Open University Press, Buckingham.
2. Michels, R. (1962) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, London: Macmillan. Schumpeter, J. A. (1943) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London: Allen & Unwin.
3. Pateman, C. (1970) Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also Jane Mansbridge's article "Does Participation make better citizens?" http://www.civnet.org/journal/issue3/cmjmans.htm
4. Diani, M. (1995) Green Networks: A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective action in the information age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. See Jo Freeman's influential essay, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html
6. Michels, Political Parties.
7. Gramsci, A. (1971) Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart: see also Adamson, W. L. (1980) Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press. Also the Gramsci links page at http://www.victoryiscertain.com/gramsci/
8. Landry, C., Morley, D., Southwood, R. and Wright, P. (1985) What a Way to Run a Railrod: An Analysis of Radical Failure, London: Comedia.
9. Landry et al, pp. 97-8. A good web-based example of this is http://www.indymedia.org.uk.
10. Hafner, K. and Lyon, M. (1996) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The origins of the Internet, New York: Touchstone, pp. 43-4.
11. R. Sharpe, quoted in Webster, F. (2002), Theories of the Information Society, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, p. 139.
12. Webster, op cit, chapter 4: Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity.
13. Barlow, J. P. (1995), "Coming into the Country" http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/complete_acm_columns.html.
14. Capel, R. (1992) "Social Histories of Computer Education: Missed Opportunities?" in J. Beynon and H. Mackay (eds) Technological Literacy and the Curriculum, London: Falmer Press, pp. 57-8.
15. Hafner and Lyon, op cit., pp. 247-9.
16. Hafner and Lyon, op cit., p. 255.
17. Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web, London: Sage, p. 137.
18. Berners-Lee, op cit., pp. 8-10.
19. Berners-Lee, op cit., p. 105.
20. Examples being Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered, London: Vintage: Pirsig, R. (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Value, London: Vintage: The Ecologist (1972) A Blueprint for Survival, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
21. Landry et al, op cit., p. 97.
22. for example, Barker, J. and Downing, H. (1985) "Word processing and the transformation of patriarchal relations of control in the office", in D. Mackenzie and J. Wajcman (eds) The Social Shaping of Technology, Buckingham: Open University Press.
23. Hafner and Lyon, op cit., p. 231.
24. Goggin, G. (2000) "Pay Per Browse? The Web’s Commercial Futures", in D. Gauntlett (ed.) web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age, London: Arnold, pp. 110.
25. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
26. See Webster, op cit., chapter 7: Roszak, T. (1994) The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence and the True Art of Thinking, 2nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, chapter 9.
27. Dunifer, S. (1998) "Free Speech: A Fable", in R. Sakolsky and S. Dunifer (eds): Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook, Edinburgh: AK Press, pp. 1-5.
28. McChesney, R. (1998) "The Political Economy of Radio", in R. Sakolsky and S. Dunifer (eds): Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook, Edinburgh: AK Press, p. 17.
29. compare with Berners-Lee, op cit., p. 115.
30. Adamson, op cit., pp. 142-3.
31. Jordan, T. (1999) Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London: Routledge.