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Networking Democracy: IT and Radical InfrastructuresDrew WhitworthPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version What now?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 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. ConclusionSome 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 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. Return to this month's front page Footnotes30. Adamson, op cit., pp. 142-3. return 31. Jordan, T. (1999) Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London: Routledge. return | |