Cyberspace does not lie within your borders
Where are we going? During a time when scholars are writing about cyberwar, debating “No, we are not involved in Cyberwar.” “Yes, we are cyberwarring.” Or, “Cyberwar or whatever it is called that is currently happening is real and must be examined, I want to critique the political science writers, bloggers, pundits who cover the topic.
Some of the younger academics’ epistemic assumptions were developed during a time when the digital revolution was just beginning or a faint reality on the horizon. Others who were in school during the height of the cold war, well, I’m not going to critique them because I’ve always been taught: “what grandpa has to say is important because it tells you about your family history.” This is most certainly true. I will listen to my forefathers and foremothers in the discipline because I do, after all, have to pass my comprehensive exams, right? But, that is all. Now, back to you younger ones…
Your scholarship represents a post-cold war era when the Clinton 90s saw the growth of American economy and power. [1. I'm not going to debate the term power here, but maybe at a later point.] A new dawn was coming, to use a cliche. This can be seen by the types of issues that were being written about in dissertations—transnationalism, human rights, etc… Clearly, those topics are still highly important today.
As we transition into a “new, newer dawn” the rise of cyberspace, the freeculture embedded in nerdpower, and transformation of nationalism from state-based to electronic-based:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather….
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.[2. Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.]
We see this reality in the most recent Google v. China showdown. China hacks Google to try to get information on human rights activists and in doing so, they hack into an untapped well of electronationalism. Leaders, elites, scholars, soldiers, citizens from China to the US to Romania use Gmail, and if you threaten their information safety, you threaten them. Guess what China (or Turkey or even the US), we’ll side with Google and will do so every time.
Globalization, when taken to its logical conclusion, means that the social sciences must be grounded anew as a reality-based science of the transnational—conceptually, theoretically, methodologically, and organizationally as well. This includes the fact that there is a need for the basic concepts of “modern society”…to be released from the fixations of methodological nationalism and redefined and reconceptualized in the context of methodological cosmopolitanism. [3. Beck, Ulrich. 2005. Power in the Global Age: A New Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 50]
An irony is, however, we are ever more reliant on the state to assure information security and open access to this realm of the stateless. I’m fine with this only if the governments treat us like the governments of Scandinavia do their citizens:
In Finland, Order no. 732/2009, states that Internet access is a fundamental right for all citizens. By virtue of this text, every Finnish household will have at least a 1 MB/s connection by July 31, 2010. By 2015, it will be at least 100 MB/s. Iceland’s Parliament is currently examining a bill, the “Icelandic Modern Media Initiative” (IMMI), which is aimed at strictly protecting freedoms on the Internet by guaranteeing the transparency and independence of information. If it is adopted, Iceland will become a cyber-paradise for bloggers and citizen journalists. [4. Web 2.0 versus Control 2.0]
We could all be so lucky, but let’s begin targeting Authoritarianism 2.0 with Web 2.0 and see what happens, aye?
Category: International Relations
