Uncle Sam's bastard children
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Morton
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The world is not for sale.
– attac website, 2003
Free trade is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is free trade.
– Sir John Bowring, 19th-century British industrialist, social reformer and free-trader
On September 11, 2003, 56-year-old Lee Kyung-Hae, a farmer from Korea, clambered onto the fence surrounding the convention centre in which trade delegates from all over the world were meeting
at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Cancun, Mexico. When he reached the top
of the fence, he took out a Swiss Army knife and plunged it into his heart. He died three hours
later in hospital.
Witnesses at the scene said they had no idea Lee was planning to kill himself. Shortly before he climbed the fence, however, he declared that the WTO was "killing farmers all over the world". Earlier in the year, he had gone on a hunger strike outside WTO headquarters in Geneva. After the news of his death was announced, the Korean People's Action Against Investment Treaties and the WTO, a coalition of 40 Korean social movements protesting in Cancun, issued a terse statement: "Lee Kyung-Hae didn't kill himself. The WTO killed him."
Lee was part of a network of protesters who have been converging on WTO meetings since the mid-1990s. If free trade is a religion, as Bowring suggested, its present-day sacred rituals are the summits and conferences of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. It's at these get-togethers of the international financial and policy elites that the pure doctrine of globalisation is propagated. Until a few years ago, no one but invited insiders bothered to turn up; the agendas of WTO meetings resemble some of the more arcane, impenetrable branches of medieval scholastic theology. But groups like the Korean Farmers League, of which Lee was a member, have turned them into global theatre – massive performances at which tear gas often replaces incense. Also present at Cancun were the Infernal Noise Brigade, indigenous groups from Mexico and many other countries, representatives of the French Peasants' Party and counter-globalisation activists from Canada, the United States and Europe.
Lee's death went largely unreported in the international mainstream media. But events inside the convention centre caused a sensation. The G21, an alliance of developing countries including India, China, Indonesia and a number of the world's poorest countries, pulled the plug on world-trade negotiations potentially worth billions of dollars to the US and the European Union. Trade bureaucrats climbed back onto their planes weary and empty-handed; the world's financial press gnashed its teeth and declared the failure of the talks a disastrous setback for global prosperity. The G21, many other countries in the developing world and non-government organisations (NGOs) from the developing world celebrated a victory – one tinged with mourning at the death of Lee.
CANCUN MARKED THE CULMINATION OF A PROCESS THAT BEGAN in the late 1990s: the emergence of network politics as the most potent new challenge to global capital. The network is emerging as the primary form of political organisation and action in the 21st century. Network politics poses a direct threat to the top-down, bureaucratic, and often authoritarian, structures that have dominated politics in the 20th century: the state, trade unions, corporations, the multilateral international organisations. In network politics, form is content: instead of agendas, meetings, the smooth running of the political machine, there's emergence and convergence – ideas, dissent and debate wink into existence in chatrooms, online journals and newsgroups and traverse a dispersed, fragmented, leaderless network, occasionally coalescing into action.
Just as market triumphalism was reaching its height in the heady days of the tech boom, a new adversary was in the process of being born, aided by the processes of globalisation itself. What's become known as the anti-globalisation movement formed, apparently out of thin air. In fact, the new possibilities of networks, both technological and cultural, gave it life.
The sociologist Manuel Castells, author of The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell, 2000), compares the anti-globalisation movement, "in all its extraordinary and even contradictory diversity", to the workers' movements that emerged in the 19th century and ultimately formed themselves into the labor movement. Network politics not only challenges the top-down, bureaucratic structures of the modern nation-state and transnational institutions but also creates new forms of organisation that are changing the rules of political engagement. The counter-globalisation movement, as its members prefer to call it, is, like the internet, a distributed system, dispersed around the globe; it has no headquarters, no central committee, no executive leadership.
Network politics existed before the internet but it was the net that brought it to life on a global scale. The British political scientist Andrew Gamble has described the counter-globalisation protests at Seattle, Washington, Melbourne and elsewhere as the "stirrings of a global civil society". At its most basic, the internet is a place for that global civil society to meet, the 21st-century equivalent of the coffee houses, salons and societies where the bourgeois intellectuals of the European Enlightenment congregated and debated. Not only does the net offer cheap, almost instantaneous communication across the globe; more importantly, it creates a global public space, a vast theatre of ideas and action accessible to anyone, anytime – provided, of course, he or she has access to the internet. The internet embodies what the philosopher and social theorist Juergen Habermas calls a "counter-public sphere": an alternative to that other global public space, television. But where global television is rigidly controlled and formatted, the net is unmediated, chaotic. The birth of the counter-globalisation movement in the 1990s is inconceivable without it.
BEFORE WE BECOME TOO ROMANTIC ABOUT THE LIBERATING energies of networks, we should remind ourselves that the network is also the ghostly form of many of our most characteristically modern nightmares. The Matrix is the dark twin of the internet; an all-pervasive, all-seeing web of surveillance and control. Yet rudimentary forms of the Matrix already exist, in the shape of Echelon, the global-intelligence network that intercepts and monitors satellite transmissions. Even an inquiry into Echelon by the European Union Parliament, which interviewed dozens of intelligence experts, was unable to come to any firm conclusions about the extent of its powers. And as Howard Rheingold, one of the most perceptive commentators on the networked world, writes in his latest book, Smart Mobs (Perseus, 2002), we are on the threshold of "a world in which ... spying machinery is built into every object we encounter". In this reading, the network becomes a pathological, hypertrophied image of the state, its last grab for control just as its traditional sources of power and authority are failing it.
It's relatively well known now that the internet is the unintended progeny of the United States Defence Department. It began as a twinkle in the eyes of JCR Licklider and Robert Taylor, two research directors with the department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was set up in a panic in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik satellite. Suddenly, the US saw its assumptions about technological superiority slipping away and created ARPA with a mandate to look over the horizon and anticipate which technologies might be important in the future. As Rheingold relates in his earlier book, The Virtual Community (MIT Press, 2000), Licklider was hired by ARPA to oversee innovative and speculative research on computing. His own major interest was in the interaction between humans and computers; in 1960 he published a paper on "Man-Computer Symbiosis", predicting that "in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly". Together with his team and researchers around the US, Licklider pursued ways of enabling communities of users to work collaboratively and interactively with computers. Individual users were linked together on a single mainframe; and then, slowly, mainframes at geographic locations scattered around the US were connected to one another. The internet was in the throes of being born.
ARPA's work came together with another preoccupation of US defence strategists: how to prevent America's military command-and-control systems being decapitated by a nuclear strike. An analyst at the RAND Corporation, Paul Baran, argued that in order to keep US war-fighting capabilities alive, it would be necessary to decentralise both the structures of military authority and the communications network that enabled them to transmit orders. If one part of the network was wiped out, messages would need to travel by alternative routes.
Packet-switching technology emerged as the preferred way of solving this technical problem: information was split up into discrete "packets" and dispatched over the network by different routes, the backroads and byways of the network as well as its main hubs, to end up at a common destination. In 1969, ARPANET went online, the predecessor to today's internet.
The story of ARPANET's evolution has been told many times. What's not so often remarked upon, however, is the delicious irony of its conception. The net, and the network politics it has allowed to flourish, owe their existence to one of the most authoritarian, secretive and powerful state structures of all time: the US Defence Department. attac, the World Social Forum, the Zapatista and the countless other groups that congregate and collaborate on the internet to oppose corporate globalisation, are, at least in one sense, Uncle Sam's bastard children. In the "world without walls" of global capital, as former WTO head Mike Moore describes it, the net and network politics form a kind of mirror image, a shadow world with the power to erupt into the desert of the real.
The godparents of the net, Licklider and Taylor, themselves foresaw its enormous potential to create communities dispersed in space. In an essay published just before ARPANET flickered into life, they wrote: "In most fields ... [these communities] ...will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest."
It's not clear whether Licklider and Taylor also sensed the subversive potential of the internet. But ARPANET was launched in the same year as Altamont, the same year in which protests on American university campuses reached their peak: 1969. As Castells points out, the anti-authoritarian, often anarchic style of the '60s counter culture influenced the emerging business culture of the computer industry. Especially in what became known as Silicon Valley, says Castells, "the technological blossoming that took place in the early 1970s can be related to the culture of freedom, individual innovation and entrepreneurialism that grew out of the 1960s culture of American campuses". Perhaps the most important development to come out of Silicon Valley in the '70s was the prototype of the personal computer, without which the internet as a mass phenomenon could never have become possible. Pioneers of the personal computer, such as Steve Wozniak of Apple, Castells argues, "were intentionally trying to undo the centralising technologies of the corporate world". In this, they shared something with other, more shadowy contemporary pioneers of network politics.