1

POLI 580 CRITICAL ASSESSMENT ESSAY JOHN ALAN SUTHERLAND 2980775 Despite arguments to the contrary by scholars like Michael Strangelove (The Empire of the Mind, 2005), ICTs and the Internet will continue to be controlled by global corporate interests unless major structural changes are made in their organization and operation. At present corporate control is exercised through thousands of tiny but consequential decisions about how information should be distributed online and how it is to be bought and sold. These decisions are made by commercial entities such as Google, Facebook, MyFace, BitTorrent, Wikipedia and YouTube and their online users(Gillespie, 2007). The sole interest of these modern capitalists is the milking of the Internet for every advertising dollar it can produce . Their decisions, based on commercial goals, shape the Internets direction and content. Their decisions affect cultural participation and biases, community involvement, political expression , learning and educational directions and democracy development as the worlds people continue to migrate online. How can it be realistic to suppose that the Internet will become a vehicle for budding dissent over corporate capitalism when for example over 50% of internet use is dedicated to the production and distribution of commercially based pornography? To argue to the contrary tests the credibility of supporters of that view of the Internet as the tool for virtual rebellion against capitalism. Yet Strangelove disputes this normalization thesis that the Internet is controlled by commercial interests for the purpose of accumulating more and more capital through an ever broadening worldwide market. He insists that what is happening online is fundamentally noncommercial and, implicitly or explicitly, anti-capitalist (Gillespie, p. 551). He severely

criticizes critical theorists who have described the Internet as having succumbed or imminently succumbing to corporate control (p. 93). To Strangelove they have failed to appreciate the anarchistic and revolutionary potential of information technology (Doughty, 2007). He finds a widespread and decentralized habitual content production (p. 91), a marked disregard for the principles of ownership, a robust and expanding anti-corporate activist community and an embrace of unconstrained expression that is itself subversive to the narrow semantic control endemic to 20th century media (Gillespie, p. 551). In making these claims Strangelove discounts the extent to which noncommercial discourse existed before the emergence of the internet. He demonizes capitalism rather than pursuing a more focused critique of how these contests over meaning actually occur. According to Strangelove corporate capitalism has to constantly reaffirm its control by fueling consumers desire to buy and by marginalizing any real dissent. However he states that this cannot be done in the case of the Internet because online discourse is unconstrained. To him the Internet need not be dependent on the market for financial backing so it cannot be dominated by commercial producers nor is it subject to control by powerful economic elites. According to him it can be used to challenge capitalist principles through cheap publication, easy distribution on the web and through email and an archival memory to both preserve criticism and to help hold commercial speech accountable. He describes this as a globalized alternative media system wherein official meanings are constantly challenged, appropriated, re-articulated and to a certain degree unfixed (Strangelove, p. 125). Accordingly he believes that the traditional tools for fixing such subversive discourse, from trademark law to economic pressure to copyright law, cannot rid the internet of these ideological challenges. Despite his examples of illicit behavior on the internet and in the mediascape and the marketplace as evidence of this defying control (Strangelove, p. 74) it is hard to picture the

casual downloader considering his or her acts as principled challenges to the symbolic order of the market (Gillespie, p. 552). These same consumers continue to purchase media from corporate vendors. Practices of information production and distribution emerging in the online environment , from news blogging to peer-to-peer file trading to culture jamming, pose at most an oblique challenge to assumptions about how information should be produced and by whom. His book lacks the solid evidence to convince us of the position he takes that internet culture is not susceptible of being controlled by capitalism. In his world Strangelove thinks that the masses can bring down big business, but he disdains anyone who thinks that the technological system is fundamentally authoritarian. He is for anarchy and against class conflict. He is against corporations and in favour of the free market. Against realities Strangelove sees an Internet very much to the opposite of what is actually occurring. In line with the issue of corporate control the Internet has and will continue to challenge our boundaries of privacy through its ability to allow wider forms of surveillance of its users. As a private person an individual might want very restricted access to personal details(intrinsic value) which includes the restriction of personal information as an end-in-itself (Wong, 1999). But as a consumer a person might want the easy flow of information (strategic value) with the aim of ensuring that the right data is used by the right people for the right purposes. The concept of privacy is linked to the concept of a person but it is up to the individual as to what degree they seek privacy for their personal information. Whitaker (The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality, 1999) discusses how we arrived at the present state of the total surveillance society. He wants to sound alarm bells, to raise public consciousness of the challenges posed to privacy by the growing use of the new information technologies. Whitaker believes that total surveillance of individuals is carried out through their use of the computer.

And even if we dont have or use a computer for Whitaker the surveillance is done through the digitization of our information which can be put into databases which can be accessed by so many government and private agencies. Perhaps his point on a broader perspective of surveillance is that information about individuals is compiled into dossiers which are traded and circulated between governments and corporate actors. Having these dossiers float around in cyberspace is tantamount to being watched because we can be tracked at all times (Wong, p. 34). But is the problem one of data migration as opposed to surveillance? More invasive of our privacy is that we as individuals are lulled into the false belief that we can go online and socialize with our friends and these internet activities will somehow be private. Carnegie Mellon Universitys Robotics Institute has recently proven that it is possible to find out someones social security number from their Facebook profile using facial recognition software (Thornhill, 2011). It is up to the individual to safeguard his or her own privacy. To Manuel Castells (2000) the issue of control in todays society can only be understood by recognizing that we are in an information economy and are subject to what he terms the forces of informationalism. He postulates that this is responsible for a wide variety of presumably connected phenomena ranging from the economic successes of the Asian tiger economies and the developmental states of south Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong to the questionable prospects of Russias capacity to sustain a healthy civil society on the ruins of communism to the mixed outcomes of crisis and decay in patriarchal institutions worldwide to child prostitution and even cocaine networks to name only a few (Calabrese, 1999). Despite the wealth of detail and narrative that he provides it is still reasonable to ask why readers should accept that it is informationalism that is the core process driving all these social processes. While he refers to Harvey (1989) it is difficult to determine whether he accepts Harveys theory of society that

focuses centrally upon capital accumulation as the primary mechanism of global discipline (p. 26). The most interesting theme of Castells work deals with the contemporary realities and prospects for democratic civil society particularly as he connects such discussions to emerging social, cultural and political projects (The Power of Identity (Second Edition) vol 2, 2010). Central to his arguments on the effective arena and scope of political action are the interconnections between the concepts of identity, civil society, the state and informationalism. Castells distinguishes among three types of identities: legitimizing, resistance and project. Legitimizing identities are manifest in the dominant institutions of society constituting what he terms civil society , a definition he attributes to Antonio Gramsci (Selections from the prison notebooks, 1971). These identities are generated by or in churches, labor unions, political parties, cooperatives and civic associations. The legitimate access to state power that civil society, defined as such, can enjoy makes it a privileged terrain of political change by making it possible to seize the state without launching a direct , violent assault (The Power of Identity (Second Edition) vol 2, p. 9) . He holds little hope for the transformative potential of legitimizing identities in light of the global information society given that they are premised on the continuation of a strong state that can be a focal point of struggles for power in civil society. His second type of identities which he describes as resistance identities are defensive sociocultural formations and are products of alienation and resentment in relation to the dominant institutions and ideologies of society. In comparison with legitimizing identities resistance identities do not generate the institutions of civil society, the reason being that they do not tend to aim primarily at institutional transformation vis--vis the state. The third type of identities are what Castells terms project identities. These are formed when social actors , on the basis of whatever cultural

materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and by so doing , seek the transformation of the overall social structure (2010, p. 8), According to his trichotomy of identities it seems that project identities can supply the foundations of civil society if and only if they aim to seize or transform existing institutions or by constructing new ones. On the question of national identities he observes the mixed potential. On the one hand is retrenchment into a reconstructed nation state; on the other hand, the possibilities of nations beyond the state increasingly enhanced in a global information society. In this regard he envisions the prospect for the building of multinational networks of political institutions in a variable geometry of shred sovereignty. Castells argues throughout that the state has become just one source of power within a new global system of power that is characterized by the plurality of sources of authority. Nation states will survive but not so their sovereignty and they will instead band together in multilateral networks with a variable geometry of commitments, responsibilities, alliances and subordinations. Castells does not address the idea of a civil society that can conceive of political space beyond state. Of course reasonable minds will disagree on whether the idea of a civil society has meaning or validity when it is no longer coupled with the idea of the state defined at a minimum in terms of sovereign territory and a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, two conditions that Castells shows to obtain less and less everywhere in the world. Hrynyshyn (Technology and Globalization, 2002) decries the belief that technology is inevitable as representing objectively existing powers in nature in what is described as technological determinism. This concept rests on two bases: firstly that the development of technology is an autonomous force independent of human control and proceeds according to its own logic; and secondly that social implications of a technology are a result of its technical

characteristics and can be understood by investigating the way technology works. When combined they support the theory that the structure of a social order is a response to the technological development that occurs in that society. To him Castells emerging network society is based on informational capitalism, a combination of the informational mode of development and the capitalist mode of production. As a critic he believes Castells has reproduced the illusion of historical inevitability of the existing path of technological development and consequently, the inevitability of the global expansion of capitalism. On the issue of control of the Internet he disagrees with the notion that the Internet is ungovernable and inherently free; that cyberspace is an inherently anarchic realm of pure freedom of expression, where censorship is technically impossible; where new technologies are made to appear as liberators of human capacity, despite their actual function. In summary he believes that the Internet is largely a marketing tool whose best known uses and applications are commercial. Capitalist competition has driven the spread of the Internet and the increased affordability of increasing amounts of computing power. The Internet has developed along a trajectory that better facilitates the accumulation of capital despite potentials in the technology to function differently. Its autonomy is too limited for it to effectively alter the balance of social forces in the contemporary world. Social forces are so weighted towards capital that without some large shift in that relationship the Internet will remain primarily the tool of the powerful and its use in challenging that power will remain marginal and ineffective. Although Capitalist globalization is not the inevitable result of the latest technological developments it has successfully appropriated these devices to such an extent that they are used most often to assist in the accumulation of capital. But the process of globalization began long before use of the Internet became widespread. The acceleration of that process may have been facilitated by the use of advanced

information technology but it was a product of many other factors. Alternative uses of the Internet will depend upon the struggle against the rush to privatize and commodify all information and communication. Why do these new technologies have to be used to facilitate the accumulation of capital?

Works Cited
Calabrese, A. (1999). The Information Age According to Manuel Castells. Journal of Communication Vol 49 Issue 3, 172-186. Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society (Second Edition) Vol 1. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishing. Castells, M. (2010). The Power of Identity (Second Edition) vol 2. Malden, Mass.: blackwell Publishing Inc. Doughty, H. A. (2007). Review of The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement. College Quarterly Spring Vol 10 No 2, 1-9. Gillespie, T. (2007). Book Review: Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the AnitCapitalist Movement. New Media Society No 9, 550-552. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Hrynyshyn, D. (2002). Technology and Globalization. Studies in Political Economy Vol 67 spring, 83-106. Strangelove, M. (2005). The Empire of the Mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Whitaker, R. (1999). The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality. New York: The New Press. Wong, J. (1999). Review of The End of Privacy. Books in Canada, 33-35.