the digital state

Bart Kosko, in Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Science & Society in the Digital Age (New York: Three Rivers Press 00) declared that "we'll have governments as long as we have atoms to protect", something that he considers will last until 'mind' is uploaded to a chip. In the interim, don't hold your breath.

As other pages of this guide - and the consideration in the Economy and Governance guides - suggest, the disappearance of government and the state won't happen in our lifetimes.

     politics

Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction 98) is essential reading for those seeking insights into how digital technologies will affect politics, the economy and community.  

We recommend his Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 90): somewhat starry-eyed at times but with an intellectual bite sadly lacking among the e-nthusiasiasts. Steven Miller's Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power & the Information Superhighway (New York: ACM Press 96) is provoking. Australia's Brian Martin suggests that we can abolish state crime by abolishing the state.

Digital Democracy: Discourse & Decision Making In The Digital Age (London: Routledge 99) edited by Barry Hague & Brian Loader is a succinct overview. 

It's more substantial than Darin Barney's faddish Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Sydney: UNSW Press 00), which pays more attention to Derrida and Heidegger than to the wires or the people, Chris Gray's Cyborg Citizen (London: Routledge 01) and Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: Palgrave 00) by Michael Perelman.

Tim Jordan's Cyberpower: The Culture & Politics of Cyberspace & the Internet (London: Routledge 99) asserts that cyberpower in the new millennium

is the form of power that structures culture and politics in Cyberspace and on the Internet. It consists of three interrelated regions: the individual, the social and the imaginary. Cyberpower of the individual consists of avatars, virtual hierarchies and informational space and results in cyberpolitics. Power here appears as a possession of individuals. Cyberpower of the social is structured by the technopower spiral and the informational space of flows and results in the virtual elite. Power here appears in the form of domination. Cyberpower of the imaginary consists of the utopia and dystopia that make up the virtual imaginary. Power here appears as the constituent of social order. All three regions are needed to map Cyberpower in total and no region is dominant over any other.

Jordan co-edited the quirky Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence & Wishart 99), with an unjustifiably upbeat appraisal of the EFF, located in one of the better spots on the "technopower spiral".

This site offers a separate guide to how digital media are affecting political processes and institutions. Among offline overviews you may enjoy Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism In the Age of the Internet (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 98), intelligent essays edited by Kevin Hill & John Hughes, and The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System (New York: Oxford Uni Press 99) by Richard Davis. 

Wayne Rash's Politics On The Nets: Wiring The Political Process (New York: Freeman 97), Tim Jordan's Activism! - Direct Activism, Hacktivism & the Future of Society (London: Reaktion 02) and The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing The Political Landscape (Merriefield: e-Advocates Press 99) by lobbyists Daniel Bennett & Pam Fielding are more superficial. 

We preferred White House To Your House: Media & Politics In Virtual America (Cambridge: MIT Press 95) by Robert Silverman & Edwin Diamond. The latter's The Spot: The Rise Of Political Advertising on Television (Cambridge: MIT Press 92) remains suggestive.

We've highlighted particular aspects of wired political processes in our e-politics guide.

     the Californian Ideology

In discussing myths about the governance of cyberspace we've highlighted  cyberlibertarian claims that the web neither can nor should be regulated. Proponents argue that the state is dead and that government per se is neither necessary nor useful.

There's a succinct analysis of such claims in Richard Barbrook's incisive paper The Californian Ideology.

While the cyberlibertarian ethos is broad, a key feature is the notion that Government needs to be kept not only out of the Internet but out of society as a whole. Personal conduct should not be regulated. Nor should commerce. Government should not impose content restrictions, ie should abandon attempts to manage offensive content or protect intellectual property. It also should not require consumers and businesses to pay taxes for public education, social welfare, infrastructure and information equity measures such as subsidised internet access.

Lou Rosetto, co-founder of Wired, for example said that

the idea that we need to worry about anybody being 'left out' is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity .... mass communication, mass production, mass poverty, mass markets, mass society, mass media, mass democracy - that's history. Ford and Marx are well and truly dead.

There's an analysis in Millennial Capitalism & the Culture of NeoLiberalism (Durham: Duke Uni Press 00) edited by Jean & John Comaroff and in Florian Roetzer's snappy paper on Outer Space or Virtual Space? Space Utopias of the Digital Age.

Barbrook comments that the new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," something that "promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." It's been achieved through "a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich."



   next page  (war & peace)