revolutions and diasporas

This page looks at questions about use of the net for regime change and by diasporas.

It covers -

• the rhetoric of revolution
• digital trumpets
• diasporas and digital nations

In discussing myths about cyberspace and life online we've noted the characterisation of the internet as innately beneficent, democratic and and subversive of autocracies. That's a charming idea, beautifully expressed by techno-romantics such as Gilmore and Rheingold, but inconsistent with what we know of other media.

     the rhetoric of revolution

The first page of this guide highlighted some of the wilder cyberlibertarian rhetoric, such as Barlow's assertion that we can simply become citizens of cyberspace ... off on a digital voyage to arcadia, sans care, sans taxes and most importantly of all sans responsibility.

That's echoed by the Interzone Republic site, a home for

individuals who have renounced or intend to renounce their citizenship in any and all geographically-based States, and who work towards replacing the valid functions of those States from collectively-held resources.

One of the feistier critiques is the 2000 Duke Law Journal paper by Amy Bomse on The Dependence of Cyberspace, building on analyses by Richard Barbrook, Lawrence Lessig, Paulina Borsook and Jack Goldsmith. Selections appear in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) edited by Peter Ludlow, a follow-up to his High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press 1996) - available here.

For a recent restatement of the arcadian vision, see Roger Clarke's paper Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost: How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism. One might well say the same of the printing press or - pace Trotsky's description of Stalin as Ghenghis Khan with a telephone - other electronic media.

There is a more nuanced analysis in Ithiel de Sola Pool's influential Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap 1987) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990), Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books 1999) or James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986). A perspective is provided by papers in Human Rights & Revolutions (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield 2000) edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt & Marilyn Young.

     digital trumpets

This page is under construction. While you're waiting for the digital trumpets to sound neath the walls of Jericho, the following items from articles in Analysphere provide a range of views on state responses to the net in Asia, the Americas and the EU.

Shanthi Kalathil & Taylor Boas' The Internet & State Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba & the Counterrevolution (PDF) suggests that those regimes are coping comfortably

Jack Qiu's 2000 article Internet Censorship in China (1999-2000), William Tao's 2001 article Censorship & Protest: The Regulation of BBS in China, and Lokman Tsui's 2001 MA thesis Internet in China: Big Mama Is Watching You (Internet Control & the Chinese Government) (PDF) offer a more critical view

V Krebs' 2001 article The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar

Harry Cleaver's paper The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric is more convincing than Vicente Rafael's paper Generation Text: the Cell Phone & the Crowd in Recent Philippine History

D Pantic's 1997 article Internet in Serbia: From Dark Side of the Moon to the Internet Revolution

     diasporas and digital nations

For diasporas see the Virtual Nations: Nationalism & Diasporas site and Nautilus' Virtual Diasporas site.

The latter comments that

Global diaspora communities are an increasingly important actor in international conflict and cooperation. Today information communication technologies bind transnational diaspora communities with their homeland, facilitate new and efficient economic networks in both the host and home countries, and increase identity and belonging to a greater transnational community. Yet other observers contend that virtual diaspora networks are an emerging source of global conflict as they facilitate transnational terrorist and criminal activity, finance wars in home states, and most importantly, cultivate divisive and fragmenting nationalism throughout the online diaspora community.

Phineas Baxandall's paper on Good Capital, Bad Capital: Dangers and Development in Digital Diasporas is a provocative analysis from the 2002 Nautilus workshop, which featured G. Pascal Zachary's paper Globalization from Below: diasporic capitalism and the more impressive paper by Guobin Yang on Information Technology, Virtual Chinese Diaspora, & Transnational Public Sphere.

Other perspectives feature in works such as Misty Bastian's 1999 Nationalism in a Virtual Space: Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet (PDF), Ananda Mitra's 'Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet' in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage 1995) edited by Steve Jones and Madhavi Mallapragada's 'The Indian Diaspora in the USA and Around the Web' in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2001) edited by David Gauntlett.

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