From Radical Philosophy - Commentaries - March/April 2011
Nicolás Mendoza
...The ‘cyber war’ announced so spectacularly (in the Debordian sense) in the days following WikiLeaks’ US Embassy Cables release is not really about the DDoS, ‘denial of service’ attacks that barely obstructed access to the MasterCard website for a few hours. If anything, the ephemerality of the disturbance leaves the sensation that Anonymous, the group that launched it, is anything but a structural threat. What journalists around the world have failed to narrate is the tale of a network that increasingly challenges, bypasses and outcompetes the global corporate-government complex.2 A struggle about the obsolescence of the very idea of the nation-state, and an almost unanimous coalition of governments, led by the USA, fighting furiously to regain control by exerting legal, financial, symbolic and, perhaps most concerning, technical violence on their adversary. The reasons for this failure of journalism are structural. As Bourdieu noted, journalism is a weakly autonomous field. In Foucault’s terms, its governmentality sets meaningful structural criticism beyond what is thinkable. The legacy of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is in this sense (so far) to replace the journalistic structures that curated the critical figure of the whistleblower with the autonomous network, thus redefining not journalism but what journalism perceives as newsworthy reality.
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I have emphasized the fragments where the meaning hides: to ‘enable Governments to carry out their roles and responsibilities’ is of course a nice way to talk about enabling the surveillance, censorship and control that the current protocols still make porous.
After Hillary Clinton stated that the leaks are ‘an attack on the international community’, the move to gain control of the IGF is unsurprising. It fits the conflict outlined by the WikiLeaks logo. Even if the motion is defeated, which is currently possible, a card has been shown. More moves of this nature, on all possible fronts, will follow until the coup de net is complete. The IGF episode matches Douglas Rushkoff’s analysis of the ongoing ‘net neutrality’ debate: ‘The moment the “net neutrality” debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. …
will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.’10 Protocols are the defining battlefield in the struggle between governments and corporations and the autonomous network. The UN’s attempt to take over the IGF is a true act of cyberwar with the strategic warfare plan of hacking the Internet to finally eradicate its aspirations for autonomy.
The notion of protocol describes not only computer protocols, but also social, cultural and political conventions that inform the behaviour of societies. In an ambivalent world that is simultaneously exploring new territories of freedom and being subjected to heightened measures of control, the gradual reclamation of the commons is the crucial operation. Scholars like Michel Bauwens and David Bollier articulate how the Internet fosters processes of decommodification that effectively challenge capitalism. Rather than being the result of a violent class struggle, the end of capitalist hegemony might be the result of a slow Internet-enabled process of migration, a dripping (to abuse once more the WikiLeaks logo) towards societies that organize around commons.
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http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=29462
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