Among the favourite nostrums/memes rampant among those who present themselves as being the surrogates for a non-existent global Internet Governance system is the notion of a “Global Internet Community”. Notably this now seems to be replacing “multistakeholderism” as the favourite meme of the day among these nattering nabobs. And it is easy for the mind and the tongue to slip gracefully and seamlessly over this seemingly innocuous and empty phrase and move on to other meatier subjects based on unspoken assumptions that of course, we all agree that there is a “Global Internet Community” and we all know what it is, where it is, who it is and what the normative basis of this community might be.
Further we know instinctively (who needs to ask) how this “Global Internet Community” would manifest itself in any of the areas in which it is being invoked as a sort of talisman against the rampaging critical hordes (those who still remember Snowden/the NSA; who find Facebook’s latest blitzkrieg on personal privacy, offensive; and who don’t own stock in Apple computer or the latest hot IPO).
I raise this because as I sit here listening remotely to the World Economic Forum/ICANN/CGI.Br Net Mundial Initiative constitutional congress err… coordinating committee meeting discussing its “constitution” err… founding document, it seems that every second phrase and certainly every second speaker is referring to this mythical beast, the “Global Internet Community” to justify whatever anti-democratic err pro-multistakeholder outrage they are attempting to impose into the current global Internet governance discussion.
While it may have made some sense to talk about a “Global Internet Community” when the Internet consisted of a half dozen profs and their respective grad students it hardly makes any sense when talking about those 9 billion or so people in the world who, whether they want to or not, whether they are aware or not, whether they even connect or not, find their individual and collective living circumstances and even to a degree their individual and collective opportunities and fates inextricably intertwined with the Internet–how the Internet operates (or doesn’t), how it is controlled (or isn’t), how it is surveilled (or the surveillance is tempered with oversight or not) and perhaps most important how its benefits are distributed or monopolized and in what way and by whom.
Talking about the Internet as a “community” is a cute little device to deflect and mask the rather more complex and increasingly ugly reality which is in fact emerging in the Internet world. A “community” by any possible definition is characterized by shared values and ways for expressing and realizing those values, a shared vision of the future, common objectives, and a deep sense of commonness—that somehow we are all in this together and need to act in these areas in such a way that our common values can be realized.
So where is the commonness of values with the USA/NSA which is intent on knowing everything about everybody via the Internet; with the Great Firewall of China which is intent on excluding whatever information isn’t acceptable today to the ruling clique in Beijing; with Silicon Valley billionaires and their adolescent courtiers looking to make their physical space and the space that they occupy anywhere else in the world a paradise for white male privilege; between zero hour contractors and those who are getting rich off their labour; and so on and so on?
The point is that there is no such thing as “the Global Internet Community” except as an ideological convenience for those who wish to proceed as though the Internet has not become a place where very real social, political, economic and cultural contestations are, will and must take place. As has been elsewhere noted there are very very real and extremely significant “stakes” on the table when it comes to the future of the Internet and there are very very real and powerful “stakeholders” attempting to exert, maintain and transfer their control, power and privileges in this sphere as in others. But this is perhaps of more significance in this sphere than in others given that the Internet provides the substrate on which so much of other activities are taking place.
The notion of community implies a commonality of interests and that out of this commonality, consensus can be found to address issues of common concern. But it is now overwhelmingly evident that apart from ensuring the continued effective technical functioning of the Internet as a common resource for all, there are effectively no common interests on the basis of which a “Global Internet Community” could be derived. Any attempt to suggest that there are such commonalities is clearly done with the intention of slip sliding over the very real clash of interests that are emerging in the Internet sphere between the powerful and privileged, between monster Internet corporations conducting tax dodging on a truly historic scale, between the Silicon Valley overlords selling our privacy to the highest bidders, between the security agencies and those who are using their services to pursue economic and political agendas — these being the Digital 1%–and on the other side is most everyone else in the world.
As I sit here listening to the NMI discussion proceeding, it is not surprising to hear the governmental representatives of the US, China, and France and their academic and NGO camp followers supporting these willful illusions. It is rather more surprising to hear and watch Dilma’s government of Brazil which historically owes its governmental role to breaking through similar delusions in Brazil and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) which historically has taken strong and forceful positions in support of Social Justice going along with this collective miasma.
Gurstein's Community Informatics 
billpks
April 2, 2015
Thanks Mike; another cogent observation upon which to hang some of my own evolving thinking – I appreciate the opportunity.
I was at a meetup earlier this week of our Regional Transit Alliance (basically friends of mass transit) and was talking to a Millennial about why the arrival of Google Fiber in our town might be more of a mixed bag (particularly as regards identity preservation and privacy) than we anticipated. He was quite indignant: “What has Google done wrong?” he wanted to know.
I don’t usually get caught off guard like I was in that moment. I’d not run explicitly into the notion that the Big G (the other one of course) was an unalloyed good for mankind. I’ll be checking out how common that belief might be from now on. But back to the conversation of the moment.
At that RTA meetup I was socialzing an idea that the future of transit in larger metropolitan areas is going to be quite different as a result of all the technology appearances and the growing muscle of the relatively Pure Digital players like Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like.
The emerging picture I see is that we can talk about three forms of mobility each of which will be co-evolving ever more vigorously for some time to come.
Mobility 1 involves transport on the Industrial Age’s legacy – the Intranet of Steel and Concrete Things (rail, bus, plane, cars,…) – ISCT transport is at macro-gravity, requires lots of energy to overcome terrestrial level inertia and moves are far-from-relativistic speeds. At those speeds, traditional flat-world map-making is a practical way of relating distances and costs of artifact transactions. It’s Newtonian/Cartesian Linearity is very soothing to Engineers everywhere the globe over.
Mobility 2 involves transport on the Modern Age Intranet of Electro-Magnetic Things (servers. fiber, cameras, sound systems, PC’s,…) – The IEMT transport occurs in micro-gravity and at near-relativistic things. Importantly it is inherently a global webworks in architecture – likely scale-free to a degree not presently well recognized. This is the domain of non-linearity, general relativity, non-normal distributions of connectivity – the New Physics of a Century ago.
As you note, modern life for 99% of the 9B souls is unfolding as personal or cultural guided navigation; it consists (consciously or otherwise) of tacking back and forth between Mobility 1 and Mobility 2. Most people navigate within the Line of Sight of their physical standing point – when they “go social” they are relatively unconscious of the resultant multiple identity and distributed “where” they practice.
Now, whereas the ISCT is either undeveloped or in rather aged conditions needing renewal; the IEMT is proliferating with all the planned obsolescence of Detroit in the heyday of fins and chrome bumpers. That contrast has everyone running for the novel while taking for granted that the bridge they’re about to cross won’t fall down as they are crossing or get crossed by a flash-flood. There are however more and more places where that does happen.
While expanding, the IEMT, for all practical purposes has realized Universal Access – there are not real dead-spots to speak of; we’re on now to Quality of Engagement both in terms of facility at the use of available spectrum channels and number of channels locally available. Already though the number of devices and software tooling far out-number the global and even local capacity to rationalize among them. That is not stopping the software vendors who service the voracious maw of modern marketing from making their digital tail fins ever larger (and more surreal).
Altogether we’ve pretty much arrived – your unruly un-United Nations fully immersed in the Socio-Econo-Techno (SET) world that came to be automated to a fair-thee-well on the back of global airlines and container ships and trains. But that model of integration came from the thinking that built those ISCT systems; the IEMT giants are more hybrid entities than they realize.
There is as yet no system of weights and measures for the value of a pure digital value proposition – stacking up ad revenue is not real where non-commercial applications are important. Just now in this period of rapid expansion we have lots of SET with the Political component of traditional global connectivity coming late to the party. The conversation you describe is pure NAFTA redux.
I’m in full agreement with you that the Quality of Engagement domain is much more Political than the giants of commerce and “peace-keeping” would have us recognize. The global free trade agreements are already the prototype for a Commerce Dominated future – if the conjoint of Mobility 1 & 2 is to remain some Open and Equitable character then the push of the Predatory Capitalists must be resisted in all domains – being fragmented means to be conquered.
But there’s a spoiler in the mix: Mobility 0.
Mobility 0 roughly corresponds to transport of Water upon terrestrial Watersheds. Any modeling of how Mobility 1 & 2 will co-evolve will do well to consider the impact of things like, not enough clean water, too much soiled water, a much more turbulent climate and weatherscape as glacial Iceboxes become liquid floods; and of course fracking induced earthquakes.
Our future as human will likely play out for the next couple of decades at least, on a platform with the three mobility legs. Call it the SETP platform. To the extent that the three legs of that platform are being driven in mindless independence we all are in for a rough ride it seems. Old fashioned politics – as in before the current explosion of Predatory Capitalism – has not seen its last day yet.
Michael Gurstein
April 2, 2015
Thanks Bill, another extremely rich and interesting commentary.
Garth Graham
April 9, 2015
“…. there is no such thing as “the Global Internet Community” except as an ideological convenience for those who wish to proceed as though the Internet has not become a place where very real social, political, economic and cultural contestations are, will and must take place. …… The notion of community implies a commonality of interests and that out of this commonality, consensus can be found to address issues of common concern. But it is now overwhelmingly evident that apart from ensuring the continued effective technical functioning of the Internet as a common resource for all, there are effectively no common interests on the basis of which a “Global Internet Community” could be derived.” (1).
There is, however, such a thing as digital culture, the mind of which can be inferred from its information and communications technology artifacts. The forums you reference have not abandoned their intention that the future of Internet Governance must depend on the existence of “a distributed, decentralized and multistakeholder ecosystem.” (2). If you were saying that organizations like ICANN should not replace the idea of Internet Governance as ecology with the vapid notion of a Global Internet Community I would agree. But they aren’t. And it seems to me that what you say about the nonexistence of a Global Internet Community also applies equally to the idea of a Global Public Interest.
On the left, the right and the center of the existing political spectrum, everyone is contesting control of the Internet’s carriage and content as a means to further their own ends. Whether it’s the people versus the elites, bottom-up versus top down, or the periphery versus the center, somebody’s trying to represent my interests in the name of democracy, social justice, market competition or some other bait-and-switch. And I can’t tell one purported ruler from another. We are hell-bent on re-balancing control of Internet Governance within the framework of existing political alignments, and it really changes nothing.
On the other hand, ISOC was correct when it described the existence of an Internet Governance Ecology. The Internet that I have, and that I want to keep, is neither a “decentralized network for unmediated social connections,” nor a “surveillance-centric network controlled by a handful of governments and corporate monopolies.” (3). Instead of framing Internet Governance alternatives in terms of a struggle for control of global power, I believe that the existence of the Internet as a technology, and the evolution of its governance so far, are symptoms of a distributed systems worldview in action. It took a particular way of seeing the possibility of a different order of things, an order based on an understanding of the principles governing complex adaptive and self-organizing systems, for the Internet to appear. It will take a conscious embrace of those principles to ensure its future integrity.
The Internet is not a place. It’s a protocol grounded in a shift in epistemology away from the mechanistic and towards the relational. Nothing inherent in the protocol’s actualization gives a damn about how senders and receivers of packets identify their ideological stances or social roles. The packets still connect, even when an autonomous individual makes the increasingly absurd choice to identify himself or herself as subordinate to someone else.
The Internet’s existence reveals something about the values and beliefs of the digital culture that was able to imagine a different way of supporting communications. To me that means seeking for the principles of an appropriate governance system by reference to its cultural origin. For example, you do acknowledge that the “effective technical functioning of the Internet as a common resource” requires a community of practice to function. There are good and proper Internet-like reasons for that.
It also seems to me that your line of argument is taking you away from another ecologically correct statement, the Community Informatics declaration that the global is a federation of locals. I am seized by that declaration precisely because I understand there’s nothing more local than community.
After the individual, community has emerged as the second essential structural element of the digital world. But the idea of community is in the process of being re-defined in relational terms. A community is a human ecological system that emerges from the relational interactions and interdependences among autonomous individuals in their social environment and the situations they occupy. As an open system, the qualities that cause it to emerge are trust and the exercise of individual choice. I do accept that evoking the idea of a Global Internet Community is an empty phrase of possible insidious intent. But the reason persons chose to use the Internet with such passion is precisely because it enables community defined in relational terms.
From the perspective of distributed systems, community, and particularly community online, is becoming defined differently because identity is defined differently. (4). Instead of society imposing identity upon individuals, they have gained access to society by design. They are “stepping out,” to an open conversation between society and the self. They know that conservatives, socialists and neo-liberals are all going to betray them in the name of liberty, security and the greater good. They have no need to surrender freedoms into the needs of group solidarity to act within the framework of a group.
We are in the process of abandoning the sense of community as a collective. In fact, collective human action such as, “people’s control of social technologies,” is not essential for the Internet to deliver good outcomes. That’s just as much of a threat as all those other ideological conveniences. Informed by the choices of autonomous individuals, the relations that form community are reciprocal but not communal.
Consider the questioning of solidarity and collective action raised in Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Inoperative Community,” how to create “being together” without a “being as one?”
“The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader…) …necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being.”
From the perspective of distributed systems (complex adaptive and self-organizing systems), community is not a thing, a noun. A community is what you get when autonomous individuals choice to bundle themselves together in a certain way without surrendering their autonomy. It’s a dynamic verbalization of relational possibilities, choices, and practices. It’s an epistemic structural realization. It’s a net of relations. A community emerges purely on the basis of trusted relations among individuals, not on the basis of the particulars of individuals and not on the basis of some externally impose ideology. Those particulars remain in the individuals themselves. The individuals who inform the bundle can change, and an individual within the bundle can change through awareness of the information. But, as long as the relations remain structurally the same, the way of bundling into community continues over time.
I once made a fast scan of the meaning of stakeholder implicit in the NETmundial outcome documents. This showed me that stakeholders are not anyone who self-identifies as such. They are qualified into collective categories of organizations that are then “represented.” The assumptions about structure that follow from that categorization are consistent with an implicit assumption to aggregate individuals into “hubs” (or as ICANN does, to indoctrinate and submerge individuals into internal “communities” in the old collective sense). This analysis reinforces my awareness that there is neither a consensus about the beliefs and values or even existence of digital culture nor an agenda about governance that intends to look in that direction.
This rush into a “contestation” of ideologies abandons the Internet’s infinite game of positive network externalities for a finite game of winners and losers. Except that everybody loses. It’s not good “Internet” if the choice to connect, and to converse, and to be together doesn’t rest at the level of the individual. It’s the individual who is at the edge of the social networks and their positive externalities. We desperately need to keep the smarts at the edge and the power distributed among a federation of locals.
(1). Mike Gurstein. Is There a Global Internet Community? Gurstein’s Community Informatics, March 31, 2015. https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/is-there-a-global-internet-community/
(2). NETmundial Principlesfile://localhost/. https/::www.netmundial.org:principles
(3). Call for an Internet Social Forum. http://internetsocialforum.net
(4). The rest of this comment is a re-working of part of: Garth Graham. Taking Internet Governance Ecology at its word. June 10, 2014
https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/48343654/ecology%20realized.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1402436268000&api=v2