Cyberspace and Ungovernability



From hmcleave Mon Mar 20 13:26:34 1995
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 95 13:26:34 CST
To: chiapas95-archive@eco.utexas.edu
Subject: Cyberspace and "Ungovernability"

This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of the Austin Comite de Solidaridad con Chiapas y Mexico.

NOTA BENE: The report that follows gives some of the ideas of a RAND analyst who has been monitoring our work in cyberspace. This guy contacted me last Spring after reading the piece I wrote on "The Chiapas Uprising: The Future of Class Struggle in the New World Order". (Which can be obtained via gopher eco.utexas.edu faculty/Cleaver/Cleaver papers.) He pointed out the similarities between what I had written and his own ideas. A collegue of his also contacted me and wanted to collaborate in work on the activities of NGOs in Chiapas. I told him that I didn't think the NGO's needed the information he wanted to gather, that it would only be of use to people who might cause the NGOs trouble with it. Needless to say I did NOT collaborate.

This is an example of the kind of monitoring and studying of our activity that I was talking about in a message I posted some time back. In case you missed that posting I will attach it to the end of this article.

That the other side is studying what we are doing, is only to be expected. Let's make sure that WE study what we are doing and think about the implications.(See my comments at the end of the three articles appended below.)

At the same time, we can do what they are doing, i.e., study the opposition. In the case of the following article, for instance, we can ask ourselves about the meaning of the assertion that our work might make Mexico "ungovernable". We know that this term was bandied about in Mexico in the period before the last elections. Various groups used the term to evoke fear and galvanize their own organizational efforts. The term also has a history in American policy circles. Remember the THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY: Report on the Governability of Democracies (1975) published by the Trilateral Commission. In the essay on the US by Samuel P. Huntington (one of three, two others were on Europe and Japan), Huntington presented an analysis of the crisis in the US as a situation in which the "balance" between democracy and "governability" had been tipped toward democracy and needed to be re-tipped in the opposite direction. In other words, the "crisis of democracy" was that there was too much democracy. (Not of the formal kind of course but of the grassroots sort, in which everyday people were interfering in the usual governing of America.)

So we know that for policy analysts the spector of "ungovernability" is a nightmare, a possibility to be avoided at all costs. Many of us, on the other hand, are fighting for just that: to make it impossible for those who would "govern" to do so, and thus to open space for a recasting of democracy in which there are not rulers and ruled, or governors and governed, but rather self-governance of the people, by the people and for the people. Hmmm have I heard that before somewhere???

The best examples I can think of from recent history in which countries became "ungovernable" are all in Eastern/Central Europe during the downfall of the Stalinist states of that area. In country after country a massive movement of people made it impossible for the communist regimes to "govern" and they collapsed, opening the way to new forms of politics and new kinds of social relationships. Now, we may not like the way the situation has evolved in those countries, but most would probably agree that those revolutions were successful in removing undemocratic regimes and opening the way to more fluid change. The usual spector raised by policy makers, of course, is that ungovernerability quickly becomes lawless chaos (of the sort depicted in Somalia and Ruwanda --or Road Warrior for that matter). This has always been the ploy of rulers, to present themselves as the only reasonable option, as the only way to avoid the disintegration of civilized behavior. (I'm going to leave aside for the moment the issue of the historical weight of the term "civilization" and assume the usual commonplace meaning, i.e., the ability of large numbers of people to live together with all their differences and similarities without so much antagonism that relationships dissolve into continuing violence and bloodshed.)

But what about Mexico? "Ungovernability" today can only mean the breakdown in the ability of the "government" (i.e., the PRI party-state) to "govern" (i.e., maintain its power). This is exactly what the Zapatistas have called for, and what so many in Mexico desire (as well as many of us outside Mexico).

Now, please note: the emphasis in the Rand analyst's work is on "ungovernability" NOT on what might replace the PRI's ability to govern. Yet in the situation he describes (and I have discussed elsewhere --the article above and the introduction to Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution --at gopher lanic.utexas.edu Latin American/Mexico) is something far more interesting: elements of alternative ways of organizing Mexican political and social life. The analyst sees that the grassroots movment that has been using cyberspace as part of its self-organization "doesn't have the ability to take power", but doesn't recognize how the new networks are increasingly made up of people who do not WANT to "take power", of people who do not want ANYBODY to "take power", of people who are working out conceptions of politics where "power" is either abolished, or reconceptualized in new, truly democractic ways.

That their "lack of centralized authority makes them less susceptible to cooptation or repression" doesn't strike him as also providing a model for a more democratic society in which "repression" and "cooptation" are made much more difficult through the organization of the polity. Yet, that is exactly what we should be striving for within the organizational fabrics we weave. That is exactly what all those who have fought against the"centralized authority" of rulers/governors/state-bureaucrats have long sought. The fabrics we weave today are complex things. They resonate with some old models --say the direct democracy of some indigenous villages-- but they are also woven within a completely new context: a global capitalism in which communications makes it increasingly difficult for the would-be rulers to divide (through ignorance) and conquer (via repression or cooptation). Now those electronic communications are not some neutral technology, even though it may seem that way at first glance, as capitalists continue to maintain their very hierarchical power structures using the same circuits that we use to undermine them and construct alternative sets of relationships. Indeed, the original network, ARPANET, was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency to facilitate the circulation of research for the Defense Department. But out of that has grown not only the Internet but cyberspace in which diverse and often conflicting goals are pursued, from commercial ventures such as America Online or Compuserve to activist networks like PeaceNet and EcoNet, from the reinforcement of capitalist power to systematic attempts to undermine it. There is no longer a single "electronic communication technology" but rather the nets themselves with all their structures AND contents constitute alternative technologies being elaborated within diverse contexts for diverse purposes. Those of us who are using the nets to fight for democracy are constructing the technology as we proceed, we are not just "users" as the big companies would have us believe.

So, we have to be very self-conscious about what we are constructing as we go along. What are the politics of what we are constructing, both in cyberspace and within the larger space within which we live and fight. If it serves no other purpose, perusal of this report on RAND research, should stimulate our collective thinking about how what we are doing can contribute "in the doing" to the construction of new, alternative ways of social being in which "governability" is put behind us, permanently.

Harry

(snip)


What follows is a reposting of earlier reflections on other examples of being watched.

Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 11:09:51 -0600 (CST)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver"
Subject: Media Recognition: Opportunities and Dangers Mar.5
To: Chiapas95

Over the last 10 days or so, the mass media has begun to report on what we are doing in and with cyberspace. The following 3 items are examples of the kind of reporting on our work that is being done. Some comments follow these three examples. [Note: the content of the following three articles can be found in the Chiapas95 archive copy of the original posting.]

ITEM #1: Tod Robberson, "Mexican Rebels Using A High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support" WASHINGTON POST, Feb. 20, 1995, pg. A1 (complete article)

ITEM #2: Russell Watson et al, "When Words are the Best Weapon. Revolution: Information can undermine dictatorships, and the faster it flows, the more trouble they're in. How Rebels use the Internet and satellite TV." NEWSWEEK, February 27, 1995, pp. 36-40. (excerpts)

ITEM #3: TV Globo and CNN Sunday February 26, 1997

The report interested CNN enough for them to run it on their weekend World Report Sunday, February 26th.

Comments:

We are watched. We are read. There are a number of issues here that it would be useful for people to pay attention to.

First, on the positive side, mass media reports may facilitate our work by leading more people to be aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it, such that they join in. As a result of being named in the Washington Post article I have received several letters asking for more information by people wanting to help.

Second, the same publicity certainly makes our enemies more aware of what we are doing and of its effectiveness. We have evidence of three kinds of responses. We know that military consultants are studying what we are doing and treating it as a kind of low-level insurgency. I was contacted last Spring by two researchers at RAND Corporation --a think tank that does much work for the state, including the military-- who had read a paper I wrote last February dealing with (in part) the use of cyberspace in the struggle. They wanted to share ideas and collaborate! I followed up enough to read some of their stuff and discovered their views on these issues. We also know that outside the state, the exteme right wing is also monitoring our activities --including the LaRouche people. Such proto-fascists can be extremely dangerous. I know of activists (in the anti-nuclear power movment) who were attacked physically as a result of their activities being monitored and reported by the LaRouche organization.We know that they are already talking about infiltrating the peace brigades being organized for Chiapas. Lastly, we know that there are well-intentioned types within such capitalist policy making institutions such as the World Bank who are passing on our information to attempt to influence policy in more humane directions.

Third, so far it is obvious that we are using the mass media as a source of information far more than they are using our material. The information we produce and circulate --what the Italians call "counterinformation"-- is designed precisely to get the real story out, the story the press and TV are not reporting, or not reporting accurately. So far, from what I have seen, the big media have used our activities for stories, but not our information, while we, on the other hand, continually monitor what they do report while assessing its usefulness and accuracy. In the story above Tod Robberson impunes the accuracy of our information with unnamed sources and fails to report what we all know: namely that misinformation gets queried and challenged and corrected here infinitely faster than it does in the mainstream media --which prints corrections on back pages if at all.

Fourth, as a result of these phenomena I think we should make concerted efforts to:

1. keep track of and document the back and forth between our work here in cyberspace and elsewhere, i.e., the paths by which our information reaches and influences those who are not in cyberspace, the feedback loops by which the activities spurred by those influences are reflected in and have an impact on what we do here. For example, I think it is very important for our own energy levels to consistently report on protest activities prompted by or fueled by information we have provided. One of the important lessons of every major protest movement in recent decades has been that individuals have more energy to fight when they can see how their own, limited individual efforts are part of a much wider movement.

2. We, or at least some of us, should keep a careful eye on the activities and discussions of our enemies: HOW they are monitoring us, WHO is monitoring us, what they are SAYING about what we are doing, what COUNTERMEASURES they are taking against what we are doing. We need to do these things because even if we do not want to view them as "enemies" many of them DO view us as enemies and are proceeding accordingly. Counterinsurgency professionals do this for a living and they believe it it. Marcos got labeled a "professional of violence" by those who really deserve the title! As far as those who are acting as intelligence providers for institutions like the World Bank but do not think of themselves as our enemies, perhaps even feel they are on our side, well, we can certainly deal with them individually as well-intentioned persons, but it is still important to recognize and watch how the institutions they are trying to influence actually behaves in the light of the information it is provided. The Bank in particular has demonstrated a certain capacity for neutralizing some of its opponents by internalizing them, i.e., giving them jobs as professional curmudgeons within the Bank. We need to watch these things to understand what threatens us and how best to deal with it.

3. We really should mobilize the "Lies of Our Times"-type critics of the distortions of the mass media to document the misrepresentations and lack of reporting that has been going on. The greatest "unreported story of 1995", at least so far, is the story of the continuing push by the Army --despite the Mexican governments denials-- and their brutal treatment of campesinos and grassroots activists in Chiapas.

4. At the same time, we need to keep track of where and how we HAVE been successful at influencing what the mass media has reported correctly. For example, when Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn published their story on the infamous Chase Manhattan report calling for the elimination of the Zapatistas and the stealing of the elections in Jalisco very few people read it in Counterpunch simply because their newsletter has a very limited readership. After we uploaded their story AND the report itself to the nets, the situation changed dramatically. Not only were both items reposted over and over again on a wide variety of lists and conferences, but they were soon being discussed in the Mexican press and then the American press and then in Europe etc. Partly, that success story was due to the intrinsic drama of the report. But more important, I think, was our ability to get that drama to so many places that it could not be ignored and therefore wasn't. Now, it is also of interest to consider who did what with it. I know that the Perot people, the Nader people and other anti-NAFTA people used it for their purposes of condemning the agreement they had been unable to block. Mexican nationalists used it to object to Zedillo following the orders of Wall Street. Anti-capitalists used it to demonstrate the perfidity of capitalism --once again. Financial democracry types (those calling for the demoratization of the Fed) used it to attack financial monopoly power. And so on. By understanding the array of forces susceptible to use information we provide, we are more likely to be effective.

5. After surveying the material we have been providing on the nets, I am struck by another thing: we are doing a better job at circulating news and analysing it than at providing more indepth material. Yet there is no reason why we cannot do this. Certainly some material is best provided in bookform, indeed can only be provided that way due the need of authors for copyrighted publications. However, the book Zapatistas:Documents of the New Mexican Revolution mentioned in the Robberson story above is a good counterexample. Not only was that book generated through the nets, but it was posted at lanic.utexas.edu BEFORE it was published by Autonomedia in Brooklyn. A certain number of more indepth pieces have circulated but a great many that might have, or still should have, have not. Some of us scurry around to get what we need from whatever source, hard copy, e-text, NPR, TV clips, etc. But a great many people cannot do that and it would be better if more material was at their fingertips and easily accessible. Therefore, I would encourage the uploading of useful material, including articles published elsewhere in hard print. The authors can usually do this by retaining copyrights. Others can get permission. A rapidly growing percentage of authors are crafting their material on computers and therefore their material exists in e-text form. It is just a matter of knowing it is there, seeing its usefulness and uploading it. The same goes, obviously, for a variety of media that can be made available on the World Wide Web --photos, speeches, reports, etc.

Enough. All these comments are simply suggestions as to how we might do what we are doing even better, and avoid some dangers. As we care on the struggle to roll back the power of the Mexican state (and that of the US government, the IMF, etc), we also need to develop the highest state of self-awareness possible about what we are doing, how we are doing it, what is most effective and what threatens that effectiveness. I would end with a call for more frequent discussion of these issues as a part of our ongoing work.

Harry