<nettime> Simulating Democracy Can Be A Virtual Breeze

["ricardo dominguez" <rdom@thing.net>]

Simulating Democracy Can Be A Virtual Breeze

[http://www.fair.org/media-beat/010524.html]

By Norman Solomon

Few media eyebrows went up when the World Bank recently canceled a global
meeting set for Barcelona in late June -- and shifted it to the Internet.
Thousands of street demonstrators would have been in Spain's big
northeastern port city to confront the conference. Cyberspace promises to
be a much more serene location.

The World Bank is eager to portray its decision as magnanimous, sparing
Barcelona the sort of upheaval that has struck Seattle, Prague, Quebec
City and other urban hosts of international economic summits. "A
conference on poverty reduction should take place in a peaceful atmosphere
free from heckling, violence and intimidation," says a World Bank
official, adding that "it is time to take a stand against this kind of
threat to free expression."

A senior adviser to the huge lending institution offered this explanation:
"We decided that you can't have a meeting of ideas behind a cordon of
police officers." Presumably, the meeting of ideas will flourish behind a
cordon of passwords, bytes and pixels.

If hackers can be kept at bay, the few hundred participants in the Annual
Bank Conference on Development Economics will be able to conduct a lovely
forum over the Internet. The video conferencing system is likely to be
state-of-the-art, making possible a modern and bloodless way to avoid
uninvited perspectives.

The World Bank's retreat behind virtual walls may fulfill its goal of
keeping the riffraff away, with online discourse going smoothly, but vital
issues remain -- such as policies that undercut essential government
services in poor countries, while promoting privatization and user fees
for access to health care and education.

"The objectives of the World Bank with this failed conference were simply
an image-washing operation," said a statement from a Barcelona-based
campaign that had worked on planning for the demonstrations. Now, the
World Bank is depicting itself as the injured party.

Protest organizers are derisive about the Bank's media spin: "The
representatives of the globalized capitalism feel threatened by the
popular movements against globalization. They, who meet in towers
surrounded by walls and soldiers in order to stay apart from the people
whom they oppress, wish to appear as victims. They, who have at their
disposal the resources of the planet, complain that those who have nothing
wanted to have their voice heard."

The World Bank's gambit of seeking refuge in cyberspace should be a
wake-up call to activists who dream that websites and email are
paradigm-shattering tools of the people. Some who take it for granted that
"the revolution will not be televised" seem to hope that their revolution
will be digitized.

But there's nothing inherently democratizing about the Internet. In fact,
it has developed into a prodigious conduit of political and cultural
propaganda, distributed via centrally edited mega-networks. America Online
has 27 million subscribers, the New Internationalist magazine noted
recently. "They spend an incredible 84 percent of their Internet time on
AOL alone, which provides a regulated leisure and shopping environment
dominated by in-house brands -- from Time magazine to Madonna's latest
album."

At the same time that creative advocates for social change are routinely
putting the Internet to great use, powerful elite bodies like the World
Bank are touting online innovations as democratic models -- while striving
to elude the reach of progressive grassroots activism.

If, in 1968, the Democratic National Convention had been held in
cyberspace instead of in Chicago, on what streets would the antiwar
protests have converged? If, on Inauguration Day this year, the
swearing-in ceremony for George W. Bush had taken place virtually rather
than at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where would people have gathered
to hold up their signs saying "Hail to the Thief"?

Top officials of the World Bank are onto something. In a managerial world,
disruption must be kept to an absolute minimum. If global corporatization
is to achieve its transnational potential, the discourse among power
brokers and their favorite thinkers can happen everywhere at once -- and
nowhere in particular. Let the troublemakers try to interfere by doing
civil disobedience in cyberspace!

In any struggle that concentrates on a battlefield of high-tech
communications, the long-term advantages are heavily weighted toward
institutions with billions of dollars behind them. Whatever our hopes, no
technology can make up for a lack of democracy.






#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net