Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 27 of 39)

Regulating the Wild West

1 August 2008 / / 0 Comments

I forgot to cross-post here a few paragraphs I posted to Liberal Conspiracy last week, commenting on Andy Burnham’s call for more internet regulation:

It is also contentious that the poor are being disadvantaged by the ‘lawless’ internet – One great advantage of the medium is that it reduces the financial barriers of entry into any given business. Putting online regulation in place will surely restore those barriers.

Later, Unity took Burnham to task at greater length, for misrepresenting John Perry Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace‘ in a quest to defend royalties for the rich music labels, at the expense of new and more equitable business models, where intellectual property is shared or even waived, that are appearing online.
Meanwhile, the CMS Select Committee suggests that YouTube should be better policed, with content certificates similar to those awarded to movies. Taming the Wild-West seems to be on the DCMS agenda.
Although the “wild-west” conception of the internet is probably inaccurate description of most people’s experience, message boards like the misanthropic /b/ board at 4chan certainly do have a lawless air to them. Not only are there no rules governing behaviour, but the participants do not seem to abide by most established social rules, or rules of decency either. But, as this interesting article from the New York Times Magazine shows, even those who are intent on disrupting the lives of others, causing panic without empathy, do seem to operate by a code of sorts, only attacking those they consider to be stupid, hypocritical, inconsistent… or careless:

“It’s not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to save them.”

Here Comes Everybody

24 July 2008 / / 1 Comment

I’m looking forward to reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody after listening to the Demos Podcast of their event with him earlier this month.
Particularly interesting are his musings on the future of the Nation State. Since the internet allows people to associate with people in geographically disparate areas, and to associate on ever more specific grounds. If people live and love online, then other types of ‘polity’ might become more politically relevant.

This is a really crazy moment in the history of the Nation State… The pull outwards into smaller, more ethnically coherent groups is actually overcoming what was, in the 20th Century, and argument for economies of scale in Nation States. Whether that is good or bad , I don’t know, it would be such a profound shift that it would transcend good and bad, it would be a new world order.

He was talking specifically with regards to ethnicity – Tiawanese students reading the Taipei newspaper online while studying in New York, say, or Indian immigrants watching nothing but Zee-TV on Sky. I haven’t thought about the implications for multiculturalism in this, but if true, it seems an essentially insular development, where the chance of exposure to new and different thoughts is reduced. In this sense, it is similar to the social gerrymandering that is occurring in the USA, with families moving homes and states in order to surround themselves with like-minded people.
However, I wonder whether the most profound shift might come when people transcend ethnicity as well as geography. With people spending so much time, and actually making money in worlds like Second Life, or building large guilds of allegiences in Eve Online or WarCraft, perhaps those bonds could be the basis for some other kind of nation or ‘polity’ with real power and relevance.

Fifth Estate or Democratic Tool?

30 June 2008 / / 1 Comment

An old printing press at the Guardian's offices in Farringdon, London.
When we think about blogging and the development of human interactions through the web, it is easy to assume some kind of historical determinism.  The Internet is one huge sandbox, with new blogs and campaigning sites being launched all the time.  Most peter out (I’ve been involved in a couple of those myself) but others persist, and grow.  This trial-and-error approach suggests that we are at least inching towards a more sophisticated and empowering blogosphere, which exercises more influence over politics and therefore the direction this country is headed.
The Blog Nation event earlier this week raised some of the key issues that the Liberal Left needs to answer in order to become more effective online:

  • Are we campaigners or pseudo-journalists?
  • Will it suffice to form ad hoc coalitions to fight single-issue campaigns, or should we be forming a more formal and wider coalition to try and affect a broader cultural shift?
  • In order to be effective, do we need to promote the rise of super-blogs or power-bloggers to rival Guido Fawkes?  Do we need a figure-head like Barack Obama around which we can coalesce, or can a leaderless network build momentum on its own?

As I crouched in the front row of the event, rubbing my temples and trying to think of answers, the following thought occurred to me: What if this is all there is? By which I mean, perhaps it is impossible to become much more organized.  I refrained from articulating this thought at the time, but it did seem a deft, if nihilistic way of avoiding giving an answer to some of the questions posed, above.  Perhaps there is no historical determinism to any of this, and we are not destined to develop anything significantly more efficient than what we have now.
Now I don’t know whether I really believe things to be so hopeless, but if its true it may not be such a bad thing.  Rather than grandiose ideas of the blogosphere become some kind of Fifth Estate, perhaps we should aspire to nothing more than another tool for the people to use in checking the power of the elite (both elected representatives and others who hold positions of influence).
Of course we should ask how existing bloggers and activists can work better together, but that is just oiling the machine, rather than inventing a new one.  A more important focus is to try to increase access to the new information and opinion that is appearing online.  Just as increasing literacy strengthens democracy and promote equality, so computer literacy can strengthen it too.  So, my suggestion for the next open source campaign – introduce one relative, friend or colleague to blogging each month.  This need not mean forcing them to set up their own blog.  Instead, just a gentle explanation of the power of RSS, and the suggestion that they bookmark one – just one – of the fine sites listed on the right.
Cross posted at the Liberal Conspiracy

On 'Open Source Campaigning'

26 June 2008 / / 1 Comment

Yesterday at the Blog Nation Event, Dan Hardie gave an account of his experiences running his Iraqi Interpreters campaign. He mentioned my post on Open Source Campaigning, but said he thought that ‘open source’ wasn’t an appropriate label, because you need a heirarchy and a leader to run an effective campaign.
To clarify, I’m not sure that the ideas of ‘leadership’ and ‘open source’ are mutually exclusive. Open Source coding projects tend to have a core team of dedicated developers, but individual tasks to code are farmed out to volunteers. Likewise with Jay Rosen’s ‘open source journalism’ – an editor or lead journalist still writes up the piece, but dozens or hundreds of other journalists are able to perform the many discrete pieces of research required.
So it is with Open Source Campaigning. You still need someone like Dan to lead the campaign and make strategic decisions, but the leg-work can be decimated if the lobbying or writing to individual MPs is shared throughout the network.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy website.

Once per Continent?

7 June 2008 / / 1 Comment

Earlier, I mentioned an analysis of Obama’s fundraising machine, the new bottom-up model beating Hillary’s practiced top-down methods. The piece also says:

The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

As I said earlier in the year, the web will continue to gain influence and in the 2012 US Presidential Election, a robust web strategy will become the crux of all the campaigns. However, part of Obama’s success resulted from mining entirely new set of donors, in an entirely new way. His model and his demographic are now common knowledge, and I wonder whether future candidates will reap quite such a harvest from future fundraising drives.
I remember watching a version of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now on TV a few years ago. Melmotte (played by David Suchet) declares that his grand plans for a trans-continental railway in the USA were a business opportunity that could only be exploited “once per continent”. I’m afraid I can’t find the appropriate reference in the book text.
Could it be that Obama’s fundraising exploits represent a one-off? A ‘once-per-continent’ – or perhaps, in this case, ‘once-per-medium’ – moment. He is often referred to as the Google of the Presidential race, and one thing that characterizes successful dot.com “killer-apps” is that they tend to pull up the ladder behind them. The innovations, once invented and exploited by the vanguard, have a very obvious key to success, which is easy to reverse-engineer and copy. However, none of the copies really achieve the stratospheric success of the trail-blazer.
I think Obama’s next challenge, aside from winning the Presidency and then saving the world, is to expand his fundraising network in such a way that it benefits more people. Perhaps an online project which could be an equivalent of Emily’s List for young, grassroots activists from areas that do not normally produce political candidates? This would certainly be a logical and interesting next step for a movement that, while supposedly about many-to-many networks and bottom-up organising, nevertheless has a single, strong personality at its centre.

Brown’s Woes

Note the recent collapse of the Labour vote, the hemorrhaging of councillors and the plummeting ratings in the opinion polls. Ministers and Labour supporters lament the withering of grassroots support. Remember Gordon Brown’s coronation as party leader. One wonders that, if he (or a challenger) had been forced into a grinding leadership campaign, he might have built up more of a base of support within the party.
The activists and donors to Obama’s campaign became effective advocates for the candidate, inoculating him from the full force of smears, and putting out a positive message after gaffes. Who’s doing that for Gordon? Let us never have a coronation again.

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