[governance] wsis 10 closing ceremony speech

[parminder]

pl find enclosed, and also below, the speech delivered by my colleague 
Anita Gurumurthy as a closing ceremony civil society speaker.

parminder


*Statement by Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for 
Change<#sdfootnote1sym> *

**

*at the closing ceremony of WSIS plus 10 review *

**

*held by UNESCO from 25th to 27th February, 2013*


Dear fellow-citizens of the world;

On the occasion of this initial meeting in the WSIS+10 review process. I 
would like to take us back in time to the decade of the 90s and the 
particular sentiments at the turn of the millennium that framed the 
World Summit on the Information Society. In the late 90s, the power of 
the digital revolution was seen as heralding a new hope for addressing 
long standing challenges in development. At the same time, world leaders 
were also concerned that the digital divide at international and 
national levels could lead to shaping a new class of those who have 
access to ICTs and those who do not. As we stand at this milestone of 
the WSIS plus 10 review, we have the responsibility to go back to this 
concern. The Internet – as the future social paradigm – is already yet 
another axis shaping exclusion and power.

The WSIS Declaration of Principles titled 'Building the Information 
Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium' avers in its preamble 
that no one should be excluded from the benefits the information society 
offers. It notes – with conviction interlaced with caution that - 'under 
favourable conditions', these technologies (that is, ICTs) can be a 
powerful instrument, increasing productivity, generating economic 
growth, job creation and employability and improving the quality of life 
of all.

This is the moment of reckoning – for all of us – to ask if we stand at 
the threshold of a new positive future for all and if indeed, the global 
and national governance and policy architectures of the new 
techno-social paradigm have created the 'favourable conditions' for the 
good life that seemed plausible in 2003.

  *

    The economic crisis of the recent years, in the developed world, is
    a serious indictment of the macro economic pathways of neo-liberal
    growth and its policies. Recent research in Europe suggests that
    serious attention needs to be paid to the inequality in work -
    wages, working conditions and social cohesion - and its
    microeconomic implications.

  *

    Even in Latin America, despite relative economic stability and
    reduction in poverty in many countries, a recent research by the UN
    says that the richest 20% of the population on average earn 20 times
    more than the poorest 20%. There is a considerable job deficit and a
    large labour informality affecting mainly the young and women.
    Colombia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia, the Dominican
    Republic, Argentina and Guatemala have all seen an increase in
    inequality in the past decade.

  *

    The Asian giants China and India, often touted as rising economic
    powers, face huge challenges in socio-economic equity – the
    consuming middle class may but be a smokescreen that hides the
    livelihoods crisis for the majority.


All this has happened in the same decade that the Internet ought to have 
been been equalising social and economic opportunity. We need to sit 
back and reflect,what went wrong?Why did the Internet, and the 
Information Society phenomenon not do what it was supposed to do? This 
is the principal question that the WSIS review process must answer.

If the good life is also about democratic transitions, then the miracles 
of technology may certainly be counted as harbingers of deep change in 
the past decade. Authoritarian states have had to come to terms with the 
power of interconnection in the network age. The Occupy Movement gave 
new hope to social movements. Yet, new configurations of power in 
mainstream spaces have more or less seen the political elite make way 
for a new class of economic elite – information society democracy 
remains as exclusionary as its predecessors. Perhaps more, with little 
place for women and others in the margins, and oblivious of new forms of 
violence and misogyny in the open and ostensibly emancipatory corridors 
of the virtual world.

Those of us committed to build a people-centred, inclusive and 
development oriented information society have to come to terms with and 
interrogate the roots of these crises – the unfavourable conditions that 
seem to have jettisoned the equalising propensities of the Internet.

The crisis today for the information society agenda is two fold – it is 
economic and it is cultural. The neo-liberal juggernaut has – at an 
unstoppable speed – usurped the power of connectedness. As some cyber 
enthusiasts continue to sing peons to the power of the supposedly 
decentralised, non-hierarchical and inclusive Net, the human predicament 
in real terms is far from this idealised picture. Today, a handful of 
colossal corporate mega-giants rule private empires - the top 10 Web 
sites accounted for 31 percent of US page views in 2001, 40 percent in 
2006, and about 75 percent in 2010...”

Centralization is the name of the game – the most powerful weapon in 
neo-liberalism's arsenal. Consider Google: when it comes to user data, 
today Google runs a much more centralized operation than five years ago 
where individual searches, youtube video histories, and calendars 
combine to generate individualised and targeted ads. The Internet market 
place atomises the consumer-user, coopting her persona as a commodity in 
a logic that may not be self evident to Internet enthusiasts unwilling 
to see the realpolitik.

The cultural crisis is deeper. What the architects of the WSIS documents 
perhaps underestimated is the way the information society would 
precipitate a normative crisis. As the Internet market place broadens 
its horizons, we see the individuals, communities and nations, 
fragmented by increasing self interest. The seamless geographies of the 
connected world are images of the Internet's economic paradigm – where 
membership for marginalised individuals, social groups and nations is a 
simple binary - assimilation or decimation. The talk of diversity and 
multiligualism notwithstanding, there is much less we can aspire today 
out of the promise of the networks society for collaboration and 
horizontalism than seemed plausible ten years ago. We need to pause and 
ask – are our normative frameworks – infoethics and info-civic 
imaginaries – adequate to ensure that every person, the last woman, can 
be a global citizen in the interconnected global world.

What we are witness to instead of a reflection around the basics of 
democracy in the interconnected world, are anxieties of nations states 
that make ancient tribal chieftans seem like impeccable upholders of 
freedoms and the rule of law

The various international summits of the UN, Rio-Earth Summit in 1992 , 
Cairo in 1994 on population, Copenhagen in 1995 on social development, 
Beijing in 1996 for women – pursued problems confronting humanity with 
the resolve to find progressive solutions. Today these have contributed 
to the broadbasing and democratisation of civil society engagement. 
There are some lessons here for civil society in the information society 
space.

Also, as we move towards the WSIS + 10 review, we need to be cognizant 
of the competing demands of the Millennium Development Goals Review 
(Post 2015 Development Agenda), the processes to set the post-Rio+20 
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the 20-year review of the 
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD+20). These 
overlapping inter-governmental processes are bound to render the ideals 
of the WSIS declaration obscure unless we are able to pitch for a review 
that can offer analytical and pragmatic segways for the other UN reviews.

The WSIS plus 10 review is a historic opportunity therefore to review 
the state of democracy – and I qualify, the state of global democracy. 
Here – we have two tasks

 1.

    Re-interpreting human rights, equality and sustainability in the
    information society. This is a dialogue that must inform the other
    UN reviews and discussions on the crises of food, fuel, finance and
    climate change, poverty and deprivation, inequality and insecurity,
    and violence against women.

 2.

    The second task is to explore the favourable conditions that can
    make the Internet an equaliser. As a global public good, the policy
    issues pertaining to the Internet are simultaneously global and
    national. Discussing the global policy issues around the Internet
    should be a principal aim of the WSIS plus 10 review process.

We stand at cross-roads. The promise of community has never been greater 
in theory, but the risk to the collective never higher in the brazen 
pursuit of economic self interest and aggrandizement of power. For civil 
society the modus operandi of organising is clear. We need to ask how 
best we can sieze and use the decentralising possibilities of the 
network age to craft new forms of organisation; how we can define the 
core issues that reflect honestly our analysis of the crises. The WSIS 
plus 10 review process must indeed take a leaf out of Jo Freeman's essay 
- 'The tyranny of structurelessness'. Let not the ideals of democracy in 
multistakeholderism be reduced to shadowboxing – where emerging 
hierarchies are denied and those that wield power escape with no 
accountability.

Multistakeholderism is a framework and means of engagement, it is not a 
means of legitimization. Legitimization comes from people, from work 
with and among people. We need to use this occasion of the WSIS plus 10 
review to go back to the the touchstone of legitimacy – engage with 
people and communities to find out the conditions of their material 
reality and what seems to lie ahead in the information society. From 
here we need to build our perspectives and then come to multistakeholder 
spaces and fight and fight hard for those who cannot be present here.



1 <#sdfootnote1anc>Www.ITforChange.net <http://Www.ITforChange.net/>

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