[governance] wsis 10 closing ceremony speech

[graciela at nupef.org.br]

I totally agree. Congratulations, Anita - and thanks! 

best,


Graciela 

Em 28-02-2013 20:43, Ian Peter escreveu: 

> Great speech
by Anita. Glad someone actually said something for a change! 
> 
> FROM:
parminder [1] 
> SENT: Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:02 PM 
> TO:
governance at lists.igcaucus.org [2] 
> SUBJECT: [governance] wsis 10
closing ceremony speech 
> 
> 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 
> 
> 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 
> 
> * 
> 
> 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. 
>

> * 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> [3]1Www.ITforChange.net [4] 
> 
>
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