[governance] Re: Netmundial - some questions

[Garth Graham]

On 2014-04-21, at 8:07 AM, Deirdre Williams wrote:
> Then considering Garth's comments on Saturday in the Netmundial – Remote Participation thread
> 
> “ I just completed a fast scan of the meaning of stakeholder implicit in the NETmundial document and posted it as a “whole page” comment to that introduction page.  I found that stakeholders are not anyone who self-identifies as such. They are qualified into collective categories of organizations that are then “represented.”  It would be consistent with that implicit assumption to aggregate individuals into “hubs” (or as ICANN does, into internal “communities”).  But it’s not good “Internet” if the choice to connect doesn’t rest at the level of the individual.”
> 
> and Karl's discussion a week or so ago on the issue of “we and me” I would like to know what is being proposed in terms of establishing and protecting the balance between the rights of the group and the rights of the individual. As “civil society” (another term which needs a definition) our interests should tip in favour of “we” - after all we call ourselves “society” - but “civil society”, at least as I understand it, is a coming together of individuals with highly diverse needs and affiliations – for the society to work the members must be satisfied, as they surrender some of their freedoms to the needs of the group, that their individual necessities have also been considered.

In one of his recent posts related to the individual, Karl Auerbach noted that, “the models of technical governance as expressed via bodies such as the IETF, do not scale.”  So then, what does scale?  I’m pretty sure that the “we” isn’t society.  It’s community.   The uses of the Internet for the emergence of community reveal a shift towards the individual and the local in our assumptions about how society is structured.
 
I think you are right that, “establishing and protecting the balance between the rights of the group and the rights of the individual,” is a foundational question that’s being ignored.  But for me, the reason it’s foundational (and also the reason it’s being ignored) is because the Internet is a symptom of a shift away from a society where individual must “surrender some of their freedoms to the needs of the group,” to act within the framework of a group.
 
Consider the question raised in Jean-Luc Nancy's "Inoperative Community," (1), how to create "being together" without a "being as one?"
 
"The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader...) ...necessarily loses the in of being-in-common.  Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it.  It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness.  The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being."
 
As an example of that retreat from collective transcendence, consider also Ursula Franklin’s definition of the good society as a “potluck supper,” (2), a with, a being-together, that is an emergent situational consequence of autonomous individual decisions and trust.
 
The other side of the global is the local.  To me the rush to define global mechanisms of Internet Governance that address global public goods and global public interests is a rush to a dangerous oversimplification that obscures the reality that human trust only scales to the level of community and not much farther.  Individuals aren't surrendering their freedoms to anything they can't touch.  That’s why I’ve been pushing the Community Informatics Declaration’s observation that the global is a federation of locals.
 
Billions of people have recently gained a new way of reaching and finding one another.  And now they face incredible reactionary pressure to turn that off and to give authority to some abstract global mechanisms that will channel that capacity according to some vague and arbitrary premises about what their common values might be.  To me, the question is –if they knew that was happening, if they knew that their choices as to the appropriate pathways to essential interdependences was about to be circumscribed, why would they allow it?  And, after the fact, when their interdependencies have been circumscribed, how will they respond?
 
GG
 
(1). Jean-Luc Nancy. La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community), Preface, 1986, xxxix.
 
(2). Ursula Franklin. “The dream of the peaceful society to me is still the dream of the potluck supper – a society in which all can contribute and all can find friendship, that those who bring things bring things they do well, but that we create conditions under which a potluck is possible.” CBC. The Current, May 7, 2010. Activist, educator Ursula Franklin discusses the democratic deficit and introduces us to a new verb: "Scrupling".
 
> 


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