[governance] Re: Netmundial - some questions

[Deirdre Williams]

Dear Garth,
Forgive me if I ask to return to your argument later.
Just for now would you say that we should retain the individual/society
(community) balance question?
And I have remembered a fifth and (to me) overwhelmingly important question
- how can "we" find trust again? Thank you for reminding me.
"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."
Deirdre


On 21 April 2014 15:12, Garth Graham <garth.graham at telus.net> wrote:

> 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".
>
> >
>
>


-- 
“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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