[governance] New Blogpost: Is There a Global Internet Community

[Garth Graham]

On Mar 31, 2015, at 2:53 PM, Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some may find this of interest…
> https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/is-there-a-global-internet-community/

…and I do!

> In his blog post of March 31/15, Michael Gurstein wrote:
> “…. there is no such thing as “the Global Internet Community” except as an ideological convenience for those who wish to proceed as though the Internet has not become a place where very real social, political, economic and cultural contestations are, will and must take place.  …… The notion of community implies a commonality of interests and that out of this commonality, consensus can be found to address issues of common concern. But it is now overwhelmingly evident that apart from ensuring the continued effective technical functioning of the Internet as a common resource for all, there are effectively no common interests on the basis of which a “Global Internet Community” could be derived.” (1).


There is, however, such a thing as digital culture, the mind of which can be inferred from its information and communications technology artifacts.  The forums you reference have not abandoned their intention that the future of Internet Governance must depend on the existence of “a distributed, decentralized and multistakeholder ecosystem.” (2).  If you were saying that organizations like ICANN should not replace the idea of Internet Governance as ecology with the vapid notion of a Global Internet Community I would agree.  But they aren’t.  And it seems to me that what you say about the nonexistence of a Global Internet Community also applies equally to the idea of a Global Public Interest.

On the left, the right and the center of the existing political spectrum, everyone is contesting control of the Internet’s carriage and content as a means to further their own ends.  Whether it’s the people versus the elites, bottom-up versus top down, or the periphery versus the center, somebody’s trying to represent my interests in the name of democracy, social justice, market competition or some other bait-and-switch.  And I can’t tell one purported ruler from another.  We are hell-bent on re-balancing control of Internet Governance within the framework of existing political alignments, and it really changes nothing.

On the other hand, ISOC was correct when it described the existence of an Internet Governance Ecology.  The Internet that I have, and that I want to keep, is neither a “decentralized network for unmediated social connections,” nor a “surveillance-centric network controlled by a handful of governments and corporate monopolies.” (3).  Instead of framing Internet Governance alternatives in terms of a struggle for control of global power, I believe that the existence of the Internet as a technology, and the evolution of its governance so far, are symptoms of a distributed systems worldview in action. It took a particular way of seeing the possibility of a different order of things, an order based on an understanding of the principles governing complex adaptive and self-organizing systems, for the Internet to appear.   It will take a conscious embrace of those principles to ensure its future integrity.

The Internet is not a place. It’s a protocol grounded in a shift in epistemology away from the mechanistic and towards the relational.  Nothing inherent in the protocol’s actualization gives a damn about how senders and receivers of packets identify their ideological stances or social roles.  The packets still connect, even when an autonomous individual makes the increasingly absurd choice to identify himself or herself as subordinate to someone else.

The Internet’s existence reveals something about the values and beliefs of the digital culture that was able to imagine a different way of supporting communications.   To me that means seeking for the principles of an appropriate governance system by reference to its cultural origin.  For example, you do acknowledge that the “effective technical functioning of the Internet as a common resource” requires a community of practice to function. There are good and proper Internet-like reasons for that.  

It also seems to me that your line of of argument is taking you away from another ecologically correct statement, the Community Informatics declaration that the global is a federation of locals.    I am seized by that declaration precisely because I understand there’s nothing more local than community.

After the individual, community has emerged as the second essential structural element of the digital world.  But the idea of community is in the process of being re-defined in relational terms.  A community is a human ecological system that emerges from the relational interactions and interdependences among autonomous individuals in their social environment and the situations they occupy.  As an open system, the qualities that cause it to emerge are trust and the exercise of individual choice.  I do accept that evoking the idea of a Global Internet Community is an empty phrase of possible insidious intent.  But the reason persons chose to use the Internet with such passion is precisely because it enables community defined in relational terms.

>From the perspective of distributed systems, community, and particularly community online, is Instead of society imposing identity upon individuals, they have gained access to society by design. They are “stepping out,” to an open conversation between society and the self.  They know that conservatives, socialists and neo-liberals are all going to betray them in the name of liberty, security and the greater good.  They have no need to surrender freedoms into the needs of group solidarity to act within the framework of a group.

We are in the process of abandoning the sense of community as a collective.  In fact, collective human action such as, “people's control of social technologies,” is not essential for the Internet to deliver good outcomes. That’s just as much of a threat as all those other ideological conveniences.  Informed by the choices of autonomous individuals, the relations that form community are reciprocal but not communal.

Consider the questioning of solidarity and collective action raised in Jean-Luc Nancy's "Inoperative Community," 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."

>From the perspective of distributed systems (complex adaptive and self-organizing systems), community is not a thing, a noun. A community is what you get when autonomous individuals chose to bundle themselves together in a certain way without surrendering their autonomy. It’s a dynamic verbalization of relational possibilities, choices, and practices. It’s an epistemic structural realization. It’s a net of relations. A community emerges purely on the basis of trusted relations among individuals, not on the basis of the particulars of individuals and not on the basis of some externally impose ideology.  Those particulars remain in the individuals themselves. The individuals who inform the bundle can change, and an individual within the bundle can change through awareness of the information. But, as long as the relations remain structurally the same, the way of bundling into community continues over time.

I once made a fast scan of the meaning of stakeholder implicit in the NETmundial outcome documents.  This showed me that stakeholders are not anyone who self-identifies as such. They are qualified into collective categories of organizations that are then “represented.” The assumptions about structure that follow from that categorization are consistent with an implicit assumption to aggregate individuals into “hubs” (or as ICANN does, to indoctrinate and submerge individuals into internal “communities” in the old collective sense).  This analysis reinforces my awareness that there is neither a consensus about the beliefs and values or even existence of digital culture nor an agenda about governance that intends to look in that direction.

This rush into a “contestation” of ideologies abandons the Internet’s infinite game of positive network externalities for a finite game of winners and losers.  Except that everybody loses.  It’s not good “Internet” if the choice to connect, and to converse, and to be together doesn’t rest at the level of the individual.   It’s the individual who is at the edge of the social networks and their positive externalities.  We desperately need to keep the smarts at the edge and the power distributed among a federation of locals.

(1). Mike Gurstein. Is There a Global Internet Community? Gurstein's Community Informatics, March 31, 2015.  https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/is-there-a-global-internet-community/

(2). NETmundial Principlesfile://localhost/. https/::www.netmundial.org:principles

(3). Call for an Internet Social Forum. http://internetsocialforum.net

(4). The rest of this comment is a re-working of part of: Garth Graham. Taking Internet Governance Ecology at its word. June 10, 2014.
https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/48343654/ecology%20realized.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1402436268000&api=v2

GG


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