Something strangely fitting surrounds the journey of the May First/People Link, USSF technology crew arriving in Dakar for the WSF and the Indymedia Convergence Center. As we experience the technological difficulties inherent in a city with randomly expected power outages combined with general struggles to accomplish the many tasks required for any given technology project, larger struggles, difficulties and processes have emerged during our time here that highlight globalization processes in both their negative and positive realities as well as highlight why 'radical techies' perceive technology and politics inherently intertwined phenomena.
Globalization, that elusive and somewhat problematic term, situates this tech group in quite obvious and particular ways, including the World Social Forum and Indymedia, each a manifestation particular to and resistive to capitalism's global processes. Indymedia born, in many ways, from the growing anti-globalization movements across the globe and specifically linked to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, represents a definitive political positioning against the global reach of oppressive economic forces, forces rising from colonial practices dating back 500 years, the Battle of Seattle an ebullition moment which rejected the gross exploitation inherent in such practices. The World Social Forum reflects a similarly situated history and emerged in 2001 as a response to the World Economic Forum, an organization willing to make "impartial" declarations for billions of people without ever consulting those people. The WSF seeks to create an 'open space' for non-governmental, non-partisan participation from the very people unrepresented by WEF. Each of these convergent histories, Indymedia and WSF, expose a people's undercurrent generated by globalization's negatives; yet, each also exposes some of the potent and positive sides endemic to global interconnectedness.
During my first week in Dakar, I have had the pleasure to befriend people from Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, and Senegal, their stories as diverse as their region of origin. Each of these people have arrived at the Social Forum in order to participate in a global transformative process, that simultaneously utilizes the power of global networks and seeks to interfere with transnational corporate/state business as usual. In order to address the global matrix in play, three definitive processes need evaluating:
- The capitalist forces functioning on a global scale, and their reliance on, control of and interrelations with state forces.
- The technological tools, practices, infrastructures, and actors enabling communication across distant spaces, and their interrelations with state forces.
- The bidirectional flow inherent in the globalization process. Local realities intertwine with global realities at cultural and political levels.
It is a provocative time to be on the African continent when looking at these three things. Currently Egypt sits in the middle of a systemic shift as the Egyptian people, fed up with 30 years of dictatorial rule under a democratic guise, have risen up in protest, taking to the streets in a definitive revolutionary stance against oppression 1. Such a revolution has long been in the making and has arrives as an exemplary manifestation of global interconnectedness, showing the strange realities in global capital and technological networks. For radical techies, technological decisions, uses, and tools exist within the global political economic structures and as significant political realities. Mubarak's response to the revolution has finally demonstrated to the world just how implicitly politics and technology get intertwined.
Attempting to disrupt the organizing efforts, Mubarak shut down Internet and SMS (text messaging) communications across Egypt, revealing the hierarchical control state's have over the often touted unstoppable Internet. While China actively blocks access to various Internet domains from citizens, Mubarak took this practice one step further by simply killing all outbound Internet traffic. This has been a crucial year for Internet politics as all root domain servers blocked http://wikileaks.org under pressure from the U.S. government, showing that Internet freedom may not be so free after all 2. Mubarak's Internet shutdown exposes just how easily global technological interconnections can be disrupted by a national government, prompting many in the West to discover the tenuousness of free speech over the global telecommunications net. As Egyptians continued swelling the streets with revolutionary cries, the Chinese government blocked the word 'Egypt' from search engines and text messages, fearing the rapid spread of revolutionary sentiment 3, an act both anti-democratic and hopeful. One thing becomes clear from the last year's Internet politics: All states, East and West, North and South, communist and democratic, willfully reject the fundamental notion of free access to information.
Reading these events across the above mentioned frameworks of globalization, deep linkages emerge between them. China's growing technological market needs a strong Internet infrastructure as a way to boost engineering, thus it walks the fence between censorship and information flows. Evidenced by last year's Google incident, China seeks entry into the high tech Internet market and the high tech market seeks entry into China 4. Looking at the Chinese problem, we see just how deeply state power, corporate power, and technology intertwine, producing a field of discouraging results in which the financial world rejects it's own ethical stance for the sake of profit. Yet an equally provocative reality exists in the interchange between localities and global realities. Not only can abuses of power be viewed in the Chinese model, but also the power of people's networks. That China seeks to hide the current revolution in Egypt suggests the fundamental reality of interconnected cultures, they feed back upon each other with potentialities. Could the Egyptian people bring a democratic people's revolution to China? It seems the Chinese government believe so.
The 'open space' Social Forum model argues for the implicit value in giving a voice to everyone, especially those drowned out by the globalization's exploitative qualities, and Indymedia finds implicit value in developing local media as a mechanism for those voices. That cultures across the globe might inspire one another into creating a better space for all may seem highly idealistic, perhaps even utopic, it is also an extremely realist view. In the next installment, I will examine some forces of cultural transmission that joyfully move people's bodies. Not the macro-level revolutionary intensity inspired by Egyptians, but micro-level cultural transmissions inspired by cultural diversity and the pleasures of Senegalese Sabar dance.
Footnotes:
1 Fisk, Robert. Egypt: Death throes of a dictatorship
2 Swiss WikiLeaks website blocked, spawns alternatives, Dec. 3, 2010.
3 China Blocks 'Egypt' on Top Twitter-Like Service, Associated Press
4 Google and China Work it Out, July 14, 2010.