Haystack, Neo-Informationalism, and When Free

Information Is Bad
Posted by Tricia_Wang on Wednesday, Sep 22, 2010

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Over the last few months I’ve been following the developments around Haystack, an “anti-
censorship tool” for Iranian internet users. As the media was fawning over Haystack as a free
speech tool and its co-creator, Austin Heap, as a poster-child for digital activism, I observed
conversations unfold on the Stanford’s Liberation Technology email list-serve where members
began to raise some serious concerns about Haystack’s major security gaffes and its shady beta
release.

Jillian York has written biting analysis of the media coverage of the Haystack Affair. The
Economist has a great review of the events.

Projects like Haystack reveal so much more about our own fears of the world. But the bottom
line is that Haystack was blown out of proportion from the very beginning for something that it
wasn’t. The Haystack Affair, however, is not an isolated incident; it is a continuation of projects
coming from Westerners who place their own narratives on people and situations they really
don’t fully understand.

The Internet Freedom Bluff

The Haystack Affair, like the recent Google-China Saga is just another technology that has been
caught in the digital geo-politics of what I’ve been calling, neo-informationalism. Neo-
informationalism is the belief that information should function like currency in free-market
capitalism—borderless, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of this rests on an ethical
framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that
free and open access to information can create real social change. I write more about the roots of
neo-informationalism from hacker and corporate tech culture in my analysis on the Google
China Saga and on my research blog on this topic, but I think what’s important to note here is
that we are starting to see that the neo-informationalist agenda is not only built into the way we
and corporations promote our technologies, but is reflected in our state policies. This all started
with Hilary Clinton’s talk on internet freedom in early January of this year, which marked a clear
turning point in US foreign policy. The talk didn’t just reprimand China for not making it
possible for Google to do business on Google’s terms in China, it also announced to the world
that the US was embarking on a new crusade for freedom – internet freedom.

And here’s the thing – the people being recruited for this new crusade aren’t your typical
jingoists who tend to support protectionist policies and centralized controls on information, but
techies who believe in free-information in the name of liberty and rights for all human beings.
Just as much as neo-liberalism successfully incorporated the Left and Democrats to support open
markets in the name of “development” when really it was all about the control of money and
power, neo-informationalism incorporates lefty digital activtists to support freedom and open
information when in reality it serves to benefit Americans and their allies at the end of the day –
not real social change in the places that need it the most. (Hackers be aware!)

Free-markets, like free-information, need to be created. Free-markets are maintained through the
heavy subsidization of the US military industrial complex. We are all familiar with this kind of
imperialism- the exploit of resources in other countries so that we can maintain our standard of
living (e.g. military build up in the Persian Golf to protect oil fields). But what’s emerging is a
new form of domination that I call digital imperialism – the exploit of other countries through
digital means so that we can maintain our status quo. The former does it in the name of free-
markets, the latter does it in the name of free-information.

Neo-informationalist policies, such as the new “internet freedom” foreign policy to ensure free
and flowing information, compliment neoliberal practices in corporate welfare to keep markets
free and open to the US and all of our allies who benefit from our work. But it’s not free for all
when it’s just free for some. And I and many others have argued that the corporate efforts of
Google must constantly be checked (just like any other institution) to ensure that their policies
are benefiting users, not just the corporation. Tim Wu’s latest book, The Master Switch: The
Rise and Fall of Information Empires, speaks to this very concern – that the history of ICTs in
the US show that when a corporation is able to monopolize a technologial innovation, its action
switch to centralizing the control of the medium. The internet is built on open protocols, but this
doesn’t mean that the very institutions that are invested in keeping those technological protocols
open are always equally invested in what’s best for their users.

The narrative of internet freedom is a myth – it’s a myth that Americans have constructed about
the technology. We hear this perpetuated with rallying cries such as, “If we don’t do X, the
internet will no longer be free!” How is this different from, “If we don’t invade X or control Y,
then American will no longer be free!” Then to add to this you have the hackers and techies
arguing that “information wants to be free,” reflecting the techno-anthropomorphization of
information. All of these statements create the larger narrative that OUR internet is free and other
internets are unfree.

The internet as freedom myth rests on a binary that the internet is a platform that either promotes
freedom or total control. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s book, Control and Freedom: Power and
Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, attacks this Western binary and asks, ” How has the
Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is
freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control?” The silver lining in her argument
is that she shows how the internet came to be constructed as a tool for empowerment – mainly as
racial and sexual empowerment in the US.

But now this myth of internet freedom has become internalized within our media sphere and
among digital activists. And at times the real concerns of serious issues like net neutrality get
mixed into the internet freedom rhetoric that has now been adopted by the State Department. The
danger of seeing the internet as a binary is that we lose the ability to see how the internet is
manifested in various ways depending on institutional contexts, how the internet AMPLIFIES
existing conditions.

It’s also a dangerous way of seeing the world because we begin to believe that real social change
can happen if the internet was just “free” and if all information just flowed freely. Now we have
this tech deterministic argument wrapped up in our state policy. And it’s quite powerful when
you combine it with the current neoliberal efforts to over-ride “inefficient” governments and
regulators to create more “efficient” markets.

Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls
the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. Neo-
informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization
theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-
sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web.
Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are
inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through
free-market conditions. This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in
governance processes. And now even our State Deparment is pushing this agenda as it fits quite
nicely with the efforts to bring democracy to the world – esp where we need it the most- our oil
fields.

Now I have no qualms with countries advocating for democracy, but like sami ben gharbia, I am
very critical of the hypocrisy in this new crusade. In sami’s latest (and awesomely researched)
blog post, The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism, he writes that

“the U.S cannot be regarded as credible in their new crusade for Internet freedom as long as
they maintain the same foreign policy which is, as many Arab affairs specialists and activists
describe it, a hypocritical and counter-democratic one.”
As Western countries such as the US become more invested in promoting freedom through
information practices, we will see more projects that attempt to fulfil the political promise of
spreading and maintaining democracy abroad (see Evgeny Morozov’s article on this topic).
We’re returning to some good old post-Cold War policy making. This time around, however,
state governments no longer need to spread information and knowledge by erecting universities
abroad when they can now offer internet circumvention technologies that will give the world
access to all information. It’s digital imperialism as its best – the marriage of computer
programmers who believe in free-information and state governments who believe in freedom.
And therein that marriage came the short lived baby named Haystack. But rest assured, there will
be more babies that come out of this new public-private partnership of digital activists and
government actors. And when these babies come, will the media and people remember the
Haystack Affair or will we repeat the same old mess?

Avoiding Cargo Cult Digital Activists

These messy digital affairs are often fueled by digital activists who unknowingly get caught up
in these neo-informationalist landscapes. This graph by sami ben gharbia illustrates the new
context of digital activism. There are whole host of new players who want to promote this new
crusade of US cyber diplomacy through the internet by working closely with digital activists and
grassroots organizations. Sami warns that if digital activists do not exercise more discretion in
who they become involved with, they can end up supporting the very policies that they are
fighting.
It may sounds alluring at first to collaborate with the government when it appears that there is a
shared goal to promote free and open access to information. It’s especially alluring to groups
who already believe and practice this. I am embedded in a community of hackers, techies, and
organizers who believe in free-information as a practice. While I share similar values, what I see
happening is that many digital activists are quick to jump on any international case promoted by
the media where information does not appear to flow “freely.” Then they launch some project
and naively step into a larger geo-strategic power struggle that has nothing to do with free-
information for all and everything to do with freedom for some.

Austin Heap, fell into this power struggle. Even worse, he prematurely courted the media’s
attention (and the media courted him) before having a solid product. Putting my anthropologist
hat on, i would say that Austin Heap was just doing cargo cult science. Physicist Richard
Feynman used this term to criticize scientists who conduct and promote their own scientific
projects just to secure research funds and media attention. (more on the history of real Cargo
cults). The point is that you can’t take cargo cult science seriously; giving it more attention (like
the media did) only encourages more spectacle.

In this new era of cyber democracy in the name of “Internet Freedom,” we’re going to see more
cargo cult technologies from digital activists. Some technologies will suck and some will work,
but the problem is that the tools that make false promises to users can actually cut off dialogue
instead of cultivating it.

And that is the MOST CRITICAL danger of tools like Haystack – they are distracting mirages
for the digital activists on the ground doing the grueling work of keeping conversations open,
encrypting banal and politicized convos, working with local communities and governments to
improve their information services, and building participatory sites. As we walk through the
dessert of global affairs, let’s not be distracted by the mirages and keep our eyes on the real goal,
which is to cultivate relationships where we can learn from each other and support communities
so that they sustain themselves economically, politically, and socially.

My issue with projects like Haystack is that the creators attached a political ideology to its
software. By politicizing the “tool,” it becomes less useful because its only targets high-value
users, which then exposes them to greater danger. Sometimes, the most depoliticized tools are
the most beneficial in highly politicized situations. Youtube is a great example of a real life
working anti-censorship tool. It’s the most popular website for video uploading and viewing and
the third most trafficked site in the world. It’s subversive because it’s popular and because it has
no stated agenda for target users. Tor is another example of a widely used anonymous software
that doesn’t set an ideological narrative for its users.

Doing more harm than good when stories are forced

What I’ve learned throughout my years of organizing is that activists too often have a pre-set
narrative for the outcome in which they are trying to change. In my early days of activism in
youth media in NYC, I was too invested in creating one outcome for the youth that we were
trying to “save” from the projects. It didn’t help that we could only find funders who would give
grants for promises of “measurable change” for “disaffected and media illiterate youth” from the
ghetto. Change is possible, but genuine and sustainable change has to be negotiated and
determined by the community. This to me is what I love about participatory tools that bring
people together whether it is an inviting warm fire or hip-hop music or an internet meme.

Over the last few years of researching technology and migrants in China, I’ve seen scores of
anti-censorship projects (from art to technology to straight up protests) aimed at freeing Chinese
people from their “censored lives.” These projects, propped up in the name of freedom, can often
hurt the very people they are trying to save or the people who are working to improve the
situation without the spotlight of international media attention (this is the topic of Linda
Polman’s book on the harm of many humanitarian aid efforts). I’ve seen this happen way too
many times. Some of the most exciting social reforms in China are happening in places without
any international NGOs or media attention or activists waiting to tell their deportation survival
story.

I think the underlying work of activism is the goal of revealing concentrated or unfair forms of
power. Yet, often times in these macro discussion of geo-political and international diplomacy
making, we forget that power is not possessed but exercised. If this is the case, then activism is
less about redistributing power but more about igniting people and communities to believe that
they have the power to represent their own stories, lives, needs, and hopes. Some of the most
exciting prospects for change are tools, projects, and institutions that facilitate people to code
their own space, to program their own lives, and to represent their own stories. As geographer
John Allen argues (pg 163), “there is no everywhere to power.” While we may all be immersed
in “arrangements of power,” power is not evenly distributed. Can this be the exploit then for
digital activists?

Truths and Stories

Philosopher Martin Heidegger tells a story of how a farmer uses traditional technology and a
Westerner uses modern technology with a piece of land. While the farmers see the land as
something to cultivate, the Westerner with her/his modern technologies sees the land as a
resource where only one thing is possible – maximum yield for profit. The farmer sees
her/himself as the steward of the land while the Westerner sees her/himself as the beneficiary of
the land. Non-modern technologies cultivate objects for the most sustainable path while modern
technologies in the West exploit resources for the ‘maximum yield at minimal expense.’

Heidegger was concerned about the Western approach to technology because it sets the world up
as a set of calculable and coherent forces. This way of seeing and doing penetrates our
subconscious as we approach countries, communities and then individuals. When armed with
technologies that helps us make rational and calculated decisions, it reifies what we see as the
truth – ours! Heidegger argued that the modern Western spirit is not whole because there is no
such thing as just one “truth.” For the spirit to be whole, Heidegger suggests that we need to be
open to a greater variety of truths.

To me, the beauty of the internet is that in the tradition of other communication tools, it offers
other ways to experience different realities and truths. Tools like Haystack reify our truth – that
others live in repression and Americans live in freedom. If you create a tool that is only for
people to fight against repressive governments, then you’re forcing one use scenario for your
users. Projects that go in with a pre-set story or mission is a myopic way of interacting with the
world because it can prevent the possibility of other stories from emerging that were never
imagined in the first place. And this worries me because having a pre-set story of “liberatory
technology” stunts the imagination for other innovative possibilities for social change with
technological objects and with people.

Cut off what?

Short of killing the actual leaders in repressive countries (which the US has done and continues
to support), social change can take a long time. It’s not sexy and it doesn’t grab media headlines.
The people at NGOs and companies creating awesome possibilities and dialogues around the
world in this space aren’t in the New York Times for every community they work with or every
bridge they build. The states that are experimenting with alternatives to neo-liberlalism and
trying to create a sustainable present don’t even get press attention (great article on how South
America has become neoliberalims’s weakest link).
If the goal for activists, in Zizek’s words, is to not dirt[y] the balls of those in power but to cut
[their testicles] off, then we should cultivate trust abroad, not destroy it. My concern is that
digital activists have not learned from our own history. Haven’t we learned from countless
projects, such as how we totally screwed up Afghanistan, that we tend to create chaos when we
naively simplify our actions as a matter of freedom and democracy? So how about we work on
“Internet freedom” on our own soil first? There’s a lot of work to be done and stories to be told.
Here’s some projects and people who are doing awesome work on good old American soil:
Jennifer Pahlka at Code For America, Anil Dash’s work at Expert Labs, Gina Trappani’s app
Think Up, and Noel Hidalgo’s work at the NY State Senate.

This post originally appeared on Tricia Wang’s website, Cultural Bytes.

When Google left China in early 2010, many attributed Google’s move as a valiant and moral
response to the Chinese government’s strict information filtering rules. I disagreed with this
point of view and wrote a post on Cultural Bytes on what I thought were the real reasons for
Google’s quick departure from China. 

A few months later, I was asked to keynote the New Directions in the Humanities Conference at
UCLA on June 29, 2010. This gave me the chance to rethink some of the original comments I
made back in early 2010. In my original post, I argued that Google failed to create
successful brand recognition in the Chinese market, to launch a recognizable marketing
campaign that stood out against Baidu (the reigning search engine in China), and to understand
the values of non-elite users in China. I then suggested that Google should’ve put more time in
understanding the cultural orientations of Chinese users before expecting services that they had
originally developed for Western users to just be readily embraced by Chinese consumers.

As I started preparing for my talk, I began thinking more about why the world’s largest search
engine left the largest online market. I realized that my original post only barely scraped the
surface of the Google-China saga. The bigger issue was more than a matter of Google failing to
conduct proper ethnography and user tests on the Chinese market. The real issue is that China
and Google see the world in different ways and this informs their outlook on how access to
information should be mediated. And ultimately Google assumed that their world view would
eventually trump China’s.

For my keynote, I make the case that Google failed in China for two reasons. First, drawing
upon the ideas that I made in my original post, I discuss how Google never created useful
services for non-elite digital users based off of my ethnographic work in China.

Second, I argue that the Google-China saga is an example of a contemporary clash in moral

orders centered around information politics. Google exemplifies a hacker ethic that can be
traced back to Enlightenment ideals of individual achievement while China reflects Confucian
cultural norms of social harmony that emerged 2,400 years ago during the early Han dynasty. A
moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels, while a moral order rooted in
Confucian ideals rewards followers. 
Access to information has become a battle site of cultural imperialism. Information politics is
ultimately a struggle over meaning and symbols. Google, one of the main players, has
successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change
which I call “neo-informationalism,” a retooling of neo-liberal ideals and a re-envisioning of
imperialism based on information as a primary means to wealth expansion in the digital age.

My talk is split into 3 parts.  I explain the history of the Google-China saga and my disclaimers
in the introduction. Part 1 is about why Google failed in China due to a lack of deep cultural
understanding of the market. Part 2 is about how Google and China ascribe to differing moral
orders. Part 3 is about Google’s unintentional engagement in imperialism. And in my conclusion
I provide directions for technologists, academics, and businesses for how to move forward with
lessons from the Google-China saga.

Here’s an excerpt from Part 3 and the conclusion. Pease take a look at my talk
here (pdf download here). My assertions will make much more sense when the talk is read in its
entirety. I’ve also included footnotes for follow up readings in the full version. The slides that go
along with my talk can be viewed/downloaded here. And some pics from the conference here,
and lastly the audio from the conference talk is here.

So let’s go directly into Part 3!

*I look forward to your thoughts on this topic. Plus, this is only the beginning of the Google-
China saga!

___________________________________________

PART 3
From doing business with guns, germs, and steel to computers, code, and clouds

Some business analysts, politicians, and the Western media cheered Google on for standing up to
China and relocating to Hong Kong which, mind you, is still a part of China. Others thought that
the sheer size of the Chinese market would sway Google to stay in China, much like Microsoft,
Yahoo, and others. But I want to highlight one particular analysis.  
Umair Haque, an economist and Director of the Havas Media Lab, claimed on the Harvard
Business Review blog that by leaving China Google had taken an ethically motivated, not an
economically motivated stance.  He argued that Google’s decision gives them an

“ethical edge…that’s always been at the heart of Google’s disruptive success.” “…a Google that

doesn’t play by China’s rules is a better business, which creates more thicker [sic], sustainable,
meaningful value.” 

In his Awesomeness Manifesto, he asserted that corporations engaged in “ethical production” are

more financially successful and meaningful than those that don’t because they innovate in the
name of a “higher calling” not in the name of profits.

Let’s consider Umair’s proposal on Google’s ethical edge. 

I agree that Google believes that they have an “ethical edge.”  They believe that they draw upon
the qualities that stand opposite from evil— benevolence, compassion, and kindness— to  serve
their higher-calling of introducing the world to information.

But I absolutely disagree with Umair that this “ethical

edge” is anything new. This is a common moral trope of
colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and neo-liberalism:
ethical beliefs that justify expansionary practices of
extracting commodities and creating new markets in the
name of a “higher calling.” 
But instead of extracting spices, opium, gold, bodies, labor or oil, Google was trying to extract
information from the Chinese market and then commodify that information as it provided it back
to Chinese consumers — ostensibly in the name of “freedom”. The weapon of choice is no
longer guns, germs, and steel, but free-information, open platforms, and distributed architectures.

              

Tropes of colonialism 

To be fair, this “ethical edge” isn’t just being practiced by Google. It’s also practiced by
countless other technology companies that make their way from the West to other continents. It’s
also the very rhetoric employed by many proponents of the free and open-source software
movement, the ICT4D field (Information Communication Technology for Development), and
OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) community.

So I ask us, why are we so invested in the idea of Google being in mainland China?  I suspect
that one of the reasons is that Google’s relocation of its servers to Hong Kong opened up an
existing set of anxieties among ourselves about America’s place in the global order.

But what Americans don’t get is that this openness is contingent upon America’s vision of
keeping markets open, tearing down national borders, and creating an open ICT network that
preserves America’s interest in being the world’s police, superpower and economic leader.
We thought that we could bring the internet to the world and the architecture would remain
open.  What we didn’t expect was for countries to use the internet to advance their own agendas
in the same way that the US was already doing: using their own culture, policies, and system of
ethics. 

Algorithms of social change: new technologies, same old games

And here’s the kicker - in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to
their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the
greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to
abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving.

What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-
informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market
capitalism -  border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism
rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,”
the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral
framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies
work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases
such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a
necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.

Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-

redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization
theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes
surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited
access to the tools that connect them to the world wide
web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that
information openness and market openness are inseparable
and non-mutually exclusive. Information
openness can only  be achieved through free-market
conditions.

This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-
informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the
governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While
Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a
variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code
and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.

What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by
very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners - I am not
comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply
a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us,
too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to
our Internets.”

We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas
past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development,
the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions
—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other
people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and
more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.

CONCLUSION
Create understanding
So does this mean that we have to give up on Google? No, the world doesn’t work in binaries
and neither should you nor I. I depend on Google for most of on my online communication. I’m
known among my friends as a Google evangelist. I force my friends onto gmail and its amazing
filtering capabilities. I heart Google and could talk about its services ad naseum. But while I love
the technical aspects of Google’s products, I am at the same time critical of the limits and
affordances of its technologies. Technologies are never just technologies. They are machines
laden with cultural expectations imbued by their creators.   

But herein lies my fear: What if we start thinking that there is no alternative to the institution of
Google? What if the “Google model” starts to become what we think of as the most natural way
to do things? We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes
something as apparently innocuous as Google.

We need to make sure that we don’t succumb to Googlist

Realism. Much like Capitalist Realism, the belief that there
is no alternative to the reality of capitalism as a way of life,
Googlist Realism is the belief that there is no alternative
to Google as our search engine and as our gatekeeper of
information. The belief that capitalism can improve life is
now supplanted by the free-information regimes of neo-
informationalism - the belief that unfettered information
access is life. 

 Google has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of

social change. This rhetoric is so strong that I worry that we could lose our imagination for any
other form of information reality or social change outside of a Google-like model. I also worry
that those who question this model will be framed as enemies of freedom, information, and
social change.

Google and China have their own visions for the social life of information and for the role of
information in society. We should be equally critical of a corporation with algorithms that create
a consensual consumer culture based on advertising clicks as we are of a country with policies
that create a consensual citizenry based on obedience through a paternalistic form of
governance. 

But we should also be equally hopeful of a corporation with digital applications that create
access to information that was reserved for the privileged as we are of a country with social
policies that empower people to explore their talents and scale their services through
government-supported, free-market entrepreneurship.

Summarizing the five main points that I’ve made today

1. As countries create their own internet policies, information politics will become a key site
of contestation in a globally networked society. 
 

As corporations and governments use the ethics of neo-informationalism to look for new markets
and cheap labor, some countries will also counter these efforts with their own ethics. Capitalist
growth depends not only on the physical architecture of ICTs, but also on the reach of an ethical
system to support the open use of ICTs.  Ethics do matter. In the absence of religious or
governmental heroes, the digital economy also needs its own goddesses.   

Just as we’ve created public institutions to regulate, debate, and check transnational corporations
in times of excess neo-liberalism, we’ve got to create similar institutions for information in times
of excess neo-informationalism. As Theodore Porter demonstrated in his insightful work on
accounting as a system of information and a site of ethical battles, “the history of information is
almost synonymous with the history of large enterprises.”

 
 2. Information disjunctures will increasingly fall along moral and ethical disagreements
between institutions, reflecting tensions in regional values and beliefs.

Institutions that mediate information will increasingly have to deal with a diversity of moral
orders that are regionally specific, originally proposed in the the “Górniak hypothesis” in
1996.  We have to realize that just like any other institution, the internet will be implemented and
used in such a way that it maps onto existing social forces, institutions, and values.

That is why understanding regional internet culture is important.

Here I draw upon institutional theory and in particular Philip Agre’s amplification model of how
new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing
ones. This theory explains why Google has not “changed” China to become a nation modeled in
the image of the US. Even something as open as the internet will be localized. This is because 1.)
not all people/countries are the same and 2.) not all sovereign nations will welcome neo-
informationalism as envisioned by the West. Many countries and individuals are suspicious of
how “The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization,
alongside the U.S. Trade Representative, the Federal Communications Commission, and other
apostles of neo-liberalism, used multiple levers to pry open global networking to corporate-
commercial investment” argues Dan Schiller.

   
3. I also argue that what’s at stake in the clashes of moral orders is the determination of
meaning. Google isn’t just an information processing entity, it is a meaning-making entity. 
As a meaning-making institution, Google is in the business of standardizing and universalizing
the domination of “autonomous [and public] information” as attached to democracy, liberation,
and excellence (Porter  228). Whoever controls information and the means of dissemination,
controls meaning and the symbols associated with it—hence culture. 
For nation-states, culture becomes an even more powerful instrument of social control which will
increasingly be mediated through digital means.

For corporations, culture becomes an an ever more powerful instrument of profit and this will
increasingly be mediated over digital information spaces where our desires and preferences can
be sorted and indexed.

4. There is a diversity in cultural orientations and they matter in how technologies are
used, received, and created.

As companies start designing more software for a diversity of communities and conditions
around the world, there is a greater need to understand how culture is exhibited in emotive and
tangible ways. We can no longer ascribe to traditional binaries that place culture on a local level
and money on a global scale. However geographically stationary some groups may be, ideas and
energies are mobile. But this does not necessarily mean that mobility leads to greater flows in
cooperation, rather it can also lead to greater fluxes in stability. A nuanced understanding of
cultural orientations as an ongoing narrative will be required to navigate this space. 

5. Institutions will continue to make attempts to bound the internet. But in a digitally-
mediated network society where communication streams and physical contact are more
frequent than ever, it becomes harder to maintain silos of communication. The digital
mobility of ideas, people, and images means that moral orders are coming into contact with
each other.

As information, culture, symbols, and ideas become more mobile, it will become harder for any
entity to unilaterally enforce their own moral orders. Because of this, we’re going to see more
collisions in moral orders as information becomes destabilized and detached from its geographic
point of origin. 

The internet is a host to amazing forms of participatory culture and will continue to be so
precisely because its network architecture allows a diversity of interactions to take place - from
gated communities to open spaces. Nation-states can try to create a bounded internet, but
with some people and ideas more mobile than ever before, it becomes harder to enforce global
digital walls. 

In a digitally mediated world, the logics of replication do not function according to a mechanical
order. A la Gilles Deleuze, Manual de Landa, and Felix Guattari, I think of Lucretius’s quote on
atoms:

“When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite
indeterminate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that
you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall
downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on
atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.”
As the moral orders of nations collide, some will clash and some will cohere. But the guarantee
is that something is going to happen. It’s already started and we’re going to need people to
deconstruct this and place what’s happening in context amid all the noise.

Values in our technologies

Let us be attentive to the values that shape the way we interact with information and the
architectures that mediate it.

Today I’ve talked about how beliefs and values are layered onto our technologies and inform our
expectations for how they are used. These technologies are never just technical, but they are
social and luckily for us they are observable.

A few week ago, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple said, ”We’re not just a tech company, even
though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,” he said. ”It’s the
marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.” 

Let us be in dialogue with Steve Jobs and Google with some liberal arts magic. Kant, Bentham,
and Descartes drew up a new ethical order at the turn of the Industrial Revolution that was a
response to the social transformation from the printing age. This is happening now for the
interneting age. The liberal arts is positioned with the analytical tools to be part of this dialogue.
We should be doing all that we can to make our work public.   

We cannot just leave this agenda to the technologists. We cannot let the new myths about
freedom and information to pass without question. We must use critical theory, ethnographic
methods, and common-sense to question how cultural values play out, in and around
technology. Values not only reproduce contemporary tensions, but they are also sites of
contestation. 

*UPDATE: here are some articles published after my talk (June 29, 2010) that I think are worth
the read

 July 23, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Google China Is Struggling To Rebuild Its Business  
 July 15, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Who Won in Google’s Showdown with China?
 July 10, 2010. Kai Pan. Henry Blodget Doesn’t Know Crap About the Google China Drama.
 July 11, 2010. Paul Denlinger China: Google backed Down Over Censorship Laws

UPDATE  - August 30. 2010:  I started a research blog, Information Peripeteia,  with Morgan
Ames tracking the rhetoric and discourse around free-information.

UPDATE  - September 18, 2010: I extend some of the ideas I first introduced on neo-
informationalism on my commentary about digital imperialism and Haystack.

The Great Internet Freedom Bluff of Digital Imperialism: Thoughts on Cyber Diplomacy, Cargo
Cult Digital Activism… and Haystack