revolutions

This page looks at questions about the net and regime change.

It covers -

• the rhetoric of revolution
• secession
• digital trumpets

In discussing myths about cyberspace and life online we have noted the characterisation of the internet as innately beneficent, democratic and and subversive of autocracies. That is a charming idea, beautifully expressed by techno-romantics such as Gilmore and Rheingold, but inconsistent with what we know of other media.

     the rhetoric of revolution

The first page of this guide highlighted some of the wilder cyberlibertarian rhetoric, such as Barlow's assertion that we can simply become citizens of cyberspace ... off on a digital voyage to arcadia, sans care, sans taxes and most importantly of all sans responsibility.

One of the feistier critiques is the 2000 Duke Law Journal paper by Amy Bomse on The Dependence of Cyberspace, building on analyses by Richard Barbrook, Lawrence Lessig, Paulina Borsook and Jack Goldsmith. Selections appear in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) edited by Peter Ludlow, a follow-up to his High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press 1996) - available here.

For a recent restatement of the arcadian vision, see Roger Clarke's paper Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost: How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism. One might well say the same of the printing press or - pace Trotsky's description of Stalin as Ghenghis Khan with a telephone - other electronic media.

There is a more nuanced analysis in Ithiel de Sola Pool's influential Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap 1987) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990), Lessig's polemical Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books 1999) or James Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1986).

A perspective is provided by papers in Human Rights & Revolutions (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield 2000) edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt & Marilyn Young.

     secession and sedition

Barlow's curious stance on digital frontiers and pirate utopias is echoed by the Interzone Republic site, a home for

individuals who have renounced or intend to renounce their citizenship in any and all geographically-based States, and who work towards replacing the valid functions of those States from collectively-held resources.

We have highlighted other 'virtual secessions' here in discussing the nature of the state in the digital environment and in the more detailed discussion of 'virtual states' and data havens.

A note on sedition in the digital environment is here.

     digital trumpets

While you're waiting for the digital trumpets to sound neath the walls of Jericho, the following items from provide a range of views on state responses to the net in Asia, the Americas and the EU.

Shanthi Kalathil & Taylor Boas' The Internet & State Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba & the Counterrevolution (PDF) suggests that those regimes are coping comfortably

Jack Qiu's 2000 article Internet Censorship in China (1999-2000), William Tao's 2001 article Censorship & Protest: The Regulation of BBS in China, and Lokman Tsui's 2001 MA thesis Internet in China: Big Mama Is Watching You (Internet Control & the Chinese Government) (PDF) offer a more critical view

V Krebs' 2001 article The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar

Harry Cleaver's paper The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric is more convincing than Vicente Rafael's paper Generation Text: the Cell Phone & the Crowd in Recent Philippine History

D Pantic's 1997 article Internet in Serbia: From Dark Side of the Moon to the Internet Revolution

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