Cyberspace as meta-nation: The net effects of online E-publicanism

Alternatives

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 113-142

  Luke, Timothy W ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 24944459957     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540102600202     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 26-49.
2. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
3. Timothy W. Luke, "Governance," in Unspun: The Web, Language, and Culture, ed. Thomas Swiss and Andrew Herman (New York: New York UP, 2000).
4. See Julie Schmit, "Internet Revolution Rolls through Asia," USA Today, February 11, 2000: B1-2.
5. John Pompfret, "Chinese Web Portal Opens to New Way of Life," Washington Post, February 13, 2000, A1, 26.
6. Internet use has grown tremendously over the past decade, rising from a few hundred thousand in 1991 to 143 million in 1998; in early 2001 it was still only somewhere around 700 million - that is, a little more than 10 percent of the world's population. In many respects, the Net is a meta-national space, but it still has been made in the United States, for the United States, and by the United States. Almost 90 percent of all Net users live in the United States or other rich industrial countries, and 80 percent of all Web sites are in English, yet fewer than 10 percent of the world's population speaks English or lives in the rich industrial countries (Washington Post, July 13, 1999: E2).
7. Gary Smith and Peter Kollock, eds., Communities in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 197.
8. Cited in Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 208.
9. Smith and Kollock, n. 6, p. 197.
10. Timothy W. Luke, "Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading Reading in the New World Order," Alternatives 18, no. 2 (1993): 229-258.
11. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963).
12. Timothy W. Luke, "Governmentality and Contragovernmentality: Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality after the Cold War," Political Geography 15, nos. 6/7 (1996): 491-507.
13. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
14. See Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997);
15. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
16. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vols. 1-3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 336.
17. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Ibid., p. 350.
18. Timothy W. Luke, "The Politics of Digital Inequality: Access, Capability, and Distribution in Cyberspace," in The Politics of Cyberspace, ed. Chris Toulouse and Timothy W. Luke (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 121-144.
19. See Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995).
20. Wilson Dizard, Jr., MegaNet: How the Global Communications Network Will Connect Everyone on Earth (Boulder: Westview, 1997), p. 14.
21. See Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia UP, 1997).
22. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
23. For this account of the industrial revolution, see Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1948).
24. These properties capture some qualities of a "technological sublime." See David E. Nye, The Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
25. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 4.
26. Being Digital Ibid., p. 6.
27. See Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper & Row, 1990);
28. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994);
29. Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997).
30. Michael and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los Angeles: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997).
31. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet Ibid., p. 204.
32. Despite all of the agitprop pushing la vida electronica, a US Department of Commerce report recently found 32.7 percent of all people in the United States are Internet users; 67.3 percent remain entirely offline (see www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/).
33. See Stephen G. Jones, ed., Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (London: Sage, 1995).
34. Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 2.
35. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace Ibid., p. 4.
36. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace Ibid., p. 4.
37. See John Seabrook, Deeper: Adventures on the Net (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
38. Bill Gates with Norman Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 4.
39. The Road Ahead Ibid., pp. 6-7.
40. The Road Ahead Ibid., p. 251.
41. The Road Ahead Ibid., p. 258.
42. The Road Ahead Ibid., pp. 258-259. Gates embellishes his version of these wide-ranging changes in the built environments of contemporary economies and societies by recounting his, and supposedly everyone else's, experience of "growing up" with computers: In the minds of a lot of people at school we became linked with the computer, and it with us. . . . It seems there was a whole generation of us, all over the world, who dragged that favorite toy with us into adulthood. In doing so, we caused a kind of revolution - peaceful, mainly - and now the computer has taken up residence in our offices and homes. . . . Inexpensive computer chips now show up in engines, watches, antilock brakes, facsimile machines, elevators, gasoline pumps, cameras, thermostats, treadmills, vending machines, burglar alarms, and even talking greeting cards. . . . Now that computing is astoundingly inexpensive and computers inhabit every part of our lives, we stand on the brink of another revolution. This one will involve unprecedentedly inexpensive communication; all the computers will join together to communicate with us and for us. . . . There will be a day, not far distant, when you will be able to conduct business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up any great entertainment, make friends, attend neighborhood markets, and show pictures to distant relatives - without leaving your desk or armchair. You won't leave your network connection behind at the office or in the classroom. It will be more than an object you carry or an appliance you purchase (Gates, n. 34, pp. 2-5). For Gates - and, of course, Microsoft - computers remake built environments. Economies and societies must change as computers connect to us, computers mature with us, computers reside with us at home, computers work with us in the office, computers colonize many other technical artifacts for us, computers integrate us into networks, and computers create new multimediated ways of life with us. Networks, like the ecologies of nature, are always beneath, behind, and beyond the political order of our civic life. This revolution, as it is made from desktops and laptops, co-evolves with, and within, a new built environment, which is fabricated meta-nationally out of bits, mediated over networks, and located online.
43. Beck, n. 12, pp. 186-187.
44. Ibid., p. 186.
45. Ibid.
46. See Andrew P. Madden, "The Lawgiver," Red Herring 53 (April 1998): 64-69.
47. Beck, n. 12, p. 223.
48. James Adam, The Next World War: Computers Are the Weapons and the Frontline Is Everywhere (New York: Simon & Schuster).
49. See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 87-104.
50. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 29.
51. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 141.
52. Ibid. The meta-national spaces of the Internet are administered very loosely by the Internet Society (ISOC), since it is the home of the Internet Engineering Force (IETF) and Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Drawing together transnational telecoms, big software houses, national scientific agencies, professional-technical groups, and media companies, ISOC is a major executive force in the management of the informatic subpolis. Its intent, however, is essentially e-publican inasmuch as its members want to maintain the Net's uniquely meta-national qualities by safeguarding "the viability and global scaling of the Internet" in ways that "assure the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world"; see www.isoc.org/mission.
53. Gates, n. 34, p. 5.
54. See Graeme Browning, Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Influence American Politics (Wilton, Conn.: Pemberton Press, 1996). Also see www.netvoting.org
55. See Roza Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini, and Cathy Bryant, eds., Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities, and Civic Networks (New York: Routledge, 1998);
56. Richard Davis, The Web of Politics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). Also see http://internetpolicy.org/research/results.html
57. See Geoff Mulgan, Connexity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997).
58. See C. Richard Neu, Robert H. Anderson, and Tora K. Bikson, Sending Your Government a Message: Email Communication Between Citizens and Government (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1999).
59. For further discussion, see David Ronfeldt et al., The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1999);
60. Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret E. Keck, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998),
61. Peter Ferdinand, ed., The Internet, Democracy, and Demoratization (London: Cass, 2000).
62. See www.eff.org/EFFdocs/
63. See www.gilc.org/about/members.html
64. A good example of this problem is William J. Mitchell, e-topia: "Urban Life, Jim - But Not as We Know It" (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
65. Amy Harmon, "Secure or Not: The Internet Has Become a Part of Life's Routine," New York Times, February 13, 2000: 25.
66. David Hamilton and David S. Cloud, "The Internet under Siege: Stalking the Hackers," Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2000: B1, B6.
67. See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1996);
68. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf, InfoWar (New York: Springer, 1998);
69. Winn Schwartau, Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1994).
70. See Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic, 1999).
71. For a democratizing vision of this alternative, see Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Century Foundation, 1999).
72. An entire philosophy of global nomadism is developed in response to these possibilities as "sovereign individualism" for e-publics. See James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
73. See Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991);
74. Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault of Democracy and Prosperity (London: Zed, 1997).
75. In the United States, for example, government at all levels owns one-third of all land, spends more than one-third of the nation's GDP, pays for 40 percent of all medical care, manages 50 percent of all individual retirement funds, and has experienced more than 50 percent greater growth than the private sector since the 1940s (see George Will, "Federal Swelling," Washington Post, February 24, 2000: A21. These activities are perhaps necessary to become a hyperpower, but many US citizens now believe they can do better elsewhere because of the individual freedoms made possible by the Net and offshore data, capital, and service havens. The digitalization of capital allows individuals and firms to park assets beyond the reach of aggressive national taxation in more passive tax environments. Personal and corporate assets held offshore are believed by the United Nations to already total US$7 to $8 trillion, which is nearly equal to the GDP of the United States. See www.un.org/News/devupdate In the United States, the individual tax issue is becoming a major problem in the sphere of state and municipal finance. The more than seven thousand taxing jurisdictions in the United States are highly dependent upon sales taxes: in 1970, for example, states derived 32 percent of their tax revenues from sales taxes; by 1996, this figure had risen to 49 percent, and in 2000, as more and more states reduced real-estate, property, and business taxes, it approached 55 percent
76. (See Washington Post, February 20, 2000: B2).
77. A 1992 Supreme Court ruling, Quill v. North Dakota, held that mail-order companies cannot be required to collect state sales taxes, and this holds true today for them and e-commerce concerns unless firms have a considerable physical presence in any given state or follow strict rules on "in-state" sales. State laws often require individuals to track their out-of-state purchases and remit the proper sales tax receipts to their state tax offices, but these regulations are routinely ignored in telephone, mail catalog, and Internet sales. As the clock runs out on the 1998 federal moratorium on new taxes on Net purchases, a national advisory committee headed by Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore has favored continuing the Net's tax holiday, while the National Governors' Association has proposed creating a telematic parastatal agency to collect taxes on all remotely made sales. This "zero-burden" system would mobilize special software to calculate, collect, and remit sales taxes to the states from any remote vendor - either offline or online (see Washington Post, February 20, 2000: B2), creating a meta-national agency to collect and distribute national taxes.
78. See Robert Rosen, Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
79. See www.aclu/org/echelonwatch
80. Beck, n. 12, p. 187.
81. Lyotard, n. 2, p. 5.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., p. 4.
84. Ibid., p. 64.
85. Ibid., p. 66.
86. Cited in David A. Vise, "FBI Says It Is Hot on the Trail of Hackers," Washington Post, February 17, 2000: E7.
87. "Experts: Animosity May Fuel Internet Attacks," Roanoke Times, February 20, 2000: A15.
88. Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 15-16.
89. Deibert, n. 19, p. 187.
90. Stephen Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 193.
91. Turkle, n. 13, p. 23.
92. Ibid., p. 102.
93. Abbate, n. 7, pp. 181-220.
94. Lyotard, n. 2, p. xxiv.
95. Ibid., p. 9.