• Communication commission discussion

  • "Peace and the Internet" in Sarajevo

    from book on Apr 14, 2014 10:10 AM 
    Welcome to the workshop:

"PEACE AND THE INTERNET"

Place : Sarajevo
Venue: (See the program of Peace Event Sarajevo http://p2014.eu)
Preliminary Date:  7 June 2014 (See the program of Peace Event Sarajevo)
Organisation: Peace Union of Finland (www.rauhanliitto.fi)
Contact and moderator:  Mikael Böök book at kaapeli.fi  +358-445511324

Idea paper (version 9 April 2014)

Is the internet something that people can do something about? How to make
cyberpeace instead of cyberwar?  In Snowden's time, everybody must have
given these questions some thought so the time is ripe for them to be
discussed at the social forums and in the peace movement. And, after the
next Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance
(Sao Paulo, Brazil,  23-24 April, 2014)  the actuality of the subject is
almost guaranteed.

* Internet governance?  State governments who continue to prepare for war
against each other have failed and will probably continue to fail if they
try to govern the internet. The same goes for big corporations who wish to
introduce corporatist versions of internet governance. Unfortunately, they
may have succeeded for the time being.  The peace movement ought to dig a
route to people power.

* Library power?  The internet is like the library - mankind's only
trustworthy memory. And, to use a common term when speaking about internet
governance: internet and library  are multistakeholder institutions. But
how about letting the librarians govern the internet, as far as this new
cybernetic (self-governing) institution needs to be governed at all? Could
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) become a
subdivision of  the International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions (IFLA)?

* Alliance with the free software community. During WW II, Communists
allied themselves with Capitalists to defeat Fascism. Today, a great
alliance between the peace movement and the free software community is
badly needed.  Can these two find a common language?


Reference material:

de Nardis, Laura & Raymond, Mark: "Thinking Clearly about Multistakeholder 
Internet Governance" (Paper presented at Eight Annual GigaNet Symposium, 
Bali Oct 2013; available via 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2354377)

de Nardis, Laura: The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale UP 2014)


---

(added 12 April)

"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself
arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already
present or at least in the course of formation" (see http://is.gd/i2l8fM).
Karl Marx, who wrote that sentence, could hardly foresee the coming
of the computers and the internet. Yet those words from the critique of
the political economy were prophetic.

The problem now is that of changing the states and the UN into a new
international political system. The computers and the internet have formed
into a material condition for the solution.

Some beginning steps that "mankind" has taken to work it out, such as the
Wikipedia, the WikiLeaks and the World Social Forum, may also be noted.
Perhaps the internet as such ought to be seen as "social movement"? (A
booklet that I found at the stand of "May First/People Link" at the first
US Social Forum in Atlanta says as much. See Alfredo Lopez and others:
"The Organic Internet. Organizing History's Largest Social Movement."
Entremundos Publications 2007.)

Best regards,

Mikael


Mikael Böök * book at kaapeli.fi * gsm +358(0)-44 5511 324 *
http://www.kaapeli.fi/book/  * http://blogi.kaapeli.fi/book/ *
http://blog.spinellisfootsteps.info/
Return to conversation view