Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the forthcoming The Anarchist in the Library and a true scholar of the internet age, presents a compelling, five-part panorama of the implications of electronic peer-to-peer networks for culture, science, security, and globalisation. His provocative argument registers peer-to-peer as a key site of contest over freedom and control of information.
Part 1: Its a peer-to-peer world
In the first of his five-part series, Siva Vaidhyanathan maps the fluid new territory of electronic peer-to-peer networks that are transforming the information ecosystem. Is this a landscape of enlarging freedoms where citizens shape the forms and meanings of social communication, or does it offer an invitation to entrenching state surveillance and closure?
Part 2: Pro-gumbo: culture as anarchy
Peer-to-peer technologies have precedents in the anarchistic and hybrid processes by which cultures have always been formed. Decoding anxious cultural preservationists from Matthew Arnold to Samuel Huntington, the second instalment of Siva Vaidhyanathans five-part series reframes p2p in the light of other technologies and practices cassettes, creolisation, world music which likewise reveal the energetic promiscuity of culture. Any attempt to censor or limit this flow would leave cultures stagnant.
Part 3: The anarchy and oligarchy of science
Science is knowledge in pursuit of truth that can expand human betterment. But part three of Siva Vaidhyanathans powerful series sees the free information flows at the heart of science being pressured by the copyright economy, the post-9/11 security environment, proprietary capture of genetic databases, and science policies of governments and universities. If commerce and control defeat openness and accumulation, what happens to science impacts on democracy itself.
Part 4: The nation-state vs. networks
In the last decade, the nation-state has survived three challenges to its hegemony from the Washington Consensus, the California Ideology, and Anarchy. The promise of a borderless globalisation unified by markets and new technology has been buried. The fourth part of Siva Vaidhyanathans compelling series asks: what then remains of the utopian vision of global peer-to-peer networks that would bypass traditional structures of power?
Part 5: Networks of power and freedom
The use by non-state networks of new communication technologies is challenging ideas about citizenship, security, and the nation-state. In response, the impulse to restrict or suppress is shared by states as different as the United States and the Peoples Republic of China. In concluding his five-part openDemocracy series, Siva Vaidhyanathan maps an issue that will define the landscape of 21st century politics.
Part 5: Networks of power and freedom
In the contemporary political world, states constantly identify nefarious networks at the heart of every perceived threat. Some of these networks are internal, yet have foreign sources and influences; others are purely alien.
The shared rhetorical value of accusing a network of being at the heart of a threat to security or identity is clear: you can never tell when a war against a network is over because you can never really see a network because it is dispersed, distributed, encrypted, and ubiquitous. Its there because you say its there.
The United States: their networks, and ours
As the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in September 2002, asserts:
Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government. Today, that task has changed dramatically. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us. Such a description clearly yields a broad, almost unlimited set of prescriptions, all of which substantially increase the surveillance and police powers of the state. In a war against an enemy you cannot measure or even see, there is no limit on the set of tasks that the emergency seems to justify. And there is no way to declare the emergency over. We couldnt see the network in the first place. So how can we be sure its gone?
Here, the Security Strategy is clear:
To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn. Of course technology plays two parts in this scenario. Our technology must be ambitious and flexible; we must invest in it without limits, regardless of the realistic levels of threat or the effectiveness of the technological defenses we built. But if they get hold of our technology, we are in big trouble, for they are radical: The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action. The state as information manager
The rise of distributed information systems certainly complicates, perhaps even undermines, the sense of stability within a nation-state. The nation-state is an information system in itself. Among its various roles, it regulates flows of information. One could even venture to define a nation-state as a particular method of information management.
An important characteristic that distinguishes a dictatorship from a democratic republic apart from its resort to physical repression and denial of basic rights is how it restricts the flows of certain pieces of information and the technologies that carry them. An authoritarian state, as Hannah Arendt argued, is the constant reminder that the state is the source of official information, and that all other information is suspect.
The most oppressive and brutal of world states Burma, Saudi Arabia, and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) can be expected to install technological restrictions on the communicative technologies at their citizens disposal. But even relatively liberal nation-states like the United States and Britain are attempting to block or monitor legitimate flows of information, and ignoring concerns for due process or free speech. And because many of these initiatives are emerging through multinational organisations and corporations, citizens have no forum for debate or appeal.
China: state, community, diaspora, nation
Liu Baiqiang understands the power of distributed information. While serving a ten-year prison sentence in China in 1989, he inscribed pro-democracy messages on small pieces of paper, releasing them into freedom by tying them to the legs of locusts. A report of the Supreme Peoples Court found that the messages contained slogans like Long Live Freedom and Deng Xiaoping should step down.
An Amnesty International report states that:
Because of these messages, Liu Baiqiang was sentenced in June 1989 to (a further) eight years imprisonment for counter-revolutionary incitement and propaganda. He was held in Shaoguan prison in Guangdong province, and due to be released only in late 2003. Liu was one of many prisoners convicted after unfair trials in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre whose cases were never reviewed. After international human rights organisations championed his case, Liu was released in the fall of 2001. His story remains important because of his courage and creativity, and because he demonstrated a principle of communication that is beautiful in its simplicity: powerful forces cant always stop small things from jumping long distances.
As Chinas government tries to stifle democratic activists and religious practice within its borders, it experiences an acute tension between the nation of Greater China and the state of the Peoples Republic of China.
Ian Buruma describes this tension in his book Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing. The Chinese diaspora composed of ethnic Han peoples who form communities from India to Singapore, Australia to Guam, Vancouver to Paris, Chicago to London have a particular vision of Chinese-ness and the greatness of China. These communities maintain their cultural ties through mail, movies, music, and the internet.
Many members of this diaspora live in both democratic and authoritarian states; many others (if Taiwan and Hong Kong are included in Greater China) have experienced a combination of each. So, it can be argued, people on the margins of Greater China are more religious, more democratic, more liberal, more idealistic, more optimistic, and more connected than the 1.3 billion of its members who live under the constant surveillance of the Peoples Republic of China.
Its important to distinguish a nation from a state. Matthew Arnold wrote that the state is the nation in its collective and corporate capacity. A nation is a collection of people that can assume some sort of bond that links them over time and space. The members of a nation need not fill a particular space at a particular time. They need only imagine that they share a history, a condition, or an identity.
A state, on the other hand, is a function a collection of administrative powers and institutions. It might claim legitimacy through democracy, through security, or through claiming to speak for the presumed interests of the nation that it might attempt to map. But, as in the case of the nation of Greater China overlapping the Peoples Republic of China, a nation is coterminous neither with a map nor the power of a state.
The experience of the PRC is central to this story because its efforts to regulate information flows have been the most overt, daring, and controversial in the world. It is important, then, to note that every restrictive effort the Chinese government has made to regulate internet access through approved and licensed internet service providers, stifle the use of proxy servers, and quash the use of encryption by private citizens has been done in partnership with major American commercial software firms.
These are the very firms that Richard Clarke, the former cybersecurity adviser of the Bush administration, wants to consult to construct his new and improved internet for us, to protect us from them (see Ian Buruma, China in Cyberspace, New York Review of Books, 4 November 1999 [paid-for only]).
FalunGong.net: a peaceful insurgency
In late November 2001, the Peoples Republic of China shut down 17,000 Wang Ba, or internet cafes, after a coordinated sweep of all 94,000 of them. The government discovered that many Wang Ba had failed to install the required filtering and blocking software controls, not protocols that would block access to sites sponsored by the distributed, decentralised, open information system known as Falun Gong.
Almost ten years after the student uprising of spring 1989 filled Tiananmen Square and filled the hearts of democrats everywhere with hope for the future, the Chinese government faced another demonstration. This time, tanks and guns were not as effective. Hundreds of followers of a fast-growing religion gathered in the square to meditate. Their organised silence frightened Chinas leaders. They had no idea that any sect had gathered such a strong following in the officially atheistic country.
The Chinese government acted fiercely. It arrested hundreds of Falun Gong supporters and set about deprogramming them, often with prison terms and torture. It had no way of confining Falun Gong leaders; the movement did not seem to have any. No single person had called or ordered the demonstration in the square. Yet the members seemed united, calm, ordered, and of one mind.
More than most movements, Falun Gong acts like a network. It has a spiritual leader, who lives in New Jersey. But it has no pope, no central authority. It grows by being open and adaptable. It threatens the Chinese government by being uncontrollable. Falun Gong members find each other through the internet if they live outside the PRC, pay telephones if they live inside.
Perhaps a bit jealous that some other force or institution could generate this level of devotion, the Chinese government turned to methods that would disrupt the network. In response to the distributed threats that democratic activists and religious practitioners seemed to make on the stability of the Chinese state, the state tried to regulate the nation.
Clearly, many of these disruptive influences came from abroad, from the Chinese diaspora, from Greater China. So the Peoples Republic of China would have to re-engineer its interface with the outside world. This would be a monumental task. It would involve registration and surveillance at internet cafes. It would require that all internet users on the mainland access the internet through approved and state-run portals. It would mean these portals would demand constant vigilance from their staffs in blocking sites offering pro-democracy or pro-religion content.
China has been trying to build and extend its electronic commerce potential yet simultaneously limit what its people could read and how they could communicate. The open, protocol-based, radically democratic, distributed network of networks that we call the internet does not seem ideal for these purposes. But its cheap, easy, popular, and already exists.
So the Chinese government decided it would roll out internet access on its own terms, which controlling to the best of its ability the smallest details of the network. In the meantime, the PRC would try to build its own proprietary network, its own intranet, over which it would have complete control (as is argued in Shanthi Kalathil & Taylor C. Boass book, Open Networks, Closed regimes: the impact of the internet on authoritarian regimes.
Hacktivism: a new form of dissent
As soon as the oligarchs in charge of the Chinese Communist Party started building the Great Firewall of China, hackers started punching holes in it. A group of hackers some members of the nation of Greater China, others passionate advocates of democracy or anarchy started producing technologies that would allow dissidents to communicate beyond the gaze of the Chinese state and access materials that the state had deemed contraband.
These tools have been in use by dissidents from authoritarian and totalitarian states as diverse as Burma, Cuba, and Laos. The strategies to protect dissidents start with a desire to keep secret the location and identity of the user within the oppressive state. Privacy is paramount. Encrypted communication is central to this effort. Email encryption must be strong enough to frustrate state security forces yet transparent enough for dissidents to use and adapt rather easily.
Other hacktivists have maintained proxy servers, through which Chinese users may get access to forbidden sites by appearing to tap into approved or unknown servers. The most ambitious effort to aid dissidents involves an effort to simultaneously hide the identity and location of the user and allow unfettered access to contraband.
This is a classic peer-to-peer system: Freenet. Ian Clarke, the founder of the Freenet project, published an academic paper outlining its principles. Basically, the system allows users to piece together content held anonymously in fragments by a wide array of servers around the world. It takes content away from the World Wide Web, which is too public for the most seditious content, and puts it among hundreds of volunteer hard drives.
The system privileges security, privacy, and redundancy. The Freenet protocols resolve the addresses where the content lay and assembles it for the user, while strong encryption keeps the internet protocol (IP) number of each user secret. Freenet is hard to use, but its almost impossible to stop. Its the perfect internet. Freenet is the most radical, anarchistic, and potentially the most influential and important of peer-to-peer electronic networks. Napster was a pioneer; but Freenet is revolutionary.
Technology, ideology, and anarchistic media
The very proliferation of these powerful communicative technologies enabled by protocols like TCP/IP raises questions about the contemporary sense of citizenship, security, and the nation-state. Once stable, secure, and potentially sealed, a nation-state is now a slightly less stable but still powerfully-concentrated information system. Each nation-state is now charged with determining its relationship with these open, anarchistic communication networks that threaten to realign or at least distract its citizens.
The prospect of sub-state violence, executed clandestinely from within, has haunted state officials for centuries. But now the most authoritarian states are faced with a different challenge: communicative technologies that seem to inspire independent thought. The communication of such thought is often irresponsible, sometimes dangerous, and always of concern to a centralised power.
How can authorities foster the commercial potential of networked communication while stemming its more troublesome aspects? American officials seek to empower private corporations to monitor and block unauthorised transmission of copyrighted files; Burmese officials ban public internet access altogether. The essence of the challenge facing these states is the same: re-engineering a set of otherwise anarchistic media so they can be harnessed for the benefit of the state.
Instead of allowing such radical re-engineering to continue without public scrutiny, it is imperative that we openly debate such efforts ecologically and systematically. The issues I have discussed in this five-part openDemocracy series ones as seemingly distinct as music piracy, global creativity, diasporic solidarity, science policy, the copyright economy, and democratic accountability are elements of the same challenge, functions of the same systems. Any efforts to limit communication in these areas could have deleterious effects. We must be careful, but inactivity is not an option.
