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Global Participatory Acts and the State

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Global Participatory Acts and the State STRENGTHENING THE STATE THROUGH DISSENT: GLOBAL PARTICIPATORY ACTS AND THE STATE By Patricia Camilien, université Quisqueya INTRODUCTION In Alvin Toffler‟s Future Shock (1970), three types of men coexist on the planet. Men of the present, living in the here and now as they are carried away by the waves and currents of the world; they are rather vulnerable to "future shock". Men of the past, who have remained in a past time long gone, are living in the twentieth century but are still in the twelfth. Men of the future, informed, insightful and perceptive, who are already surfing on the major trends of tomorrow. In today's world, these men of the future are part of a transnational and nomadic elite helped by the increasing liberalization of trade and the disappearance of borders – at the least for them. Transnational companies like oil brokerage firm Trafigura i – made globally (in) famous in 2010 by a journalist‟s tweet about a file hosted on WikiLeaks – exemplify this (future) global world. They enjoy the best of corporate law around the world and diversify their operations accordingly. This use of different national laws according to the benefits they offer is not limited to transnational corporations and their owners, but now extends to individuals who, while they are not billionaires in dollars, are so in reticular connections. Using global participatory acts (heretofore participactions), they seem to be the ones to help the people move from the present to the future. Moral and social entrepreneurs, they are the vanguard of the future changes in society they are trying to drive through networked actions as relayed by mass self- communication. Bold and innovative, these global participactions, helped by the States‟ growing inability to respond, alone, to many of the challenges of today's world, highlight, confirm and reinforce, by their growing success, the double democratic deficit – both internal and external – of an increasingly discredited (nation-) State. This paper is based on the first findings of a research project that hopes to evaluate the impact of such actions on the State and provide a model of intelligibility able to anticipate and guide their effects. We have retained the following hypothesis: 1. Erving Goffman‟s Theory of Marginalization and the Discredited Self, conditions the renewal of credibility to two actions: the discredited must play another role and find another audience. 2. Global participactions being actions by cooptation, a coopted state modeled after the Catalonian anarchism and heterarchical modes of organization could satisfy both conditions. 1 3. This new social contract, freely chosen – as in not simply justified by political philosophy –reinforces the sense of belonging to the state and therefore its legitimacy. We seek to reconcile the resolutely post-state nature of these participactions and the still inter-national world we live in, in order to understand the continuation of the State in the new reticular society. We have identified several mechanisms that can be used by governments and have already been applied in various domains. Among them, two global trends stand out the most: global participatory projects such as Facebook,Groupon, Bitcoin or WikiLeaks, and the growing importance of “legal tourism”. The latest is an international forum shopping that has grown recently with the enactment by national legislators of laws that are specifically designed to attract foreigners. Examples include the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) in Iceland, commercial surrogacy in India and the opacity of financial havens. This increasing "commodification of sovereignty" indicates a competition between the States for the favors of the transnational elite. In this, it is already similar to a system of gradually co-opted organization upon which can be built the new post-national state. A state that has successfully changed its current reputation, from that of an entity of questionable legitimacy [Part I] to that of smart efficiency [Part II], to eventually become, as a Reddit user puts it, “the next evolution of humanity‟s social structure, one of equality and accountability” [Part III]. PART 1: CHALLENGING LEGITIMACY In late 2009 and early 2010, while researching the controversial websiteii, we met, on WikiLeaks‟ secured IRC channel, Coheniii, a young 19 year old computer science student from Germany. Clearly devoted to what he saw as a good way to bring about social change – which later turned out to be the famed diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world – he would easily, as a volunteer, spend hundreds of hours working on restricted documents, while trying to convince his friends and acquaintances to contribute financially to the organization. He also gave his blood – literally, by selling it to the Red Cross and donating the money – to the whistle blowing website. The first time Cohen heard about WikiLeaks, he was reading a blog post about a leak on the Bundesnachrichtendienst networks. “I love this type of thing. ;)”, he confided candidly. When we, jokingly, remarked that giving his blood to WikiLeaks made him “practically a saint”, he answered very seriously: “I‟m only living my passion. There‟s a difference between knowing the way, and going and showing the way”. About two years later, going and showing the way, Mohammed Bouazizi would go even further than Cohen by setting himself ablaze and the Arab Spring in motion. The events that have unfolded since then, including the Occupy and Indignados movements, have emphasized and drawn attention to the global confidence crisis; underlining the need to understand its basis as well as explore the possibilities of change it offers. 2 UNDERSTANDING THE CONFIDENCE CRISIS In the world of pre-Cablegate WikiLeaks, they were many Cohens "going and showing the way". According to statistic averages from Alexa and Quantcast, wikileaks.org, at that time, was usually visited by men of Caucasian descent, who had higher education, between 18 and 30 years - with a focus on the 18-24 range - and had no children. Virtually the same demographic could be found on the WikiLeaks IRC channel or, currently, on Reddit, arguably one of the most influential websites on the Internet. They are students in computer science, mathematics, history, political science … Like Cohen, they love "everything that has to do with democracy, freedom, modern stuff and the economy" and, like him, "[they] hate those fucking lying politicians”. Born into a general confidence crisis (Dalton, 2004), they are much more affected by the many moral panics that regularly accompany the double democratic deficit and, therefore, are significantly more likely to be seduced by the rather radical remedies like WikiLeaks. Of no particular political orientation - some self-identified as anarchists - or religious beliefs, they seem to be naturally libertarian, akin to the cyberspace where they dream and work for a better world. They are part of a new emergent global polity in which loyalties are increasingly conditional; with the Internet acting as a rhetorical public sphere. In international relations theory, three approaches attempt to define this new polity. Globalization theorists (see (Held, et al., 1999)) use the existence of a democratic deficit at the top – due to the inability of national democracies to influence the global forces that affect them – to defend the idea of a cosmopolitan democracy. Inspired by the democratic deficit within the State, Transnationalists (see (Badie, et al., 1999)) describe a constant globalization of interconnected local societies. Neo-medievalists (see (Linklater, 1998)) reference a political order roughly identical to that of the Middle Ages in Europe, before the arrival of the modern state; successfully linking the first two, to give, in our view, the explanatory model that is best suited to the global civil society. An echo of the neo-medieval analysis proposed by Hedley Bull (1977), this relatively recent International Relations theory presents a political order of overlapping authorities. An international order characterized by the coexistence of different levels of (sub-, national and transnational), none of them dominant. In doing so, it assumes the existence of a civil society simultaneously global and fragmented where the intermediate dialogues of these (rhetorical) public spheres can be part of a planetary conversation. Participating in that conversation was Ólafuriv, a then 24 year old History student from Iceland I met in the same WikiLeaks IRC channel, in January 2010. In his dream of a better world was an Iceland, where lies and secrets like those that had just led an entire country to the brink of bankruptcy where no longer possible. An admirer of the WikiLeaks project, he and some friends, invited its leaders to an international conference in December 2009. Two of them (Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, who have since then parted in less than amicable terms) came ... and stayed. Two months later, on February 17th, 2010, a bill to make Iceland into a 3 "refuge" for journalists around the world, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative was introduced to the Parliament by its newly elected Member and WikiLeaks supporter, Birgitta Jónsdóttir. When asked about his involvement with WikiLeaks, Ólafur who participated in writing and translating the proposal from Icelandic to English, seemed to be aware of the global nature of his actions, or, at the very least, wishing it were the case. He felt part of a global movement, that of the hacker community that he described as "a group of people dispersed, wide enough, who are technically competent and clearly prefer to see technology used to limit the exercise of power rather than complete it." Wary of most (traditional) activists, he found in projects like WikiLeaks "a refreshing freedom from the identity politics that seem to dominate today”. Practical, he is part of generation that wants to get rid of frills – and of which Twitter and its hundred and forty characters is a very telling symbol; a generation that wishes to get results quickly and efficiently.
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