incommunicado reader Edited by Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle reader.20.10.05.c.indd 1 10/21/05 7:45:40 AM reader.20.10.05.c.indd 2 10/21/05 7:45:41 AM incommunicado reader Edited by Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle reader.20.10.05.c.indd 3 10/21/05 7:45:42 AM reader.20.10.05.c.indd 4 10/21/05 7:45:42 AM information technology for everybody else reader.20.10.05.c.indd 5 10/21/05 7:45:42 AM Colophon Reader: Editors: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle Editorial Assistance: Pieter Boeder and Sabine Niederer Production: Sabine Niederer Design: Kernow Craig Print: Cito van Kesteren http://www.citoreprogroep.nl Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, http://www.networkcultures.org Supported by: Hivos, http://www.hivos.nl CD-Rom: Interview Team: Geert Lovink, Stefania Milan, Nat Muller, Gerbrand Oudenaarden, Barbara de Preter (production), Jerneja Rebernak, Gerben Starink. Editing: Gerbrand Oudenaarden and Gerben Starink Technical production: Florian Schneider Design: Kernow Craig Duplication: Tapes, Amsterdam http://www.tapes.nl Contact: Institute of Network Cultures HvA Interactive media Weesperzijde 190 1097 DZ Amsterdam The Netherlands http://www.networkcultures.org [email protected] t: +31 (0)20 5951863 - f: +31 (0)20 5951840 Order a copy of this book & cd-rom by sending an email to [email protected]. reader.20.10.05.c.indd 6 10/21/05 7:45:43 AM table of contents 3. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle, Incommunicado Glossary 11. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Digital Capitalism and Development: The Unbearable Lightness of ICT4D 30. Bernardo Sorj and Luís Eduardo Guedes, Digital Divide: Conceptual Problems, Empirical Evidence and Policy Making Issues 50. Lisa McLaughlin, Cisco Systems, the UN, and the Corporatization of Development 64. Shuddha Sengupta, Knowing in your Bones that You’re Being Watched (Transcript) 68. Roy Pullens, Migration Management: Export of the IOM Model 85. Alexandre Freire, Ariel G. Foina, and Felipe Fonseca, Brazil and the FLOSS process 92. Kim van Haaster, The University of the Future: Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba 104. GovCom.org, Digital Cartogram 106. Scott S. Robinson, Diaspora Incommunicados - IT, Remittances and Latin American Elites reader.20.10.05.c.indd 1 10/21/05 7:45:43 AM 109. Glen Tarman, The Biggest Interactive Event In History? 115. Ravi Sundaram, Post-Development and Technological Dreams 122. Nnenna Nwakanma, The mirage of South–South cooperation in ICT4D: Reflections from African Civil Society 127. Loe Schout, Why Civil Society is not Embracing FOSS 130. Heimo Claassen, Formatting the Net: Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management to Accelerate the Proprietary Seizure 146. Steve Cisler, What’s the Matter with ICTs? 159. Solomon Benjamin, E-Politics of Urban Land 164. Maja van der Velden, Cognitive justice: Cultivating the diversity of knowledge 171. Jo van der Spek and Cecile Landman, Info-Solidarity with Iraq 178. Appendix with: Solaris Call, Incommunicado 05 program, PPPlist call. Inside Back Cover. Incommunicado CDRom reader.20.10.05.c.indd 2 10/21/05 7:45:43 AM incommunicado glossary Geert Lovink & Soenke Sehle Instead of an Introduction Aiming to bring some of the network-cultural forms of collaboration into ICT debates dominated by standard policy and research procedure, the Incommunicado project does not offer a univocal master-narrative of what’s wrong with the world of ICT, or of how it should be. Members of the Incommunicado network are pursueing multiple vectors of inquiry that are unlikely to converge in yet another civil society declaration or intergovernmental policy proposal but - at best - coordinate possible interventions across the imperial ter- rain of a global network economy, at least heighten our sense of the incommensurability of competing info-political visions. To stress the simultaneity of these efforts, and to take stock of where we think incommunicado ‘is’ at the time of this writing, the entries below are a first attempt to identify some of these vectors. Being Incommunicado The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter also implies an extra-judicial space of ex- ception, where torture, executions and ‘disappearances’ occur all-too-frequently in the lives of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the world. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer articulated in third-worldist or tri-continentalist terms. Yet despite the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and third-worldist perspec- reader.20.10.05.c.indd 3 10/21/05 7:45:43 AM incommunicado reader tives that continue to inform contemporary visions of a different information and com- munication order. The term ‘incommunicado’ was chosen as the name for this research network of activists, academics and geeks to acknowledge that while questions related to info- development and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, one of the aims of the Incommunicado project is to explore tactical mobilisations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its concepts, and its absolutisation as a political perspective. Incommunicado 05 Conference The program of the Incommunicado 05 conference, held in Amsterdam on June 15-17, 2005, had an explicitly broad and investigative character. Besides obvious WSIS topics such as internet governance and open source, the event attempted to put a few critical topics on the agenda, such as the role of NGOs, the ‘critique of development’ in the internet age, and the question of ‘info-rights’. Some debates were also new and had to be explored, such as the role of ICT corporations as ‘partners in development’ at the UN or the role of culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context. While participants agreed that the standard scope of ICT4D debates and research needed to be expanded, there was not yet any agreement on how this might best be done. What is certain is that the kind of critique the incommunicado network was set up to ex- plore and facilitate is unlikely to proceed through the consensus-building model of civil society caucuses and inter-institutional networks. Given the commitment to different, even mutually exclusive logics and models of institutionalisation in different camps, from media activists to a development NGOs and academic ICT analysts, the mutual engagement in a spirit of self-critique has its more or less obvious limits. But this is not necessarily a weakness. Part of the Incommunicado idea was a critique of the assumption of a general comprehensibility and commensurability of efforts grouped under ‘civil society’, a shift in emphasis to trace the faultlines of such conflicts and identify their stakes rather than their resolution and subsumption to a master-paradigm that would then serve to contextualise and inform a new politics. reader.20.10.05.c.indd 4 10/21/05 7:45:44 AM incommunicado glossary Info-Development We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of the web from an essentially Euro-American post-industrialist project to a more complexly mapped post- third-worldist network, where new south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical definitions of info-development as an exclusively north-south affair. Before the recent ‘flattening of the world’ (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development - also known by its catchy acronym ‘ICT4D’, for ICT for development - mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. The old ‘technology tranfer’ discourse is becoming questionable, if not put upside down. While still widely (and even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a ‘digital divide’ that follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging. Different actors continue to promote different - and competing - visions of ‘info- development’. New info-economies like Brazil, China, and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances that challenge our sense of what ‘development’ is all about. However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging alliances should not be romanticized in terms of a new tri-continentalism. However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for themselves either as basic infrastructure, supportive of all other development activity, or as complement to older forms of infrastructure and service-oriented development. Often they are expected to meet a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, catapulting peas- ants into the information age, promoting local ICT and knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratisation through increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, info-development also facilitates trans-national corporate efforts to offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of transposition, leaving local ‘stakeholders’ at a loss as to whether or not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain industries likely to move on anyway. Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restric- tions on which commercial info-development is based.