The Digital Bantustan – Connectivity Qua Balkanization
Just finished reading Immanuel Wallerstein’s article in the excellent Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change. Wallerstein is the founder of World Systems Theory, which focuses on the processual links between societies as an explanation of historical events, though the theory has grown far beyond Wallerstein’s capitalism-oriented, modernity-constrained initial description. Without getting too arcane, there’s a movement in the academy toward integrating environmental systems into the study of history, and to do so you need to systemitize history to make it feasible. But Wallerstein’s essay–the final one in the book–doesn’t focus on understanding extractivist culture or divining proxies for deforestation, but rather on the collapse of the modern world.
Pretty heady stuff. According to Wallerstein, the systemic failure of the current system is already a given, and it’s only a question of whether the enlightened aristocracy of Davos ends up controlling the next great system or the Wikipedia-like, distributed (and chaotic) peers typified by the World Social Forum. For those of you, like me, who are unfamiliar with the WSF, their meetings sound like the equivalent of a real-world Wikipedia:
Other people that were not coming from Latin America were unconsciously excluded from the forum, as there were no interpreters at the forum at all, and it was very difficult for people who were coming from outside Latin America to follow speeches or activities that were taking place in the forum from day one of the forum. It was made clear that it was not the responsibility of the organizers to organize interpreters for people, it was people’s responsibility to organize their own interpreters and it was very difficult for us to get that as there was no prior arrangements made. This was a pity. In our struggles in South Africa we have many different languages but our movements always take responsibility for organizing translation – especially for visitors. Of course the NGOs in South Africa want to do everything in English but not the movements.
Of note is the growing importance of academics and Non-Governmental Organizations in the ranks of the WSF, which runs afoul of an anti-expert bias like that typically associated with Wikipedia (And philosophical Daoism, but that’s way off topic). Contrast this with the expert-driven and much swankier World Economic Forum and you start to see an almost uncanny resemblance between the state of these two groups and the state of the university and the growing connected-world knowledge bases. The World Economic Forum is about to be underway, and it’ll even include celebrity Twitter interviews as well as a host of externally accredited experts, thereby limiting the number of participants to a modest two and half thousand, versus the tens of thousands who show up for the WSF.
Wallerstein posits these two organizations as emblematic of the two paths toward the “Next System” (Some kind of post-capitalist/post-Marxist future means of economic organization) and wonders, as I did in my last post, how the current instability will play out. It is interesting to note that there is some kind of dichotomous self-organization occuring across various realms, with a peer-collaboration expression on the one side (WSF is criticized, like Wikipedia, as being Communist at its core) and an expert-oriented version acting like a Zoroastrian neccessary-opposite. Strangely enough, these various evil dopplegangers seem to be unaware of their placement within a putative Pantheon of Global Social Conflict:
Wikipedia, Open Source Software, World Social Forum
vs.
Academia, Proprietary Software, World Economic Forum
Since I can’t think of a simple dichotomous relationship to posit Local Community / Global Multinational without expanding on whether I’m talking about services, products or agriculture, I’ll leave it out. I realize there’s no strict alignment between these forces, and that you have academics supporting Wikipedia and Apache being used by major corporations, but there’s already a growing sense that the local organic farmer (or bookshop owner) should be using Linux and supporting Wikipedia and taking part in the WSF. Not sure how the social networking sites figure into this, they don’t seem to skew or splinter along ideological lines, but that could just be a sign of my own unfamiliarity (and extreme disdain) for them. What’s extremely strange, at least to me, is that there is a definite dualistic nature to our modern world ideological system, and yet it seems that we’ve fractured into more ideological bantustans than ever before–due in part to the remarkable ability of the Web to break down communication and organization costs and therefore allow for Mao’s thousand-flower continuum. The bantustans are natural conflict-absorbers, because they make disagreements, like modern art, seem so subjective. To paraphrase a quote that may or may not have come from Kissinger, you can express vicious disagreement precisely because of the very low stakes. But this masks a very real, distinct dichotomy of ideology that permeates global culture and which seems to be expressing itself in every new endeavor.