I saw a few references to The New Westphalian Web by Katherine Maher on Twitter, and I read the article. It was fairly mediocre, as it was basically just a compilation of the utopian ideal of the Internet as a borderless "autonomous realm" and a knock on the evil states that try to control it -- like the US, which is placed on par with Pakistan or Saudia Arabia or Russia as always happens in these sorts of pieces.
There didn't seem to be anything significantly new in it, except the fact that the person writing it represented Access, a relatively new organization headed by former Google lobbyist and former White House staffer Andrew McLaughlin. Maher used to be at NDI, but I don't think I ever heard her speak, she is one of the people who has been going around working the Arab Spring with the idea that mobile access will increase freedom. It's too bad the authoritarian state under Morsi and the Islamists get in the way of these ideals.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW LOST IN CYBERSPACE
The article might not have gotten a second look, but I decided to leave just a short comment when I saw her invoking uncritically John Perry Barlow's silly "Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace" which I countered years ago (my latest revision was done last year with a refutation of much of his collectivist and utopian ideologies that are antithetical to human rights and the rule of law).
My comment was this:
The problem is that nobody elected or even appointed John Perry Barlow, and people in fact like their nations and like and defend their states and the defense of liberties they bring. This borderless woo-woo pretends that authoritarian states and terrorism won't take over instead of their pastoral utopianists bringing us back in fact to the village, not the urban life.
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/03/resistance-and-alternatives-to-john-perry-barlows-a-declaration-of-independence-in-cyberspace.html
GRUMPYCATFITZ
The next thing I know, Ethan Zuckerman, who has never gotten over my critique of his dissing of Twitter in Moldova to fight the communists back in the day, is telling Maher to follow @GrumpyCatFitz which is the parody made about me -- I'm fairly certain by either Joshua Foust or Nathan Hamm or both or someone in that circle around Registan. GrumpyCatFitz is a hilarious grumpy meme cat who takes my tweets and makes them sound like "get offa my lawn!" sort of harumphs by dividing them into two parts, one at the top of the meme poster, and one at the bottom in capital letters, a method which can make just about anybody's tweet sound like a cantankerous old curmudgeon, but my tweets can lend themselves especially to this method : )
The anonymous GrumptyCatFitz also created @opcatzhunt and began to harass me together with the Anonymous newbies from Ohio who decided to make the heckling of me on Twitter an "op" to earn their Anon spurs -- but failed. GrumpyCatFitz began her life in December telling all the Registan regulars and their little extended circle of lefty Internet freedom fighters like Zuckerman to follow her -- and they did. Grumpy had an active life for a few weeks but then got bored until she could join the Anonymous assault on me. This may be due to the fact that bout Foust and Hamm became unemployed recently. I guess the Sequester is already starting to bite hard in the defense analysis industry...
In any event, Maher, whom I don't know, but who seems youth and thin-skinned as youth often are these days, rushed to Twitter with in minutes of my comment (perhaps she was refreshing her article's page waiting for more comments!) and typed:
A LEGENDARY TROLL!
katherine maher @krmaherMy FP article just got trolled by a legend. This may mean I've said something good.
When Zuckerman urged her to follow @GrumpyCatFitz, I realized she meant me. Imagine, my little paragraph questioning her utopianism and JP Barlow, and I'm a legendary troll!
Well, I reject the entire notion of "troll," which geeky boys have been trying to impose on us since the days of the Well to mean "anything we don't like", and I fail to see why calling out the obvious utopianism of this piece was somehow "trolling". But that lets you know just how much they believe they are the new normal -- although it's hard to believe anybody would conceive of themselves as the new normal with JP Barlow in their midst. There it is, however.
THE WORLDWIDE TREND TOWARD...COUNTRIES
I first heard the term "Westphalia" years ago as a young person at the UN. There, people often look into the middle distance and talk about the realities of "Westphalia" to mean "sovereignty" which they find gets in their way of their more idealistic ventures like international human rights. The reality is that human rights, although about such universalism that tends toward the ideal and "world government," has evolved now to be about "the responsibility to protect" -- which was a clever device thought up by the Canadians and Francis Deng, the UN special rapporteur to sort of use ju jitsui on states -- con them into thinking they wouldn't have to part with their sovereignty but in fact would be called upon to exercise it -- but in the cause of treating refugees or internally displaced peoples better. I've written a fair amount on why RTP is so fundamentally misplaced as an idea, as it assumes good will of states like Sudan that it doesn't have, and pretends that 8,000 Sudanese policemen who were busy displacing IDPs five minutes ago are now going to protect them.
Speaking of Sudan -- well, that's just it. While people like Maher are pursuing the utopian notion that states are withering away and borders are disappearing, real people in the real world are doing things like trying to carve South Sudan as a new country out of greater Sudan, to get away from oppressive Bashir in Khartoum. And on and on around the world -- there are all kinds of states that either came into being recently (Kosovo or Tajikistan) or which want to come into being and are oppressed (Kashmir or Chechnya) and movements of peoples that want their own states, like the Tibetans or Uighurs. They're not content with the hipster borderless Internet, you know.
I've spent years and years at the UN, OSCE, and other international bodies. And it's very clear to me from observing reality instead of ideology that most of the people of the world want countries, identities, languages of their own, and don't really want to be part of some internationalized, homogenized conveyor belt of jet-set intellectuals. That is, sure, there are some international civil servants, NGO staffers, various carpetbaggers particularly of the left who make up this jet-set that go around to all the conferences -- as one suffering Internet freedom fighter from an oppressive country was heard to say to another sufferer in Vienna at the OSCE conference I just attended, "See you in Amsterdam next month" -- where the next occasion for per diems and nice hotels and good food would be had by all sufferers for freedom!
INTERNATIONAL JET-SET AND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
And it's very easy when you live among these jet-setters with i-phones and i-pads especially now to enhance their international elite status to believe they are "taking over" and they are "all as one" and the Internet is uber alles. But the reality is, well, countries. They still do what they want. And that's because most people either want them to do what they want, or they are oppressed. And if they want to get out of their oppression, the path of international pop fronts organized by elite collectivists isn't always the appetizing one for them.
Well, there's more about the borderless Internet I don't like -- the Global Village, I've come to find out, is pretty oppressive and reactionary all its own. (McCluhan never meant it to be that). You know how you left your small town to come to the big city? To get away from the place where everybody knew your business and got in your face? Well, now you're back there again, where you have no privacy when you are doxed by Anonymous or scraped by corporations or eyeballed by a potential employer who doesn't like your Facebook party photos. You're back there again -- you might as well be in the grade school play yard -- being bullied and heckled and told to conform -- or else.
Or else people like Jillian York will get you fired from your job! Or Anonymous will harass your relatives, even though they are not relevant to their beef with you. Or Katherine Maher will call you a "troll" -- the greatest of Internet curses! -- and whistle to her friends to come protect the Motherland.
Like Dan LaTorre who calls himself a "change agent". And then calls me a "known stinker":
Daniel Latorre @danlatorre@krmaher ha & a known stinker at that. sigh. was about to dive into the comment thread then just noticed that flury. ignoring steadfastly.
Are these people like...twelve years old?
And you would ignore a robust discussion because a "troll" has commented in it? Oh, my.
LOBBYING FOR GOOGLE'S LAST MILE
Well, if you can get past all these childish antics, here's what seems to be going on:
Access is flexing its muscles hard, getting ready for more serious lobbying and the March Through the Institutions. Andrew McLaughlin may be "ex" to about most of the powerful things of our time -- Google, the White House, ICANN, the Berkman Center, etc. -- and is now at Betaworks -- but obviously he retains ties to all these things and is a powerful networker and influencer -- recall how he said to The Wall Street Journal's Crovitz that he believed the ITU should "have its kneecaps broken". (!)
Access will take on a menu of various things like the anti-CISPA crusade -- it will be interesting to see how much they load up their advocacy agenda and keep to c-3 versus c-4 status or how that will work. Certainly they oppose SOPA and advocate for net neutrality. Basically, they are about ensuring somebody else pays for Google's last mile and that Google never has to see a law it doesn't like. But they will likely steadfastly, hand on heart, declare they have nothing to do with Google. Maher already wrote to me:
"katherine maher @krmaher @catfitz I missed the part where we have Google staffers on our executive team. Or, you know, are sectarian.
I had said:
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz@krmaher Access, a Google-run sectarian cadre organization.
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz@krmaher Who said "staffers"? You are saying w a straight face that Andrew McLaughlin has no relation to Google?! http://andrew.mclaughl.in/about-me/
Now, does it have to literally have Google staffers to be "Google-run"? No. It's my belief that it's enough to have McLaughlin there, who can be trusted to run the Google line, and communicate with whomever he needs to communicate with at Google -- exactly as he did at the White House, an act for which he was reprimanded -- about which you can read either the left or right version of the story.
GOOGLE'S REVOLVING DOOR TO THE WHITE HOUSE
What's interesting to me about that first link under "left" for TechPresident is that Darrell Issa began by launching that probe alleging that McLaughlin talked to two dozens Googlers -- TechPresident says it was not such a big deal -- but today, you see Issa eating out of Google's hand, taking donations from Google, and advocating vigorously against SOPA/PIPA and demanding investigations of the prosecutors in the Swartz case. How did this happen? Did he get knee-capped?
Everyone has long forgotten this story now as it was back in Obama I. But eventually McLaughlin resided as Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Google spends more money lobbying than ever. In a way, they don't even need some ex-Googler who is under something of a cloud to lobby their issues, but Access is something that has a lot of Silicon Valley backing with every single aggressive cadre fighting for the copyleftist/Google vision on their board -- and was involved in what I consider was aptly called RightsCon (more later on that).
THE RUCASS RUCKUS
But to get back to Westphalia, something Alec Ross also discussed as if it were now history.
It isn't history, and it isn't as if Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Sudan any of the others in the aptly-named RUCASS caucaus at the ITU making trouble for the free Internet just started controlling the Internet today. They have been at it for years, and I catalogued some of the latest round here.
Despite whatever international regimes get going, there are always states that simply don't play. In the OSCE context, out of the 57 members, only 48 have signed the Fundamental Freedoms document affirming that "offline rights apply online" -- something that John Perry Barlow and Katherine Maher actually would do well to learn, because there are many rights they'd like to dispense with in cyberspace in the quest for their collectivist utopia.
A NEW HELSINKI ACCORD FOR CYBERSPACE?
I've been mulling over whether there should be some kind of new "Helsinki Accord" for cyberspace to prevent militarization -- just as the Helsinki process did -- but I think it's likely premature when the very same bad actors like Russia can't even sign the document affirming the "offline=online" stuff.
Naturally, for Maher, the militarization of the US looms huge and scary in her eyes although with her experience abroad, she should know better that the US is the least of our problems.
She incorrectly refers to SOPA as "breaking" the DNS system, when in fact it was *alleged* to *hypothetically* break a *future* regime of DNSSEC, not in place yet, which in fact big companies haven't adopted because its expensive and complicated. We've had that long discussion on my other post about the "breaking" of the Internet and how fake it is. As for "warrantless searches" under CISPA because information might be exchanged that could affect privacy, again, I don't believe this particular bunch ever met an Internet law they liked, and they are never serious. When CISPA isn't a law, we get an executive order, which is worse.
It's not fair to book to the US some horrid edge in "militarization of cyberspace" because of Stuxnet, either. Russia and China militarized and weaponized cyberspace long before the US did, and made the US their constant targets as we know full well. What is the problem that Russian or Chinese hacking is supposed to solve in the world? American capitalism? That's not a problem, that's a solution; they're the problem. And what was the problem Stuxnet was to solve? The intractable problem of a nuclear Iran. It's not like the US dreamed up Stuxnet to be mean to a nice country and throw their digital weight around. They dreamed it up as a means of dealing with the meat-world challenge of Iran in real life, where it's authoritarianism is a misery to its own people and its neighbours and the world. Stuxnet is a response, not sui generis; fastening on this effort to digitalize the Cold War with Iran instead of bombing Iran outright and calling that "militarization of cyberspace" is fairly lame. Why?
FAILED TWITTER REVOLUTION OF 2009
Because it doesn't address the problem of the failed Twitter revolution of 2009. Cyberspace could not save Iranian democrats. And the leftists and "progressives" of the world, even those who did pay attention, couldn't save them either, especially not by tweeting. It was good to tweet, but the Internet cannot save you. So it's really reprehensible to forget the blood in the streets of 2009, and people not saved by Twitter, and then suddenly get indignant about Stuxnet and the militarized cyberspace. Who militarized real life -- and Twitter, for that matter -- first?! Oh, and please don't whine to me about Israel having the bomb -- they are a democratic state under the rule of law, unlike Iran. And that's where we Internet freedom fighters differ with Katherine and Jillian and all the rest of them -- they think the US and Israel are the problem; Iran is only a dim memory by now.
DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN CYBERSPACE
What was interesting amidst this discussion was a reference to a new pushback against that wily old Grateful Dead nerd Barlow. This is a Declaration of Interdependence in Cyberspace put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, something I am just learning about but which is described in the comments as a corporate shill or a Republican shill with Darrell Issa and Orrin Hatch. Well, good! We need diversity in this space, and with the Mitch Kapor run groups and things like Access, we haven't had much of that.
Given that I haven't been able to win the lottery yet and open my Institute for the Study of Internet Ideologies (plural), it's good that there is something like this new "Interdependence" manifesto that could be seriously lobbied in Washington. The Institute itself has existed since 2006, but it seems to have lobbied on specific technology issues and not gotten into the overarching ideological battles (such as I've been involved in for years). I've never seen them in this space. I mean, somebody more informed than I am about Washington lobbyists can tell me if I missed the memo on this, but the op-eds of this group have been things like "ARPA-E’s RANGE Program Will Boost Battery Innovation" or "The Tesla-Broder Debate and What It Says About Decarbonizing Transportation" more than they've had larger, overarching ideological texts like "The Declaration of Interdependence".
I do wonder if Darrell Issa, who is stumping against the prosecutors of Aaron Swartz, who was no doubt inspired by Barlow's manifesto, realizes that Daniel Castro's "Interdependence" manifesto would tend to mitigate the radical anarchism of Swartz. Do they talk about these things at board meetings?
The Declaration isn't quite something I can endorse because I think it has some incorrect referencing to international law in it (i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't support property rights and capitalism to the extent implied) and needs more input from international human rights lawyers -- and not of the sort captured by the Googlers like Susan Crawford But by and large, it calls out some of the real fatuousness of Barlow's stuff and I can only welcome this initiative.
Perhaps soon I can retire from blogging. It is now shaping up that the West Coast Mitch Kapor or John Perry Barlow organizations and all their permutations have some resistance on the East Coast -- from Berin Szoka's organization, which mounted the alternative manifesto to the Free Press' socialist cadre group's collectivist manifesto -- the alternative also stressed private property and capitalism as legitimate; and also from the Tech Liberation Front bloggers, some of whom are at George Mason, even from Red State's Tech at Night.
I won't retire just yet, however, as these are two extremes of the left and right that tend to meet each other behind the barn and come together around things like opposition to SOPA or glorification of Swartz's anarchic "propaganda of the deed". There has to be a better balance that is not antithetical to real human rights.
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