A people will only be free when they control their own communications | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

Democracy lock down – but where is that exactly?

October 3rd, 2009

But its a bit complicated. However I think that communication technologies today are so powerful within a networked context that we are going to witness things we never thought possible – good and bad. In my lifetime I never ever thought would see the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am not so sure ultimate control is possible in the networked society. And the panacea of a wealthy middle class may work in Singapore but I am not sure it is the soma for everyone.

BEIJING — Authorities in China’s restive northwestern Xinjiang region on Sunday approved a bill making it a criminal offence for people there to discuss separatism on the Internet, state media reported.

The bill passed by Xinjiang’s standing committee bans people in the region from using the Internet in any way that undermines national unity, incites ethnic separatism or harms social stability, the China News Service reported.

The bill requires Xinjiang’s Internet service providers and network operators to set up monitoring systems — or strengthen existing ones — and report anyone who breaks the law, the report said.

This was released by Associated Press this week just gone. Read in association with Freedom For Sale: how we made money and lost our liberty

Podcast of John Kampfner speaking at the RSA

In a Times review,

Marx was wrong, according to John Kampfner. It is not religion that is the opium of the people, but capitalism. Give them good shopping opportunities and they will forget about liberty, equality and fraternity, and cease to care about who governs them and how. And while they worship at the shopping malls, the governing class gets on with managing the state according to its own ideas. But this is with the consent of the people, who value prosperity more than they fear for their freedom.

In China and Russia, journalists and activists may risk their lives as well as their livelihoods, but the bargain with the people is the same: in some degree the open society is sacrificed for stability and wealth. Given their history in the past 100 years, there are many reasons why this is attractive to the average Chinese or Russian. The result is a sustainable authoritarianism enabled by the efficiency of the capitalist system. This means, says Kampfner, that we may have been wrong to believe that the spread of capitalism would lead to democracy. The authoritarianism by consent of Singapore that had hitherto seemed an isolated and ambiguous case turns out to have a wider application. Whether this will last remains to be seen. The story of China is not halfway through. It is developing intellectually as well as economically; the turbulence of ideas may yet spread into politics. Russia, too, has deep moral and political resources that may not be satisfied by the drug of materialism.

JG Ballard had a thing or two to write about that, The Times continues,

What is certain is that the media is under pressure everywhere (perhaps it always has been: commercial and government control are both problematic). What ought to worry us most in democratic countries is the decline of our parliaments. They are the ones who should devise regulatory systems for the media and roles for public service broadcasting; they should be the primary constraint on the executive. None has done much to prevent the gross errors of the executive on either side of the Atlantic. The expenses scandal in Britain seems to signal a group of people who have lost pride in their function and instead exploit it for personal gain. Democratic assemblies are the heart of representative democracy; if they have lost their purpose, then we are in serious trouble.

And I completely agree with that. But we should also not forget that in the UK we have the highest percentage of CCTV cameras almost anywhere in the world – so how free are we? This is a very rich and interesting debate to be had on Democracy per se: Participatory, Representative, Monitory, Networked?

Jared Diamond in his book Collapse makes the simple point that civilisations do not last forever. If you want things to stay the same you need to change. This world in which only the systematic human being striving for ‘more’ is left standing is in stark contrast to many of us who are beginning to ask what ‘more’ exactly means. Chindogu: is a Japanese word for all the useless things we might be tempted to buy, if ‘buoyant consumer demand means a world full of junk, its hard to see why we would want to work so hard for it. And, may I add work that makes us so unhappy, says Charles Handy in the Hungry Spirit. Finally the Times summary,

In the end, it has to do with our conception of man. It is not just what people want that matters, it is what serves human dignity. Having struggled so long to govern our own lives, did we escape the grip of dictators to fall instead under the spell of Louis Vuitton? The city states of Athens and Renaissance Italy that strove for democratic or republican government stood for something nobler, reflected in their great works of art. Dubai may rent these from the Louvre, but neither the Gulf nor Singapore seems likely to produce a Michelangelo or a Sophocles.

And Richard Sennett had a point of view on that too as does John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy

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