Exclusion and Inclusion in History and Future

By Sohail Inayatullah

“The Rights of Your Robots: the Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in History and Future”, in Edmund Ryden, ed., Human Rights and Values in East Asia (Taiwan, Fujen Catholic University, 1998), 143-162 (also at: http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_15/faf_v15_n08/index.html).

Many years ago in the folly of youth, I wrote an article with a colleague titled, “The Rights of Robots.” [1] It has been the piece of mine most ridiculed.  Pakistani colleagues have mocked me saying that Inayatullah is worried about robot rights while we have neither human rights, economic rights or rights to our own language and local culture – we have only the “right to be brutalized by our leaders” and Western powers.

Others have refused to enter in collegial discussions on the future with me as they have been concerned that I will once again bring up the trivial.  As noted thinker Hazel Henderson said, I am happy to join this group – an internet listserve – as long as the rights of robots is not discussed.

But why the ridicule and anger? Is it because as James Dator says: the only useful comments of the future should be ridiculous. That is, most statements about the future are tired and timid, reflections of staid academic thinkers who have no creativity, who are unable to grasp the grand technological and civilizations bolder souls are willing to speculate on?  Is the rights of robots a problematic issue because it strikes a deep discord about the world, that is, a world we know is fundamentally unjust, a world where technology will have rights but street children will not? A world where speculative capital is free to choose the most desirous nation but we as labor can at best only hope for a decent retirement account? Where labor can only hope that we will somehow make it and not become landless and laborless?

Or is it something else?

We wrote the piece not only because we believe robots will have legal rights one day – they will, to be sure! – but more so to show that rights are not decreed by nature but are reflections of legal conventions.  As Christopher Stone has argued: “throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been theretofore, a bit unthinkable. We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless `things’ to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of the status quo.” [2]

Is it that we as humans are unwilling to consider giving rights to robots partly because we live in a zero-sum world. If robots have rights than others won’t. Our history of rights can be seen as a battle between inclusion and exclusion. The forces of exclusion have not been the same, they have changed through history – sometimes they have been centralized empires, other times centralized religious systems, and other times nation-states operating in a world-capitalist system. They have also been elders, brothers, bosses and all the other petty tyrants we must negotiate with day after day.

GLOBALISM AND RIGHTS

We have consistently defined others as less than ourselves: once done so, then every possible heinous crime can be committed against them. Globalism, is of course, the latest victory in defining others as somehow less – become more efficient, more productive, export more, be all that you can be. You are fundamentally a producer and consumer, and unless you do the former first, your ability to engage in the latter will be restricted. Globalism merely continues the language of colonialism and developmentalism – the same sense of inevitability is there, the same recourse to the grand masters of social evolution – Comte and Darwin – is there. And indeed responses to globalism follow the same simplistic pattern as well – a conspiracy of the powerful, of the West, of capital (instead of an understanding of the deeper structures of history).

The basic presumption of globalism is one of hierarchy, framed neutrally as comparative advantage but in fact a social-genetic-cultural model of who is civilized and who is barbaric.

But what if we were to take a different tack?  What if we took serious, for example, the Tantric Indian civilizational worldview wherein all of life, including technology, is alive. Or the American Indian, as developed by Jamake Highwater, who reminds us that it is the collective that is alive, existing in a relationship of sharing, caring and gratitude, not dominance.  Could the robot then enter as friend.

Again, this does not necessarily mean a totally horizontal world where all have equal rights as in the Western perspective nor a collectivized “Father knows best” vertical world. Rather it means a world where they are layers of reality, where mind is in all things from humans to animals to plants and, even, dare we say to robots.

This certainly does mean a world with some rights for plants and animals as well – a vegetarian world; one cannot love the collective if one eats the individual, the tantrica might tell us.  By vegetarian, we are not only situating the personal in the political but reminding that behind our collective foot habits is an anti-ecology regime, an anti-life regime, an anti-health regime, that is, our eco-system is at stake,[3] our health would all be better if we saw animals and plants as being not part of the Darwinian chain of life, the circle of life, but as part of an ecology of consciousness.

But you will say, this is an ethnocentric argument. We are meat-eaters.

Yes, rights then are ethnocentric and more often than not human-centric.  The extension of rights has always been unthinkable, the impossible, and yet we have not had any level of human progress without the extension of rights to those we previously considered not-worthy.

In an essay titled, “Visioning a Peaceful World,” Johan Galtung writes: “Abolition of war [can be seen as a similar goal to the fight against] slavery and colonialism, abject exploitation and patriarchy were and are up against. They won, or are winning. We live in their utopia, which then proved to be a realistic utopia. So is ours: a concrete utopia for peace.”[4]

INCLUSION AND RIGHTS

This is thus other side of the story, as much as history has been the exclusion of rights, it has also been the advancement of rights, about inclusion, about gentleness, about the struggle for love.  My reading is as follows:

Glossing human history, we argue that even while there are certainly cyclical dimensions to history (the rise and fall, the strengthening and weakening, the back and forth of class, civilization, varna, nation), there has been a linear movement towards more rights, towards laying bare power.

In the European context, for example, there have been a succession of revolutions, each one granting increased rights to a group which had been exploited by the dominant social class and limiting the powers of those at the top.

(1)        The revolt of the peasants against feudalism (the late middle ages, the 14th century). Increased rights for peasants.

(2)        The revolt of aristocrats against clergy (church/state) – wherein church power was contested (modernity). The breakdown of Church dogma and the development of scientific thinking.

(3)        The revolt of aristocrats against the king, a constitutional revolution as in the English Glorious Revolution of the 17th century, a process started much earlier with the Magna Carta in the 13th century.

(3)        The revolt of bourgeois against the aristocrats and clergy. This was the French revolution and created the Enlightenment – a victory for rational humanism and science against ideational church dogma.

(4)        More recently the revolt of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This was the Russian socialist revolution of 1917. Increased rights, at least in the short run, for labor. In Nordic nations this was more of a gradual evolution of labor power, of the welfare state.

(5)        Elsewhere, there was the revolt of the peasants against the city. This was Mao Zedeng’s formula (the argument that the two opposing camps are the city and the rural). Pol Pot took this view to its tragic consequence. The city, however, appears it is winning although telecommunications might allow a return to the village, but at this stage it is more the Los Angelisation of the planet than the creation of a global village.

(6)        More recently (and of course, part of a long term trend) has been the revolt of women against men, against patriarchy in all its forms. This is the pivotal trend of increased rights for women.

(7)        The revolt of nature against industrialism. This has been the Green position calling for a limits of technocracy.

(8)        The revolt of the Third World against Europe, with calls for Third World solidarity. This decolonization process – The 18th American Revolution being a much earlier example of this – has eventually led to

(9)        The revolt of the indigenous against all foreign social formations, calling for the creation of special status for them as guardians of the planet

(10)      Finally is the revolt against the nation-state worldview, wherein social movements are aligning themselves to create a third space that beholden neither to the prince or merchant, nor to the interstate system or to global capitalism.[5]

DEFINE OR BE DEFINED

This last four have not only been about increased rights but about defining the rights discourse, deciding what constitutes a right, who defines it, and how rights are to be protected and implemented.  This is one of the crucial battles of the near term future, to define or be defined by others.

Globalisation is of course about defining the world of others – asserting that traditional systems of knowledge, local languages and self-reliant cannot lead to a modern society. As Ashis Nandy writes: “Few hydrologists are interested in what the natives think about their grand irrigation projects and megadams; health planners depend almost entirely on modern medicine; and agricultural innovations are not introduced in consultation with farmers.”[6] In Australia, the nomadic way of life of aborigines is to be rooted out if Aboriginal health is to improve – they have already been defined as out of the norm, health practices based on modern sedentary lifestyles are not seen as the problem, writes Michael Shapiro.[7] Of course, even multinational pharmaceutical companies now scourge the planet looking for the latest herb to patent but this process is done so within the modernist corporatist context and not within the cultural knowledge system of the local.  Defining what is real, what is important, what is beauty has become as important as ensuring that one is not periphery but centre in the world economy.

While the general trend at one level is progressive – more happiness for more people – at another level there are exaggerations of systems such that the victory of the Enlightenment over religious systems, over traditional society, has led to a pendulum shift back to traditional systems – localisms, ethnicity, and in many ways a pre-scientific world.  This tension is also leading to the possibility of a post-rational and post-scientific world, which integrates the sensate and the ideational.  Finally, at a third level, there has been little progress, each new technological improvements creates new side-affects, each new growth spurt in the world-economy creates new losers and vaster sites of impoverishment.

Certainly then, the advancement of rights, while progressive, does not got far enough.  Among others, including our robot friends, I think not.  They need to be expanded.

(1)        First, following Sarkar,[8] we need to expand humanism to neo-humanism, which struggles against the Enlightenment’s human centrism and argues for increased rights of plants and animals – towards global vegetarianism and for an global ecological regime.

(2)        Following, numerous third world activists and federalists, what is needed is to expand the concept of the magna carta (against the power of the king) into a neo-magna carta and develop a world government with basic human rights; rights of language, right of religion and right to purchasing power (related to this is maxi-mini wage structure wherein minimum economic rights are guaranteed).

The expansion of these rights, however, will not come about through polite conferences, but as we know, through epistemic (the language/worldview battle), cultural (through a renaissance in art, music, and thought) social (the organizations of values and institutions) and political (challenging state power) struggle.

THE PROCESS OF RIGHTS

At the level of rights, the process, according to Neal Milner is as follows.[9]

His first stage in this theory is imagery.  Here imagery stressing rationality of the potential rights‑holder is necessary. This has been part of the struggle for rights of nature, since nature is not considered a rational actor.

The next stage of rights emergence requires a justifying ideology.  Ideologies justifying changes in imagery develop.  These, according to Milner, include ideologies by agents of social control and those on the part of potential rights holders or their representatives.

The next stage is one of changing authority patterns.  Here authority patterns of the institutions governing the emerging rights holders begin to change.

Milner next sees the development of “social networks that reinforce the new ideology and that form ties among potential clients, attorneys and intermediaries.”[10]

The next stage involves access to legal representation.  This is followed by routinization, wherein legal representation is made routinely available.  Finally government uses its processes to represent the emerging rights‑holders.

Of course, for our discussion this is somewhat limiting, rights are more than legal expressions, they are nested in civilizational views of space, time and other.

Thus while for some civilizations rights become so when governmentalized, in other maps rights are part of a web of relationships between self, community and the larger collective, the state, this is especially so in collectivist societies. Rights are related to ones responsibilities, to one’s dharma.

However, rights when defined strictly in western individualistic terms often are unable to deal with issues of import from other civilizations. For example, indigenous access to land, ancestors, and gods/angels are all non-negotiable civilizational givens.

At the same time, these too should not be seen in essentialistic terms, that is, all civilizations are practice, they are potent life forces with operating mythologies.  These mythologies can be used by leaders, most recently in Yugoslavia with Milosovic, to deny the human rights of other cultures. Civilizational traumas are used then by politics not for transcendence but for further exclusion.  Trauma is piled on trauma and the linear progression of rights become lost – rights become not an asset for the oppressed but a stock of symbols for the state to use against others – rights are used in a zero-sum competitive world.

In contrast is the case of Taiwan where a traditional system, Confucianism, has been modernised to include the democratic impulse. Asian values are not seen as fixed but as dynamic, democracy can be reshaped to exist with non-Western values.[11]

INCLUSION

A rights discourse is essentially about inclusion and about built-in agreed upon  structures of peaceful mediation to resolve conflicting rights. By now it should be quite clear that what is under discussion is not the future of technology, but the future of power.

Denial of rights of robots – since they are considered other, as not sentient, and thus not part of our consideration – becomes of an exemplar of how we treat other humans, plants, animals and civilizations.  Like children, the environment and future generations, robots do not have adequate representation (and thus are considered rightless). Like children, the environment and future generations, robots are considered less alive, less important, and thus are considered rightless. Since they are so different, why should they be given rights?  This is made more so by a worldview which is rationalistic and reductionist, which resists emergence in technology. In contrast are Buddhist views, for example, which see all as persons, and not at things. Shamanistic perspectives as well can imagine the spirit entering technology, thus allowing it to become, while not more human, certainly  part of what it means to be human.

Robots call us to consider culture and civilization not as fixed but as dynamic, as growing in response to other cultures and civilizations, to technological dynamism.  Responses to dramatic changes in technologies and values can lead to societal disintegration, to a cultural schizophrenia, can be directly creative as with Toynbee’s minority, or can be resistance-based, and thus create a new culture.[12]

TRANSFORMATIONS IN EPISTEME[13]

The rights of robot is only one emerging issue that promises to change how we see ourselves and others. Genetics, multiculturalism, the women’s movement, postmodernism, information and communication technologies as well promise to alter how we see nature, truth, reality and self.   There are four levels to this epistemic transformation of the future of humanity, perhaps well summed up by the following poem:[14]

It’s only a paper moon

Floating over a cardboard sea.

But it wouldn’t be make-believe

If you believed in me.

The first is: transformations in what we think is the natural or Nature.[15]  This is occurring from the confluence of numerous trends, forces, and theories.  First, genetics and the possibility that with the advent of the artificial womb, women and men as biological beings will be secondary to the process of creation. The link between sexual behaviour and reproduction will be torn asunder.[16]  But it is not just genetics which changes how we see the natural, theoretical positions arguing for the social construction of nature also undo the primacy of the natural world. Nature is not seen as the uncontested category, rather humans create natures based on their own scientific, political and cultural dispositions. We “nature” the world. Nature is what you make it. There is no longer any state of nature. Feminists have certainly added to this debate, pointing out that they have been constructed by men as natural with men artifactual. By being conflated with nature, as innocent, they have had their humanity denied to them and tamed, exploited, and tortured just as nature has.

As nature changes its social meaning, so will the idea of natural rights. Arguments that rights are political not universal or natural, that is, that rights must be fought for also undo the idea of a basic nature. Thus, nature as eternal, as outside of human construct, has thus come under threat from a variety of places: genetics, the social construction argument, and the rights discourse.

Related to the end of nature are transformations in what we think is the Truth. Religious truth has focused on the one Truth. All other nominations of the real pale in front of the eternal. Modernity has transformed religious truth to allegiance to the nation-state with science and technology as its hand-maiden.  However, thinkers from Marx, Nietzsche, to Foucault from the West, as well as feminists and Third World scholars such as Edward Said have contested the unproblematic nature of truth. Truth is considered class-based, gender-based, culture-based, personality-based. Knowledge is now considered particular, its arrangement based on the guiding episteme.  We often do not communicate well since our worlds are so different, indeed, it is amazing we manage to understand each other at all.

Language is central in this shift, as it is seen not as a neutral mediator of ideas but as opaque, as participating, indeed, in constituting that which it refers to.[17]  It is not so much that we speak languages, but that languages create our identities. We language the world and language constitutes what it is that it is possible for us to see.

Multiculturalism has argued that our images of time, space, and history, of text are based on our linguistic dispositions. Even the library once considered a neutral institution is now seen as political. Certainly Muslims, Hawaiians, Aborigines, Tantrics, and many others, would not construct knowledge along the lines of science, social science, arts and humanities.  Aborigines might divide a library – if they were to accede to that built metaphor – as divided by sacred spaces, genealogy and dreamtime. Hawaiians prefer the model of aina (land), the Gods, and genealogy (links with the everpresent ancestors).  Not just is objectivity under threat, but we are increasingly living in a world where our subjectivity has been historicized and culturized. The search is for models that can include the multiciplicities that we are -layers of reality, spheres with cores and peripheries.

In any case, the belief in one truth held traditionally by religious fundamentalists and now by scientists is under assault. Can we moves towards an ecology of mind, where many ways of knowing, where truth as claimed by differing traditions is honoured, dialogued? That is, once truth has been decentred, and all perspectives are allowed, what then? Can we create a global project that unites yet respects multiplicities? Can we create a world in the context of an ecology of rights – interpenetrating rights, their expansion enhancing each other?[18] Or are there non-negotiable fundamentals that do not allow agreement but still might allow small practical steps taken together leading to a better world – many peace processes? [19]

Central to the end of the grand narratives is a rethinking of what we consider as Real.  Our view of the real is being shaped partly by technology, specifically virtual technology and its promise. Cyberspace has become a contender for the metaphor for the future of reality.  By donning a helmet, we can enter worlds wherein the link between traditional, or natural physical reality and cyber/virtual reality are blurred. Will you be you? Will I be me? As we travel these worlds, will we lose our sense of an integrated self? Where is the reality principle in these new technologies? What of human suffering and misery?  How will traditional Asian systems that are more collectivist in identity deal with the individuality of virtuality? Can virtuality become more group based, or will it destabilise Asian identities?

The real is what can be created by desire.  Whereas for Buddhists, the task has been to extinguish desire, for the West, the project is to totally fulfil desire, reality is what you want it to be. Desire is truth.

The environment as a place of rest, as beauty, as a source of inspiration, as a living entity of itself, then becomes secondary. Whereas philosophers have deconstructed it, cybernauts have captured and miniaturised it. Why do we still need to protect wildlife when it can be virtually rendered, we can now meaningfully ask? Since we will not be able to perceive the difference between the natural and the technological, wouldn’t it be better to use the environment for development then? The virtual environment, let us remember, comes without insect bites, without bush fires, without fear. It comes without imperfections.

The rights of minorities will likely become less important since all different perspectives can be kept alive virtually, thus not stopping progress.

Paradoxically, as the real becomes increasingly metered and sold, as reality ceases to be embedded in spiritual and sacred space, becoming instead commercial real estate space, others have began to argue that the ideational is returning, that the pendulum is shifting again.  Echoing Sorokin’s idea of the  need for a balance between the sensate and the ideational, Willis Harmon argues that the physical world is only one layer of reality. The spiritual world is another. What is needed is a balance, a move towards global mind change. Rupert Sheldrake with his idea of morphogenetic fields, Sarkar with his ideas of microvita (providing the conscious software to the hardware of the atom), De Chardin with his idea of a noosphere, all point to the notion that we are connected at a deeper layer, perhaps at the level of Gaia.  Lynn Margulis takes this to the cellular level reminding us that it is cooperation that succeeds at this minute level.

Materialism as the global organising principle is under threat from post-rational spiritual perspectives, the new physics, and macrohistorians[20] that believe the historical pendulum is about to shift again.

Reality is thus changing. The old view of reality as only religious or the modern view of the real as physical are under threat from the postmodern view that reality is technologically created and from the ecological view which sees the real as relational, an ecology of consciousness, where there is no one point, but all selves are interactively needed.

The final level of deep transformation is in what we think is Man.  Whether we are reminded of Foucault[21] arguing that man is a recent, a modern category, and that his image will disappear like an etching on sand, about to be wiped away by the tide, or if we focus on the emergence of the women’s movement as a nudge to man as centre, man as the centre of the world is universally contested.  While the enlightenment removed the male God, it kept the male man. The emerging worldview of robots -what Marvin Minsky of MIT calls “mind-children” – cyborgs, virtual realities, cellular automata, the worldwideweb, microvita as well as the dramatic number of individuals who believe in angels, all point to the end of Man as the central defining category.

We are thus witnessing transformations coming through the new technologies, through the worldviews of non-Western civilisations, through the women’s movement, and through spiritual and Gaian perspectives.  All these taken together point to the possibility but not certainty of a new world shaping.

Let us say this in different words. We are witnessing the end of modernity. What this means is that we are in the process of changes in Patriarchy (I am male); Individualism (I win therefore I am); Materialism (I shop therefore I am);  Dualism (I think therefore I am); scientific dogmatism (I experiment therefore I know better or I have no values thus I am right); Nationalism (I hate the other therefore I am); and humanism (humans are the measure of all things). This is however a long term process and part of the undoing of capitalism.  All these connect to create a new world, which is potentially the grandest shift in human history.  We are in the midst of galloping time, plastic time, in which the system is unstable and thus can dramatically transform.

What this means is many things. First, my friends the robots will probably be happy in this artificial world being created. Second, civilizations will survive especially those that can quickly adapt. Cultures, of course, will not be lost but miniaturized, virtualized. Third, that the struggles for human rights, environmental rights, refugee rights, to mention a few, will pale compared to the dislocations in front of us.  As important as fighting for the rainforest will be greening genetics.  As important as rights for children will be the right to sexually reproduce.  As important as rights for refugees will be rights for the identity-less. As important as struggles for allowing the voice of all, will be a struggle against postmodernism, which has embraced all, even evil, making all relativistic, and thus all the same, denying a layered approach to rights and values.

EAST ASIAN FUTURES

What will be the futures of East Asian cultures and systems of knowledge in this dramatically to be transformed world.  First, the East Asian responses to modernity, to the problem of the West, have been dynamic.  Japan, for example, has reinvented itself at the level of technology but managed to maintain its unique cultural heritage. Thus, it has at the surface level been transformed, and in many ways has become more Western than the West, that is, continuing the Western world-capitalist project. At the same time, Japan has held on to its Confucian/Buddhist and Zen/Daoist elements, having been able to selectively choose aspects of Westernisation that fits it cultural overlay.

Kinhide Mushakoji argues that the traditional two poles of Japanese society (and East Asian society as well)  of Confucianism (formal/hierarchal) and Daoist/Zen (informal, networks, mystical) are with postmodernism about to shift to the Daoist pole.[22] This model at essence will be self-organizing, that is, chaotic (ordered disorder). Indeed, the postmodern challenge of language as constituting the self is very much a zen perspective. The plastic nature of self that genetics and robotics create again fits well in the Zen overlay. However, while Zen has always maintained the natural/unnatural dichotomy[23] (with all other dichotomies open to transgression), it is the final structure of thought that postmodernism evaporates. Moreover, multiculturalism and the women’s movement pose challenges to Confucian societies that traditional “every person in their class” ideology will not be able to manage so easily.

The Singapore model, in particular, will be under question. Singapore has been equally keen to adopt western financial practices and technological impetus but has stalled cultural democracy keeping Singapore a managed state. It will resist chaotic tendencies with more management, with more control. Indeed, it could become a type of social museum, the perfect modernist site in a chaotic world of genetic, robotics, the internet and deep multiculturalism.

South Korea has added Christianity and Westernization to its triple heritage of Shamanism (Daoism), Confucianism and Buddhism. It has managed to keep its public sphere male and Confucian with its private sphere female and shamanistic. However, the changes to come challenge that division.

Fortunately, this future is not inevitable. These trends can play themselves out in varied ways. There is room to manoeuvre still.

Among others, Anwar Ibrahim in his The Asian Renaissance[24] believes that Asians can meet these challenges. He believes Asians and their leaders have developed the capacity to challenge the lure of jingoism, of culture being used for political capital, for immediately political gain.

Ibrahim argues that cultural jingoism, while understandably a reaction to Western dominance, cannot redeem, cannot liberate, rather it is the fodder of narrow tribalists, nationalists and fundamentalists.  A renaissance is about a reawakening of the universal and not about using the category of “Asian” for authoritarian and totalitarian means, for erasing the individual in the guise of the Asian collective.  Anwar Ibrahim reminds us that even in the family-oriented Confucian tradition, the self and community are seen as equally important – the wise person develops his moral self, articulating it for self-perfection and the greater good.

Economic productivity, he argues, can coexist with a cultural development. An Asian renaissance based on a true multiculturalism – unity in democratic diversity can provide a path to a new future for Asian and the world.

Importantly, he asserts that “As Asia gains wealth and power, it must search its deepest conscience. It should not assume the role of the new executioner to reply the old history of oppression and injustice.”[25]

In addition to Ibrahim’s vision of civilizations in dialogue, of a reborn Asia, I offer the following general scenarios as possibilities.

SCENARIOS OF THE FUTURE

The first scenario is the Artificial Society. This would be the end of environmentalism, humanism and the cultural view of rights. It would lead to the technologization of the self. The goal would be full unemployment with technology working so that humans could rest and play. But more than artificial it is about the end of the distinction of technology and artificial such that we would no longer have a category called Nature. It is with postmodernity that all is possible and history is packed in virtual museums, eternally available but never realisable.

In the first stage of this scenario, rights would be framed around the tensions between humans and technologies, between humans and their genetic offspring (with humans as the missing link[26]).  Concretely, these would include the right to procreate, the right to disconnect from the net, the right to not travel.  Eventually human/machine and technology/nature distinctions would disappear, as would the idea of rights.

The second scenario is The Communicative-Inclusive Society. This is deep spiritual ecology, with rights of all, and the self as cosmic. Technology is considered part of humanity’s expansion but at issue is power and control, who owns and what values are used to design technology. Equally central is the metaphysics of life: desire as channelled expression, as creativity, creating new forms of expression as opposed to filling a fundamental emptiness. Essentially this is a communicative society, where communication between humans, plants, trees, animals,, angels, and technology are all considered legitimate. The central project is a dialogue between civilisations, nature and the divine through which a good society (and not the perfect society of linear developmentalism) can be created. A good society embraces its contradictions, a liberal democracy in search of a perfect, contradiction-free society attempts to eliminate them.

Globalism would come to mean not just the right of capital mobility but labor mobility. It would also mean the creation of a planetary civilization with a world government consisting of houses for corporations, social movements, individuals and nations.

The third scenario is Business as Usual or Incrementalism – It is appropriation of the Other through the idea of the melting pot, or shallow multiculturalism. Dominant issues are daily power issues, for example, in Australia of the republic versus monarchy argument. New technologies provide impetus for the expansion of capital, giving capitalism fresh air. Technologies are considered culturally and gendered neutral tools. As the gun lobby says, people kill people, not guns. Communication is merely used for instrumental purposes not for reaching shared goals. The environment is a resource to be used for growth. Rights would remain individualistic with the structural causes of poverty and the cultural basis of reality ignored.

The last scenario is Societal Collapse. The position is that man has gone too far, that Earth will strike back with earthquakes and tsunamis. Globalism has created a system out of control, only stock market collapse through perhaps cybercurrency fraud leading to a softer slower pace of life can rend things in balance again. The most likely immediate future is a global depression and the timing will be myth related, that is, at the end of the millennium.

Rights would go the physically strongest and not just the richest or the mentally agile. Life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”

MAKING THE RIGHTS DECISION

What the future will be like we cannot say.  We do know that grand macrohistorical forces cannot be easily changed, but bifurcation is possible. At the edge of chaos lies transformation, wherein by finding the strange attractors of change, concerted efforts by the few can dramatically change all our futures.

Let us imagine a different future than that which we are heading toward. Let us through our responses help create it.  Remembering the dilemma of Yang Chu, who weeping at the crossroads, said, “Isn’t it here that you take a half step wrong and wake up a thousand miles astray?”[27] Let us take a half a step in the right direction and be part of a global awakening, be part of the progressive expansion of rights.

As we do let us not forget our friends the robots – that is those who are so different than us, we automatically conclude they should be rightless – let us ensure that as we progress forward – given the limitations of macrohistorical forces – we take everyone with us.

Contact Sohail Inayatullah for the reference notes to this article.

By Sohail Inayatullah, 1997

Information theory, while claiming universality, ignores civilisational and spiritual perspectives of knowledge. Moreover, the information society heralded by many as the victory of humanity over darkness is merely capitalism disguised but now commodifying selves as well. This essay argues for a more communicative approach wherein futures can be created through authentic global conversations – a gaia of civilisations. Current trends, however, do not lie in that direction. Instead, we are moving towards temporal and cultural impoverishment. Is the Web then the iron cage or can a global ohana (family, civil society) be created through cybertechnologies? Answering these and other questions are possible only when we move to layers of analysis outside conventional understandings of information and the information era and to a paradigm where communication and culture are central.

Key words: Information, Communication, Gaia of Civilisations

“The time for the liberation of heart and mind has not come yet…This is not your final destination.”[i] Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Has the future arrived?[ii] Ended? Cyberspace and cloning; postmodernity and globalism are creating worlds where the future as a place of possibility and as a site of critique of the present, no longer exists. With virtual reality, cyberworld and genetics having arrived, the future and, indeed, history has ended. Our imaginations have become real – the fantastic has become the real.

However, perhaps the “cyber/information era” view of the future is overly linear, exponentially so, and forgetful that two-thirds of the world does not have a phone and much of the world lives over two hours from a phone connection. While postmodernity has speeded up time for the elite West and the elite in the non-West, for the majority of the world there is no information era.  Moreover, in the hyperjump to starspace, we have forgotten that while ideas and the spirit can soar, there are cyclical processes, such as the life and death of individuals, nations and civilisations that cannot be so easily transformed. While certainly there are more people making their living by processing ideas,[iii] perhaps we are engaged in a non-productive financial/information pyramid scheme where we are getting further and further away from food production and manufacturing, building virtualities on virtualites until there is nothing there, as in advaita vedanta[iv] wherein the world is maya, an illusion.  But perhaps it is important to remember from the history of previous empires that decline is in order when the capitalist class grows only from financing and knowledge creation, giving up manufacturing and losing vital resource to insecure peripheries.[v]

The coming of the information era, ostensibly providing untold riches in bits of freedom for all, in fact limits the futures of others because it robs them of their future alternatives – it certainly does not create a communicative gaia of civilizations,[vi] a new planetary future. Reality has become constructed as the worldwideweb, but perhaps this web is Max Weber’s iron cage – the future with no exit, wherein there is an inverse relationship between data and wisdom, between quick bytes and long term commitment, between engagement to technology and engagement with humans, plants and animals. We know now from email culture that the twin dangers of immediacy and speed do not lead to greater community and friendship, rather they can lead to bitter misunderstandings.[vii] Email then becomes not the great connector leading to higher levels of information but the great disconnector that gives the mirage of connection and community.[viii]  Email without occasional face to face communication can transform friendships into antagonistic relationships. Just as words lose the informational depth of silence, email loses information embedded in silence and face to face gestures.  The assimilation and reflection as well as the intuition and the insight needed to make sense of intellectual and emotional data are lost as the urgent need to respond to others quickens. Slow time, lunar time, women’s time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity where “21C” is for all instead of peculiar to Western civilisation.[ix]

Cybertechnologies thus create not just rich and poor in terms of information, but a world of quick inattentive time and slow attentive time. One is committed to quick money and quick time, a world where data and information are far more important than knowledge and wisdom.  It is a world where history is exponential versus a world that is cyclical: that believes the only true information worth remembering is humility; that civilisations that attempt to touch the sky burn quickly down; that economies that become so far removed from the real economy of goods and services, of agriculture, of the informal women’s economy and that become utterly dependent on cybertransactions can easily melt down.

It is thus a mistake to argue that there will only be an information rich and poor, rather there will be information quick and slow. Time on the screen is different from time spent gazing at sand in the desert or wandering in the Himalayas. Screen time does not slow the heart beat down relaxing one into the superconscious, rather we become lost in many bits, creating perhaps an era of accelerating information but certainly not a knowledge future or a future where the subtle mysteries of the world, the spiritual everpresent is felt.

Dark Side Of The Earth

There are two clear positions. In the first, the information era provides humans with the missing technologies to connect all selves. In the other, “Cyberspace is the darkside of the West” to use Zia Sardar’s provocative language.[x] He argues that cyberspace is the West caving in on itself, leaving no light to see outside of its own vision.[xi] It is a Spenglarian collapse. While cyberspace claims community, there in fact is none, it is anonymous. There is no responsibility towards others since there is no longer term relationship – there are no authentic selves, all exist for immediate short term pleasure and not for the larger task of working together towards a shared goal. People are because they struggle through projects/missions together, not just because they exist in shared virtual worlds.

This quickening of the self was anticipated by McLuhan in 1980.  “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals. At the speed [speech] of light man has neither goals, objectives or private identity. He is an item in the data bank – software only, easily forgotten – and deeply resentful.[xii]

Selves lose reflective space, jumping from one object to another, one Website to another, one email to another.  It is not a communicative world that will transpire but a world of selves downloading their emotional confusion onto each other.  Writes Sardar, “Far from creating a community based on consensus, the information technologies could easily create states of alienated and atomised individuals, glued to their computer terminal, terrorising and being terrorised by all those whose values conflict with their own.”[xiii] It is as if we have all become psychic with all thoughts interpenetrating creating a global schizophrenia.[xiv]

Virtual realities have and will prosper not for the glimpse they give to us of other worlds but because they detach us from this world. Among the main virtual projects is the continued silencing of women from the technological discourse. Virtual technologies are growing because of their ability to simulate sexual pleasure.  Once these technologies are fully developed, men will no longer need to connect emotionally or with commitment to women (and some women to men as well), rather they will simulate their relationships with virtual dolls, creating worlds where women exist only as male representation.  What Playboy has not yet accomplished because of the flat dimension of centrefold spreads, virtual full dimension will realise it. Men will then continue to locate women as pleasure objects and create them as standardised beauty forms. The first step is the reduction of women to the hormone maddened images of adolescent males. The next stage is the elimination of women through virtual simulcras. Through genetics (the first phase as cloning but more important is the artificial womb), they will not be needed for procreation as well.  While this perhaps might be too bold of a statement, certainly the new genetics cannot in anyway be seen as nature or women-oriented technologies. While Finland, for example, extends the metaphor of the home into a caring State, genetics will lead to the opposite: the total penetration of the State into the home and then the body of women.[xv]

The Great Leap Forward         

Virtual reality thus fulfils the homoerotic male fantasy of a world of just men. However, some argue that virtual reality is a new technology whose future development is up for grabs, that computing does not have to be male biased, that women can enjoy user groups dominated by men.  While the technology is certainly male-dominated,[xvi] Sherman and Judkins give the banal advice that women[xvii] should educate themselves on the positive and negative dimensions of this new technology and then make it into their own (of course, forgetting the reasons why it is male dominated).[xviii] Fatma Aloo, howoever, of the Tanzanian Media Women’s Association argues that the internet is a necessarily evil.[xix] Even though it is male-dominated and the technology in itself is male-cultures, women endanger themselves more by not using these new technologies. Her association and the numerous other ngo’s hope to empower women through the net. Through the net, they are able to tell their stories of suffering, of marginalisation as well as their victories to others – at the some level then, isolation can disappear.

But for cyber enthusiasts, these new technologies are not necessarily evils but grand positives that give do more than merely provide information, they give more choice. They reduce the power of Big business and Big State, creating a vast frontier for creative individuals to explore. “Cyberspace has the potential to be egalitarian, to bring everyone into a network arrangement. It has the capacity to create community; to provide untold opportunities for communication, exchange and keeping in touch.”[xx] Cybertechnologies will allow more interaction creating a global ecumene – authentic global communication. They create wealth, indeed, a jump in wealth.  The new technologies promise a transformational society where the future is always beckoning, a new discovery is yearly[xxi] – and as our memory of the past becomes increasingly distant, humans become important not for themselves but for the new genetic/cyber species they create. The evils of the past slowly disappear as we know each other more intimately. The oppressive dimensions of bounded identity – to nation, village, gender, culture – all disappear as we move in and out of identities and communities.  History is then exponential with visions of collapse, of the perpetual cycle, of the weight of history, merely fictions of the past.  Our children will live in a world without gravity, believes Nicholas Negroponte. In Being Digital he argues that, “Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony,”[xxii] where historical social divisions will disappear.  Predictably Bill Gates writes that “we are watching something historical happen and it will affect the world seismically, rocking us in the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of the printing, and the arrival of the industrial age did.” [xxiii]  Mark Pesce goes even further than Negroponte and Gates, believing the web to be “an innovation as important as the printing press – it may be as important as the birth of language itself … in its ability to completely refigure the structure of civilization.”[xxiv] This is the moment of kairos, the appropriate moment, for a planetary jump to a new level of consciousness and society. It is the end of scarcity as an operating myth and the beginning of abundance, of information that wants to be free. The late 20th century is the demarcation from the industrial to the information/knowledge era. Progress is occurring now. Forget the cycle. That was misinformation.

But while the growth data looks impressive and the stock of Microsoft continues upward, there are some hidden costs. For example, what of negative dimensions of the new technologies such as surveillance? Police in Brisbane, Australia use up to a 100 hidden cameras in malls to watch for criminal activities.[xxv] Hundreds more are anticipated creating an electronic grid in central Brisbane. While this might be possibly benign in Brisbane (Aborigines might have different views though), imagining a large grid over Milosevic’s Yugoslavia or Taliban’s Afghanistan (or under Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan where every “immoral” gaze would have led to arrest) it is enough to frighten the most fanatical techno-optimist. Or is it? Many believe that privacy issues will be forgotten dimensions of the debate on cyberfutures once we each have our own self-encryptors so that no one can read or enter us (the 21st century chastity belt). Technology will tame technology. Over time, the benefits of the new technologies will become global with poverty, homelessness and anomie all wiped out. All will eventually have access – even the poorest – as the billions of brains that we are, once connected, will solve the many problems of oppression.[xxvi]  While we have always imagined such a future, it is only now that technology allows it so.

The new cybertechnologies will also change how we war each other.  “The world is in the early stages of a new military revolution. The technologies include digital communications, which allow data to be compressed; a “global positioning system” (GPS) of satellites, which makes more exact guidance and navigation possible; radar-evading “stealth”; and, of course, computer processing.”[xxvii]

But they will also create a world in perpetual war with itself.

The new warfare will be `multi-dimensional’, meaning not only that air, sea and land operations will be increasingly integrated, but also that information and outerspace will be part of modern war. `Information warfare’ could mean disabling an enemy by wrecking his computing, financial, telecoms or air-traffic control systems. The relevant weapons might be computer viruses, electro-magnetic pulses, microwave beams, well-placed bombs or anything that can smash a satellite.[xxviii]

Competitive advantage will go to those who are the most information dependent, thus creating information gaps between themselves and others. This dependence, however, is a weakness, both sapping innovation by leading to a closed surveillance society and allowing others not dependent on instant information to attack from non-information paradigms. It is enantiodromia in action – one’s excellent is one’s fatal flaw.

Access To Global Conversations

At the metalevel, at issue is not just the access of individuals to technologies but more how the new technologies have taken over the discourse of global conversations, how they have infected our deep social grammar. While certainly it is important to have a global language – a way of communicating – the internet not only privileges English, it englishes the world such that other languages lose their ability to participate in global futures. It continues global standardisation. Who needs cloning, writes Kiirana@unm.edu when you already have global standardisation in the form of global coca-colaisation.[xxix]

The web creates a voice, a rhetoric, a certain kind of rationality which is assumed to be communicative.  But while certainly web pages that provide information on airline flight arrivals and departures or on hard to find books are instrumentally useful, information retrieval is not communication.  Communication proceeds over time through trauma and transcendence.  In trauma, communication occurs when human suffering is shared with others. In transcendence, communication occurs when differences are understood and mutuality discovered, when beneath real differences in what it means to be human, similarities in how we suffer and love are realised. Merely having a web page does not mean one is communicating with others except at the banal level of an electronic business card.

A web page, like a Coca-Cola ad on the moon or on Mars for visiting aliens provides some information but certainly not at a level most civilisations in the world would find satisfactory. It amplifies a certain dimension of self, however, as with all such amplifications, far more interesting is to note what is not sent, what is not said, then what is officially represented in email or on a website.

While Marshall McLuhan was certainly correct in writing that we create technologies and thereafter they create us, he did not emphasise enough that technologies emerge within civilisational contexts (where politics are naturalised, considered absent).  Technology creates the possibility of a global village but in the context of the Los-angelisation of the planet. It is the global city of massive pollution, poverty and alienation that is the context. In addition, the more vicious dimension of the village – the history of landlords raping farmers, of exclusive ideologies and of feudal relations is often forgotten in the metaphor of the global village, indeed, a global colony would be a far more apt metaphor.  But new technologies do create differences in world wealth, access to power and access to the creation of alternative futures.

Cyber-enthusiasts rightfully point to the opportunities of the one world created by new technologies. But they need to remember that the one world of globalism remains fundamentally capitalistic with the local (local economy and power over one’s future) increasingly being attacked. The tiny Pacific Island of Niue recently discovered that 10% of its national revenue was being sucked out through international sex-line services.[xxx] The information era as P.R. Sarkar points out is late capitalism, a system in which all other varnas – psycho-social classes and ways of knowing (the intellectual, the worker and the warrior)  – become the “boot lickers of the merchants.”[xxxi]  And: “In order to accumulate more and more in their houses, they torture others to starvation … they suck the very living plasma of others to enrich the capabilities.”[xxxii] While intellectuals invent metaphors of postmodernity and post-industrialism, capital continues to accumulate unevenly, the poor become poorer and less powerful (however, they can now have a Website).  The information era still exists in the context of the world capitalist system – it is not an external development of it, and it will not create the contradictions that end it. The knowledge society or non-material society that many futurists imagine conveniently forgets humans’ very real suffering. But for virtual realities, we have virtual theories.  The words “I make friends” from the genetic engineer character in the movie Blade Runner take on a different meaning. Making friends becomes not an “exchange” of meanings but the manufacturing of like-minded life forms – friendly robots in this movie.  One can easily imagine scenarios with corporations making happiness, love and life (not to mention providing passports/passwords).  The advertising genius of the 20th century will pale in comparison to what is to come in the next.

THE POLITICS OF CONVERSATIONS

Current global conversations are not communicative spaces of equal partner but conversations wherein one party has privileged epistemological, economic and military space. Certainly the emerging Palestinian world can not have a meaningful conversation with the power of Israel – they do not enter the conversation as equals. Moreover the language of such conversations uses the categories and assumptions of those that have designed the metaconversation.  We do not enter conversations unencumbered, as Foucault, Heidegger and many others have pointed out. Trails of discourses precede our words.  We do not own words, indeed, it is not even so much that we speak but that discourse creates the categories of “we”. That is to so say, it is not that we speak English, but that we language the world in particular ways.

Remembering the Unesco MacBride Commission report, Majid Tehranian argues that the major problem in global communication is the lack of a meaningful dialogue between West and non-West.  Each cannot hear the other – their paradigms are too different, for one. Second, the West does not believe that as the losers in history Asia, Africa, the Pacific have the right to speak. Only Confucianist societies (who present an economic challenge) and Islamic societies (who do not accept their fate and challenge the positioning of the West) are problematic for the future of the West.

The West desires the non-West to procreate less; the non-West points out that the West argues for population limits only after it has robbed the future of the world’s resources and without contesting the structural relations of imperialism.  After all, Los Angeles uses the same amount of energy as India. As Gayatri Spivak writes: “A large part of this deplorable state of affairs is lodged between the legs of the poor women of the South. They’re having too many children. At Halloween, one day in the United States, more than 300 million dollars was spent on cards, 72 million dollars on costumes and more than 700 million on candy. More than a billion dollars. One of those children is 300 times [in terms of consumption] one of the children in the South. So what kind of body count is that.”[xxxiii] Spivak thus locates the problem in consumption-oriented capitalism and not in Indian women who do not need information on world population trends.

The West desires a free-flow of information, the non-West (and France) wants to protect its culture, arguing that the real flow is downward from Disneyland to Islamabad and rarely the other way around. This is not because Western culture is superior, because truth really did begin in Greece, but because the West has technological and financial advantages and because over the past 500 years they have defined what is beauty, truth and humour. Free flow can exist when lines of videos, television and music are, in fact, authentically based on market relations. Currently the West has structural advantages. However, the West believes that it is bringing faster, quicker and more exciting global culture, and that the non-West is using these excuses as a way to deny their citizens global culture, to protect their culture industries and to oppress dissent in their home countries. For example, East Asian nations have used Confucianism as an argument against liberal democracy. New technologies then will merely continue a dialogue that others cannot hear but they do so at many levels now – the space of nationalism becomes wider and thus sovereignty harder to maintain.  But while it might be argued that this is so for the US and European nations, that the Net limits their sovereignty, this forgets that the creators, the designers and the value adders are from the US largely.

Thus, before we enter global conversations we need to undo the basis of such conversations asking who gets to speak; what discourses are silenced; and, what institutional power points are privileged?  We need to ask how the language of conversation enables particular peoples and not others (peoples as well as animals[xxxiv] and nature). We need to see particular linguistic movements as fragile spaces – as the victory of one way of knowing over other ways of knowing.  Our utterances are political in that they hide culture, gender and civilisation.  Conversations come to us as neutral spaces for created shared agreement but they are trojan horses carrying worldviews with them. For example, centre nations often want to enter into political reconciliation conversations with indigenous peoples but the style and structure of such conversations almost always reinscribe European notions of self and governance instead of indigenous notions of community and spirituality. By entering, for example, a parliament house or a constitutional convention, the indigenous person immediately enters a terrain outside of his and her value considerations – in fact, outside his or her non-negotiable basis of civilisation. As traditional Hawaiians say, the aina (land) is not negotiable, cannot be sold – it is rooted to history, to the ancestors and cannot enter exchange relations.[xxxv]  Hawaiians have been prodded by the US Federal government to engage in a constitutional convention to articulate their ideal state, governance system. As with traditional American conventions, delegates are to run and lobby for election, each one to act as a delegate and thereby somehow representing their nation. During the convention, they are to follow discussions and enter in conversations as bounded by Robert’s Rules of Order. However, for many Hawaiians entering a constitutional convention already limits the political choices they have. Ho’pono’pono, for example, as a method of negotiation – wherein ancestors are called, where all others are forgiven, where a shared spiritual and social space is created – is far more meaningful than the power worlds of suits and ties.

As a Maori elder has argued: Westerners want us to have a governance system based on parliamentary democracy wherein electoral legitimacy is based on full representation and attendance of delegates. In this system, the Maori are often chided for not showing up to meetings. What Westerners do not recognise, is that “they” is not only constituted by “physical beings”. More important than particular individuals showing up is if the mana shows up. If the mana is not there then it does not matter if all voted in unanimity. Having or not having mana determines civilisational success. Merely voting, while perhaps a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition. One’s relationship with the mana is. Representation by the Maori and the Hawaiians is made problematic – one person, one vote is part of the story but it misses the expanded communicative community of other cultures, including the special voices of elders (those who dream the past) and of angels (and other non-human beings who affect day to day life) as well as of the community as whole.  Finally it misses the mana, that there is more to a person or to a community than its human population.

Conversation then is more than being able to access different web pages of Others. A global village is not created by more information transfer.  Conversation is also more than about equals meeting around a table but also asking what type of table should we meet around? What type of food is served? Who is fasting? Should food be eaten on the ground? Who should serve? Is there prayer before eating? When should there be speech? When silence?[xxxvi] What constitutes information transfer? When is there communication? The meanings we give to common events must be civilisationally contextualised.  Libraries, for example, create knowledge categories that are political, that is, they reflect the history of Western knowledge. These divisions of knowledge – the floors of a library – bear little relationship to the orderings of other civilisations where reality does not consist of divisions between art, science, social science, government documents and other. The Web, however, does to some extent create a new global library, which allows for democracy in terms of what is put on the Web and in terms of how it is accessed. Categories are more fluid, allowing for many orderings of information. At the same time, the web flattens reality to such an extent where all information is seen as equal, the vertical gaze of hierarchical knowledge – of knowing what is most important, what is deeper, what is lasting – is lost. Immediacy of the present all categories being equal results with the richness of epistemological space lost.

A REAL INFORMATION SOCIETY

A real information society, an ilm (knowledge in the Islamic worldview) world system would thus be one that was diverse in how it viewed knowledge, appreciating the different ways civilisations ordered the real.  It would not just be technical but emotional and spiritual as well and ultimately one that used knowledge to create better human conditions, to reduce dhukka (suffering) and realise moksa (spiritual liberation from the bonds of action and reaction). The challenge then is not just to increase our ability to produce and understand information but to enhance the capacity of the deeper layers of mind, particularly in developing the vijinanamaya kosa (where knowledge of what is eternal and temporal is realised).  Certainly, even though the Web is less rigid than a library, it is not the total information technology some assume – spiritual energies and shamanistic dissenting spaces cannot enter. Of course, underlying an alternative view of an information society is a commitment to prama or a dynamic equilibrium wherein internal/external and spiritual/material are balanced.

The issue is more than equality but the illumination of difference – difference at the level of political-economy, at the level of epistemology, of worldview.  Information is not information and knowledge is not knowledge.

But for the moderns, these concepts are understood by characterising the other as existing in religious worldviews.  Following Comte and Spencer, as the intellect develops, philosophy and then later science flourishes – real knowledge, objective science, that can lead to commercial success arises. Other ways of knowing become characterised as backward, or in more generous terms as not having access to enough information. With full information, ignorance is reduced and the objective revealed. In contrast, for non-Western civilisations, it is the subjectivisation of information that is far more important (with Islam trying to balance the subjective and objective).[xxxvii] Moreover, the division between secular and religious is less strict.

But the techno-optimists of the information postmodern society believe that these differences between worldviews can be accommodated.  By decentralising power, the new technologies allow the spirit of the individual to thrive. Through the internet, we will all be wired one day happily communicating all day long – that difference will lead to a space of communicating equals all sharing a confidence in world connectivity.  The noosphere imagined by Teilhard de Chardin is just years away.  But what type of connectivity will it be? While certainly email helped the Belgrade student and opposition movement of 1997 gain world – Western – support, the Algerian Muslims equally deprived of electoral victory have received few hits on their Websites. What happened to our image of an objective information rich society where more information leads to wiser and fairer decisions?

POSTMODERN NETS

Time writer Julian Dibble believes that the Belgrade revolt was an internet revolution since it was the one media the fascist Milosevic regime did not manage to control. Certainly access to the rest of the world through email provided important emotional support and it provided an antidote to the pro-Milosovic government reporting, as evidenced in Australian TV newscoverage through the SBS channel.  However, the revolution “succeeded” because of other factors.  The US’s clear warning to Milosevic that violence to protesters would have severe repercussions (at the very least the reinstatement of sanctions), the creative non-violent tactics of students (the revolt tactician was a theatre director) and loss of right-wing nationalistic (fascist) support to Milosevic since he was now seen not as the father of a Serbian homeland but the one who sold out the Serbs in Krajina. The internet was neither a necessary nor a sufficient factor. Mass protest, a neutral Army, support from the powerful military nations, threat of UN sanctions and courage of individual women and men in the face of policy brutality were.  But the process of the mythification of the internet continues.

Information optimists remain convinced that more information about others leads automatically to a better world. For example, in an article by Anthony Spaeth at the recent Davos World Economic Forum, he writes that South African Thabmo Mbeiki, the Executive Deputy President, said that if South Africa had been connected, there would not have been apartheid.[xxxviii]  Somehow despots are undermined by the Web, racism disappears once we have more information about events.  However in the very same issue of Time we are told that the best predictor of one’s view of American football player OJ Simpson’s guilt or innocence was race.[xxxix] Irrespective of any evidence or objective information, black Americans were far more likely to believe in his innocence, white americans in his guilt.  Clearly being wired is only one factor in determining how one sees the world. The US is internet connected and yet two groups separated only by a bit of skin colour can see the world so differently. Information is obviously not so flat. For Blacks the trial was about history, about inequity in the US as well as about how they see themselves constructed by white Americans (as an inch removed from barbarism). For Whites it was more evidence that blacks are dangerous irrespective of their “white” credentials.  To assume that more information leads to insight into others, misses the point. We make decisions based on many factors – conceptual information is just one of them.  Our own personal history, the trauma each one us has faced. Our moments of transcendence when we have gone beyond the trauma and not othered others (ie as less or evil or as a reified social category).  Civilisational factors and of course institutional barriers are other variables that mediate both the introduction and dissemination of technology but as well as how technology is constituted.

But others believe the Net can be about transcendence. Sherry Turkle argues that the internet allows us to delink from our physical identity and gain some distance from our personal traumas.[xl] We can play at being female or male, human or animal, diseased or health. She describes stories of healing where women and men understand their own pathologies better through play with other identities.  However, she was not so thrilled when others created a character called Dr. Sherry, that is the foundational basis for her identity was suddenly questioned.  Of course, it is easier to play (assuming other identities in fun) when one has a sovereign coherent identity and when one is still making one’s historical identity.  Identity play as postmodern irony is a far more painful episode when one has had identity systematically removed. Among others, Asians and Africans are currently undergoing such a trauma, between imposed selves, a range of historical selves and desired future selves. Turkle forgets is that it is not just Websurfers who have many identities. Colonised people have always had an ability to be multi-selved, not for play, though, but for survival. For example, survival for Indians during British rule meant creating a British self, holding on to a historic self and a synthetic self. While multi-tasking might be the craze today and for Douglas Rushkoff[xli] the most important ingredient for success tomorrow, it is not just playing on computers that create multi-tasking, as any mother will tell, having children is the true teacher of multi-tasking.

Internet enthusiasts forget that the wiring of the globe means the wiring of the worst of ourselves and the best of ourselves. Evil and goodness can travel through broadband. Technology is political, constitutive of values and not merely a carrier. The information era remains described in apolitical terms forgetting the culture of technology creating it, forgetting the class (Marx) and varna (Sarkar) basis of these technologies, that is, they exist in the end days of capitalism, and it forgets that Net privileges certain values over others.  We need to remember that if there were 100 people with all existing ratios the same, 70 would be unable to read, 50 would suffer from malnutrition, 80 would live in sub-standard housing, and only one would have a college education.[xlii]

Also forgotten is that merely entering a cyberworld makes no promise of justice or global fairness.  And as South African Mikebe will find out, his nation will enter the world information system not on their terms, their categories, their view of history but on the views of those with the most definitional power.  Currently, the world guilt ratio favours South Africa. That will certainly change as it is currently with US anger at South Africa’s selling of arms to Syria (ethical arms trading, it is now called).

At the same time, even with the limits of Webspace, as the Zapatista have managed to do, a revolution of land and labor can, while not be won in cyberworld, certainly be kept alive there.[xliii]  Through numerous Web sites and quick access to international human rights organisations and other NGOs, the power of the Mexican state to obliterate the Zapatistas is dramatically reduced. When local power is not enough, movements can enter the global ecumene and find moral power from international society, speeding up the creation of a global ohana. Clearly the Web has changed the relationships between oppressor and oppressed, between national totalitarianism and movements of dissent. Indeed, Sardar writes that CD-ROM has the potential to change power relations between individuals and religious scholars (who served as human memory banks controlling the intrepretations of what one should or should not do as a Muslim). By making vast amounts of information easy to access and thus allowing Muslims to interpret themselves truth claims made by a particular class of people. “Islamic culture could be remade, refreshed and re-established by the imaginative use of a new communication technology.”[xliv] But perhaps this is too hopeful, expert information systems can be designed that reinforce the views of the mullah class, interpretations can be framed so that their power base and their view of Islam continues.

The ubiquitous power of the Web is such that one cannot escape it – there is no luddite[xlv] space available, one has to enter the technology and do one’s best to make it reflect one’s own values and culture. But technology more than a site of progress must be located as a site of contending politics.

We thus need to ask if the Web and the promised information world change the hegemony of the West (here now extending West outside of its geographical borders to cosmology, a way of knowing) – ie definitional power, deciding what is truth, reality and beauty; temporal power, deciding what historical landmarks calender the world, eg that 21C is arriving; spatial power, imagining space as urban, secular (without feng shui or local knowledge) and to be owned; and economic power (upward movement of wealth from the periphery to the centre). Clearly it does not. It does give more pockets of dissent and it has now once again packaged dissent as a Website – with the right graphics, name, format and sexy catch words (and payment to search engines to ensure one’s Website comes up first).

The challenge for cultures facing cyberworld ahead is to find ways to enter global conversations, that is, to protect local ways of knowing and at the same time enter the end of history with new ways of knowing – worlds beyond the information era. This is a far more daunting task than cross-cultural communication. It is a vision of a gaia of civilisations.  It is a deep global conversation that admits metaconversations.[xlvi]  To do so, one cannot be a luddite.  Historical change happens because of environmental clash and cohesion and because of the clash of ideas. But it also occurs because of a desire for something other – an attraction to the Great, in sanskrit, for ananda. Science and technology thus must be seen in cultural terms (what ways of knowing they privilege) but also in terms of their political economy (who owns them and how the benefits are distributed) but even as we evoke non-linear images of time, space and spirit, there is a crucial linear progressive dimension to history, of increasing rights for all, of some possibility of decreasing levels of exploitation (through social innovation). The enlightenment project, however, must be seen in the context of others – civilisations and worldview.  Moreover, it is not perfection of society that must be sought as in the Western project, since this means the elimination of all that is other, nor is it the perfection of the self as in the hindu tradition, since this avoids structural inequity. It is the creation of eutopias – good societies. Technology balanced with the finer dimensions of human culture can provide that upward movement in history and Antonio Gramsci warned, we must not be excited by rubbish – A gaia of civilisations cannot occur in the context of the deep inequity of the world capitalist system.

A Gaia Of Civilisations

We thus need to imagine and help create social spaces so the new technologies participate in and allow for the coming of a real planetary culture, a gaia of civilisations; one where there is deep multi-culturalism and where the epistemologies of varied cultures – how they see self and other are respected – flourish.  To realise this, open communication and travel are necessary factors but they are not sufficient. Interaction amongst equals and not merely information transfer, that is to say a right to communication is needed as well.

Finally, instead of seeing culture as rigid and fixed, we need to remember that cultures have more resilience than governments give them credit for.  For example, while India might be made problematic by Disneyland, Indic civilisation will not be since it has seen the rise and fall of claims to world empire repeated many times. Pax Americana will go the way of the British Empire, which went the way of the Moguls.  Indeed, the strength of Indian culture and other historical civilizations (especially the West and particularly the United States) is its ability to localise the foreign, to localise english, to localise western MTV, to create its own culture industries. Culture and identity then is fluid. When the powerless meet the powerful, confrontation need not be direct. It could be at different levels, wherein the powerful are seduced then changed – where, at least in the Indian tradition, all enter as foreigners but leave culturally transformed, as eclectic hindus.

What we also learn from other cultures is that the new electronic technologies are just one of the possible technologies creating world space. Indeed they just act at the most superficial levels. As important as cyberspace is microvita space or the noosphere being created through our world imaginations. Indian mystic P.R. Sarkar reminds us that behind our wilful actions is the agency of microvita – the basic substance of existence, which is both mental and physical, mind and body.  Microvita can be used by minds (the image of monks on the Himalayas sending out positive thoughts is the organising metaphor here, as is the Muslim prayer in unison throughout the world with direction and focus) to change the vibrational levels of humans, making them more sensitive to others, to nature and to the divine. And as Sheldrake reminds, as images and beliefs of one diverse world become more common it will be easier to imagine one world and live as one world, as a blissful universal family.  The Web then can participate in the historical decolonisation process giving power to communities and individuals in the overall context of global human, economic, environmental and cultural rights.

Or can it?

Notes

[i].          The words of Pakistani socialist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

[ii].          Nearly every brochure on the benefits on the new communication technologies begins with that phrase. The future is seen solely in technological terms.

[iii].         See, for example, William E. Halal, “The Rise of the Knowledge Entrepreneur,” The Futurist (Vol. 20, No. 7, November-December 1996), pages 13-16. Halal writes that in the US “Blue-collar workers should dwindle from 20% of the US work force in 1995 to 10% or less within a decade or two. …non-professional white-collar workers [will be reduced] from 40% to 20%-30%. The remaining 60%-70% or so of the work force may then be composed of knowledge workers. …meanwhile, productivity, living standards and the quality of life will soar to unprecedented levels,” page 13.

Also see, The Think Tank Directory in which it is reported that the number of think tanks have exploded from 62 in 1945 to 1200 in 1996. For more information on this email: grs@cjnetworks.com or write 214 S.W. 6th Avenue, Suite 301, Topeka, KS 66603, USA.

[iv].         One of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy. Only Brahman, the supreme consciousness, is postulated as real. Everything else is but an illusion – maya.

[v].         Majid Tehranian, “Totems and Technologies,” Intermedia 14(3), 1986, page 24.

[vi].         I am indebted to Ashis Nandy for this term, although he calls it, “A gaia of cultures.” See Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds., The Futures of Asian Cultures (Bangkok, UNESCO, 1993) for more on this theme.

[vii].        See, S.C Gwynne and John F. Dickerson, “Lost in the E-Mail,” Time (April 21, 1997), pages 64-66.  They report on the dangers in businesses when bosses use email to berate employees, creating considerable ill-will and inefficiencies. Email exports the anger of the sender to the receiver. Diane Morse Houghten writes that “E-mail leaves a lot of blank spaces in what we say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretation” (page 65).

To avoid sending the wrong message, four rules are suggested: “(1) Never discuss bad news, never criticize and never discuss personal issues over email. And if there’s a chance that what you say could be taken the wrong way, wlakd down the hall to discuss it in person or pick up the phone” (page 66).

[viii].       Lyn Simpson, head of the School of Communications, Queensland University of Technology reports on a disastrous result of an email sent to school students. Asked if they were interested in greater liaison/representation of students in faculty committees, she was treated to a barage of obscenities. When reminded that email was a privilege and not a right of registered students, the obscenities did not subside.  Whether this was because of pent up frustration of students towards the university or a response to the formal tone of Professor Simpson’s message is not clear. Certainly, none of them would have expressed vulgarities in face to face communication. Moreover, they were not bothered by the fact that their messages had their return email addresses on them, that is to say, they could be easily identified.

[ix].         For more on the temporal hegemony, particularly in the construction of the 21st century as neutral universal timing instead of as particular to the West, see Sohail Inayatullah, “Listening to Non-Western Perspectives” in David Hicks and Richard Slaughter, eds, 1998 Education Yearbook (Kogan Page, 1998).

[x].         Zia Sardar, “alt.civilizations.fax Cyberspace as the darker side of the west,” Futures, 27(7), September 1995, pages 777-995.

[xi].         On one public newsgroup the following message on May 6, 1996 was posted to the question: what would you do with an unconscious womans body?  According to Walter Sharpless, he would: Well if it were a 8 year old boy’s body, i would … the rest is too pornographic (even from extreme libertarian positions) to report especially since it concludes with  … Thank you for all your time. it has been very satisfying knowing you will read this.

In response, was the equally stunning response from Max Normal: “Now here’s a guy that needs therapy .. the twelve gauge kind! a 44 mag would be more in line … with the brain that is.” What is not contested is the pornographic nature of the initial question ie “what would you do with an ….”

Internet as necessarily a progressive form of knowledge? Perhaps not.

[xii].        Marshall McLuhan quoted in New Internationalist special issue titled, “Seduced by Technology: The human costs of computers” New Internationalist, 286, December 1996, page 26.

[xiii].       Zia Sardar, “The future of democracy and human rights,” Futures, 28(9), November, 1996, page 847.

[xiv].       Sohail Inayatullah, “Frames of Reference, The Breakdown of the Self and the Search for Reintegration” in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds. The Futures of Cultures (Bangkok, Unesco, 1993).

[xv].        See Vuokko Jarva, “Feminst Research, Feminist Futures, Futures (forthcoming). Also see, Vuokka Jarva, “Towards Female Futures Studies,” Rick Slaughter, ed., The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Directions and Outlooks. Vol. 3 (Melbourne, DDM Media Group, 1996), pages 3-20. Women’s inner circle of reproduction and the home will thus be transformed but without entry into the male sphere of production and the public – they will lose their traditional source of power and history, and as they are not participating in the creating of the new technologies, they will enter a new unfamiliar world with few sites to locate their selves. Indeed, the new technologies are attempts, argues Jarva, to dismantle the women’s sphere dimensions of the welfare state.

[xvi].       See Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (North Melbourne, Spinifex Press, 1996)  and Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds., Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace (Seattle, Seal Press, 1996). For an excellent review, see Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte,” Australian Women’s Book Review 8(3), October, 1996, pages 8-10.

[xvii].      Some, of course, are already doing this in sophisticated ways. Margarat Grace, June Lennie, Leonie Daws, Lyn Simpson and Roy Lundin argue in Enhancing Rural Women’s Access to Interactive Communication Technologies (Interim Report, The Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology, April 1997) that email is a soft technology, it can be led in appropriate directions given the appropriate context.  In their research, they have found that by guided moderation, by creating conditions in which community and connectedness can develop, email can be beneficial for all concerned.  Thus it is not just the technology but the cultural framework. In their case, they found that a community was created among rural women in Queensland, Australia.  While contentious issues where not swept away, they were raised in gentle ways, wherein women would “test the waters” to see if a certain behavior was ok with others. It was done in a way not to make others wrong but to learn from each other.  This is in contrast to many user groups, private email communication, wherein since the emotional, face-to-face dimensions are not visible, small issues lead to troublesome relationships, undoing rather than enhancing communication. The conclusion by Grace and others is that email, given appropriate moderation and an appropriate cultural contest (in this case a womanist framework) can be a medium that helps create a more communicative society, at least among rural women.

[xviii].     Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins, Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell: Virtual Reality and its Implications (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1992).  See chapter 14, “A New World for Women.”

[xix].       Comments given after the presentation of my paper on “Communication, information and the Net.” Paper presented at the “Women and the Net” UNESCO/SID meeting held in Santiago de Compostelo, Spain, May 20, 1997.  Wendy Harcourt is the principle organizer of this group. Lourdes Arzipe has provided the UNESCO leadership behing the women and the net project.

[xx].        Dale Spender quoted in Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte” page 9.

[xxi].       Ismail Serageldin in “Islam, Science and Values,” International Journal of Science and Technology, Spring 1996, 9(2), 1996, pages 100-114 compiles an impressive array of statistics.  “Items in the Library of Congress are doubling every 14 years and, at the rate things are going, will soon be developing every 7 years. …In the US, there are 55,000 trade books published annually. …The gap of scientists and engineers in North and South is vast with 3800 per million in the US and 200 per million in the South. … [Finally], currently a billion email messages pass between 35 million users, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is doubling every 10 months,” 100-101.  Of course, why anyone would want to count email messages is the key issue – as ridiculous would be to count the number of words said daily through talking, or perhaps even count the silence inbetween words.

[xxii].      Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), page 230. For a critical view of such claims, see the brilliant essay by Kevin Robins, “The new communications geography and the politics of optimism,” pages 199-210 in Danielle Cliche, ed., Cultural Ecology: the changing dynamics of communications (London, International Institute of Communications, 1997).

[xxiii].     Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (London, Viking, 1995), page 273 quoted in Kevin Robins, op cit. reference 22.

[xxiv].     Mark Pesche, “Proximal and Distal Unity.” Paper available at: http:www.hyperreal.com/~mpesce/pdu/html. Quoted in Duane Elgin and Coleen Drew, Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm (San Anselmo, California, The Millennium Project, 1997). See, in particular, pages 6-9 on the global consciousness and the Communications revolution. They are hopeful that the emerging global brain – signified by the ever increasing web of communication conducted through the internet – will achieve a critical mass and turn on (page 8). Writes Peter Russel, “Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking billions of minds of humanity into a single system,” page 8. See, Peter Russell, The Global Brain Awakens (Palo Alto, California, Global Brain, Inc, 1995).

[xxv].      Stated on the television show Sixty Minutes, Channel 9, Brisbane, Australia, March 16.

[xxvi].     While these are optimistic forecasts, Roar Bjonnes reports that according to The Nation Magazine “368 of the world’s richest pople own as much wealth as 40% of the world’s poor. In other words, 368 billionaires own as much as 2.5 billion poor people. Moreover, the trend is toward greater inequity with the “share of global income between the world’s rich and the world’s poor doubling from 30-1 in 1960 to 59 to 1, in 1989. The information revolution will have to be quite dramatic to reverse these figures. Email: Rbjonnes@igc.apc.org, 13 August 1995. Bjonnes is former editor of Commonfuture and Prout Journal.

[xxvii].    Staff, “The Future of Warfare,” The Economist (March 8, 1997), page 21.

[xxviii].    Ibid.

[xxix].     For more on this see: Sohail Inayatullah, “United We Drink: Inquiries into the Future of the World Economy and Society,” Papers De Prospectiva (April 1995), pages 4-31.

[xxx].      “Niue takes moral stand on sex lines,” The Courier-Mail (February 20, 1997), page 19.

[xxxi].     P.R. Sarkar, The Human Society (Calcutta, AM Publications, 1984), page 97.

[xxxii].    P.R. Sarkar, Problem of the Day (Ananda Nagar, India, AM Publications, 1959), page 3. The corporatist framework of the the new information technologies, of the information superhighway, removes them from state control and from people’s democratic control. “This technology legitimates the hegemony of corporate interests,” writes Kosta Gouliamos. See Kosta Gouliamos, “The information highway and the diminution of the nation-state,” page 182 in Danielle Cliche, Cultural Ecology, op cit.

[xxxiii].    Julie Stephens, “Running Interference: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,”  Australian Women’s Books Review, 7(3/4), 1995, page 27.

[xxxiv].   For more on the silence of animals, that is how discourse silences them, see New Renaissance, 5(2), 1995. The focus of that issue is on the silence of the lambs.

[xxxv].    Of course, few Islanders have managed to maintain this level of purity. Rather, land has been sold to others for short term profits.  However, by selling land (and not using it to develop through agro-industries and manufacturing), Pacific Islands remain locked at the bottom of the world capitalist system.

[xxxvi].   For more on the communicative role of silence, see The Unesco Courier (May 1996). The issue focuses on the ontology of silence.

[xxxvii].   Email transmission from Acarya Abhidevananda Avadhuta. March 1997. On Ananda-net.

[xxxviii].  Anthony Spaeth, “@ the Web of Power,” Time (February 17, 1997), page 67.

[xxxix].   Christopher Darden, “Justice is in the Colour of the Beholder,” Time (February 17, 1997), pages 30-31.

[xl].         Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996).

[xli].        Douglas Rushkoff, Children of Chaos (New York, HarperCollins, 1997).

[xlii].       “What’s happening in the global village,” Asian Mass Communication Bulletin 26(5), 1996, page 17. Also important is to note that “electricity is still not available for two billion people and many others have only intermittent access.” See, The Global Futures Bulletin, No. 38/39, July 1, 1997. Available on-line from the Institute of Global Futures Research, P.O. Box 683, NSW, 2022, Australia. igfr@peg.apc.org

[xliii].      Kathleen Grassel, “Mexico’s Zapatistas: Revolution on the Internet” New Renaissance (Vol. 7, No. 2, 1997, pages 22-23. They are just one example, hundreds of non-governmental organisation use the internet as a way to pressurize governments and corporations by making their policies more public. Email campaigns for world peace, to stop tortures of prisoners throughout the world or to save vegetarian orphanages as, for example, in Romania (on Ananda-net) where, for example, vegetarians sucessfully campaigned against a preliminary decision by a Romanian agency (Protection of Minors Agency) to close an award winning Ananda Marga school since it did not feed students dead/cooked animals ie meat. Inundated with faxes and letters from all around the world, including the entire gamut of vegetarian/health organisations, the Romanian agency relented. Whether this was because of the international nature of the pressure – because they did not want to be seen as parochial -or because of a change of heart towards dietary practices is not clear.

[xliv].      Zia Sardar, “Paper, printing and compact disks: the making and unmaking of Islamic culture,” Media, Culture and Society, 15, 1993, 56.

[xlv].       Although Kirpatrick Sale’s recent article makes this word now problematic. He argues that Ned Ludd’s effort were not simplistic attacks on technology but an understanding that the new technologies were increasing the power of the masters. “The Luddite idea has … flourished wherever technology has destroyed jobs, ruined lives and torn up communities.” Kirpatrick Sale, “Ned Ludd live!” New Internationalist, (286, December 1996), page 29. The entire issue is a must read. Ashis Nandy has taken a similar position in his essays sympathetic to the Gandhian critique of technology.

[xlvi].      For the problems and possibilities of this approach see, Ceees J. Hamelink, “Learning cultural pluralism: can the `Information Society’ help?” pages 24-43 in Danielle Cliche, Cultural Ecology.

By Sohail Inayatullah, 1997

Has The Future Arrived?

Many claim that with the advent of the web and internet, the future has arrived. The dream of an interconnected planet where physical labor becomes minimally important and knowledge creation becomes the source of value and wealth appears to now here. But perhaps the “cyber/information era” view of the future is overly linear, exponentially so, and forgetful that two-thirds of the world does not have a phone and much of the world lives over two hours from a phone connection.

While new technologies has speeded up time for the elite West and the elite in the non-West, for the majority of the world there is no information era.  Moreover, in the hyperjump to starspace, we have forgotten that while ideas and the spirit can soar, there are cyclical processes, such as the life and death of individuals, nations and civilisations that cannot be so easily transformed. There are more people making their living by processing ideas,[i]

Perhaps we are engaged in a non-productive pyramid scheme where we are getting further and further away from food production and manufacturing, building virtualities on virtualites until there is nothing there, as in advaita vedanta[ii] wherein the world is maya, an illusion.

The coming of the information era, ostensibly providing untold riches in bits of freedom for all, in fact limits the futures of others because it robs them of their future alternatives. Reality has become constructed as the worldwideweb, but perhaps this web is Max Weber’s iron cage – the future with no exit, wherein there is an inverse relationship between data and wisdom, between quick bytes and long term commitment, between engagement to technology and engagement with humans, plants and animals.  We know now from email culture that the twin dangers of immediacy and speed do not lead to greater community and friendship, rather they can lead to bitter misunderstandings.[iii]

Email then is perhaps not the great connector leading to higher levels of information but the great disconnector that gives the mirage of connection and community.  Email without occasional face to face communication can transform friendships into antagonistic relationships. Just as words lose the informational depth of silence, email loses information embedded in silence and face to face gestures.  The assimilation and reflection as well as the intuition and the insight needed to make sense of intellectual and emotional data are lost as the urgent need to respond to others quickens. Slow time, lunar time, women’s time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity where “21C” is for all instead of peculiar to Western civilisation.[iv]

Cybertechnologies thus create not just rich and poor in terms of information, but a world of quick inattentive time and slow attentive time. One is committed to quick money and quick time, a world where data and information are far more important than knowledge and wisdom.  Cybertechnologies not only create an information rich and poor but also an information quick and slow. Time on the screen is different from time spent gazing at sand in the desert or wandering in the Himalayas. Screen time does not slow the heart beat down relaxing one into the superconscious, rather we become lost in many bits, creating perhaps an era of accelerating information but certainly not a knowledge future or a future where the subtle mysteries of the world, the spiritual everpresent is felt.

This quickening of the self was anticipated by McLuhan in 1980.  “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals. At the speed [speech] of light man has neither goals, objectives or private identity. He is an item in the data bank – software only, easily forgotten – and deeply resentful.[v]

Selves lose reflective space, jumping from one object to another, one Website to another, one email to another.  It is not a communicative world that will transpire but a world of selves downloading their emotional confusion onto each other.  Writes Zia Sardar, “Far from creating a community based on consensus, the information technologies could easily create states of alienated and atomised individuals, glued to their computer terminal, terrorising and being terrorised by all those whose values conflict with their own.”[vi] It is as if we have all become psychic with all thoughts interpenetrating creating a global schizophrenia.[vii]

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

But for cyber enthusiasts, new technologies give more choice. They reduce the power of Big business and Big State, creating a vast frontier for creative individuals to explore. “Cyberspace has the potential to be egalitarian, to bring everyone into a network arrangement. It has the capacity to create community; to provide untold opportunities for communication, exchange and keeping in touch.”[viii]

Cybertechnologies will allow more interaction creating a global ecumene. They create wealth, indeed, a jump in wealth.  The new technologies promise a transformational society where the future is always beckoning, a new discovery is yearly.[ix]

The oppressive dimensions of bounded identity – to nation, village, gender, culture – will all disappear as we move in and out of identities and communities.  It is the end of scarcity as an operating myth and the beginning of abundance, of information that wants to be free. The late 20th century is the demarcation from the industrial to the information/knowledge era. Progress is occurring now. Forget the cycle of rise and fall and life and death. That was but misinformation.

But while the growth data looks impressive and the stock of Microsoft continues upward, there are some hidden costs. For example, what of negative dimensions of the new technologies such as surveillance? Police in Brisbane, Australia use up to a 100 hidden cameras in malls to watch for criminal activities.[x]

Hundreds more are anticipated creating an electronic grid in central Brisbane. While this might be possibly benign in Brisbane (Aborigines might have different views though), imagining a large grid over Milosevic’s Yugoslavia or Taliban’s Afghanistan (or under Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan where every “immoral” gaze would have led to arrest) it is enough to frighten the most fanatical techno-optimist. Or is it? Many believe that privacy issues will be forgotten dimensions of the debate on cyberfutures once we each have our own self-encryptors so that no one can read or enter us (the 21st century chastity belt). Technology will tame technology. Over time, the benefits of the new technologies will become global with poverty, homelessness and anomie all wiped out. All will eventually have access – even the poorest – as the billions of brains that we are, once connected, will solve the many problems of oppression.[xi]

While we have always imagined such a future, it is only now that technology allows it so.

While cyber-enthusiasts rightfully point to the opportunities of the one world created by new technologies. But they forget that the one world of globalism remains fundamentally capitalistic with the local (local economy and power over one’s future) increasingly being attacked. The tiny Pacific Island of Niue recently discovered that 10% of its national revenue was being sucked out through international sex-line services.[xii]

The information era as P.R. Sarkar points out is late capitalism, a system in which all other varnas – psycho-social classes and ways of knowing (the intellectual, the worker and the warrior)  – become the “boot lickers of the merchants.”[xiii]

And: “In order to accumulate more and more in their houses, they torture others to starvation … they suck the very living plasma of others to enrich the capabilities.”[xiv]

While intellectuals invent metaphors of postmodernity and post-industrialism, capital continues to accumulate unevenly, the poor become poorer and less powerful (however, they can now have a Website).  The information era still exists in the context of the world capitalist system – it is not an external development of it, and it will not create the contradictions that end it. The knowledge society or non-material society that many futurists imagine conveniently forgets humans’ very real suffering. But for virtual realities, we have virtual theories.

A REAL INFORMATION SOCIETY

Still, there are progressive dimensions to the new technologies. As Fatma Aloo of the Tanzanian Media Women’s Association argues, “They are a necessarily evil.”[xv]

Women and other marginalised groups must use and design them for their own empowerment or they will be further left out and behind.

What is needed then is the creation of a progressive information society. It would be a world sytem that was diverse in how it viewed knowledge, appreciating the different ways civilisations ordered the real.  It would not just be technical but emotional and spiritual as well and ultimately one that used knowledge to create better human conditions, to reduce dhukka (suffering) and realise moksa (spiritual liberation from the bonds of action and reaction). The challenge then is not just to increase our ability to produce and understand information but to enhance the capacity of the deeper layers of mind, particularly in developing the vijinanamaya kosa (where knowledge of what is eternal and temporal is realised).  Certainly, even though the Web is less rigid than a library, it is not the total information technology some assume – spiritual energies and shamanistic dissenting spaces cannot enter. Of course, underlying an alternative view of an information society is a commitment to prama or a dynamic equilibrium wherein internal/external and spiritual/material are balanced.

A GAIA OF CIVILISATIONS

We thus need to imagine and help create social spaces so the new technologies participate in and allow for the coming of a real global civilisation, a gaia of cultures. One where there is deep multi-culturalism, where the epistemologies of varied cultures – how they see self and other are respected – flourish.  To realise this, open communication and travel are necessary.  But certainly not enough.

What we also learn from other cultures is that the new electronic technologies are just one of the possible technologies creating world space. Indeed they just act at the most superficial levels. As important as cyberspace is microvita space or the noosphere being created through our world imaginations. Mystic P.R. Sarkar reminds us that behind our wilful actions is the agency of microvita – the basic substance of existence, which is both mental and physical, mind and body.  Microvita can be used by minds (the image of monks on the Himalayas sending out positive thoughts is the organising metaphor here, as is the Muslim prayer in unison throughout the world with direction and focus) to change the vibrational levels of humans, making them more sensitive to others, to nature and to the divine. And as Sheldrake reminds, as images and beliefs of one diverse world become more common it will be easier to imagine one world and live as one world, as a blissful universal family.  The Web then can participate in the historical decolonisation process giving power to communities and individuals in the overall context of global human, economic, environmental and cultural rights.

Or can it?

[i].          See, for example, William E. Halal, “The Rise of the Knowledge Entrepreneur,” The Futurist (November-December 1996), pages 13-16. Halal writes that in the US “Blue-collar workers should dwindle from 20% of the US work force in 1995 to 10% or less within a decade or two. …non-professional white-collar workers [will be reduced] from 40% to 20%-30%. The remaining 60%-70% or so of the work force may then be composed of knowledge workers. …meanwhile, productivity, living standards and the quality of life will soar to unprecedented levels,” page 13.

Also see, The Think Tank Directory in which it is reported that the number of think tanks have exploded from 62 in 1945 to 1200 in 1996. For more information on this email: grs@cjnetworks.com or write 214 S.W. 6th Avenue, Suite 301, Topeka, KS 66603, USA.

[ii].          One of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy. Only Brahman, the supreme consciousness, is postulated as real. Everything else is but an illusion – maya.

[iii].         See, S.C Gwynne and John F. Dickerson, “Lost in the E-Mail,” Time (April 21, 1997), pages 64-66.  They report on the dangers in businesses when bosses use email to berate employees, creating considerable ill-will and inefficiencies. Email exports the anger of the sender to the receiver. Diane Morse Houghten writes that “E-mail leaves a lot of blank spaces in what we say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretation” (page 65).

To avoid sending the wrong message, four rules are suggested: “(1) Never discuss bad news, never criticize and never discuss personal issues over email. And if there’s a chance that what you say could be taken the wrong way, wlakd down the hall to discuss it in person or pick up the phone” (page 66).

[iv].         For more on the temporal hegemony, particularly in the construction of the 21st century as neutral universal timing instead of as particular to the West, see Sohail Inayatullah, “Listening to Non-Western Perspectives” in David Hicks and Richard Slaughter, eds, 1998 Education Yearbook (Kogan Page, 1998).

[v].         Marshall McLuhan quoted in New Internationalist special issue titled, “Seduced by Technology: The human costs of computers” New Internationalist, 286, December 1996, page 26.

[vi].         Zia Sardar, “The future of democracy and human rights,” Futures, 28(9), November, 1996, page 847.

[vii].        Sohail Inayatullah, “Frames of Reference, The Breakdown of the Self and the Search for Reintegration” in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds. The Futures of Cultures (Bangkok, Unesco, 1993).

[viii].       Dale Spender quoted in Carmel Shute, “Women With Byte” page 9.

[ix].         Ismail Serageldin in “Islam, Science and Values,” International Journal of Science and Technology, Spring 1996, 9(2), 1996, pages 100-114 compiles an impressive array of statistics.  “Items in the Library of Congress are doubling every 14 years and, at the rate things are going, will soon be developing every 7 years. …In the US, there are 55,000 trade books published annually. …The gap of scientists and engineers in North and South is vast with 3800 per million in the US and 200 per million in the South. … [Finally], currently a billion email messages pass between 35 million users, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is doubling every 10 months,” 100-101.  Of course, why anyone would want to count email messages is the key issue – as ridiculous would be to count the number of words said daily through talking, or perhaps even count the silence inbetween words.

[x].         Stated on the television show Sixty Minutes, Channel 9, Brisbane, Australia, March 16.

[xi].         While these are optimistic forecasts, Roar Bjonnes reports that according to The Nation Magazine “368 of the world’s richest pople own as much wealth as 40% of the world’s poor. In other words, 368 billionaires own as much as 2.5 billion poor people. Moreover, the trend is toward greater inequity with the “share of global income between the world’s rich and the world’s poor doubling from 30-1 in 1960 to 59 to 1, in 1989. The information revolution will have to be quite dramatic to reverse these figures. Email: Rbjonnes@igc.apc.org, 13 August 1995. Bjonnes is former editor of Commonfuture and Prout Journal.

[xii].        “Niue takes moral stand on sex lines,” The Courier-Mail (February 20, 1997), page 19.

[xiii].       P.R. Sarkar, The Human Society (Calcutta, AM Publications, 1984), page 97.

[xiv].       P.R. Sarkar, Problem of the Day (Ananda Nagar, India, AM Publications, 1959), page 3.

[xv].        Personal Comments to the author, Santiago de Compostelo, Spain, May 20, 1997.