All Networks are Created Equal?

I want to use this space to elaborate on a point I made during our discussion of Inventing the Internet . Not only did military funding (i.e. DARPA) contribute to the creation and development of the Internet, it continues to play a central role in its advancement (i.e. Carnegie Mellon's $66 million of DoD funding in 2007). The ways in which Benkler describes the "networked information economy" does not only apply to the media, or the academy, or social interaction, but to warfare , and it has for a long time. DARPA researchers John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt created the buzzword "netwar" to describe the new type of modern warfare. No longer do we see guerrillas against central states, we see networked guerillas versus networked states. In one of the innumerable scary passages from their 1994 project The Advent of Netwar they write, "Netwar is blurring the line between peace and war, offense and defense, and combatant and non-combatant. As a result, the United States will face a new generation of nettlesome challenges that, in our view, will require new doctrines and strategies to combat them" (2). Well, yeah. Good call, DARPA.

The point here is that "the wealth of networks" that Benkler argues for is not only the "wealth of democracy" but the war all-the-time ideology of the something we may try to define as the Network-Industrial-Complex. In fact, the democracy Benkler calls for may be part of the need to implant democracy in intransigent nation states, or even the need to continue manufacturing nation-states at all. Arquilla and Ronfelt characterize netwar as: "about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico's Zapatistas more than Cuba's Fidelistas, the Christian Identity Movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, the Asian Triads more than the Sicilian Mafia, and Chicago's Gangsta disciples more than the Al Capone gang" (5). They don't mention Al Qaida, but one cannot help but read them into this list. But the scariest thing about their proposition is that not just "sleeper cells" and "rogue agents" but western democracies as well. We can create our own list. EU more than France, League of Democracies more than UN, Coalition more than US, etc. Networks are not inherently resistant anymore than they are inherently imprisoning. The scary reality is that they are hegemonic.

Read more about the dystopian future for free at RAND.org! Get RANDY! http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR789/index.html