Scrawled in Wax

In a video on Ideas Project, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, talks about whether the net can affect structures of authority. Some of it is the usual ‘expertise versus crowdsourcing’ discussion, but I think it’s still a good starting point for discussion. My thoughts follow the video clip.

1. In providing examples of what exactly is changing, Newmark’s first is advertising. Later, when he talks about things we can all do, the first thing he mentions is user review sites. It seems an interesting choice. After all, for all the high-flung rhetoric that many – including me – throw around about the democratising appeal of the web, a significant portion of user-interaction takes place in relation to consumer goods and the sites that discuss them. Primarily, this is because of ease and accessibility: user reviews and the like are a great entry-point for those who wish interact, help others and to see the collected effect of that aggregated content. At the same time, it does highlight that a dominant mode of Western web culture – and possibly more than just the West – is consumption and the display and discussion of that consumption. This both is and is not resistant to ‘traditional structures of authority’.
2. But this question of ease is also connected to the material and physical possibilities, and limits, of using the web to congregate and collaborate. Iran is the perfect example here, as even a thoroughly grassroots, crowdsourced reaction to repressive structures of authority can fail to impact those same structures when the power to beat, torture and shoot still lies with those who are in control. It must be said, however, that the effect of the representation of this resistance, as it filters both through the web and houses and coffee shops in Iran is, according to people like Zakaria, yet to come .
3. At the same time, this last point raises another issue. Traditional structures of authority work through a combination of material, top-down control – the police, the army, the schools etc. – and a more ideologically based, loosely-dispersed network that, rather than forcing people to do things, beckons them by asking them to identify with a particular ideal or set of goals. The contrast might best be characterised by the difference between, on the one hand, being forced to join a military organisation and, on the other, joining of your own accord because you feel that it is your patriotic duty, because you are good citizen and that your country is good etc etc. If that’s the case, then what happens when the web fragments channels that distribute information and those that function as ‘horizons of identification’ , i.e. provide a differing vision of what it means to be a citizen, to be a person etc. etc.
4. But I don’t mean this so much in the sense of ‘the government doesn’t control the airwaves, man’. Instead, what’s much more interesting to think about is what happens when ideas like individual citizenship, and the idea of national identities themselves – notions based on the constitutive relationship between a person and a singular structure of authority or identity – shift and change in relation to much broader horizon of possibilities. More simply, when half of your friends are from different countries, and half of your life is spent in a world where borders are much more murky (but still there) will it be as easy to identify as a national citizen, or someone of a particular ethnicity etc.? And then what happens to the idea or the state of the group or the government? Will the exercise of power, both in the repressive and affirmative modes, be as straightforward as it once was? And what happens when people’s interests aren’t limited to just one nation-state or one ideological sphere?
5. And I just realised why I banged out so many words. This is the actual question I’m asking: most discussion about authority and the web conceives of the exercise of power as an act of repression – “you cannot do this thing, we will not let you”. But there is also a long-established line of thinking, initiated by thinkers Althusser and Foucault, that suggests power works through affirmation, through encouraging particular behaviours and thoughts, through ‘creating individuals in its image’. How does a discussion about power and the web change if we think about authority in that way – rather than as the ogre who blocks you as you try to cross the bridge?