Case 4: The power of the future.

4 : Legislating for the Future.

To live in a torrent of technological change is to challenge so many existing systems of power. Economic system, state, broadcasting companies, all feel they ought to have something to say- have some redress to the world of technology. It ought to be made somehow to reflect their very real power; More than that their power ought to be augmented by it is some way. After all, the appeal goes – they are the natural powers of the land. And yet of course powers are not simply asserted, they u need to be earned and generated constantly and all the more so in a shifting world of technology. And the problem these traditional powers have is always how to assert themselves. The problem is of course that their ‘real’ powers look rather out place in the new media. Broadcasting companies find it then had to assert their rights of selection and ownership. The economic system finds it hard to conjure the difference between the economic and the real world in money. The recent crash was in part because they thought the technology was going to drive the system – and obliviate the power of real money – real land - a mistake that very nearly took the entire finical system with it. Finally states are caught up endless trying to regulate a constantly changing world, and design systems for a moving target. Whatever a states does then appears to be wrong (as the world will have moved on before it gets the chance to act).
Moreover this failure is a very real one. It matters. It is after all part of the myth of a state and their assertions of power than they are adequate to every challenge. It is the role of states then to be able to assert a certain form of power over their citizens and the wider world. And failure so to do matters therefore, for it risks putting into some kind of question the entire rational of states in the first place. States then would rather get heavy – rather be oppressive than let the matter slide. But it is not that simple. For the trouble with new technologies is that one has to legislate for what has not yet happened. The trouble of course being that if one waits for the crimes and then legislates, one will have to play endless and pointless catch up. What the lawyers in parliament then end up doing is creating portmanteau criminalities. General laws, that it is hoped, will be applied to the worlds as it changes and evolves. Laws are then passed that grow into their oppression, and grow slowly.
At which point two further factors kick in. new technology is of course not simply about computers. It is rather then fact that if one increases the numbers and kinds of links between people, the one increases what small group of individuals can do or plan. Individuals are in constant and regular contact with one another- and so both enforce one another’s feelings and plan. What is more they have the know-how and the technology, on tap to find out how to do something about that oppression. A world where disgruntled teenagers can be refracted into genuine terrorists is a terrifying one indeed. Secondly it goes without saying that any general law, always gets miss used and warped in a myriad of ways. Parliament passes the legislation just in case, and then it gets taken up by criminal lawyer and made into something. It becomes a monster – animate and changing in its own rights, and there is very little anyone can do about the fact. The same general laws then one needs to restrict to enforce the power of the state of new technology, are laws which when applied in the real world increase rather alarming what a state can do, and who it can monitor. Nor of course are these two facts unrelated. The problem of technology for a state is that in part, it creates endless new echo chambers for the prejudices for citizens. Grumbles can then be echoes into real grievances in such chambers – making so much of the population a potential threat. And the state, feeling its responsibilities very heavily, acts the only way it knows how. It monitors us all, and justifies itself for so doing.
The threat to the state here is a real one. Nation states are not a natural state of affairs. They were created in the welter of a certain set of historical events, and will only remain a political reality as long as they can master those events. Their very reality is then put in question by technology. It is no wonder then they passes paranoid legislation. That is it is no wonder those individuals who have poured their beliefs and channelled their dreams into the powers and the sovereignty of the nation (politicians and Bureaucrats) can only look askance as their power melts ways. It is then only natural they resist, and resist they do a resistance that has clearly warped (and is warping) so much of our recent poltical history.
There appears a kind of rule, where a state attempts to imposes a fourfold axis of powers, general and specific upon technology. This axis then asserts general and specific rules at the level of both the individual, but also the ‘citizen’ (that is the person caught up in the state). These rules are designed on the one hand to police, but also to explain and so control the emergent technologies. That is behind these four rules are the twin heads of the need to control what is there and the desire to have some input on what is developed.
The most critical of these factors in recent times had been the emergence of terror. The terror wars need realistically to be divided into four rather distinct elements (which the get very confused). First there are the real outrages that have occurred (for whatever reason). The outrages certainly have links to one another, and to a wider sequence of injustice – how could they not in a connected world- But actually are home-grown, and independent and self contained: A far more worrying thought. Secondly there is a sequence of wars which again are loosely linked together, but that link is not obvious or simple. The very fact we are fighting might be enough. Thirdly (and most critically in the context to the rest of this essay), there is the fact that the state endless is up against in these wars its lack power, and its failure to keep us safe. It is therefore up against how modernity is limiting its powers, and is so constantly. It response then in these terror wards is always the same – to greatly expand what it is aloud to do to its potentially rebellious citizens (this might be pretty well - all of us). It then looks to expand its powers to monitor, to arrest, and its right over our bodies (torture). Finally looping all these together is a threadbare myth of terrorism and global threat
The conflict itself that is the main symptom of this was has in had its own twofold effect. Firstly it defines the sense in which the state has arrived in the world of technology, We turn around and the state is their, policing away, asserting is rights in he name of nation security- a rights we are all want to agree with (how can we not). Secondly in the best Foucault traditions, there is something happening here. Unrest is being given a name and a career. Al Queada might not be a shadowy spectre like organization, but if people belief it is, they will invent it in their disgruntlement accordingly . They will look to it, and its organizers, to develop their anger. From which will develop little terrorist carriers terrorist do certain things- go certain place- and so become discoverable. The potential open ended threat of a population is then directed in a certain reaction. Those who are going to be a problem become findable. Invading Iraq and Afghanistan might have then increased the likelihood of home grown terrorists, but more critically it meant that terrorism understood itself in terms of a certain struggle, and behaved accordingly. It became then findable. The Terror wars then always not only the state to conjure new places to be, but also creates a new individual, the career terrorist, to monitor and control.
The terror that underpins the war is real enough. The state is terrified- for it is up against the limit of its power. This same terror of the other – of people, beyond the nations order, who we no longer can segregate as we did, of course translated into a population as something rather different. It becomes that old quasi-racist quasi-real and always queasy fear of migration. That is the population starts (not totally unreasonably) to assume it is about to be taken over by the other and that it way of live is being undermined. The trouble of course is that the fear in a sense is right. A global world does undermine our way of life, by making the world too complex to support it. That is we lose the rights to certain jobs, or to easy wealth or to use of history to strut around the world stage. All of that is gone- and with it so much of how we have understood ourselves for at least sixty years. Our way of living is, in a sense undermined. And yet of course we can do nothing about that fact. What is more we would not simply stop it, even if we could. We would not turn back the clock and unmake cheap products or improved information exchanges. All we can do then is blame someone else, and then go looking for the offender. Migrants and asylum seekers, who are in their own way also victims of the same process, and then simply there- a visible symptom o the problem and viable culprit for the paranoia we feel (and media stoke to make a profit).
The result is then of course a population that warped in its own way by new technology. It feels its jobs fly way to other parts, and new folk arrive. It naturally then blames the new folk (who are foreigners after all) for taking the jobs those other foreigners took. It then naturally looks to then state to DO something about it. A request that is utterly unreasoning, and yet natural. A request that moreover the sat feels it needs o look as if it was doing – if no other reasons that to prove it still have purpose and validity. Looking after the border, and protecting the borders, are after all the kind of things, the territory that states need to exist in. The result is then a shadow world, where we mind one thing, blame another and the state is caught needing to act.
However technology clearly challenges not merely states but individuals. Here there is a clear and concerted attempt but the powers that be, to make us worry about our electronic individuality. The facts here are complex. Fraud does exist and is certainly real, and nasty. There is always then a chance that one will be ripped of by individuals elsewhere. One needs then in the form of passwords and encryptions enforce some kind of identity (that is have same means to demonstrating it is really you- be it fragments of personal history, or elaborate names). And yet this risk is very to exaggerate. All the more so by a state that even more than we do, wants was to have fixed identities as we do in the actual world. For of course once we do have such identities then the entire apparatus of the state can be bought to bare upon the individual. Once we are riveted down, and made simple again, the state knows what, and trace who is doing what, and will get to recreate its power in the virtual world, and it fixed citizens. The state needs us all to behave ourselves, so it can regulate properly.
In effect there it is clear we are one of those moments history here. We have a choice. To accept an identity it to accept the state’s regulation over a medium that has been free up to now. One then gets the protection of the state, by agreeing to its protectionist terms, and paying ultimately its protection money. We allow it then to once again the biggest bully on the block, and to the one we need to pay and obey. Or we could not we could accept the risk, and revel in the freedom (or more realistically find other ways to protect ourselves). The state then wants us to be afraid here. It needs our fear to give itself purpose. A story that will run and develop.
Finally, on the personal, but now on a more general level, states are clearly rethinking their role. If organization is happening for free on the internet, then it is clear a state can change some of what it can do. or at last it might be able to. For it is true that the internet can allow us to-do something states do. (if we can be bothered). The trouble is of course that it is not clear exactly that it can do everything. or perhaps better, it can only do everything if we can all be persuaded to behave on line as we do in the real world. We need then to be that online big society. Capable of getting on with it ourselves, of organization ourselves, while the state or the powers that be look on with reflected glory. At least with this ‘idea’ –If it merits the term, does get the fact that the states role is changed . The trouble is it merely then off loads that role on a bewildered population that probably does not want to do it. The result is then rather to predict., and may well of course lead is to re-inventing the state in gratefully relief.
This essay started with a real problem. How does a state deal with the fact that is power is no longer fixed or certain? Can it legislate for that fact. Can it expand into the void, and force us to realize its power? - a method which has been tried and failed. All it produced was a society state that had to ignore exactly the civil liberties that had been is crowning glory. The mirror alternative is now being tried state suddenly draw back, and we are left to get on with it – or at least to feel the void that opens on our world without state help. The trouble with method is that in all like hood, it will remind us why we have states in the first place, namely that they allow us all to be part of the same basic narrative. It new then withdraws them not only will the effect be very different in differing parts of the country but how we understand that difference will be different, leading to social unease (if not unrest). In short no solution. The problem is after all not whether we do or not do without states but rather how to do we change them, to make to allow them to be relevant in a new world, a change that might be profound (it might mean we sacrifice nations), is necessary, and yet we not as yet minded to do.