[WSIS CS-Plenary] Bruce Sterling Blog: Merge the UN and the Internet

[Elizabeth Carll, PhD]

Rik,

That IS humorous.  :-)

Elizabeth

Dr. Elizabeth Carll
Focal Point
International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies;
Chair Media/ICT Working Group,
NGO Committee on Mental Health, New York
Tel: 1-631-754-2424
Fax: 1-631-754-5032
ecarll at optonline.net
  -----Original Message-----
  From: plenary-admin at wsis-cs.org [mailto:plenary-admin at wsis-cs.org]On
Behalf Of Rik Panganiban
  Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 11:13 PM
  To: plenary at wsis-cs.org
  Subject: [WSIS CS-Plenary] Bruce Sterling Blog: Merge the UN and the
Internet


  Some not-so-serious Monday morning reading for you all.....

  San Francisco writer Bruce Sterling has posted a somewhat tongue-in-cheek
blog entry on the eco-tech website "Worldchanging" where he argues that the
United Nations should "marry" the Internet. He has some interesting things
to say about the deficiencies of the UN and the internet, the WSIS process,
and the ITU. I.e.


    At WSIS, earnest people are trying hard to make it look like our world's
net-transformation is happening on purpose. There might be a tipping point
in there -- if enough of them can agree on a societal spirit and a set of
online rules. But their rules haven't yet been invented. Why? Because the
Web doesn't know what diplomacy is. The Net has got no such idea. The Net's
got some social software, collaborative websites and buddy lists, but the
Net still lacks any deliberative tools that any diplomat or a
parliamentarian would take seriously. There are no sound methods of
establishing transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability for online
negotiators, in all the major languages. Nobody has addressed that market,
because that isn't a market at all -- that is governance.


  Check it out here:

  http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001314.html

  Enjoy.

  Rik Panganiban

  ==========================================================

  "Bruce Sterling Is Worldchanging"

  Imagine that the United Nations married the Internet. Any matchmaking
program would consider them a dream date. After all, they're both (a)
supposedly global in scale and (b) fearsomely crippled.

  The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can't get
anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and
military adventurism. The UN was invented to "unite nations" rather than
people. The Internet unites people, but it's politically illegitimate.
Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at
will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models
collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess
of cross-border spam and fraud.

  Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the
grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial
though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations. Then bride
and groom would unite their virtues and overcome those gloomy vices gnawing
at their vitals. The global worldchanging multitudes could beat back the
darkness of the gathering New World Disorder while swiftly improving the
cramped lives of the planet's majority in a beneficent orgy of networked
interdependence! Wow!

  That's a spectacular vision, but I'm not the one making it up. Last year
in Switzerland, world delegates from 180 nations triumphantly proclaimed the
dawn of universal global access to information!

  "We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, (...) declare our
common desire and commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive and
development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access,
utilize and share information and knowledge(...)"

  The World Summit on the Information Society is the weirdest global summit
on the globe.

  The sponsor of WSIS is the International Telecommunications Union, an
outfit that formally belongs to the UN, but it is fifty years older. Today
the terms "Union," "International" and "Telecommunications" are all archaic,
so the ITU needs a raison d'etre. The ITU's idea of a summit looks nothing
much like normal, formal UN summits, except for the customary big hall and
swarms of translators. In the WSIS summit in Geneva in December 2003,
diplomats abandoned their podiums to go mix it up with hardware vendors.
That behavior is unheard of. Odder yet, civil society groups (normally kept
at a nice safe distance at summits, shrieking and sucking tear gas) were
cordially brought right into the mix. At WSIS, the NGOS were finally treated
as what they are: connectors, network brokers, and means of access.

  If you want to crawl inside a big, scary, global summit and see its
entrails without even leaving your chair, then WSIS is the summit for you.

  There are many cautious distinctions formally made between the UN per se,
the WSIS Summit, the "summit organizing process," the ITU, and the
wsis-online.net website. For our purposes, wsis-online is naturally where
it's at. Here Kofi Annan offers you a personal invitation to log right on to
the dizzy apex of global policy-making.

  Here it is. Have a look. Don't be scared. These guys really need you to
give them something to do.

  These WSIS attendees come from literally all over. They can't find a boss,
a coherent agenda, any carrots or sticks, or any guns or butter. Instead
they are immersed, apparently forever, in a dizzying host of thoroughly
unlikely, lateral, polyglot connections: the "All-Ukrainian Association of
Computer Clubs" rubs virtual elbows with the Egyptian "Free Internet
Initiative." The Malaysian Super Corridor tries hard to look really Super.
The Australian Agency for International Development wonders how to improve
matters in the Third World without getting car-bombed for it.

  At WSIS, earnest people are trying hard to make it look like our world's
net-transformation is happening on purpose. There might be a tipping point
in there -- if enough of them can agree on a societal spirit and a set of
online rules. But their rules haven't yet been invented. Why? Because the
Web doesn't know what diplomacy is. The Net has got no such idea. The Net's
got some social software, collaborative websites and buddy lists, but the
Net still lacks any deliberative tools that any diplomat or a
parliamentarian would take seriously. There are no sound methods of
establishing transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability for online
negotiators, in all the major languages. Nobody has addressed that market,
because that isn't a market at all -- that is governance.

  Here's the secret of summits: heads of state at summits do practically
nothing. They have dinner there, basically. All the real work gets done by
legions of "sherpas." These summiteering technocrats handle the choice of
issues, drafts of documents, rules of order, agenda-setting, prioritizing...
the tangle of bureaucratic fooforaw that is the life and death of nations
and international bodies. Sherpas are a digitally under-served group.
Sherpas still do their labors face to face, in big international hotels.
Nobody's come up with a good way to do serious sherpa-work online. A
legitimate, accountable, binding, electronic, Net-based way.

  WSIS is a site for digital sherpas trying to imagine and invent such a
thing.

  WSIS may not succeed -- but somebody probably could. Then you'd truly have
the worldchanging infant of the Net and the UN. The group that pulled that
off could be bigger than the self-appointed Davos Forum, faster and smarter
than the Porto Alegre contingent, less cranky than the Soros initiatives,
less creepy than Bilderberg, more potent than MoveOn, and faster-spreading
than Napster. Imagine that -- what if that actually worked?

  Bruce Sterling, Worldchanging Ally#1, is the author of a mess of great
books, including Holy Fire, Tomorrow Now and Zenith Angle, and the man
behind the curtain at Beyond the Beyond.


  ===============================================
  RIK PANGANIBAN Communications Coordinator

  Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship
  with the United Nations (CONGO)
  web: http://www.ngocongo.org
  email: rik.panganiban at ngocongo.org
  mobile: (+1) 917-710-5524
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