Cyberpunk-web 1.0 “Egoism” Greets Groupweb

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Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 30, No. 3, 2008: 299–323 R

CYBERPUNK-WEB 1.0 “EGOISM” GREETS GROUP-WEB 2.0 “NARCISSISM”: CONVERGENCE,

CONSUMPTION, AND SURVEILLANCE IN THE

DIGITAL DIVIDE

Kym ThorneUniversity of South Australia

Alexander KouzminSouthern Cross University and University of South Australia

ABSTRACT

The question of paradigm “shift” or paradigm “continuity” in thevirtual worlds of controllable and exploitative existence needs to becanvassed. Web 1.0 hubris seems to be augmented by a newer Web2.0-based propaganda and related, commercial discourses involvingthe putative “liberating” politico-economic contours of cyberspace.The “democratizing” and “developmental” gradients of the “digitaldivide,” externally and internally, have now been subsumed within anew “politics of fear,” a new hegemonic discourse of “terrorism”and “security”—so much so—that echoes of past debates about theprofundity of ICT developments and democratic social impacts be-gin to sound like dystopian subversion. Neoliberal cyberspace, Web1.0- or Web 2.0-based, is a coercive space fraught with vulnerabilityand exploitation.

INTRODUCTION

The digital revolution represents “ignorance meets egoism, meetsbad taste, meets mob rule . . . on steroids . . . towards the BraveNew World 2.0.” (Keen, 2007, pp. 1-2)

“Tethered appliances” will eliminate what today we take forgranted . . . . a world where mainstream technology can be influ-enced . . . but the core battle will remain. It will be fought throughinformation appliances and Web 2.0 platforms like today’sFacebook apps and Google Maps mash-ups. These are not justproducts but also services, watched and updated according to theconstant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them.(Zittrain, 2008, p. 5)

2008, Public Administration Theory Network


300 Administrative Theory & Praxis ❖Vol. 30, No. 3

Engaging cyberpunk hubris involved in the distorting discourses (Cas-tells, 2002) of a “liberating” engagement with cyberspace (as repre-sented by web-based portals/communities and online websites),requires considerable courage once the neoliberal masking functions ofInternet-driven cyberspace are fully considered. What is evident in thepolitical economy of cyberspace is that consumption obsessed netizens(Kouzmin & Jarman, 1999) are not empowered in cyberspace—a spacewhich does not respect difference, does not provide a level playingfield, does not provide a safe haven for authentic, democratic discourse;let alone safety from the predatory actions of the Homeland Securityapparatus of the state (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2008) or other online “rack-eteers” (Thorne, 2005).

The privatization of the Internet is of major concern. This is despitethe origins, and the first years of protocols, of the Internet being in the“public domain” (Kouzmin & Dixon, 2006) and extensively dependenton governmental expenditure (Naughton, 1999; Newman, 2002). Thisdependency has been obscured by the elaboration of an extensive my-thology surrounding Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, drawn from the discoursesof the “anti-corporate, IBM, blue-suited conformity” (see Whyte,1956); personal computer and anti-regulation narratives evident incyberpunk science fiction of cyber-pirates; (Apple) hackers (the Unixcommunity); information liberationists (Yahoo, Google, andWikipedia); online communities (MySpace, Facebook); and Zen war-riors (Oracle) blowing apart the old governmental and corporate order.

As Murphie and Potts (2003) observe, “utopian hopes in the trans-forming powers of technology now resides in cyber-culture, where mys-ticism often fuses with belief in technological progress [and] techno-mystics . . . dream of transcendence and immortality through the imma-terial means of cyberspace” (p. 62). However, within these mystifica-tions, Microsoft’s much less romantic corporate approach led it tobecome the IBM of the personal computer and software era, andhelped corporate email become ubiquitous within the Web 1.0 universe,while Amazon’s and e-Bay’s commercial success was based on the mas-tery of global logistics and personalized marketing. Similarly, Yahoo’s,and especially Google’s, search engine “optimization” made the “trea-sure trove” of corporate sites and information, embedded on top ofsearch sites (Keegan, 2008) on the Internet, instantly available to any-one connected to the worldwide net based on “clicks” and other formsof revenue generation. News Limited (among others) drew old and newmedia together by its almost simultaneous investments in Facebook andthe Wall Street Journal.


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INTERNET HISTORY AS MYTHOLOGY

Cyberspace was heralded by technological pundits and free marketadvocates as a place for immediate, democratic communication that ob-literated all forms of preexisting “difference” and presumed a bravenew world. As Gerlach and Hamilton (2000) and Thorne (2005) indi-cate, cyberspace, supposedly, is an “info-machine” (Barnatt, 1995). Aslong as any individual or group of like-minded individuals are able togenerate a moneymaking idea, and are able to access logistical andother digital communities or networks, they are able to dominate theglobal virtual economy based in cyberspace. Constant, global, digitalmotion is everything. The “tyranny of distance” (Blainey, 1982) hasbeen eliminated. Physical limitations are overcome by cyber-intercon-nectivity. Information becomes the currency of the future. Inequalitiesand contradictions of physical and social existence no longer matter.

Governance, based on national boundaries, or sovereignty, isdeemed irrelevant. Racial, ethnic, sexual, and economic “differences”require no corrective action in non-exploitative, transcendent cyber-space. These Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 discourses envision cyberspace as avirtual place where invisible, flexible, individual “masters of the uni-verse,” egotistical corporations and narcissistic “communities of one”can exist and compete with multinationals and media conglomerates.Every netizen, or web blogger, is as powerful as News Limited or Dis-ney Corporation. Individuals operating from no precise location can in-teract creatively and commercially in free cyberspace; theirtechnological “smarts” and inherent flexibility mean that they can out-maneuver any inflexible corporation and escape any regulation im-posed by moribund nation-states. Web 2.0 “mass collaboration”(Tapscott & Williams, 2007) mythology goes even further, claiming thatdigitally connected, highly fluid communities of narcissistic individuals,obsessed with some topic or other common interest, can provide betterillumination or resolution than anything possibly available from giantcorporate, or government, action.

The cyberpunk mentality, fundamental to anti-establishment cyber-space, presents fragmented, decentered experiences as transforming.Renegades Case and Molly in Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer (andechoed by Neo and other “revolutionaries” in the Matrix trilogy [Irwin,2000]) “jack” in and out of cyberspace, merge with each other’s “re-cordings of information” and are constantly “reconstructed and re-wired from the ground up” (Melley, 2000, p. 194). Yet, the aim of thesefictions is to “imagine a future in which ‘centered’ subjects still runfree” (Melley, 2000, p.194). Melley concludes that, redolent of the many



utopian, liberational, and transformational claims made for new tech-nologies by those wanting to benefit from actual and/or purported ep-ochal transformations, “cyber-punk’s re-invention of the Americanfrontier is part of a mythic recuperation of the unconditioned and un-controlled subject, a fantasy of liberation which has historically func-tioned in the service of imperialism and a fantasy which critics haverightly linked to masculine self-making” (p. 194). As Melley also indi-cates, the cyberpunk genre invokes the self-reliant, almost universallymale protagonist “highly sought after for his unique, human ingenuityin combating synthetic, self-governing technologies” (p. 194). Yet, thishero is actually re-fighting much older battles symptomatic of muchmore important conflicts:

By pitting lone, rugged individuals struggling against an immenseand powerful organization, these fictions depict precisely the sortof battle William Whyte [1956] urged his readers to wage . . . recu-perating, in displaced form, the comforting notion that rational, au-tonomous agents still do battle with one and other in order tosecure life, liberty, and property. (Melley, 2000, pp. 194-195)

Ethnic, religious, gender, class, and other differences, and their hardfought political positions, are reduced to dependence on individualagency in an atmosphere whereby the concerns of difference are con-sidered to be old fashioned, irrelevant, or just another cosmopolitanflavor which can be incorporated into those “sovereign individuals”(Thorne, 2004) contending in boundaryless cyberspace for positions inthe global economy. Minority status or the ability to command physicalenterprises no longer matter in dephysicalized cyberspace without lim-its. Old nation-state based antagonisms, such as those between capitaland labor, are outmoded. Technologically based individualistic andcommunal cosmopolitanism flows beyond borders and subsumes allforms of special interest, especially elite and minority political compacts(Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004). Cyberspace appears as some strange fron-tier where preexisting laws and old ways of doing things no longer mat-ter. The present is notable for the total triumph of global free markets,information and communications technology (ICT), and neoliberaldemocracy.

An immanent future has emerged in which the constraints of timeand space are deemed to no longer matter. History has ended(Fukuyama, 1992) and everything now depends on individual and com-munal ability to marshal and command information in digital cyber-space. Many time/space narratives are possible (Gross, 1981, pp. 59-78;Soja, 1989) but all involve fluxing (in)visible power and the Internet



“narrative’ is saturated with a post-Hegelian time/space synthesis justi-fying claims to hegemony. The institutional and legal frameworks whichhad protected physical capital in the industrial era are no longer of anysignificance. According to Hardt and Negri (2000) the “multitude” ofknowledge workers connected via the Internet (and especially via thevast possibilities for communal interactions inherent in Web 2.0) re-present a “project for the democratic management of globalization” (p.339).

It is difficult to accept that the physical dimensions of time and spaceare defeated within enveloping global cyberspace. More probably, moreenduring forces of capital accumulation and competition are at work.Certain geographic locations have more lure and attraction than others.The Internet does not cover all of America, let alone the globe. Despiteadvertisements showing knowledge workers with their laptops workingon mountain tops and at the beach, not everywhere is equally attractiveor competitive. Despite other wondrous advertising about teams/groups of “knowledge workers” interacting seamlessly via ICT-drivencyberspace, such networks carry costs and uncertainties. Thorne (2005)demonstrates that the realities of physical, market based competitionare more than evident in disembodied cyberspace. Enduring aspects oftangible capitalist competition, such as size and scale, rule even themost digitally connected, intangible spaces. These include the globalmedia industries where some brands are more important, more visible,than others. Most significantly, information is not free or unrestrainedin the new “Internet economy.” In fact:

Expanding systems of intellectual property . . . have enabled a rela-tively small number of [U.S.] corporate players to amass huge intel-lectual property portfolios . . . . When the history of 20th-centurybusiness regulation is [re-]written, this will come to be seen as one[of] the century’s most remarkable achievements. (Drahos &Braithwaite, 2002, pp. 5 & 28)

Even digital code is not instantaneous; cues need to be sequencedand complex interactions of hardware, software, and human action arerequired. Digital “pipelines” in cyberspace have capacity restrictionsand huge infrastructure and resource costs. Cyberspace is not separatefrom physical space (Crampton, 2003). Completely dephysicalized, vir-tual organizations are not evident within cyberspace (Thorne, 2005).Boundaryless, constantly switching communities and/or networks arenot decisive within cyberspace or global competition. Thorne (2005) lo-cates purposeful, often large organizations with some virtual links(based on enduring visible and invisible characteristics) operating with



carefully chosen partners within well-crafted, continuous networks, asbeing capable of superior performance within twenty-first centuryglobal competition. 24/7 competition is not required in every industry,in every possible location. Local, highly physicalized factors such as in-trinsic knowledge, which cannot be captured by data mining or incorpo-rated into digital code, still resist incorporation into cyberspace.

Agency, whether based on rugged or cosmopolitan individualism, orselfish communalism, is extremely difficult to envision in such dephysi-calized cyberspace and deterritorized, physical space. As Melley (2000,p. 186) notes, boundaryless, disembodied agency poses special problemsfor liberal theory, fundamental to both global capitalism and globalcyberspace. Cyberspace and ICT are not independent of governmentaland business interests. ICT is not revolutionary—technology does notseek, or require, freedom. As Ralston Saul (1997) reminds one, “Gov-ernment and industry have been at the centre of development, con-stantly striving for control. Even as the ‘information highway’ takesform, public and private interests are carving it up as an informationcontrol system and a sales mechanism” (p. 144).

INTERNET INDIVIDUALSM AND AN ONTOLOGY OF FEAR

Cyberspace—even communal cyber-activity—is essentially formu-lated on the triumph of certain technocratic, enabled forms of self-reli-ant, yet networked individualism (Castells, 2002). This individualismrejects the efficacy of relying on preconditioning and constantly rein-forcing notions of religion, ethnicity, national identity, gender, class,and similar crutches. Rather, what is actually going on under the coverof cyberspace is what has the most significance for those wanting tosubsume their “difference” into a cosmopolitan, technocratic individu-alism that seeks to be successful in global cyberspace. The epochal fluxof visibility and invisibility (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004, 2006), which hasaccompanied the rise of cyberspace and the faith in global, free mar-kets, ICT, and neoliberal democracy, disguised the extension of existingphysical and newer, supposedly dephysicalized, forms of exploitation byglobal, corporate capitalism. The interests of corporate capital andother elites benefiting from the hegemony of an imperialistic empire(Harvey, 2003; Johnson, 2000, 2004) were maintained by the obscuring,deflecting “shock” strategies (Klein, 2007) evident within cyberspace.The profusion of global corporate capitalism has led to an Interneteconomy in which:

The wealth share of middle-level employees has stagnated over thepast generation, even as the wealth of those at the top has bal-



looned. One measure is that, in 1974, the chief executive officer ofa large American corporation earned about thirty times as much asa medium-level employee, whereas in 2004 the CEO earned 350 to400 times as much. (Sennett, 2008, p. 35)

Under the veneer of this easily disturbed, cosmopolitan individual-ism (Albrow, 1996), there are separate and unequal networks, separateand unequal communities, and separate and unequal ways of life. Thishas resulted in the development of new forms of actual and virtual sur-veillance (Bogard, 1996). Even within imaginary cyberspace, it is notactually possible to make “physicality” go away. Individuals withincyberspace are still treated as mechanisms to be managed or controlled.It is this fetish for control that is the reality of cyberspace and corporatecapitalism, and this fetish drives the outlandish expenditures on militaryand other technology, even though the returns have been debatable.The problem is that the instrumental “worship of technology” is beingused to drive out the best and the worst aspects of physical existence,and to reinforce the notion that unruly physicality always requires tech-nological regulation.

The U.S. and Australia have been notable for the speed with whichthey moved from championing a “new world order” of globalization toreasserting, via the “war on terror,” the surveilled and militarized na-tion-state (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004, 2008). The U.S.’s far reaching leg-islative/legal response revolved around the USA PATRIOT Acts of2001 and 2006 and the Department of Homeland Security Act of 2002.Australia’s response involved legislating for new criminal offences inthe criminal code: The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005 (Revised) (seeLynch & Williams, 2006). Both countries significantly extended domes-tic and non-domestic counterterrorist intelligence gathering and re-sponse activities. Both countries kept their populations in fear of aconstant threat from terrorists—a tense state of fearful emergency(Thorne & Kouzmin, 2008).

Furthermore, the emergent visible and invisible stratagems in thewar on terror pushed new world order notions of benign cosmopolitan-ism—especially ICT—into a contradictory reliance on overt nation-state based military action (Atwan, 2006, p. 233) and the very overtcurtailment of hard won civil liberties. “Secret evidence; closed trials;false imprisonment; warrantless searches; involuntary drugging; and theseizure of private property seem like something out of the Nazi [andSoviet] era[s]” (Marrs, 2006, p. 307) but the “politics of fear” allow forsuch acquiescence. Thousands of pages of public documents in the pub-lic domain have either been reclassified (Kouzmin et al., 2002) or de-



leted from the Internet. Wikipedia censoring/re-editing is rife—fromthe Australian Prime Ministerial office to global corporations and eventhe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Hafner, 2007; Moses, 2007).

Nield (2005) indicates that the war on terror is “the chosen pretextfor the global integration of police, intelligence and military functions. . . . [and] governments across the world are promoting the idea thatsociety must militarize itself in order to be free of terror” (p. 110).

The “personal safety” state, the latest replacement for the ailing[privatized] “social” state is not known for being particularly de-mocracy friendly. Democracy draws on the capital of [citizen’s]trust in the future and sanguine self-confidence in an ability to act.The “personal safety” state draws on fear and uncertainty, arch en-emies of confidence and trust . . . . it saps the foundations of de-mocracy. (Bauman, 2006, p. 154)

“Intelligence centers,” run by the U.S. government, have access topersonal information on millions of U.S. citizens, from unlisted mobilephone numbers (Web 1.0 databases) to group photographs (Web 2.0vulnerabilities). “Many organizations, known as ‘fusion centres,’ cre-ated after 9/11, were created to ‘improve’ the way in which informationwas ‘shared’ . . . . fusion centres use face-recognition software and databrokers who maintain records on 98 percent of Americans” (“TerrorNet,” 2008, p. 8). Keen (2007, pp. 184-185) identifies Google’s “holygrail” as the “ultimate search engine,” “the modern-day version of theancient Greek oracle” that redefines one’s existence by supposedlyknowing everything about everything, whilst anticipating an “age of to-tal digital surveillance” in which no information is private.

In actuality, the Internet is far from being a viable location for indi-vidual and/or collective empowerment. Knowledge workers and knowl-edge communities connected to the Internet are kept in a constant“emergency time” or in a permanent state of tension about how to sur-vive in the seemingly elusive, but ever threatening, technocratic bravenew world—an “existentialism” as to how to frame and utilize physicaland non-physical arena’s of visibility and invisibility, and how to act ornot act in everyday life (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2007a, 2007b).

The abuses of the Internet in these proprietal politics of fear con-texts—identity theft, pornography, pedophilia, violence, and increasedsurveillance capacities—need auditing. In other words, a cost/benefit ofthe “dark-side” of ICT (Korac-Boisvert & Kouzmin, 1994) is called for,especially in the vulnerable context of the “North/South Gradient”(Faux, 2001). Increasingly visible within cyberspace is the reproductionof conflicts evident within physical and social space. Conservative and



libertarian debates over sexual activities, personal freedoms, and in-stinctual behavior have transferred to cyberspace. Most apparent is theuse of the Internet to demonize individuals and groups, and to engagein scapegoating and proxy wars which reinforce the deprivitization ofinformation and the dephysicalization of human life; for example, theunexpected alliance between religious fundamentalists and feministsagainst online pornography and digital pedophilia.

This involves the unwarranted fanning of the fear of the cyberspace“stranger” rather than the physically proximate family or extended-family member. In this strangely intermingled, ideologically driven ap-proach to physical- and cyberspace, thinking about doing something isthe same as actually doing the “thing.” “Gazing” is the same as beinginvolved in the actual event. Science fiction techniques of surveillanceand capture meld into the war on terror, intensifying the politics of fear,creating a world where potential enemies/criminals are everywhere.Just as with the physical pursuit of “terrorists,” cyber-, pre-crime profil-ing is used to entrap or arrest potential offenders before anything actu-ally happens.

Even more disturbing is the possibility of the mutually reinforcingmythology of rampant, Web 1.0-enabled masters of the digital universeand the Web 2.0 fantasy of constantly forming and reforming issue-fo-cused, transformative, online communities masking a much sadder, al-most tawdry, actuality. In Barham’s (2004, pp. 307-308) investigationsinto British youth culture in “today’s . . . fragmented, contradictory,multiple, disjointed” and electronically mediated, Western world:

Located neither in widespread connections nor in actual or civicactions, one finds a series of “disconnect zones” or “gated,” “en-tertainment communities” keeping governments and other authori-ties separate and outside the shared interests of those disengaged,“tight-knit, social groups” . . . . operating in secluded physical and/or cyber spaces with highly-localized frames of action.

Barham (2004) acknowledges that there is “ongoing contact betweenmembers, via websites, chatrooms and mobiles, offering a fluid and al-most permanent means of staying in touch, and organizing the nextevents”; yet, any evident “restless desire for transformation” is limitedto “the possibility of visibility within [one’s] community of local fame”(pp. 308-309).



PUBLIC DOMAINS AND THE EXCLUSIONARY/EXPLOITATIVE PROBLEMATICS

The “public domain” context of the ICT/digital divide (DD) (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin, & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000) is conspicuous in itsabsence in the increasingly monopolized discourses involving ICT. Formany minority groups and individuals, other non-digital divides involv-ing such issues as poverty, educational attainment, and remoteness stillpersist and are still decisive. Far from a world of “knowledge workers”fused with everyone else via the Internet, there are a number of otherindicators of separate and unequal networks and separate and unequalways of life. Geographic regions in macro- and micro-aspects resemblepatchworks of inclusion and exclusion for both individuals and groups.These economic and social “gulags” are often connected by purposeful,point-to-point networks which re-create social networks, such as thoseassociated with criminal activity existent for a millennium (Thorne,2005) and those economic networks which have corralled human andother resources for capitalism since its inception. Furthermore, digitalconnection is not the same as physical connection (Millar, 2000, p. 21).The Sweeney Report (Sweeney Research, 2003) concluded that the con-nectivity afforded by ICT is not sufficient to render supposedly invisi-ble, cyber-enabled workers immunity from the machinations oforganizational politics or the insecurities of part-time work.

The proliferation of ICT offers challenges to developing countriesthat struggle with basic human needs. The key to development is ininformation which is inaccessible to them. Facing these challenges, de-veloping nations start from a position of frailty based on low levels ofcapital, a limited information infrastructure, dependencies on foreignaid and multinationals, and an ever-increasing population growth. Theeffects of current ICT policies and corporate and government praxislead to electronic futures, which a majority of the world population,arguably, would not choose and would actively seek to avoid. Growingdiscrepancies between “information rich” and “information poor” andthe problematic future of employment in an electronic society—verymuch contrary to anarchic and individualistic rhetoric—focus on thegrowing dark side of ICT, its abuse, and its addictive potential.“Techno-stress” (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin, & Kakabadse, 2000a) inthe “wired” economy matches the socially dysfunctional consequencesof ICT “abuse.” The contestable issue of re-regulating the Internet forsocial and economic purposes is an underdiscussed issue (Kouzmin &Dixon, 2006).



Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin, and Korac-Kakabadse (2000, p. 172)have pointed out that the information gap between rich and poor in theworld is not difficult to assess: The Bangladesh economy devotes onetenth of one percent to hardware and software products and relatedservices while the U.S. corresponding figure is one hundred timeslarger—ten percent of the U.S. economy goes to ICT (see alsoDertouzos, 1998). “Similarly, with poor Americans, there is an equallyobvious dissonance between ICT expenditures in the inner city and thesuburbs—people struggling for the daily bites of food having nothingleft over for ‘bytes’ of information” (Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2000, p.172).

The ICT revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor na-tions and rich and poor people within nations. Whatever ICT “opportu-nities” present themselves, they are dependent on communication-systems infrastructure and training needed to join the “IT-harems,”otherwise known as the “information club” (Korac-Kakabadse et al.,2000, p. 172). It will be very difficult to recover the non-instrumentalsocial life of information (Brown & Duguid, 2000). As globalization andICT impacts sovereign nations, “the global economic tendency to re-duce job security, increase distress, corrode cultural diversity, limit ac-cess to knowledge and human rights when less than five percent of theworld’s population uses ICT (“For the Record,” 1998) is disturbing”(Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin, & Kakabadse, 2000b, pp. 20-21).

ICT has facilitated downsized, “tethered” (Zittrain, 2008) businessexecutives to follow itineraries that place them on global, round-the-clock time schedules, subject to laptops, modems, mobile phones, faxes,email and other messaging at any time of the day (Tonn & Petrich,1998, p. 270). In the past twenty years, in the U.S., vacation time hasdecreased for the average worker by three and one-half days and com-muting time has gone up by 23 hours per year (Korac-Kakabadse et al.,2000b, p. 21). “A Wall Street Journal poll found that 80 percent of re-spondents describe their lives as busy to the point of discomfort”(Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2000, p. 21)

The tension in industrial society between work, family, and leisure ismore so in an information economy where work places major con-straints on the amount and quality of people’s discretionary time andattention (Lobel, 1992). The information age produces a society in a“real time” mode composed of people who are “economically pressed,politically depressed, and socially stressed” (Beeman, 1996, p. 3). Theemerging techno-stress agenda challenges human resource managementresponsibilities considerably. Emerging less from stress due to conflict



over accepting, or adjusting to, new technology, as “cyber-life” replaces“physical-life,” techno-stress will grow due to increasing commerciallymotivated and state condoned over-identification with and dependencyon existing and emerging ICT.

A growing aspect of corporate and governance capabilities associ-ated with techno-stress and the dark side (Korac-Boisvert & Kouzmin,1994) of the information age is the abuse by individual actors and or-ganized groups of opportunities afforded by ICT. Although electroni-cally mediated interaction can be more egalitarian, it also may be more“disorganized.” The regulatory, as distinct from the libertarian, implica-tions of managing trust are harder to redefine and enforce through anICT medium. The crisis implications of the dark side of ICT behavior isan emerging policy issue of the first order within the “divides” increas-ingly evident with the information society and for the development ofan “ICT meta-policy” aimed at tackling the impending crises of digitaldivides (Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2000, p. 182).

The war on terror compounds the current dilemmas of ICT/DD andits exclusionary impacts. Government agencies have shut down websiteafter website, have reclassified documents previously declassified, andhave now rendered information as “dangerous” within this newer, “se-curity fortress” context. The “securitization” of e-government is not be-ing adequately addressed. The loss of accountability capacities under“commercial-in-confidence” requirements of privatization/outsourcingdoes not auger well for the putative democratizing assertions of ICT/DD—Web 1.0- or Web 2.0-based. Recent events in Burma and else-where have demonstrated the ease by which governments are able todisconnect the supposedly open, mutable democratic network of In-ternet connections. Similarly, Google has subverted its position as the“enabler/protector” of Internet searches and communications to serveits own commercial interests (Keegan, 2008) and the antidemocratic in-terests of the Chinese government.

It is clear that new vulnerabilities and regulatory questions arisefrom tracking developments in benchmarking Internet based, economicdependencies. E-government is one measure of the ICT/ DD, but theexclusionary impact of ICT/DD lies in the emerging Web 1.0 “individu-alized” and Web 2.0 “communitized” e-society developments within aneoliberal agenda of market fundamentalism and ICT/DD strategiccompetitiveness. ICT research and development has become economicand geopolitical “warfare.” Despite the protestations of utopian techno-crats and cyber-geeks to the contrary, there are very few voices present-



ing a worldwide, socially inclusive framework for the ICT/DD(Johnston & Stewart-Weeks, 2007; Kouzmin, 2007).

There is also the need to disaggregate the consultant/corporate stra-tegic interests in the issue of ICT. For example, can developing societies“leap frog”/“technologically migrate upstream” in the political econ-omy of the ICT/DD? Can there be any “level playing fields” within theICT/DD? There are convergence assumptions about ICT/DD which arenot warranted and “Formative Contexts” (Unger, 1987) of sovereignnations and the continuing impact of their democratic and an-tidemocratic impulses are devalued. Can convergence be achievedthrough ICT? Should it? The ICT/DD is a divisive policy agenda; itsubsumes “culture wars” and many other polarities: the role the Englishlanguage, gender, and ethnicity in ICT use; consumer versus citizenconceptions of participation; and exclusionary “information clubs.”Tracking the ICT/DD set of contradictions over the next 20 years willbe an important task. The North/South Gradient persists (Faux, 2001;Kouzmin, 2002), perhaps, even more so through ICT/DD.

The lack of a level playing field in cyberspace and its inability toinstigate equal competition, let alone a level playing field for individu-als and communities, especially those with distinctive “differences,” ismost pronounced in the emblematic cultural industries. As Millar(2000) found, one is bombarded by a “data storm” in which it is difficult“to achieve shared understandings in the face of difference” (p. 149).Yet information, the currency of cyberspace, is “not differentiated interms of quality but is viewed, instead, as quantitatively significant, as ameans to accumulating power and wealth” (p. 149). Successive waves oftechnology have failed to bring about the nirvana, or the widespreadsense, of economic, cultural, or social improvement.

The political economy of the knowledge society is about the emer-gence of new property rights and their global enforcement (Kouzmin,Shankaran, Hase, & Kakabadse, 2004). Yet the emergence of new prop-erty rights to be enforced in a globalized regime will not help the physi-cally or cyber-dispossessed and the “expropriation” of knowledge willbecome increasingly contentious.

Despite protestations to the contrary, unrestrained neoliberal corpo-rate capitalism has not resulted in new era of economic productivity, letalone an innovative brave new world. The “millennium bug” nevereventuated, the “dot-coms” crashed. Instead, within Web 1.0 and Web2.0, it is possible to locate the continuing, physically exploitative formsof capitalism, conjoined with newer forms of cyber-exploitation and in-



terwoven with a militarism that perverts democracy and the commons(Klein, 2007; see also Lichtenstein, 2004, p. 124).

HESITATIONS IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD 2.0

“Current ICT problems range from Internet pornography to onlineforgery; credit card theft; identity theft; virus attacks; unauthorized ac-cess to a system to destroy data; hacking in to read e-mail and crackingpasswords; and taking over accounts may also erode electronic democ-racy . . . Using technology to modify voting patterns may be a new ave-nue of computer crime” (Korac-Kakabadse, Korac-Kakabadse, &Kouzmin, 2003, p. 51; see also de Haven-Smith, 2005, 2006). Computercrime units are a relatively recent innovation in policing, emerging onlysince the 1990s (Creedy, 1997). In the increasingly interconnected econ-omies, exemplified by stock exchanges and frontierless capital markets,globalized production, and marketing, ICT crime combat and preven-tion requires global policies and cooperation.

“Instead of creating a community based on consensus, unthinkingICT applications can easily create states of alienated and atomized indi-viduals who communicate with each other through computer terminals,terrorizing and being terrorized by all those who value conflict or aredetermined to pursue their own agenda” (Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2003,p. 53; see also Ogden, 1994; Sardar, 1994). The development of Web 2.0interactive technologies immerses users in a totally convincing illusion.“They seek to assemble a ‘real’ and sharable environment within a cy-bernetic ‘tele-place’—the synthetic equivalent of a fully ‘inhabitable’ al-ternate world—in which increasingly alienated individuals havedifficulties distinguishing between real affection from ‘techno-affec-tion’”(Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2003, p. 53). The results of such devel-opments are socially dangerous.

The infinite desire for personal attention is driving the hottest ofthe new Internet economy [1.0 or 2.0] . . . . social networking sitessuch as Myspace, Facebook, and Bebo . . . all claim to be about“social networking” . . . but in reality are about advertising one self. . . the increasing tasteless nature of such self advertising has [sup-posedly] led to an infestation of [actual] anonymous sexualpredators and paedophiles . . . . the holy grail of advertisers in theworld of Web 2.0 is to achieve the trust of others. (Keen, 2007, pp. 7& 25)

Research laboratories and arcade virtual reality (VR) implementa-tions already enable the user/participant, masked or wrapped insensory effectors, to walk through unconstructed buildings, feel thepull of molecular gravity, or engage in a high-tech “shoot-out” with



a computer or a human operator. Although VR peripherals arelimited at this point to primitive step platforms, data gloves, bulk-head mounted audio/video displays (HMDs), and tactile effectorsare already being tested. Systems with tactile effectors, which tran-scend current definitions of simulation, may become a convenientsubstitute for reality. (Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2003, p. 53)

Korac-Kakabadse, Korac-Kakabadse and Kouzmin (2003, p. 53) fur-ther argue that “tactile effectors, such as ‘remote intimacy’ dimensions,have the potential to alter, forever, the legal and social landscape (Fo-gelman, 1994, p. 299) . . . . network pirates could, someday, employrecorded or counterfeit ‘bit streams’ to commit heinous acts of breakingand entering; ‘virtual sexual harassment’; ‘information kidnapping’ or,even, ‘remote statutory rape’ and ‘remote murder’(Fogelman, 1994, p.299; Stephenson, 1995).”

The threat of being cut-off from ICT, like being held hostage orbeing kidnapped, is a very real possibility . . . . terrorists could cut-off communication to an individual, a group, a community or to anentire government . . . . and considering that “tele-medicine” willinclude the automatic transfer of data from consumers to theirmedical records, and that home care will increase (Olson, 1996),sending counterfeit bit streams to patients can induce murder(Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2003, p. 53)

The concept of cyberspace, which “coalesces around visions of vir-tual community-centred and networked, citizen-controlled, ‘Jefferso-nian networks,’ or autonomous collectives of virtual communities” is aconcept of a transcendent meta-community (Korac-Kakabadse et al.,2003, p. 57; see also Rheingold, 1993). What rights and freedoms of“new speech” (many paths of sharing multidimensional worlds of sight,sound, and touch over invisible and ubiquitous “tera-byte” highways)can be applied in the era of the information superhighway (Korac-Kakabadse et al., 2003, p. 57), especially in a Web 2.0 world which is so“digitally fragmented that no informed debate is possible . . . . a form ofdigital narcissism prevails and the only conversations one wants to hearare those with ourselves or those like us” (Keen, 2007, p. 55)? In“fabricating the people” (Catlaw, 2007), especially netizens, “politicalergonomics” (Winner, 1987) will need to be reinvented for any prospectof democratic praxis within Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 cyberspaces.



CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A CRITICAL DISCOURSEON CONNECTIVITY

Technology only properly becomes an economic issue when “thequestion of relative scarcity and cost arises” (Freund, 1972, p. 161). De-spite the claims of the “digital-ati,” it remains most important not toforget Weber’s admonition “not to confuse technological efficiency witheconomic viability” (Freund, 1972, p. 161). However, the early twenty-first century is distinctive for an enveloping and simplistic

promise of technological progress [which] not only stimulates tech-nologic fantasies and generates consumer excitement, but, also,continually holds out as the ultimate panacea for all manner of so-cial ills . . . . The future, one is simply and repeatedly told, is digi-tal—a veritable “techno-topia” in which only the fully wired willsurvive. (Millar, 2000, p. 13)

Yet, in Millar’s (2000) view, most of the web/cyberspace content isdisappointing. Apart from the commercial sites that reinforce the con-stant need to consume goods and services, the rest is “largely [a] toiletwall,” where individuals and groups project “their darker side on thehypertext world of cyberspace” (p. 149). Ralston Saul (1997) is alsoequally disappointed by the content of cyberspace where, as the resultof corporatist domination, “we are inundated by non-information infor-mation. Already government departments and corporations are begin-ning to flood the Internet with their rhetoric and propaganda, all in thename of public debate” (pp. 145-146).

Crumlish’s (2004, p. xii) claim that the Internet and the World WideWeb enable collective action “to change the nature of governance pos-sibly everywhere” is an exceptional misconception and overestimationof the revolutionary significance of cyberspace and ICT. Individualisticcyberspace does not naturally produce communal action which tran-scends the need for external regulation. There have been other, suppos-edly ungovernable, technological frontiers. According to Spar (2001),every one was initially notable for “a rush away from governments anda surge to individualism” and, then, a move, inevitability, towards self-serving regulation. Clayton (2003), drawing upon Lessig (1999), indi-cates “there is nothing in the Internet that makes it inherently beyondregulation” (p. 201).

What is required is a Public Administration discourse prepared tointerrogate and engage in the continuum between physical space andcyberspace—a discourse reflecting cyberspace’s interaction withcyberpunk, science fiction (Gerlach & Hamilton, 2000; Thorne, 2005)



which exhibits what Csicsery-Ronay (1991) notes as the science fictiongenre’s serious, passionate concern for a social responsibility to recovermultiple histories and to imagine better, even if more uncertain, contin-gent futures—a discourse which adopts science fiction’s two hesita-tions—historical/logical and ethical—a discourse which effectively“embeds scientific concepts in the sphere of human interests and ac-tions, explaining them and explicitly attributing social value to them”(Gerlach & Hamilton, 2000, p. 287). This type of Public Administrationdiscourse relates to Farmer’s (2005) invocation for an “ethical hesita-tion” to be displayed by public administration practitioners—the “typeof ethical hesitation which resists the state/government being used bycyber-rebels to secure the empires that they [wish to] buil[d]” (Spar,2001, p. 21). This also involves a discourse understanding and acknowl-edging the extension of corporate capitalism’s imperialism under therubric of globalization, virtuality, and individual sovereignty as a formof deception—one needs to see that cyberspace is a natural “play-ground” of corporate capitalism.

Both cyberspace and physical space have suffered from the actions of“heroes” who have had an ethical certainty about the current state of(in)visibility and the administration of the “named” and the “un-named.” Effective ethical action is not simply a matter of increasingtransparency but of understanding the interplay of visibility and invisi-bility in relation to cyberspace. Despite the neoliberal and cyber-punditdenials that nation-states have any physical or cyberspace jurisdiction,borders are made to appear or disappear and the nameless become thenamed simply as another flux in the “great game” of (in)visibility(Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004). Following Millar (2000, p. 14), “we mustrecognize the relationships between those who produce, consume, ser-vice, and promote digital technologies and cyberspace” and, especially,discern the interests of those who benefit the most from the promotionof cyberspace and ICT—the critical, problematic, qui bono question.One must carefully and continuously interrogate and confront, with anappropriate, proportionate refluxing of visibility and invisibility, anyunwarranted claims that cyberspace represents a refuge from differ-ences, a level playing field for every group or person and a safe havenfrom any form of discrimination or exploitation.

This requisite, carefully calibrated reflexivity (Gouldner, 1970) willbe difficult to achieve if one continues to be subservient to the embraceof “emergency time” which leaves little time for individual or commu-nal reflection. Kroker (1992) reveals that the postmodern notion of“virtual reality,” pace Gibson (1984), invokes “the world of digital



dreams” revolving around the “possessed individual,” enfolded within“eerie and disturbing . . . cynical technology which denies both thephysical and cyber-worlds any viable form of agency” (pp. 2-3). Accord-ing to Sim (2002), this involves a postmodern discourse in which “tech-nology is co-opted into a [seemingly] radical program designed to bringabout the end of the self [or community] as we know it” (p. 169).

However, despite Sim’s claim to the contrary, Kroker (1992) doesnot present a compelling account of “technology as ideologically sub-versive.” The individual is privileged over the communal with devastat-ing implications for the possibility of any civil or political action. Theindividual does not have to be coherent or contained as no metanarra-tive is able to hold sway. Yet, this leaves disembodied, dephysicalized,experimental, technologically obsessed “selves” floating around physi-cal space or, more likely, cyberspace, interacting with unlimited “littlenarratives” that “are free to operate without interference from eitherauthority or convention” (Sim, 2002, p. 169). This produces a self-serv-ing narcissism which intermerges with neoliberal, corporate capitalism’sfantasy of constantly evolving, increasingly free, egotistical “masters ofthe universe.” But, much more seriously, it distracts intellectual andcritical attention from realizing that some narratives are still not as “lit-tle” or as undirected as others and that capitalism is about the relentlessaccumulation of capital and masking, within (in)visibility, the interestsof those who benefit from its activities.

Neoliberal corporate capitalism’s “technologies, geared towards reg-ulation, containment, command and control,” are not “feeding into thecollapse of everything they once supported” (Sim, 2002, p. 174). Morefrighteningly, the technologies (used in the widest instrumental sensepossible) of neoliberal corporate capitalism are enveloping increasinglyundefended, physical space and colonizing “open,” equally undefended,cyberspace. Centralized control and hierarchies are increasing in bothphysicality and cyberspace via tethering (Zittrain, 2008).

Nunes (1997) also conveys that there may be minimal room in globalcyberspace for any democratic involvement in society. Sennett’s (2008)investigations found that new “Internet economy” workers are skepti-cal of institutions and exhibit “lower rates of voting and political partici-pation than technical workers two generations ago” (p. 36). TheInternet/cyberspace provides an “ideal (or rather model) world for eco-nomic, political, and cultural control [see Selznick, 1952; 1957], onewhich is always already conquered and colonized” (Nunes, 1997, p.165). Nunes locates within Kroker and Weinstein (1994), and other ne-oliberal and postmodern exponents of virtual cyberspace, the view that



“empowerment is a kind of liberal seduction into virtuality” (p. 165). Inthis seduction, the “enlightenment liberation of (mental and economic)energy becomes, in practice, the abandonment of flesh to a virtualworld of pure circulation” (p. 165).

Adapting Furedi (2005), it is questionable whether this seductive fic-tion of “empowered” cyberspace allows one to move “away from theStone Age of ideologies” and whether the underlying ideology that pro-motes and protects an “egotistical individualism” and “narcissistic com-munitarianism,” is part of a “time when the transformative potential ofpeople has achieved a remarkable force” (p. 168). Does one want to be“empowered” in a cosmopolitan, individualistic, or communal cyber-space when it presents “a vague, incoherent doctrine that has little tosay about genuine public engagement” (Furedi, 2005, p. 167) or demo-cratic governance? Furthermore, the increasing privatization of cyber-space and the growth of the new “Internet economy” (1.0 or 2.0):

make democratic citizens trespassers on knowledge that should bethe common heritage of humankind—their educational birthright.Ironically, “informational feudalism,” by dismantling the “public-ness” of knowledge, will eventually rob the knowledge economy ofmuch of its productivity. (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 219)

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Kym Thorne is a senior lecturer in the School of Commerce at the University ofSouth Australia. His current research is at the penumbra of cultural theory andpolitical economy, seeking to accommodate a more reflexive, postmodern posi-tion within the prevailing neoliberal project. He has published in leading criticaljournals and presented many papers at international conferences. In 2006 hereceived an Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence. His new bookdeals with the Political Economy of Invisibility.

Alexander Kouzmin is an adjunct professor in the School of Commerce andManagement at Southern Cross University, adjunct professor in the School ofManagement at the University of South Australia, and visiting professor ofmanagement at the University of Plymouth. He has published eight books, con-tributed some 60 chapters to national and international monographs/books,presented research papers and keynote addresses at more than 200 interna-tional conferences, and has published, to date, some 180 refereed papers andreview articles.

Documents

Cyberpunk-web 1.0 “Egoism” Greets Groupweb