social capital, information restrictions, and swarming

Hardt and Negri’s study of the Multitude on the abstract level made me think of community development in a global world. Some of what I got out of H&N was a sense of people coming together to achieve things in the face of adverse pressures brought on the assymetrical power relations in a global world. I am especially thinking of their discussion of resistance, at least as much as was mentioned in the “Multitude” section.

It brings to my mind the notion of “social capital” from Jodie Kressman and others who investigate community development: what it is and how it can be harnessed by the multitude.

Often the strongest barrier to people coming together to use their individual and group social capital is information – particularly lack thereof. If the voices of the multitude are going to communicate with each other, they need to understand what there is to resist.

I was drawn to this opinion column in the New York Sun regarding Google’s agreement to abide by Chinese government censors on searches by Chinese Google users.

“Googling the Great Firewall: Googe Kowtowed to Communist Censorship”
Erping Zhang, Jan 31
http://www.nysun.com/article/26791?page_no=1

The columnist was particularly upset by what the inequality Google is showing between its American users and its Chinese users: “In this instance, it appears that Google lawyers will go to bat to defend the right to privacy of Americans doing searches for child pornography, but they deem it less important to defend the rights of Chinese citizens to learn more about religious freedom and democracy.” Indeed, Google refused the US Government access, but has agreed to the Chinese government’s demands in order to have Google used in China.

The columnist also expresses concern over access to information. We’ve talked in class about whether there is any such thing as unrestricted access to information, if not in so many words. Some people can’t access the internet to search. And even when you can access the internet, who is writing what. Who runs the media if you watch TV? Who is the radio talk show host? Information seems always to be imperfect. But, on the other hand, the case here with China is fairly straightforward…and deliberate.

“The top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party writes a list of the topics it deems threatening to its complete control over political and social capital within the country. It hands that list to Google executives, who proceed to build their China search engines with filters installed.”

And what is being restricted? While this is only one person’s opinion, I think it is very revealing: “Recent studies from the OpenNet Initiative show that while Chinese Internet filters block about 7% of the top 100 search results for pornography, more than 70% percent of the top 100 results were blocked in searches on the Falun Gong movement, outlawed in China in 1999. More than 80% were blocked in searches for the China Democracy Party. Now searches on www.google.cn will yield similar results.” To draw this distinction even more clearly, consider that “Chinese Internet users log on and search for information on Falun Gong and they receive results of sites for Chinese propaganda of an "evil cult." They receive no information regarding the imprisonment of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinese reeducation through labor camps.”

At issue is who is in charge of the information, and what information do they allow versus what they restrict? Preventing people from drawing on resources that may unite them against those in authority would clearly be against the plans H&N would like to foresee for the multitude.

In some ways, this is not to be taken as the ultimate example. After all, most agree today that 1984’s NewSpeak that didn’t have a word for “freedom” so that people wouldn’t be able to conceive of freedom would be fallible. On the other hand, in the case of restricting information, H&N’s swarm intelligence will have to do the work for the multitude of resistors in China.