Where Every Colour is Black

And yet,for every euphoric story of digital and internet technologies orchestrating a new mode of participation and existence,we also hear of a growing despair of how the internet is not really free. I do not want to take away from the politics of hope. However,I do want to look at the continued dismay that is voiced by activists,civil society organisations and researchers who,when faced with the reality of everyday practice,realise that their plans for the future was writing on the beach. I want to examine why we have this expectation of the free and open from the internet and digital technologies and how emphasis on the free and open obfuscates the more restrained and status-quo nature of these technologies.

Lets start at the very beginning and realise that the internet was developed within defence complexes in the US army and associated academic research centres that were interested in two primary things: One was the calculation of complex ballistics,to determine missile trajectories in war and the second was to send private data through secure encrypted lines,across remote geographies. The internet,in other words,was designed to help extraordinary violence and to construct closed and impenetrable information circuits. When Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) coined the term World Wide Web,his imagination of the Web as a universal medium,open to all and not biasing the information it conveys was directly in contradiction with the existing internet policies in the secretive cultures at MIT Labs where the experiments were being conducted.

From that invention of the World Wide Web in 1991,internet technologies have been developed and endorsed by nation states built on military and market expansions. The early days of the internet might have been open to the few who had access to it,allowing the old boys club (with an occasional woman) to play with the technologies. However,with the mass marketing of the internet as an everyday tool,the open was thrown out of the window a long time ago. With IBM,Microsoft and Apple,the internet,when it came to countries like India,was already a commodity to be packaged and sold to the Indian consumer.

While it might look like a benign space of freedom and openness,it is also a space that one must be able to afford. With broadband penetration as low as 12.5 per cent in India,we need to ask who gets to participate in this new public sphere. It is time to acknowledge that despite state intervention,the internet is a lifestyle product that affects life and language,but is selectively available to only those who can afford it.

Even with Microsoft running citizen service centres in villages,Infosys producing the outsourcing empires for digital technologies,public registrars being appointed as gateways to the Unique Identity Number it comes as a surprise that the cyber-utopians continue to think of a free and open internet. Interface and surface analysis of digital practices and protests often overlooks the complex negotiations that mark this age of Googlisation. The over-emphasis of the free and the open blinds us to how it facilitates a libertarian regime where consumption becomes the only logic of development. It glosses over how fundamental freedoms are replaced by an endless array of choices. It neglects to see how governments perpetuate invasive practices of surveillance and privacy to encroach on the dignity of citizens. Henry Ford famously said,It can be any colour as long as it is black,as the mantra of Fords automobile success. In the success stories that we hear of the internet,are similar undertones where we have the freedom to be anything we want as long as we become one of the things that the menus offer.

Internet freedom is a good thing. But who is it good for,is a question that is worth asking.

digitalnativeexpressindia.com