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HARRY HALPIN

 

Digital Sovereignty: The immaterial aristocracy of the World Wide Web

Harry Halpin [University of Edinburgh]

Abstract: Built upon the foundations of the Internet, the World Wide Web has been the most significant technological development within recent history, sparking a reformulation of both capitalism and resistance. The Web is defined as a “universal information space” by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C, reflecting the universal scope of politics and struggle today. Yet while its effects have been scrutinized, the Web itself has received little inquiry. The composition of the governing networks that control the infrastructure of the Web have only recently been engaged with by activists with the ICANN affair and WSIS protests. The Web is governed by a network that is composed of an “immaterial aristocracy” of radical democratic “hackers,” corporations such as Google and Microsoft, and non-governmental organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These networks continually negotiate between the needs of global capitalism and the desires of immaterial labour on the Web. We explore the evolution of these governing networks, including the recent hegemony of Google and Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web (a term first used by Foucault).

An archeology of the Web

Across the world at this very moment, a countless multitude of people are sitting, staring into the ether. In the whole history of our rather active species, this silence and stillness stands unique. Their bodies are checked in at the front door, immobilized except for the tiniest of movements – the lighting-speed tapping of fingers. The steady hum of the clicking of buttons fills the air, reminiscent of the strange movements of gears in some industrial factory. A factory of angels perhaps (Yurick, 1985). A translucent light is cast upon their eyes by their screens, and their sight is fixed upon a world unknown to outside observers. What would an alien anthropologist, some cosmic exile in the style of McDowell, make of this state of affairs (McDowell, 1994)? Would it decipher their language in the frequency of their keystrokes, the words their keystroke spelled in this silent tongue? Would he observe a grammar composed in the ghostly flickers of the screen, and deduce the importance of various buttons that exist only inside the screen itself? More importantly, could this alien understand their intentions, and offer a theory that structured the behavior of immobile beings, who seem crippled in comparison to more mobile species?

To offer a theory of the Web is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead of trying to decipher the circle of cause and effect between the Web and its users, we instead will offer something more humble: a hidden history of the Web. Even this is impossible, for unlike the annals of revolutionary France or the advent of the idea of evolution, it is neither well-documented nor easily pinned upon one individual or chronicled in one or a series of books. A true history of the Web, an application built on top of the Internet, would be possible but would require a life times of diligent work. Even the archives of the old list-servs, the photocopied papers, and the other historical documents needed are probably at this point difficult if not impossible to find due to unforeseen factors such as the decay of hardware and the corruption of software. I will instead present an archeology of the Web, the digging up and exposing to the light various connections in an attempt to explain its origins, and in particular the origins of those who govern it. “The development of the Internet arose, as we have seen, form a certain bizarre conjunction between publically funded institutions – the original militarily research ARPANet – and the autonomous activity of hackers, techno-hobbyists, and computer dissidents,” and we explore this story in detail (Dyer-Witherford, 2000).

Those who govern the Web and its underpinnings I will dub the “immaterial aristocracy.” The word “aristocracy” is chosen carefully. The concept of aristocracy usually reflects the control of capital: machines, money, power (Hardt and Negri, 2000). One immediately thinks of CEOs, stock brokers, attorneys, bureaucrats, doctors. This is the material aristocracy, whose power comes from material machines, the ability to purchase material goods, and to command material armies. Theirs is the ability to move bits of matter about the surface of the earth. This conception of aristocracy dates back to the feudal aristocracy, where within the borders of nascent nation-states and decaying empires, those with power and money could field their own private armies, extort riches, and effectively be semi-sovereign rulers of their own fiefdoms. If you revolted, you would suffer the most material of fates, death. In contrast, the immaterial aristocracy field no armies, and are generally well-off but not wealthy. They possess no specialized machinery, and for the most part command no employees. They are nonetheless aristocrats because they have powerful ideas, ideas that can change the world. They are aristocrats in the ancient Greek sense, aristocrats who are devout before their task, and are known for their sense of justice and humility. They forsake immoderate wealth since it would undermine their fanatical devotion to the perfection of their idea. Previously, one would have usually considered these people to be the artists, the literati, the professors, and bohemians. Yet there is a singular difference between the the immaterial intellectuals and the immaterial aristocracy: the immaterial aristocracy have a track-record of turning their immaterial ideas into bioproductive power. Particularly given the advent of mass intellectuality, the ability anyone to join the realm of ideas makes ideas themselves no longer a mark of distinction. As the production of linguistic and symbolic meaning is now the hegemonic mode of production, the crucial difference between our immaterial aristocrat and the ordinary programmer on the street is that the immaterial aristocracy create the ideas behind the technologies that others implement and use.

It would also be ridiculous to conflate the immaterial aristocrats of fashion designers with the ascetic hackers who helped create the Web. While both activities require work, their work is in distinctly different spheres; the fashion designer is the sovereign of the aesthetic affect, while the hacker is the sovereign over the ideas that are given flesh in computer technology. It would also be a mistake to confuse these aristocrats with the aristocratic public intellectual with best-selling books. Few people, if any, know the names of or ideas of the immaterial aristocrats of the Web. It would be inaccurate to abstractly characterize these aristocrats as only hackers, software designers, or even technical people. Some, such as Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons, are lawyers, while others like Ted Nelson are professional “visionaries.” The difference is their sphere of sovereignty. We are interested in immaterial aristocrats who hold domain not over the analogue world, but the digital world. The digital world is the realm defined by the use of computers. The immaterial aristocrats are the architects and technicians of this world. They define the ideas – from artificial intelligence to hypertext – that become so ubiquitous as to no longer possessor an author. These ideas are defined as open standards (in alliance with the material aristocrats and often in consultation with masses of users) to be held in a perpetual common by the digital world. Without them the digital world would fragment and so lose its universalizing power. These digital ideas let capitalism flourish by creating decentralized spaces for the flow of knowledge and currency. Yet some posit that these very technologies have sown the seeds for the downfall of capital by making real an ever-expanding digital commons. Is the eschatology of the Internet warranted? While many have produced inquiries into these new forms of capitalism, we present here an inquiry into the technological infrastructure that sustains this new form of “cognitive” capitalism itself.

The first immaterial aristocrats of Artificial Intelligence

The original immaterial aristocracy was an aristocracy of professors, directly employed by the military in order to create machines that could accurately and quickly make the calculations needed to improve the firings of ballistics. Some, such as Turing, were used and abused by their masters. Others like von Neumann (the creator of the computer architecture used to this day), openly embraced their generals, and von Neumann himself went so far as to calculate the exact co-ordinates of the explosions at Nagasaki and Hiroshima to maximize their damage. Let us note that history has a sense of irony, for von Neumann died of cancer due to his witnessing the nuclear explosions at Bikini Atoll. Most of these professors (with the exception of Turing) and the military saw computers as primarily giant calculators, whose subject matter was restricted to Platonic numbers.

       As von Neumann’s gambit of mutually assured destruction became policy, the crisis faced by Cold War capital became not one of death but one of life. Until recently, both capitalists and anti-capitalists have been plagued by the same dream: the replacement of human labor by machines. The anti-capitalists thought this would bring the final crisis to capitalism: “Marx advances the thesis that the systematic application of technico-scientific knowledge to production would achieve the outcome of freeing the worker from the factory, thus making the measurement of wealth in terms of human labor time completely impossible” (Piperno, 1995). The capitalist needed compliant machines to replace antagonistic human labour, for “ss Marx says, machines rush to where there are strikes,” and so the possibility of human labor replaced completely by machines fascinated capitalists. (Negri, 1982). Capitalists viewed mechanization as a way to increase productivity and profits, while anti-capitalists believed this would liberate human labour. Regardless of their political differences, both their goals were ultimately the same.

       Within the United States in particular, productivity had to be increased while the antagonism of labor had to be reduced. From the perspective of capital,as labor itself began to become intellectual and cybernetic, dumb machines were not enough. Indeed, the economic coercion of forcing people to do repetitive tasks was getting expensive, for if wages were kept down, the mass worker would threaten revolt – yet without the mass worker, the machines could not continue production. One needed machines that could function without workers, that could absorb and replicate their labour. In one famous passage from the Grundrisse, Marx predicts, “What was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coursely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – as though its body were by love possessed” (Marx, 1973). The military had more than productivity on their minds, for if the president and his men were destroyed in a nuclear war, how would retaliation happen from beyond the grave? How could the military fight back, delivering death-for-death the instant after the bomb went off? The answer was to put an inhuman thinking machine in control of the nuclear arsenal.

       One group of scientists realized that these computers could accomplish these goals if they were not confined to ordinary numbers. Newell and Simon demonstrated convincingly that computers could manipulate arbitrary symbols, a revolution at the time (Newell and Simon, 1976). In these heady days when the insights of Chomsky about the fundamentally symbolic nature of human thought were still freshly triumphing over behaviorism, these ideas were fresh and revolutionary. When Newell and Simon’s program the “The Logic Theorist” managed to prove 38 of the theorems of the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead, Russell responded, “I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I had known about this possibility before we both wasted 10 years doing it by hand” (Lewis, 2001). Heady with accomplishment, Newell and Simon soon predicted that computers would beat grandmasters at chess, and more importantly, run mechanized factories. Herbert Simon was, besides the inventor of symbolic computing, the inventor of organizational decision-making. In his “Architecture of Complexity,” Simon envisions both the human mind and human organizations can be explained by the advent of ever more complicated hierarchies (Simon, 1969). Again, history knows no bounds of irony, for he died in 2001 just in time to see the rise of decentralization in computers.

The failure of Artificial Intelligence

Excited by the prospects of using symbolic computing to mechanize all of knowledge, with the subtext of mechanizing all of production, a group of professors held the Dartmouth conference to announce that their “study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (McCarthy et al., 1955). They dubbed this vision “artificial intelligence.” McCarthy also had a plan: to formulate all of intelligence within the framework of deductive logic. The research money began flowing in from the US military. From a philosophical standpoint, artificial intelligence as originally conceived was the height of the Enlightenment project: the definition of all of intelligence as pure rationality, and mechanized as pure logic (Dreyfus, 1972). Understanding human thought required investigation into symbolic knowledge representation and its constraints in space-time. Planning algorithms were developed, AI programs made for everything from vision to reading, and progress seemed unlimited. The search for artificial intelligence internationalized, and soon Americans were even terrified that they would be economically overcome by Japanese industry controlled by “Fifth Generation” AI computers. Companies were founded to commercialize such expert systems (systems that formalize human knowledge and transfer it to machines), and the entire artificial intelligence industry appeared to take off.

       All was not well for the artificial intelligentsia, as predicted by the Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, employed by RAND to determine if AI was truly a good investment (Dreyfus, 1973). While in limited and highly formal domains such as mathematical proof-proving and fairly immobile factory robotics, AI made great strides forward. On simple problems, such as getting a machine to walk across a cluttered floor, AI failed miserably. AI failed because it could not unify the concrete intuitive and kinesthetic skills with its abstract formal rationality, or in other words, because it was a mind without a body (Dreyfus, 1973). Results at machine translation came back as failures, and knowledge representation languages became so powerful they could not reliably draw inferences. The military withdrew funding, and the AI industry collapsed in a strange forerunner of the “dot com” bust known as “AI Winter.” AI reorganized itself slowly, and a new breed of professors and graduate students began focusing the next few decades on creating robots with bodies and simulating emotion. The era of digital sovereignty of the first generation of immaterial aristocrats, the artificial intelligence researchers who were primarily based in the University, ended not with the bang they had hoped for, but with a whimper. As the death knell of AI, Brian Cantwell Smith proclaimed that researchers should “forget intelligence completely, in other words; take the project as one of constructing the world's largest hypertext system, with CYC functioning as a radically improved (and active) counterpart for the Dewey decimal system. Such a system might facilitate what numerous projects are struggling to implement: reliable, content-based searching and indexing schemes for massive textual databases” (Smith, 1991). Although AI was distracted by creating robots and simulating emotion, this is exactly what happened.

The foundations of the Internet

A new social subject was created in the artificial intelligence laboratories of MIT. While their professors, who were by nature philosophers and mathematicians, tried to determine if mechanization of human intelligence was possible, their students fell in love with the computers themselves. AI professor and social critic Weizenbaum describes this new social subject, the “hacker,” in pure disdain, “Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move,” for they only exist “only through and for the computers.” (Weizenbaum, 1976). Arch-hacker Richard Stallman, a drop-out graduate student of the artificial intelligentsia who would go on to invent free software and copyleft, explains the root of this new social subject not as a rejection of humanity, but a community and practice of joy, “It was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don’t want to stop” (Williams, 2002). In hindsight, it was the artificial intelligentsia who really were trying to define in their computers an intelligence with a body or emotions, while hackers accepted the unique potential of computers themselves. As the project of AI ground to a halt, it is a world-historical surprise that it would be the hackers that would make up for the failure of AI by the maintaining the Internet and creating the Web. Note that we distinguish between the Net and the Web. The Net is the Internet, a set of protocols like TCP/IP, while the Web is the World Wide Web, technically based on a “universal” identification scheme for finding resources over the Web, although more popularly identified with hypertext and browsers . Note that the Web is generally considered to be an application of the Internet, as there exist many applications such as Telnet and File-Transfer Protocol (FTP) that do not necessarily use the Web.

While many academics were involved in AI were attempting to create an individual in silicon, in Russia there was a veritable rebirth of interest in cybernetics, the universal theory of feedback and control. Unlike AI who insisted on replacing humanity, cyberneticists were primarily interested in using cycles of input and feedback in order to create ever tighter coupling between humanity and machines, but they were discredited by many in logicist AI such as Minsky. Led by Axel Berg, a new generation of soviet cyberneticists came to believe that only through computer-mediated feedback cycles between workers and producers could the Soviet economy go beyond the inherent problems of the command economy of Stalin (Lange, 1967). Also, worrisome to the military, the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, was increasingly against the Cold War and the military funding of science, and became a hero in Russia. In panic to the possibility of losing the “cybernetics” war, as revealed by John Ford's unclassified “Soviet Cybernetics and International Development” report, the U.S. military poured funding into the creation of an American alternative to Soviet cybernetics. In 1962 Licklider of MIT proposed the creation of a “Galactic Network” of machines, and with his obtaining leadership of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), he proceeded to fund this project while the Soviets reverted back to a more centralized comman economy (Barbrook, in preparation).

Before Licklider's idea of the “Galactic Network,” networks were assumed to be static and closed systems. One either communicated with a network or not. However, under the aegis of DARPA far-seeing groups of scientists determined that there could be an “open architecture networking” where a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture” would allow diverse networks to connect to each other, so that “they required that one be used as a component of the other, rather than acting as a peer of the other in offering end-to-end service” (Leiner et. al. 2003). This concept became, foreshadowing later social movements, the “Network of Networks” or the “Internet.” While the Internet architecture provided the motivating concepts, it did not define on the onset a scalable transfer protocol. Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf devised a protocol that took into account, among other, four key factors (Leiner et. al. 2003):

1. Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.

2. Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.

3. Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.

 4. There would be no global control at the operations level.

       The solution to this problem was TCP/IP. Data is subdivided into “packets” that are all treated independently by the network. Any data sent over the Internet is divided into relatively equal size packets by TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which then sends the packets over the network using IP (Internet Protocol). Each computer has an Internet Number, a four byte destination address, such as 152.2.210.122, and IP routes the system through various black-boxes like gateway and routers that do not try to reconstruct the original data from the packet. At the recipient end, TCP collects the incoming packets and then reconstructs the data.

       While the system is decentralized in principle, it is in reality a hybrid network with centralized elements, for the key assignment of IP addresses to individual machines comes from an authority. However, in general the central authority (formerly the volunteer Jon Postel and currently ICANN) is restricted to a fairly minimal amount of control, such as the top-level bytes, while other organizations can assign the lower-level bytes in a decentralized manner. By defining the minimal architecture needed for people to share information in a decentralized fashion and a way of information to be sent through many possible routes, the immaterial aristocrats of the Internet exemplified the perennial architecture of the network: decentralization, redundancy, and possibility.

Immaterial aristocracy: the Internet Engineering Task Force

Although the Internet was started by DARPA as a military research project, it soon spread beyond the rarefied confines of the university. Once news of this “Universal Network” arrived, universities, corporations, and even governments began to “plug-in” voluntarily. The Internet became defined by voluntary adherence to open protocols and procedures defined by Internet standards. However, the co-ordination of such a world-spanning Internet standards soon became a social task that DARPA itself was less and less capable and willing to administer. As more and more nodes joined the Internet, the military-industrial research complex seemed less willing to fund and research it, perhaps realizing that it was slowly spinning out of their control and with the threat of Soviet cybernetics declining. It began with four nodes in 1969, yet by the end of the 1970s was spread across the continents. The Internet Control and Configuration Board (ICCB) was formed in 1979 to administer and control the standards of the Internet, and its first board consisted mainly of scientists and engineers involved in the original Internet development, and the chairman of the ICCB was called “the Internet Architect.” In a development typical of the immaterial aristocracy, the loyalty of these engineers seemed to be more to the Internet itself than anything else, and in 1984 the U.S. Military split its unclassified military network, MILNET, from the Internet. No longer under the aegis purely of DARPA and given a large amount funding by the NSF (U.S. National Science Foundation), the Internet began a political process of self-organization to establish a degree of autonomous digital sovereignty. An Internet Architecture Board was devised to begin oversight in an era of decreasing military and research funding. Many academics and researchers then joined the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG) to develop a long-term vision of the Internet. Perhaps with the academics distracted, creating standards and maintaining the infrastructure fell into the hands of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a group squarely in the hands of the people who had committed the most hard-time and labor to making the Internet: the hackers. Unlike their predecessors, the hackers often did not have postgraduate degrees in computer science, but instead had an intense and lifelong joyous commitment to the idea of a universal computer network.

The organization of the IETF embodied the anarchic spirit of the hackers. It was an ad-hoc and informal body with no board of directors, although it soon began electing the members of the IAB, who soon performed more and more of a symbolic role, and the sovereignty of the Internet moved to the IETF. The IETF credits as their main organizational guiding principle the IETF Credo, attributed to MIT Professor and the first Chair of the IAB David Clark: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” True to its Credo, the IETF operates by a radical absolute democratic process. There are no official or even unofficial membership list, and individuals are not paid to participate. Even if they belong to an organization they must participate as an individual, and only participate voluntarily. Anyone may join, and “joining” is defined only in terms of activity and contribution. Decisions do not have to be ratified by the form of consensus or even majority voting, but in general voting takes only a rough measure of agreement on an idea. IETF members instead prefer to judge an idea by actual implementation (running code), and arguments are decided by the effectiveness of practice rather that ideological debate.

       The structure of the IETF is defined by areas such as “Multimedia” and “Security” and then subdivided into Working Groups on obscure (yet important) subjects such as “atompub” and “smime.” In these Working Groups most of the work of hashing out RFCs takes place. Groups have elected Chairs whose task is to keep the group on topic. People are respected for working for the common good of the Internet, and any work that is suspected of personal or corporate interests is strongly frowned upon. The etiquette is self-effacing, and egoism or cults of personality are also openly discouraged. Even within the always technical yet sometimes partisan debates, there are no formalities, and everyone from professors to teenagers are addressed by their first name. Arguments often feature high levels of stubborn and strenuous intellectual debate, yet a co-operative and practical focus usually leads to arguments being resolved.

       This kind of informal organization is likely to develop informal hierarchies, and these informal hierarchies are regarded as beneficial, since they are composed usually of the brightest and most dedicated who volunteer the most of their time for the Net: “A weekend is when you get up, put on comfortable clothes, and go into work to do your Steering Group work.” If the majority of participants in IETF feel that these informal hierarchies are getting in the way of practical work, then the chairs of Working Groups and other informal bureaucrats are removed by a voting process, as happened once en masse in 1992. The IETF is also mainly a digital organization, as almost all communication is handled by e-mail, although the IETF holds week-long plenary sessions three times a year that attract over a thousand participants, with anyone welcome. Even at these face-to-face gatherings, most of the truly ground-breaking discussions seem to happen in even more informal “Birds of a Feather” discussions that take place over refreshments. The most important product of these list-serv discussions and meetings are IETF RFCs “Request for Comments,” which define Internet standards such as URIs (RFC 1945) and HTTP (RFC 3986). Indeed, the IETF exemplifies cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour, as their labour tends to be part and parcel of their intellectual and recreational lives, and their product is the result of a social process. The social aspect of the IETF is intertwined with the technological aspects, as both the rules of “netiquette” for ordinary users (the Responsible Use of the Network memos) and their own IETF process guidelines, such as “RFC 1603: IETF Working Group Guidelnes and Procedures,” are presented as any other technical standard.

The anarchist on the Internet

An anarchic body such as the IETF by nature attracted technically adept political activists, of who the most celebrated was probably Edinburgh-based anarchist Ian Heavens. Ian Heavens was a singular revolutionary force within the Scottish anarchist movement, and a key organizer of the Scottish Anarchist Federation. He also was well-travelled, and he combined his love of Latin samba and Scots punk to create the hybrid punk samba band “Bloco Vomit.” The band did several tours, even to Brazil, and continually raised money through benefits to keep the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh afloat, a formerly squatted social centre in Edinburgh. The Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh served as the operating base of the Edinburgh Claimants, one the key groups that operated to organize the unemployed for better living conditions, and part of the group “Community Resistance” that sparked the anti-poll tax movement in Britain through its direct action-based tactics.

       Just as he selflessly served the autonomous political movement in Edinburgh, he selflessly devoted his time to the Internet. He participated regularly in the IETF, and became famous for finding “bugs” (errors) in TCP/IP that had not been noticed for years, co-authoring a IETF RFC 2525: “Known TCP Implementation Problems.” He was quickly introduced to e-mail, and began the first digital archive of Internet texts at Spunk.org, still maintained at http://www.spunk.org. He traveled around Britain, explaining to activist groups how to use the then-new Internet, and how the Zapatistas had effectively used the Internet to communicate solidarity with their struggle. Yet in the fall-out of the infamous “Green Anarchist and ALF” case, the tabloid press soon discovered Ian Heavens. They printed an article about him and Spunk.org called “Anarchists use Information Highway for Subversion.” (Adrian, 1995) Besides the outlandish claims linking Spunk.org to groups like Direct Action in France, the article then proceeded to proclaim Ian Heavens the mastermind behind the use of computers by the anarchist movement. While the article noted that Ian “disapproved of violence,” in a case curiously similar to the indictment of Sherman Austin, the article noted his website included files on “how to overthrow the government” by “robbing banks, disabling police vehicles, stealing documents and inciting readers to arm themselves.” Suddenly at the center of a media controversy, Ian was arrested for “encouraging violence by computer” and he nearly lost his job (Adrian, 1995). He was prevented for using the Internet for further anarchist activity, and had to cut off all ties with the IETF. Having the joy of his work, both political and technical, taken from him, and facing mounting media pressure on his family – just before his draft RFC of his famous finding bugs in TCP/IP was about to published – Ian took his own life. The Sunday Times article quotes Simon Hill, editor of Computing magazine “We have been amazed at the level of organization of these extremist groups who have appeared on the Internet in a short amount of time” (Adrian, 1995). Indeed, little did they suspect that the organizational structure of the autonomous movement, due to its strategic and historic focus on decentralization, would within a few short years use the Internet to organize the anti-globalization movements and wreck the neoliberal “free trade” program. Furthermore, little did they suspect that the nature and social organization of the Internet was itself anarchy, and anarchists were some of its main pioneers.

The Universal Information Space: the World Wide Web

Around the time of Ian Heavens’s death, another IETF participant, Tim Berners-Lee was seeing the fruition of his dream of a “universal information space,” which he dubbed the “World Wide Web” (Berners-Lee, 1999). His original proposal brings his belief in universality to the forefront: “We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics and complex extra facilities” (Berners-Lee, 1989). As a software engineering consultant at the nuclear physics plant CERN, Berners-Lee was bedeviled at how to keep the myriad machines and information linked together, and fell back upon his previous idea for an information-organization system for his notes called “Enquire Inside On Everything” that would be “a universal space across which all hypertext links can travel.” (Berners-Lee, 1989). The IETF, perhaps due to its own anarchic nature, had produced a multitude of incompatible protocols. While protocols could each communicate other computers over the Internet, there was no universal format for the various protocols. Tim Berners-Lee had a number of key concepts (Berners-Lee, 1989):

1. Calling any thing that someone might want to communicate over the Internet a “resource.”

2. Each resource could be given a universal resource identifier (URI) that allowed it to identified and perhaps accessed. The word “universal” was used “to emphasize the importance of universality, and of the persistence of information.”

3. The idea of simplifying hypertext as the emergence human-readable format for data over the web, so any document could link to any other document.

       These three principles formed the foundation of the World Wide Web. In the IETF Berners-Lee, along with many compatriots such as Larry Masinter and Roy Fielding, spear-headed development of the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) standard and the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) standard. However, Berners-Lee was frustrated by the IETF, who rejected his idea that any standard could be universal. While Berners-Lee enjoyed the “T-shirts and jeans, and at times no footwear” atmosphere, the process in the IETF slowed to a stop in the URI working group, such that “partly due to the number of endless philosophical rat holes down which technical conversations would disappear. John Kelsin, IETF Applications Area director, was to angrily disband it” (Berners-Lee, 1999). At the time a more hierarchical file-research system known as “Gopher” was hegemonic way of navigating the Internet. In one of the first cases of digital enclosure on the Internet, the University of Michigan decided to charge corporate (but not academic and non-profit) users for the use of Gopher, and immediately the system became a digital pariah on the Net. Berners-Lee, seeing an opening for the World Wide Web, surrendered to the IETF and renamed URIs “Uniform Resource Locators.” Crucially, he got CERN to release any intellectual property rights they had to the Web, and he also managed to create running code for his standard in the form of the first Web browser.

       Despite the previous narrative, it would be a mistake to hold Berners-Lee up on a pedestal as the creator the Web. While some of the original insights such as “universality” are his, the Web was created by a genuine social movement of hackers. Berners-Lee, Fielding, and the others served primarily as untiring activists of the Web, convincing talented hackers to spend their time creating Web servers and Web browsers, as well as navigating the political and social process of creating Web standards. The Web still primarily remained in the hands of hackers until a grad student at Illinois called Marc Anderssen created the Mosaic Browser. In the words of Terry Winograd, an AI researcher whose students went on to found Google, “I was surprised at how totally different the feeling was. It was immediately obvious that the introduction of graphics with text would make a big difference and that it was a new phenomenon” (Winograd, 2003). Within a year the Web had spread over the world, making Anderssen’s company Netscape a fortune. In what would perhaps be another historical irony, years before the idea of a universal political space was analyzed by Hardt and Negri as “Empire,” a universal technology space was both articulated created by the hackers (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The idea of “universality” runs deep in the Web: it is precisely this technological universal space that set into motion the feedback cycles that led to the emergence of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

A crisis in digital sovereignty: the browser wars

Within a blink of the eye, the immaterial aristocracy of the IETF lost control of the Web in the first crisis of digital sovereignty of the Internet and Web. Previously the Internet was considered useful for global communications, but the Internet qua Internet was not viewed as a place where capital could extract value. With the development of the Web as the hegemonic form of the Internet, the Web stopped being viewed as a playground of hackers and was viewed instead as the latest frontier of capital, an even infinite one. It would be the backbone that the “knowledge economy” of Bell, that promised never-ending returns of productivity, would be built (1973). The Web’s the rate of adoption skyrocketed, for soon all the major corporations had a website. The corporations sent their representatives to the IETF in an attempt to discover who the power-brokers of the Internet were (and to stack their meetings in order to control voting process), but instead found themselves immersed in obscure technical conversations and mystified by the lack of formal body of which to seize control. So, instead of taking over the IETF, the corporations began ignoring the IETF.

       The corporations did this by violating standards in order to gain market adoption through “new” features. The battle for market dominance between the two largest opponents, Microsoft and the upstart Netscape, was based on an arms-race of features supposedly for the users of the Web. These “new features” in reality soon led to a “lock-in” of the Web where certain sites could only be viewed by one particular corporate browser. This began to fracture the rapidly growing Web into incompatible corporate fiefdoms, building upon the work but destroying the vision and sovereignty of the IETF. Furthermore, the entire idea of the Web as an open area of communication began to be challenged, albeit unsuccessfully, by the Microsoft’s concept of “push content” and channels, which in effect attempted to replicate the earlier hierarchical and one-way model of communication of the television on the Internet. Seemingly fulfilling, Bell’s dreams of an endless upward economy and other various neoliberal end-of-history fantasies, capitalist speculation on Web-based companies entered unheard of and supposedly never-ending heights (Bell, 1973).

       Indeed, it seemed as if the corporate industries had discovered a solution to their labour problem that they had unsuccessfully attempted to solve earlier via artificial intelligence. By using the Internet as the backbone of their global communications system, the corporations could monitor and control with ever-increasing precision their labour anywhere in the world, as opposed to earlier where control of productive processes was directly tied to spatial boundaries. This led to an increase in labour outsourcing and attendant neo-liberalization as they hounded the world in search of ever cheaper labour. Yet it also led to an ever-increasing antagonism, an antagonism that realized itself through its use of the Internet to globally network the dispossessed, and led to the misnamed “anti-globalization” movement that challenged and eventually helped eventually bring neoliberalism to its knees at Seattle and beyond. Yet as Microsoft triumphantly battered Netscape to a shallow shell of its former self, the frenzied over-speculation led the “dot com” bubble, which exploded into a crisis as many highy speculated companies failed to make a profit. The new corporate immaterial aristocrats fell considerably in power, and soon (as in MSNBC and AOL-TimeWarner) merged with older, more established television-age aristocrats.

Re-establishing digital sovereignty: the World Wide Web Consortium

Behind the scenes, the creators of the Web were horrified by the fractures the corporate browser wars had caused in their universal information space. In particular, Tim Berners-Lee felt like his original dream of a universal information space had been betrayed by corporations trying to create their own mutually incompatible fiefdoms on the Web for profit. He correctly realized it was in the long-term interests of both the corporations and the users of the Web to have a new form of digital sovereignty. With the unique informal position of merit Berners-Lee had as the “inventor of the Web” (although he admits freely and humbly the invention of the Web was a collective endeavor), he decided to reconstitute digital sovereignty in the form of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a non-profit dedicated to “leading the Web to it’s full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web” (W3C, 2006). Because the corporations had ignored the IETF since they found its informal process far too slow and impenetrable, Berners-Lee moved from the absolute democracy of the IETF to a model based on representative democracy that the major corporations would understand and join, allowing the Web to harness the power of the corporations while preserving its universality. With the rapid growth of the Web, Berners-Lee believed that an absolute democracy based on informal principles could not react quickly enough to the desires of users and prevent corporations from fracturing universality for short-term gain. Instead of the IETF, that would only standardize protocols that were already widely used, the W3C would take a proactive stance to deploy standardized universal formats before various corporations or other forces could deploy them. Berners-Lee was made Director for life of the W3C, which was based originally at MIT (although now it maintains headquarters of equal standing at INRIA in France and Kyoto in Japan).

       In the W3C, “membership was open to any organization: commercial, educational, or governmental, whether for-profit or not for profit.” Unlike the IETF, membership came at a price. It would cost fifty thousand dollars for corporations with revenue in excess of fifty million, and five thousand dollars for smaller corporations and non-profits. It was organized as a strict representative democracy, with each member organization sending one member to the Advisory Committee that oversaw the whole Web. By opening up a “vendor neutral” space, companies who previously were “ interested primarily in advancing the technology for their own benefit” could be brought to the table. When the formation of the W3C was announced, rather shockingly both Microsoft and Netscape agreed to join, and as a point of pride Netscape even paid the full fifty thousand dollar fee even though they weren't required. Having the two parties most responsible for fracturing the Web at the table provided the crucial breakthrough for the W3C. This allowed them to begin standardization of HTML in a vendor-neutral format that would allow web pages to be viewed in any standards-compliant browser. While the IETF still released its RFCs as ordinary ASCII text files, the more cutting-edge W3C released their specifications as well-formatted web-pages with color graphics. It soon became a matter of pride for companies to join the W3C and make sure their people had positions on W3C Working Groups. Berners-Lee’s cunning strategy to envelop the corporations within the digital sovereignty of the W3C worked: “The competitive nature of the group would drive the developments, and always bring everyone to the table for the next issue. Yet members also knew that collaboration was the most efficient way for everyone to grab a share of a rapidly growing pie” (Berners-Lee, 1999). Based in a humble hacker ethos, the original universal vision of the Web was inscribed into W3C mission statement: To expand the reach of the Web to “everyone, everything, everywhere” (W3C, 2006).

       Despite corporate backing, a W3C without the hackers would be doomed. It is a truism in Web circles that truly innovative products, technologies, or standards have always been the product of committed hackers who “do for love what others would not do for money” in the pursuit of better technology. The open and informal process of the IETF encouraged the digital sovereignty of hackers at the expense of the corporations, but the W3C had to negotiate between both corporate and hacker interests for the greater benefit of the Web. If the W3C only managed to produce second-rate specifications that thinly disguised corporate interests at the expense of the users of the Web and alienated hackers, what digital sovereignty that was mythologically embodied in the persona of Berners-Lee would be lost quickly. However, based on the funds gathered from its corporate clients, unlike the IETF “the W3C would have a small full-time staff to help design and develop the code when necessary” (Berners-Lee, 1999). This in turn allowed Tim Berners-Lee to hire as staff many of the brightest and best hackers. The low fees allowed many hackers based in corporations or who ran their own small businesses to join. Furthermore, every working group that was deciding on a standard had a “Invited Expert,” a position usually given to prominent hacker. To those hackers unable to find otherwise participate, most of the list-servs were open (including the most important procedural ones, in order to ensure that the organization remained transparent), and each standard went through extensive process of open review and comments. In this manner, if anyone from a well-known web architect to a completely unknown person objected to any decision, this objection would be made public and the W3C would be accountable. In this manner the W3C gained the trust of the hackers. The W3C could then both take advantage of the measureless immaterial productivity of the hackers while also harnessing the material prosperity and obedience of the corporations, who needed the hackers to be the motor of innovation behind the wheels of the digital industry.

       After the standardization of HTML, the next great triumph of the W3C was without a doubt the invention of XML (Extended Markup Language), a simplified version of the grandfather of HTML known as SGML, that could serve as a universal data syntax for transferring almost any kind of data around the Web. It was originally designed to help separate content from style, but soon became used as a general purpose data-format, a sort of ASCII for the Web. Combining both a hacker’s instincts for simplicity and usability with widespread corporate adoption, it soon overtook the Web, powering everything from RSS (letting web-sites keep each other aware of their updated content) to the merging of the myriad corporate and government databases. This led to a whole cottage industry of XML-based technologies, some of which never took off, while others became de facto industry standards. Indeed, no small part of the W3C's success could be due to marketing genius, for the Extensible Markup Language's acronym is, after all, XML instead of EML.

From Heidegger to search engines

In Silicon Valley, a distinctly different story was taking place. Terry Winograd had been a student to Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence at Dartmouth. Perhaps under the influence of subversive currents prevalent on the West Coast, he did two unthinkable things. First, in an act of absolute refusal that would normally destroy one’s career, he refused to take any military funding whatsoever and helped found the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to organize against the militarism rampant in academic computer science. Second, after a series of conversations with Hubert Dreyfus, he began reading Heidegger and was one of the first AI insiders to realize that the transcendental programme to create a disembodied classical AI was a failure. Instead, Winograd championed the sense of immanent “being in the world” and decided to try to build AI based on principles of human-centred hermeneutics, as opposed to transcendental analytic philosophy.

       Meanwhile, in Chile under the socialist government of Allende, the work of radical biologist Maturana help continue a revival of cybernetics theory, discredited by artificial intelligence in the United States. Instead of trying to formalize knowledge using logic and representations, Maturana instead tried to describe self-sustaining networks through his concept of “autopoiesis.” Autopoiesis is defined as “an autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them” (Maturana and Varela, 1973). This concept of “autopoiesis” is also a remarkably apt description of the Internet. This profusion of these ideas in Chile led Allende and a young systems theorist Ferndando Flores to bring over the social cyberneticist Stafford Beer. The job of Beer's company, with the aid of Flores and his team, was to deploy a real-time computer network called Cybersyn to control the entire Chilean economy. Twenty years ahead of its time, Cybersyn allowed every factory to be in constant contact with each other via telex in order to co-ordinate production. Cybersyn straddled the tension between a centralized command economy and, as Allende himself put it, a “decentralizing, worker-participative, and anti-bureaucratic network that allowed each worker to communicate to others” (Medina, 2005). Foreshadowing the eventual cybernetic nature of immaterial labour, Cybersyn's ideal was to allow a worker “to contribute both physically and mentally to the production process” (Medina, 2005). The network proved its mettle early, for its protocol Cybernet proved invaluable in co-ordinating supply trucks, giving a crucial advantage to the Allende government its its battle against the 1972 counter-revolutionary strikes, and afterwards Flores was promoted to head of the economy. Cybersyn was never completed due to Pinochet’s coup, and the military “found the open, egalitarian aspects of the system unattractive” (Beckett, 2003). Cybersyn was utterly destroyed just as the Internet in the United States was taking off.

       Flores was thrown in jail by Pinochet for three years, yet managed with the help of Amnesty International to escape to Palo Alto. There Flores met the disillusioned Terry Winograd, whose project of re-founding AI upon hermeneutics never truly took off. The two began to re-envision the purpose of artificial intelligence. Instead of trying to create an independent silicon intelligence, they wanted computer scientists to focus on what type of design that would complement human abilities. They explored these questions of allowing humans and computers to interact in a mutually beneficial and hybrid (some would say “cyborg”) manner and wrote a book “Understanding Computers and Cognition” explaining their new ideas (Winograd and Flores,1986). While Flores went off to become a business consultant, Winograd continued teaching classes on Heidegger and human-computer interaction. One of his students Larry Page had the idea that the Web as not only a space of information, but a social space, and this could be the key to an effective search engine. Indeed, one giant blind-spot of the original Web was that there was no index and so no way to search its content. Under the influence of Winograd, Larry Page and his partner Sergey Brin had an epiphany about the nature of the Web: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value” (Page et. al.,1999). By realizing the social nature of information is inscribed in the technical apparatus of the Web itself, and so one could rank pages by relevance by looking at not only the terms contained in the page, but how many other pages linked to them. Brin and Page founded a company, Google, based on this idea and followed rules of human-centered design, such as keeping their search engine homepage uncluttered with advertisements in order to keep users happy and to have the page load quickly (which led it not being valid W3C HTML, much to the consternation of the W3C). The company took off, and within a few short years it had virtually conquered the search engine market, making itself into a digital sovereign force on a scope never before seen. Rumor has it that internally Google's motto is “Google is the Web.” No other search engine has ever achieved such hegemony over the Web.

The Semantic Web and the hegemony of Google

The W3C’s latest project is the Semantic Web, to transform the current Web into a “web of meaning” whose meaning would be accessible both to humans and machines (Berners-Lee, 2001). Berners-Lee has always had as part of his vision that URIs should not only be given to people, but to anything, including “dogs and cars.” (Jacobs and Walsh, 2004). The Web should extend its universal information space from web-pages into reality itself. Berners-Lee calls this “The Semantic Web,” a term first-used by Foucault when referring to the “semantic web of resemblances” in his “Les Mots et Les Choses” (Foucault, 1966). The Semantic Web lets one create new and richer types of links between URIs, and use this format to give data on the Web a “well-defined meaning” in order for it to be “understandable by machines” (Berners-Lee, 2001). In other words, these new “links” should have a mapping to formal logic, that would allow machine agents to combine and reason about them automatically. This goal is curiously similar to the spirit of classical artificial intelligence, and it is no surprise that many of the key movers on the Semantic Web are members of the artificial intelligentsia, such as McCarthy’s cohort Pat Hayes or the ex-chief lieutenant of Cyc, R.V. Guha. Unlike previous attempts at knowledge representation, the Semantic Web would be a universal yet decentralized system: “The problem with knowledge representation is that theses systems are designed around a central database ... the Web , in contrast, does not try to define a whole system, just one Web page at any one time” (Berners-Lee, 1999). Stepping down from his usual role as neutral director, Berners-Lee and the W3C are aggressively pursuing this vision of the Semantic Web as a ultimate universal space for all data, bound together by formal logical languages and navigated by intelligent agents. Due to this endeavour by the W3C, the field of artificial intelligence is experiencing a full-scale revival.

In stark contrast, Google scoffs at the Semantic Web vision. Yet the ride has not always been smooth for Google. As news leaked about is Pagerank algorithm and “link farms” began abusing it, rumor has it that Google has stopped using its PageRanking algorithm. Instead of letting the user describe their own data like the Semantic Web, Google needs the content of the data itself, and uses massive machine-learning algorithms to discover the relevancy of pages to searches. This increasingly requires using complex techniques from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics to inspect the content of the data itself. However, their gambit on focusing on “the content” seems to be working, as Google manages confidentially to hold on to an increasingly precarious position as the hegemonic search engine on the Web – although their position may have just as much to do with advertising as the quality of their search engine. This precarious corporate position is causing Google to restrict open flows of information from within its company to the outside world. Fighting on decidedly corporate turf, Google closely guards as a secret the details of the successor to the Pageranking algorithm, and even mere visitors to one of the many Google compounds now have to sign a non-disclosure form to never mention to anyone what they have seen there.

       Even more mysterious plans are afoot as Google buys endless miles of “dark fiber” in the United States, perhaps to shortcut the telecommunications giants that control current broadband services. Google has proposed to blanket San Francisco in free wireless, and many speculate that the world may by their goal, so that Google would de facto become the entire Internet (Hanson,2005). Google once prided itself on being just a search engine, it is now offering its users more and more services from mail to calendars, and is even outrightly buying small companies ran by hackers like Writely in an attempt to outmaneuver Microsoft in the office productivity sector. Despite its much lauded hacker (and not-so-covertly anti-Microsoft) “Do No Evil” slogan and its defense of its search logs from the encroaches of the U.S. Government, Google has co-operated with the Chinese government in restricting access to the Web on forbidden terms like “democracy” and there is no doubt now that its bottom line, despite all the marketing, is profit (Ghitis, 2006).

       A crisis in sovereignty for the Web is on the horizon: Google is the exemplar of the search engine without which the Web would be unusable, and the W3C is the alliance of industry and hackers that keep the Web from being monopolized by a single party. Yet Google is increasingly keeping data on search queries, e-mails, and all other aspects of its users, and so has the ability on a scale hitherto unimagined even by governments to monitor and discover information about people. This “data-mining” will likely be for profit and varied forms of soft control. On the other pole of digital sovereignty, the W3C is increasingly fanatically devoted to the Semantic Web vision, and is banking its credibility on the success of a vision with a remarkable resemblance to the failure of classical artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and other companies are now preparing for the second battle for the Web against the hegemony of Google, and it is unclear if the W3C can maintain its digital sovereignty so that the Web will survive as a truly universal information space.

Following Google’s business model, a host of smaller “Web 2.0” companies unaffiliated with either Google or the W3C have arisen under the slogan of “social software.” These small companies offer some sort of free service to their users (such as the free photo or bookmark sharing). In return, the users are subjected to advertising. These companies allow users to organize their data not through a Semantic Web hierarchy but through a flat ontology of natural language key words, or “tags,” and then offer this tags and data to other users of their service as a valuable benefit. The Web 2.0 ideology is “to let your users build your content for you” – for free. These companies then can through contextual advertising make money from the immaterial labour of their users. What most of their users don’t understand is that their data is “locked-in” to their particular Web 2.0 service company much as web-pages were previously “locked-in” to browsers. With access to their user’s photos, e-mail, bookmarks, and so on, one could only imagine what these Web 2.0 companies could do in the pursuit of further profit with personal data. The precedents are already happening. The Web 2.0 company del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo, and Yahoo in turn recently gave the Chinese government digital information vital to imprisoning the journalist Shi Tao (Kerstetter, 2005). Who knows the Chinese government would do with Shi Tao's bookmarks? Yet as many of the hackers join these Web 2.0 companies in an attempt to make living, one can see a new non-Google and non-W3C pole of digital sovereignty in formation.

Digital civil war: the ICANN affair and beyond

Furthermore, what is surprising about digital sovereignty is that these immaterial aristocrats, while often funded by traditional governmental bodies or large corporations, tend to operate almost completely autonomously from any governmental or corporate oversight in the style of traditional hackers. In fact, when faced with complying with bureaucracy they consider useless or rules that they consider to “close down” access to information, many of the immaterial aristocracy would rather go on to found their own corporations that respected the “hacker” ethos. This “Do No Evil” mindset was the narrative spun by Google at its onset. Still, these halcyon days of the hackers are increasingly over, with governmental and corporate forces preparing to fully take over or destroy the Internet. This is not alarmist, as recent reports from the White House have confirmed their desire for “maximum control of the electromagnetic spectrum, denying, degrading, disrupting or destroying the full spectrum of communications equipment” – in other words, their ability to “fight the Net” (MacKay, 2006).

It is always easier to control rather than to destroy. On a practical level, the United States Department of Commerce owns the assignment of IP numbers to machines. This is the crucial naming mechanism that underlies the functioning of TCP/IP. While for years it was controlled due to government neglect by hackers, it is now leased to the private corporation ICANN ( Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The control of IP addresses and domain names is the most centralized aspect of the otherwise decentralized Internet and Web. Formerly, this most sensitive of tasks was headed at first on a voluntary role for the good of the Internet by well-respected IETF participant Jon Postel. After his death, the service was privatized to the non-profit corporation ICANN by the United States Department of Commerce (Courtney and Kapur, 2002).

Many members of the Web community decry ICANN as undemocratic and state that it bears no sense of no responsibility for the Internet. Worryingly to conspiracy theorists interested in Google, ICANN also has as its chief board of trustees Vint Cerf, founding father of the Internet that now works at Google. It holds supposedly “public” meetings in locations such as Accra, Ghana. At the meeting in Ghana, ICANN historically decided to reduce public participation in its process. Behind closed doors, most of the Internet community smells corruption, and this came to light when ICANN sold the .com registry (the files containing all the .com domain resolutions) to the for-profit Verisign corporation, who then hiked the price up for buying .com domains. Verisign even overstepped its bounds by letting mistyped domain names go to a page full of Verisign advertisements, breaking a crucial component of the architecture of the Web. Only under considerable public pressure did ICANN force Verisign to stop. Berners-Lee has always been forthcoming that he would prefer domain names (and likely IP addresses) to be given to a legal body (Berners-Lee, 1999). His wish could come true, since with the advent of the Verisign crisis the United Nations stepped with an ominous rumbling that it could take over the capabilities of ICANN (McCullagh, 2004). Indeed, much of the world now sees the United States as unfairly dominating ICANN and Internet infrastructure in general.

The digital sovereignty of the W3C is its alliance between hackers and the corporations, but it now will soon be challenged by nation-states, in particular the United States. The United States Congress is at the time of this writing passing the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006” backed by the telecommunications industry giants to create a multi-tiered Internet in order to save the obsolete industry model of cable and telephony from being superceded by video and voice over the Internet (Grebb, 2006). Although it is unclear what the final result would be – and would violate one of the founding principles of the Internet, that of “net neutrality” – that every computer on the Internet would not discriminate against data from any other computer. If net neutrality is discarded, this could lead large phone corporations like AT&T to charge web site owners for giving them website bandwidth. In a worse case scenario, corporate web-sites would download faster, and the Internet itself could devolve into corporate fiefdoms with no room for revenge. With a multi-tiered Internet, independent media sites or non-corporate bloggers would be be intolerably slow, while the news of MSNBC or AOL-TimeWarner would download almost instantly. The independent decentralized nature of the Web would be choked to death, and this prospect has outraged everyone from Google to Berners-Lee. With such privatization in the works, combined with ominous war games to shut down the Internet being played by the neoconservatives, the world has a right to be afraid of United States control over any part of key Internet infrastructure. Yet it is in the long-term interest of capital to keep some form of “net neutrality,” for privatizing the very infrastructure of the Internet would destroy the framework they need to maintain productivity, as “the privatization of the electronic `commons' has become an obstacle to further innovation. When communication is the basis of production, then privatization immediately hinders creativity and productivity” (Hardt and Negri, 2004).

The United Nations is becoming increasingly strident in its demands to hand-over key Internet infrastructure over to itself, as being planned by its forums such as the Global Forum for Internet Governance and the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) (McCullagh, 2005). While on the surface viewed by some as an improvement over the current situation, the United Nations are hopelessly vague as regards their actual plans and possibly equally as dangerous to the Net as the United States. In one of the first mass mobilizations related to digital sovereignty, in 2003 an alliance of Internet activists and “anti-globalization” democracy activists gathered against the WSIS in Geneva. Their base of operations, the Polymedia lab that exemplified horizontal and open communications, shut down by riot police (Brennan, 2003). The next phase in WSIS happened in Tunisia, a country with an autocratic ban on freedom of expression. The W3C seems sympathetic to the United Nations, with Tim Berners-Lee and Kofi Annan sending out a joint e-mail to students encouraging them to use the Web to “share enough understanding planet-wide to bring peace.” Caught in between a corporate influences to divide the Internet and plans by the inter-governmental structures to take over infrastructure, the immaterial aristocracy of the Web is in crisis and it unclear how digital sovereignty will re-constitute itself. As the Web has proved to be a common good for much of humanity, this could be a little-known yet truly historic crisis.

The end(s) of the Net

Let us now return to our cosmic exile who is contemplated the silent – and not so silent – language of the Internet. Taking stock of our inquiry, we have discovered the human history of the Internet and the Web, and so can cast aside the mystification surrounding the appearance of the knowledge economy. What should be clear is no one person, government, or body can claim ownership over the Internet. In popular mythology, Al Gore “invented” the “information super-highway,” but one suspects he may just be copying a line from his high-way building father.. Likewise, Berners-Lee perpetually notes that while the particular combination of some ideas were his, the actual creation of the Web was a “giant grassroots and collective effort” (Berners-Lee, 1999). The Internet and Web were built on the creative and fertile hybrid of government-subsidized research, the corporate drive for profit, and the humble joy of thousands of nameless hackers. We have traced the formation of these interests as the immaterial aristocracy who constitute the governing bodies of the Internet and Web. We have traced the path of these aristocracy through the absolute democracy of the IETF, the crisis of capitalist subsumption of the Internet architecture known as the browser wars, and the reconstitution of digital sovereignty in the form of the representative democracy of the W3C, a body that hybridized both corporate and hacker interests. Yet our cosmic exile would not be satisfied with a mere historical response: the real question is not from whence and where, but why?

What is the destiny, of the Web? Does this latest phase of the “wandering of humanity” even have a teleological purpose (Camatte, 1975)? Or is it just, as the quintessential hacker would believe, technology for technology’s sake? This is certain: the Web – by creating a universal and immanent smooth plane for flows of knowledge, creates ever more capitalist productivity. The dream of artificial intelligence is just this notion taken to its infinite limit: the replacement of all human labor by machines. Yet this goal of AI, the robot-worker, it has been a failure. However, this vision could mean the complete symbiosis of the worker and capital, or in other words – of the human and the machine: the cyborg worker as opposed to the robot worker. The cyborg worker – and the cyborg consumer, the only side of the coin – are the dominant paradigm of the Web. The real trick of capital in the age of globalization is simple: Robots are expensive, human labor is globally is cheap. So, ironically, the Web is both the world's largest encyclopedia and the enabler of hitherto unimagined global sweatshops, a historic phenomena never before possible except with the cybernetic co-ordination of the Internet So the Web is the great enabler of immaterial labour, yet it also is the great co-ordinator of material labour. The real costs of immaterial labour are still grounded in material labour, and material labour is a transformative process: the transformation of living labour and natural resources into capital.

So the greatest blind spot of autonomist currents recently has been their neglect of this concept of “natural resources,” a stark contrast to the nearly infinite universal resources of information given by the Web. For the hidden cost of the capital’s externalities have begun their untimely return. The natural resources of the planet have been proved by science to be finite, and faced with the infinite expansion of capital, the infrastructure of life itself is under threat, as witnessed by threat of peak oil and climate exchange. Indeed, climate change may ultimately destroy the human species itself, cutting down our wandering and rendering capitalism a millennial experiment gone wrong. The growth of the Web is itself grounded in material production: there are few processes more resource-intensive than the creation of computer chips. Is the purpose of the Web to further the development of unrestrained capital, who despite the turn to immaterial labour, will lead the human species and life itself to extinction? Are the digital sovereigns presiding over a suicide?

In one of his later essays, Lyotard develops an ingenious argument that even our cosmic exile would understand: “It isn’t any human desire to know or transform reality that propels this techno-science, but cosmic circumstance” (Lyotard, 1991). The cosmic circumstance that Lyotard is referring to the coming “solar explosion” of our sun, and its attendant destruction of the planet. Therefore, for true survival of the species and the continuation of thought itself, the entire project of humanity – including postmodern capitalism – must be to find a way to survive this coming “pure disaster” (Lyotard, 1991). Indeed, if one buys this hypothesis that perhaps even on some unconscious level the goals of capital are the survival of thought beyond the solar collapse, then “theoretically the solution is very simple: manufacture hardware capable of ‘nurturing’ software at least as complex (or replex) as the present human brain, but in non-terrestrial conditions” (Lyotard, 1991). The gambit of artificial intelligence seems obscene to the contemporary capitalist: Why bother with artificially intelligent robots if humans are cheap, especially given the destruction of Keynesianism and the advent of neoliberal globalization? If one suspends one's disbelief in Lyotard's thesis, the gambit of artificial intelligence makes perfect sense if we are to wish for true immortality beyond the solar collapse, and all thought of profit is indeed instrumental to this goal. In fact, the gambit of artificial intelligence is the true end of capitalism.

Is this technological eschatology necessary, or just the parting cosmic joke of Lyotard? It seems increasingly serious, as both the prominent digital sovereigns of the Web, Google and the W3C, seem increasingly to be turning their energies to artificial intelligence. More and more artificial intelligence researchers are disappearing behind the gates of Google and as the W3C grows increasingly evangelical in his quest for the Semantic Web, the dichotomy between the failure of artificial intelligence and the Web was false. Instead, the Web may be the midwife of the artificial intelligence capable of surviving the solar death, permanently displacing the human subject with its inhuman power.

Lenin in Silicon Valley

Despite the certainty of solar death in the distant future, there are more pressing matters. For to create artificial intelligence, the world will need at least decades more time, if not a millennium. This would be if the prospect for genuine artificial intelligence was philosophically sound (which Dreyfus and others have convincingly argued that it is not). As for artificial intelligence, there is no time. The ecological crisis being provoked by capitalism may end life on this planet far sooner than any solar death. The question of the hour is “What can be done?” The answer is straightforward. Capitalism based on infinite growth must be ended, and a new form of economic organization more amendable to the finite bounds of human life must take hold. Bolter argued the computer age could bring us some respite from the infinite accumulation of capital, “Perhaps the most revolutionary change of all is that the computer man thinks of his world, intellectual and physical, as finite”(Bolter, 1984). Bolter was thinking of the first resource-scarce computers. In contrast the Web seems to provide infinite computing power and knowledge, and so it is doubtful if Bolter's hypothesis still holds. More important than the merely finite resources of the technology is the realization of the infinite creative biopower that has only started be realized by the Web. As Hardt has noted in one of his lectures, technological and social forms accompany and reinforce each other, so just as the factory brought about and sustained the mass worker, the Web has brought about and sustained the multitude.

The realization of the multitude could be an alternative telos to the Web. This is coming none-too-soon, for the creative powers of the multitude will have to be up to task of solving the increasingly profound ecological crisis. This perspective leads us to see the Web not as the handmaiden of AI and the precursor to the death of humanity, but as humanity’s last best hope in face of the ever-mounting crisis. As has been pointed out by Gorz and numerous others, in Marx’s original formulation the ecological crisis has been left out of the analysis (Gorz, 1979). Exempt in a few scattered and heavily interpreted references, so has the advent of information technologies such as the Web. Both the advent of information technology and the looming ecological crisis are the two crucial new variables that will have to be taken into account in any analysis of the present, and both variables are conspicuously absent in traditional readings of both capitalism and Marx.

Instead of staring into the face of the inhuman, with our brief inquiry complete we can look into the human face of the Web. The patron saint of Silicon Valley, Teilhard de Chardin would have proclaimed that the Web is the latest material realization of the noosphere. “The idea,” de Chardin writes, “is that of the Earth not only covered by myriads of grains of thought, but enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale ... no one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively” (de Chardin, 1959). In fact, in one apocryphal story, it is de Chardin who inspired Robert Noyce to invent the integrated circuit, which currently powers all modern computers. In another idealistic quote, Berners-Lee reflects on how human society serves as the metaphor for the Web, since “the reason we need universality is that’s how people operate in the real world. If the World Wide Web is to represent and support the web of life, it has to enable us to operate in different ways with different groups of different sizes and scopes at different places every day” (Berners-Lee, 1999). The Web should not be viewed as inhuman, but as part and parcel of our evolution and our society.

One critique of the multitude is that its proponents have no concrete plan for bringing it from the plane of the virtual to the actual. While the analysis is ground-breaking, strategically we are left with little except utopian (or not-so-utopian demands) for global citizenship and guaranteed basic income. We hope that our inquiry into the history of the Web can help us recognize another way forward, to fight for and preserve the technological infrastructure that enables the social form of the multitude. For the creation of this infrastructure was not written in the stars, but the collective work of committed individuals. It could have easily turned out other-wise. One can hear the echo of Mario Tronti, “Then perhaps we would discover that 'organizational miracles' are always happening, and have always been happening” (Tronti,1964). So it is not true that we have no model for the multitude. The technical infrastructure of the Web itself is a model for the multitude: “The Internet is ... the prime example of this democratic network structure. An indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes communicate with no central point of control, all nodes regardless of territorial location connect to all others through a myriad of potential paths and relays” (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

The problem is not that “the hardest point is the transition to organization” for the multitude (Tronti, 1964).The problem of the hour is the struggle to keep the rhizomatic “non-hierarchical and non-centered network structure” of the Web open, universal, and free (Hardt and Negri, 2000). There is no Lenin in Silicon Valley, plotting the political programme of the network revolution. The beauty of the Web is that it makes the very idea of Lenin obsolete. Instead of modelling themselves on oligarchs and vanguards, revolutionaries of today should be genuine situationists, realizing that no political programme can bring about the revolution. The situationist realizes that only the creation of revolutionary situations where the people can transform into the multitude by realizing their own strength and creating connections of communication and action . These situations are not just created by street carnivals and struggles over precarious labour, these situations can be created through technical infrastructure. In fact, the defining situation of the multitude, a universal antagonist for Empire, is reflected in the universal information space of the Web.

Lastly, the truth of the matter is that the immaterial aristocrats are not the motor of the Web, although their ideas have helped create its infrastructure. The true motor of the Web is none other than immaterial labour itself, the collective desires of humanity. What gives the digital sovereigns power is precisely their ability to fulfill and desires and needs of “users” – humanity at large – and the desire of the potential multitude for ever more universal communication and commonality. For example, the immense desire of the most technically inept child to hear new music, to communicate to others, to stay “in touch” with their loved ones – and to do all of these things for free – is in of itself revolutionary. These desires for better technology are not the private domain of the immaterial aristocrats, but the common desire of humanity. Only by creating the technical means to fulfill these desires, while negotiating with the various imperial entities, do the immaterial aristocrats maintain their sovereignty. The sharing of music is a common good, and yet the former ruling musical aristocracy, the recording industry, wish to defeat this at all costs. Those aristocrats like Jobs who can negotiate the power of the recording industry to provide the multitudes with the ability to copy and play music cheaply and digitally are those that will receive power. To resist the desires of the multitudes on the Web is like trying to swim against the tide. Let us not put the horse before the cart: it is the potential of the multitude that drives the immaterial aristocrats, and those that acknowledge and understand that are those who maintain their sovereignty.

The close relationship between the Web and the multitude has tactical bearing upon future: At all costs the Web must preserve its universal nature in order to further bring about the creation of the multitude. If there is truly inherent revolutionary potential – not always realized – in the network structure of the Web, then it must be defended against all odds by potential destruction. In this case, while the immaterial aristocracy of the IETF and the W3C are doubtless part of the imperial regime, both organizations are primarily motivated by the joy of the creating and maintaining technical network, and are heavily committed to keeping the network universal. By realizing this, proponents of universal absolute democracy should join common cause with these organizations to help defend them against the onslaught of corruption (ICANN), corporate hegemony (Google), and the imperial designs of governments (WSIS, the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006” in the United States). Since these immaterial aristocracies operate in a democratic fashion, even an absolutely democratic fashion in the case of the IETF, all it takes – in the spirit of Ian Heavens – is time and commitments from revolutionaries to help resolve the latest round of crisis in digital sovereignty. The most straight-forward path is to begin to interact with the immaterial aristocracy, such as by attending an IETF gathering or joining a W3C list, and also to build alternative sources of digital sovereignty such as through exploration of peer-to-peer software, or the creation of alternative forums such as the World Summit for a Free Information Infrastructure. This brief inquiry into digital sovereignty may help this most practical of affairs. We are approaching a cross-roads, and nothing less than action is required. Nothing more than the future itself may be at stake.

Dedication:

This paper is dedicated to Push Singh, former AI researcher at MIT and one of the kindest and gentlest souls I have ever known. Push wished to pursue the task of classical artificial intelligence: to create the intelligence of an individual human being fully in silicon. Unlike previous researchers, he began modeling “common-sense,” and hoped to build emotions and social behavior in these simulated agents. Yet, did they ever provide him anything except a cold and mechanical embrace? What future did he discern in these simulations? Did he come to the understanding that computers are not humans themselves, and their silicon intelligence is in-of-itself inhuman? I remember arguing with him in Marvin Minsky’s living room, defending my thesis that computers are not replacements for humans, but computer are complementary to humans. Did he discover humanity in his machines, or did he surrender to the inscrutable difference that separated him from his silicon creation? We shall never know, for he took his own life for reasons that can only haunt our imaginations.

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