Policy is theft: The state of global Internet policy in an age of revolutions

Abstract

Men must learn now with pity to dispense; For policy sits above conscience. (Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, III.ii.91-3). tech corporations and platforms, which see the global internet as a private market; state legislatures and regulatory systems, which advance national and sectional interests; consumer rights, where ‘consumer’ means individual shoppers, not creative citizens or classes acting at global scale. There is a limit to what piecemeal reform of existing arrangements can achieve. That limit is reached when global challenges confront both the living planet (the biosphere) and humanity (as a species). The current horizons of policy are set by administrative, not constitutional parameters. As important as the reality and quantity of suffering were the ways in which this era saw and tabulated social dysfunction. The ‘Social Question’ that preoccupied mid-nineteenth-century Europeans was a constellation of real-world problems, but it was also a way of seeing. (Clark, 2023, p. 15) ‘Ways of seeing’ are not simply empirical descriptions of existing realities, they are also ways of imagining alternative possibilities, including new ways of constituting a polity or the relations among them, and ‘ways of seeing’ are notoriously cultural in origin (Berger, 1972). This constitutional struggle is the ‘Social Question’ of emergent industrial modernity (Clark, 2019), which reached its emblematic climax in the ‘year of revolutions’, 1848. The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. (Schwab, 2016) From this perspective, technology has enabled the exploitation of energy resources (steam, oil, electricity and electronics) to mechanise, scale up, automate, and globalise industrial production, transforming the production of value from materials to information. In the process, not only the social and cultural, but also the ‘physical, digital, and biological spheres’ are now under the sway of technology, which stages its own revolutions, each more abstract—but more pervasive and unarguable—than the one before. It seems nothing can escape the exorbitant logic of ‘datafication, platformization, metaverse’, but meanwhile, much of humanity seems to be missing. Agency is produced and reproduced by automation, AI, and robots, resulting in what Harari (2017) famously dubbed ‘the rise of the useless class’. Does this mean that those he calls the ‘unworking class’ are no longer human; discounted along with a succession of pitiful others who've been disenfranchised and dispossessed by imperial-colonial industrialisation and its successors, including traditional cultures and First Nations, women and girls, migrants and refugees, and what they used to call ‘the poor’, in the guise of welfare dependants and ‘the Global South? In line with presumptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the internet is construed as a technological invention. That means its infrastructure, platforms, and applications can be owned—unlike language, culture, and sociality. Thus, ‘global internet policy’ (insofar as it exists, through ICANN, for instance) is administered through the ‘way of seeing’ of intellectual property, a lens that cannot observe the biosphere, humanity, or global crises as part of its ‘sphere’ of action. Thus, reducing the internet to property means that policy is part of the apparatus of appropriation, accumulation, and enclosure, or privatisation, of language, culture and mediation in the name of sectional interests, favoured nations, and powerful corporations. In short, extending the classic critique of Pie