IICAT Internet Research Portal
Richard Widick (IICAT:4/21/2014)
Modern western societies, and increasingly all societies, to the extent that they model themselves on the modern western nation-state and adopt its formal expression as Constitutional Democracies, can be understood to be largely organized according to their juridical self-constitution of three relatively autonomous (and thus reciprocally determining) rights-driven institutional spheres—the economic, public, and political arenas of practical activity.
As such, transformations of the public sphere are overdetermined by transformations of the economic and political spheres (for example, one can imagine that a victorious conservative political administration in the US might execute policies intended to privatize the internet, limit net neutrality, etc., in the interest of intensifying their hold on political power, which itself might be used to extend tax breaks on the wealthy, whom not incidentally overwhelmingly finance the conservative political parties).
IICAT thus recognizes the profound role of the Internet in the transformation of the economic, public sphere, and political institutions of the modern world, and dedicates this page to introducing its readers to the people and organizations that are themselves dedicated to understanding the Internet.
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Activate: Changing the World Through Technology (a project of London’s Guardian news organization)
This project conceives itself as “the Guardian’s gathering place for leaders of a new global network focused on harnessing and employing technological and social innovation for human betterment.” At their Activate Summit in New York (March 2011), we found this interview with Benjamin Bratton, Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics (DGP) at the University of California’s California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
At DGP, according to Bratton, the objective is to study “the impact of planetary-scale computation on how we build, how we communicate, dwell, and govern a post-natural world…” Surely planetary-scale computation will overdetermine the struggle between the Global Climate Justice Movements and the UNFCCC’s international climate change negotiations. At iicat we believe that the farthest-reaching speculative investigations of IT/computational theory, like that of Bratton at the Guardian’s 2011 Activate New York summit, constitute an important resource for climate action theory and climate action planners. Such investigations routinely open up new philosophical planes of thought that can shock researchers in more conventional disciplines out of their dogmatic institutional slumbers, thus serving as a valuable source of creativity.
When and if it becomes available, iicat would be exceptionally pleased to present to its readers video from DGP’s Designing GeoPolitics symposium, convened June 2-3, 2011 at UC San Diego, where Larry Smarr, Naomi Oreskes, and Charlie Kennel appeared in the panel Planetary Governance under the following description: “Historically, governance has assumed the shape of the information technology it can use to describe and organize the spaces over which it claims sovereignty. Cyberinfrastructure envelopes an entire planet, turning the globe into an instrument of self-quantification. Today those technologies are not only superseding national boundaries, they produce new forms of territory in their image. The challenge of managing a planet now represented as a single domain with a granularity heretofore impossible is one of the key challenges put to cyberinfrastructural design. But the sheer quantity of data does not guarantee governability. This is particularly true for ecological governance. The reality described can be overwhelmed by ideological obfuscation. More importantly, however, the politics of data require the design of forms of production, storage, semantics, distribution, surveillance, structure that exceed those possible through sheer quantification. Particularly, what is the capacity of science to provide models for how a global politics of information can constitute itself?” [cited from DGP]
iicat takes an intense interest in the UNFCCC’s international climate negotiations, which we see as a singular experiment in planetary environmental self governance and thus a principal object of reflection for people both theorizing and practicing cyberinfrastructural design.
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California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)
Visit the Networked Infrastructure research site of Calit2 here.
Visit the Environment and Civil Infrastructure research site of Calit2 here.
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“We bring innovators together from many different fields—science, technology, design, corporate and civic leadership, public health, social and ecological innovation, and the arts and humanities, among others—in a network that complements the silos.
We convene this community in intimate, peer-level gatherings where participants can share their most provocative questions and their most promising new ideas, and begin to work together on new approaches to some of the world’s toughest challenges. In so doing, we constantly seek out the ‘genius in the white spaces,’—insights that can only be discovered when people from very diverse disciplines come together, and concepts from one field are ‘mashed up’ with those from another.
By design, all of our PopTech programs—from our Labs that investigate new domains with disruptive potential to one of our renowned annual conferences—share this eclectic and visionary spirit.”