[WSIS CS-Plenary] Bruce Sterling Blog: Merge the UN and the Internet

Mon Oct 4 04:13:05 BST 2004

Some not-so-serious Monday morning reading for you all.....

San Francisco writer Bruce Sterling has posted a somewhat 
tongue-in-cheek blog entry on the eco-tech website "Worldchanging" 
where he argues that the United Nations should "marry" the Internet.   
He has some interesting things to say about the deficiencies of the UN 
and the internet, the WSIS process, and the ITU.  I.e.

> At WSIS, earnest people are trying hard to make it look like our 
> world's net-transformation is happening on purpose.  There might be a 
> tipping point in there -- if enough of  them can agree on a societal 
> spirit and a set of online rules.  But their rules haven't yet been 
> invented.  Why?  Because the Web doesn't know what diplomacy is.  The 
> Net has got no such idea.  The Net's got  some social software, 
> collaborative websites and buddy lists, but the Net still lacks any 
> deliberative  tools that any diplomat or a parliamentarian would take 
> seriously. There are no sound methods of establishing transparency, 
> inclusiveness, and accountability for online negotiators, in all the 
> major languages.  Nobody has addressed that market, because that isn't 
> a market at all -- that is governance.

Check it out here:

	http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001314.html

Enjoy.

Rik Panganiban

==========================================================

"Bruce Sterling Is Worldchanging"

Imagine that the United Nations married the Internet. Any matchmaking 
program would consider them a dream date. After all, they're both (a) 
supposedly global in scale and (b) fearsomely crippled.

The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can't get 
anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror 
and military adventurism. The UN was invented  to "unite nations" 
rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it's politically 
illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment 
users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its 
business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The 
Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud.

Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the 
grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the 
magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United 
Nations.  Then bride and groom would unite their virtues and overcome 
those gloomy vices gnawing at their vitals.  The global worldchanging 
multitudes could beat back the darkness of the gathering New World 
Disorder while swiftly improving the cramped lives of the planet's 
majority in a beneficent orgy of networked interdependence! Wow!

That's a spectacular vision, but I'm not the one making it up. Last 
year in Switzerland, world delegates from 180 nations triumphantly 
proclaimed the dawn of universal global access to information!

     "We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, (...) declare 
our common desire and commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive 
and development-oriented Information Society,  where everyone can 
create, access, utilize and share information and  knowledge(...)"

The World Summit on the Information Society is the weirdest global 
summit on the globe.

The sponsor of WSIS is the International Telecommunications Union, an 
outfit that formally belongs to the UN, but it is fifty years older. 
Today the terms "Union," "International" and "Telecommunications" are 
all archaic, so the ITU needs a raison d'etre. The ITU's idea of a 
summit looks nothing much like normal, formal UN summits, except for 
the customary big hall and swarms of translators. In the WSIS summit in 
Geneva in December 2003, diplomats abandoned their podiums to go mix it 
up with hardware vendors. That behavior is unheard of.  Odder yet, 
civil society groups (normally kept at a nice safe distance at summits, 
shrieking and sucking tear gas) were cordially brought right into the 
mix. At WSIS, the NGOS were finally treated as what they are: 
connectors, network brokers, and means of access.

If you want to crawl inside a big, scary, global summit and see its 
entrails without even leaving your chair, then WSIS is the summit for 
you.

There are many cautious distinctions formally made between the UN per 
se, the WSIS Summit,  the "summit organizing process," the ITU, and the 
wsis-online.net website.  For our purposes, wsis-online is naturally 
where it's at.  Here Kofi Annan offers you a personal invitation to log 
right on to the dizzy apex of global policy-making.

Here it is. Have a look. Don't be scared. These guys really need you to 
give them something to do.

These WSIS attendees come from literally all over. They can't find a 
boss, a coherent agenda, any carrots or sticks, or any guns or butter. 
Instead they are immersed, apparently forever, in a dizzying host of 
thoroughly unlikely, lateral, polyglot connections: the "All-Ukrainian 
Association of Computer Clubs" rubs virtual  elbows with the Egyptian 
"Free Internet Initiative."  The Malaysian  Super Corridor tries hard 
to look really Super. The Australian Agency for International 
Development wonders how to improve matters in the Third World without 
getting car-bombed for it.

At WSIS, earnest people are trying hard to make it look like our 
world's net-transformation is happening on purpose.  There might be a 
tipping point in there -- if enough of  them can agree on a societal 
spirit and a set of online rules.  But their rules haven't yet been 
invented.  Why?  Because the Web doesn't know what diplomacy is.  The 
Net has got no such idea.  The Net's got  some social software, 
collaborative websites and buddy lists, but the Net still lacks any 
deliberative  tools that any diplomat or a parliamentarian would take 
seriously. There are no sound methods of establishing transparency, 
inclusiveness, and accountability for online negotiators, in all the 
major languages.  Nobody has addressed that market, because that isn't 
a market at all -- that is governance.

Here's the secret of summits: heads of state at summits do practically 
nothing.  They have dinner there, basically. All the real work gets 
done by legions of "sherpas." These summiteering technocrats handle the 
choice of issues, drafts of documents, rules of order, agenda-setting, 
prioritizing... the tangle of bureaucratic fooforaw that is the life 
and death of nations and international bodies. Sherpas are a digitally 
under-served group. Sherpas still do their labors face to face, in big 
international hotels. Nobody's come up with a good way to do serious 
sherpa-work online. A legitimate, accountable, binding, electronic, 
Net-based way.

WSIS is a site for digital sherpas trying to imagine and invent such a 
thing.

WSIS may not succeed -- but somebody probably could. Then you'd truly 
have the worldchanging infant of the Net and the UN. The group that 
pulled that off could be bigger than the self-appointed Davos Forum, 
faster and smarter than the Porto Alegre contingent, less cranky than 
the Soros initiatives, less creepy than Bilderberg, more potent than 
MoveOn, and faster-spreading than Napster.  Imagine that -- what if 
that actually worked?

Bruce Sterling, Worldchanging Ally#1, is the author of a mess of great 
books, including Holy Fire, Tomorrow Now and Zenith Angle, and the man 
behind the curtain at Beyond the Beyond.

===============================================
RIK PANGANIBAN       Communications Coordinator

Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship
with the United Nations (CONGO)
web: http://www.ngocongo.org
email: rik.panganiban at ngocongo.org
mobile: (+1) 917-710-5524 
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