0. Doomed Agendas

The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) is scheduled to take place in the next month (December 10-12, 2003) in Geneva. This much celebrated meeting will supposedly shed light upon the obstacles that the so-called information society faces, and wil discuss ways to deal with them in the most efficient manner for the greater good of all. In a nutshell, the WSIS is the place to be if you're interested in how we all together can widen authentic civic engagement in matters rooted in the epicentre of the information society.

Having said that, I expected that the agenda of the meeting would be straight-forward, picking on issues as diverse as spam and how to cut down on it, file-sharing and what it really means, digital ethics, access and government-imposed restrictions on Internet use, the role of open standards, software and institutions, and emerging forms of collective governance enabled partly by the Internet that might in turn help better the process of political decision-making. Instead, as of this moment, all there is in the agenda that is worth repeating here can be summarised in less than two lines of text: election of president and adjacent officers, followed by small talk, and coming to an end with plans to be discussed at the second phase of the summit in Tunis [1]. You may wonder whether the above was worth repeating. Perhaps it isn't. But that's all there is in the agenda, and I am afraid not much else will be added.

and another bit:

And the renaissance we 're now in the midst of is as profound as the ones that went before it. We' re no longer limited by geography, or any technological and cultural priesthoods for that matter. Again, peer-to-peer is a fine illustration of that paradigm shift. Most peer-to-peer technologies, from Napster to Freenet and from Jabber to weblogs enable us to step outside from our assigned role as passive consumers of reality. Tools developed in a bottom – up fashion empower us to become the authors of our own lives and architects of our own frames of governance. We, the people, are now for the first time in history able to reinvent our cultures and societies in unprecedented ways, changing the ways we relate to each other, and to the old world order. We don't need to ask for permission; we are the new establishment that emerges from the ashes of the old ruined world of cultural impotence, economic inefficiency, and political megalomania. We develop the tools; we use them; and the world is changing with us as we go along. Trying to destroy the political artefacts of an earlier epoch – copyrights and patents [17]– is not necessary. Those insitutions will self-destruct as people realise their striking irrelevance to the new inter-networked world of knowledge. Napster and similarly functioning software are “the market's correction for the failure of mainstream radio not just to adapt to the Net, but even to fulfill the missions it established for itself over the decades” [18]. Weblogs enable us to re-claim a higher state of democratic consciousness [19]. The free/open source software community demonstrates that co-operation, passion and talent makes capital dance. We should not try to revolt against the old older. In fact, I believe that the old order is revolting against us, trying spasmodically to secure a few last moments of breath before dying forever. Sure enough, we need to be cautious and have a vigilant eye, but we don't need to consume ourselves with dystopic visions of big brother - manufactured technotopias. There is no revolution to start here; if there was one anyway that has started a long time ago with the emergence of the network of networks. It's time we called it a rebirth, a renaissance of our identities in a digital world. We don't need to be consumed with fighting wars; instead, we should be forging bonds and caring for the new big issues that unfold before our own eyes. In my opinion, that is digital ethics [20], but I will leave that discussion for another time and place – perhaps WE SEIZE!.

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