After three and a half weeks in Cuba I’m rather relishing my own internet freedom which allows me to link to the video of Hilliary Clinton’s speech on internet freedom and offer my own initial reactions to it.
The speech was very much in the aspirational tone of the cyber-utopians: democracy (‘like ours’) will flow when the planet is truly connected and all have the possibility and opportunity to express themselves freely. In comparing the attempts by some authoritarian governments to stem the free flow of ideas to the Berlin Wall, Clinton dissappointingly reinforced a cold war rhetoric that just doesn’t seem to die. It’s a simplistic view that neither takes into consideration the globalising trends of the past thirty years nor deals directly with the fear that Clinton et. al. seem to have that authoritarian governments are actually surviving the glut of global information flows.
Although this was to be a policy speech there was very little actual practical policy. Instead, it seemed like the opportunity was taken to outline the ‘Clinton Doctrine’ (she called it ’21st century statescraft’ – as if it could be anything else really … 8th century statescraft?) centred on the addition of a new human right: the right to connect. ‘The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyberspace … It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate in the name of progress’. Now, I think that Clinton’s assembly is less like a public square and more like a market square. She talked of the stand against censorship (thank goodness she restrained the rhetoric to stand and not war) as becoming part of the ‘American Brand’ and emphasised that the freedoms she was in favour of would make everyone well, more prosperous. Google in particular, one suspects, if, that is, they do ‘the right thing’.
This idea of the ‘right to connect’ is a provocative one and, linked to the cold war rhetoric, will provoke reactions in places like China, Singapore, Russia, Egypt and Cuba. In Cuba, the response will probably be a series of questions: what right to universal health care do US citizens enjoy (topical if nothing else)? How connected are those citizens to their local hospitals/doctors? How can Cubans connect through an illegal embargo? The ‘Information Iron Curtain’ needs to be lifted in terms of US trade sanctions first which will allow US companies the freedom to trade in, alongside other things, information. In other words, Clinton hasn’t moved the argument any further on. Her stand on censorship is too simplistic and open to accusations of hypocrisy: will the US hacktivists who have launched cyber-attacks on the Iranian government be prosecuted? Will citizen data be made more open? It’s not censorship which is the issue here but rather who controls the internet and how.
‘The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip’ was Reagan’s prediction in … 1989. It seems that the US State Dept. still thinks that throwing iPhones at everyone will produce prosperity which will produce freedom which will produce democracy. That is, as long as everyone ‘does the right thing’.
