Anarkistas, Photo By Author

In my last post, I explored the idea that online communities follow the anarchist development model cited by Simon Collister, and what happened when I explained this to Dr. Whitson, an old college friend. Dr. Whitson’s response could best be characterized as cautious. How, he asked, could communities actually be anarchist (or more specifically anarchist collectives) if the method for transmission of data – the Internet itself – still sat in the hands of corporate interests? Cisco built the switches, Microsoft (full disclosure: Microsoft is an Edelman client) runs the servers, and Comcast or Cox or Virgin or AOL control your gateway in – and ultimately the data you can send and receive. To this end, if a company truly wanted to throttle a community or silence it, it would not be difficult to do so through one method or another.

Let’s be clear: this is not the anarchism of punks smashing windows at Starbucks (full disclosure: Starbucks is an Edelman client) and McDonald’s in some kind of misplaced rage against a capitalist power structure. This isn’t the anarchism of Leon Czolgosz or Powell’s (in)famous Anarchist Cookbook. It’s anarchism as political and social theory, as a method by which communities naturally develop when there is no overarching central authority – the so-called Wild West of the Internet, which so far has resisted attempts at mass authoritarian control.

But as Dr. Whitson implied, this may only be because the companies that control the Internet have thusfar refused to exert mass control over it – likely because it is still more profitable for them not to. Those days may be coming to an end, however, if the Google-Viacom decision and any others like it are upheld – and that’s just in the US. Enter controlling government power structures and you end up with the Great Firewall of China, rigidly controlling the content people there can see. Needless to say this doesn’t exactly bode well for those of us pushing for companies to join conversations: why should they if the means really do exist to ‘delete this [negative] blog from the Internet’ as one client asked us to do a few months ago, or simply to disenfranchise the author from the conversation by blocking access?

Conspiracy theory stuff to be sure and the infrastructure doesn’t exist for this to happen – yet. But just as there are those of us carrying the banner and pushing for change, it only takes going to a large PR or marketing meetup of any kind to recognize that for every one of us advocating conversation, there are ten or twenty traditional PR people still looking to manipulate, control, create, own, and broadcast. Sheer numbers and economic viability means that censorship or control of conversation is a very real prospect because someone out there will find a way to make money from this service, just as governments used to hire Pinkertons to strikebust in centuries past.

Sinister overtones aside, this is a very real and present problem in one of the ‘hottest’ areas of Internet development and digital PR: mobile. If you haven’t read Joi Ito’s 23 May post Is mobile Internet really such a good thing?, you need to. A key and extremely relevant quote:

I don't think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile networks that actually work are built on infrastructure that is operated by a small number of mobile operators who use a lot of regulated and closed technology.

It’s not just mobile though, it’s everything online. Look far enough under the hood and there are still a small number of ISPs who use a lot of closed technology. The future suddenly looks a little more dim, doesn’t it?

Next time: A science fiction solution to a technical problem.