[Reader-list] On Tools and Regulation

[Rana Dasgupta]

These regulations all seem to be preventative measures
against (perhaps as-yet-unimagined) social formations
that make existing systems of control inadequate.  The
fact that, as Jeebesh points out, the regulations are
directed against the tools with which these social
formations construct themselves, rather than against
the content of their exchange, shows that the anxiety
is not that communities will exchange undesirable
content, but that they will exist at all.

The stern control on the use of email and Internet
facilities within corporations (where surveillance, if
it does not exist, is usually at least implied) is due
quite substantially to the fact that they allow
incredibly efficient informal communities to arise
among personnel which are more or less invisible to
conventional systems of control.  These networks may
not do anything except share jokes, but they represent
a significant shift in the information economy of the
corporation.  Suddenly ‘horizontal’ communication
outnumbers ‘vertical’ communication by a massive
amount, thus diminishing the relative importance of
the latter.  Placing restrictions on the use of email
itself (the ‘tool’ rather than the ‘content’) is the
most obvious way of dealing with this because it is
the strength and efficiency of these networks that is
threatening, not the content they pass around (which
is probably completely harmless for the most part).

High-profile media stories about the efficiency with
which child pornographers and terrorists can use the
Internet to organise into large international groups
demonstrate the extent to which these micro paranoias
operate also at the macro level of the nation-state’s
legal apparatus.  New technology-enabled social
formations are usually portrayed in the media (I’m
thinking of a recent CNN report about how to protect
your kids from cyberprowlers) as collections of social
outcasts with modems who put their deviant heads
together online to make disgusting plans against ‘our’
security – and particularly our children.  But the
regulations Jeebesh lists tell another story – it’s
not just a peddler of child pornography that is going
to feel the hard real-world boot of the law, but
anyone who seeks to create communities that seem to
evade conventional description or control.

The fact is that no one can ever tell, when a ‘tool’
such as this is introduced, what uses will be made of
it and what society will look like with it.  What will
cyberterrorism, cyberpornography, cyberactivism,
cybertheft etc turn into, and what new cybercategories
for which there is no real-world equivalent will
emerge?  It is this unimaginability of future social
formations that makes the managers of society very
edgy - and consequently very aggressive.  

The legal system does not want to be caught out in the
future by phenomena which ‘clearly’ need to be
prevented but which are not illegal because the law
had never anticipated their existence.  So at such a
(still early) stage in the emergence of new social
formations it must ensure that there are as many ways
of preventing their activities as possible.  Once
again, concentrating on the the tools rather than
trying to anticipate the uses that will be made of the
tools, is simplest.  Hence these regulations which
help expand the category of ‘cybercrime’ until it is
pretty much equivalent to sitting at a computer with a
connection.  


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