[Reader-list] The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure

[Harsh Kapoor]

opendemocracy  | 26 - 6 - 2003
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=8&debateId=101&articleId=1319

Part 1: The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure

Siva Vaidhyanathan

[ Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the forthcoming The Anarchist in the
Library and a true scholar of the internet age, presents a
compelling, five-part panorama of the implications of electronic
peer-to-peer networks for culture, science, security, and
globalisation. His provocative argument registers peer-to-peer as a
key site of contest over freedom and control of information. ]


The rise of electronic peer-to-peer networks has thrown global
entertainment industries into panic mode. They have been clamouring
for more expansive controls over personal computers and corporate and
university networks. They have proposed radical re-engineering of
basic and generally open communicative technologies. And they have
complained quite loudly - often with specious data and harsh tones
that have had counterproductive public relations results - about the
extent of their plight.

But the future of entertainment is only a small part of the story. In
many areas of communication, social relations, cultural regulation,
and political activity, peer-to-peer models of communication have
grown in influence and altered the terms of exchange.

What is at stake?

This is the story of clashing ideologies: information anarchy and
information oligarchy. They feed off of each other dialectically.
Oligarchy justifies itself through "moral panics" over the potential
effects of anarchy. And anarchy justifies itself by reacting to the
trends toward oligarchy.

The actors who are promoting information anarchy include
libertarians, librarians, hackers, terrorists, religious zealots, and
anti-globalisation activists. The actors who push information
oligarchy include major transnational corporations, the World Trade
Organisation, and the governments of the United States of America and
the Peoples' Republic of China.

Rapidly, these ideologies are remaking our information ecosystem. And
those of us uncomfortable with either vision, and who value what we
might call "information justice", increasingly find fault and
frustration with the ways our media, cultural, information and
political systems are changing.

The most interesting thing about these challenges and battles is that
we can observe how ideologies alter our worlds. Ideologies are, to
use a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, "structuring structures".
Ideologies are lenses, ways of thinking and seeing, that guide our
perceptions and habits. They are permeable and malleable. They are
not determinative. But they make a difference in the judgments we
make and the habits we develop.

In recent years we have seen the rise of anarchy as a relevant
ideology in many areas of life. Our ideologies affect the
technologies we choose to adopt. And using certain technologies can
alter our ideologies. Anarchy is not just a function of small
political groups and marginal information technologies any more.
Anarchy matters.

This is more than a battle of ideologies. It is also the story of
specific battles. There are dozens of examples of recent and current
conflicts that arose out of efforts to control the flows of
information:


*	The story of the "Locust Man," an imprisoned dissident
democratic activist in China who distributed political messages by
attaching them to the backs of locusts.
*	The ordeal of the public library in Arlington, Virginia, at
which two of the hijackers of 11 September 2001 used public terminals
in the days preceding their attack. An increasing number of American
librarians have had to endure federal law enforcement agencies asking
them to violate their code of ethics and their patrons' privacy since
this incident.

*	The controversy over the complaint that some Canadian women
can no longer get tested for genes that indicate a predisposition for
breast cancer because an American company has patented those genes
and charges too much for the test.

Through such incidents, we can examine the following issues:

*	The battle to control democratic sources of information such
as public libraries, which are suddenly considered dens of terrorism
and pornography. Libraries are under attack through technological
mandates and legal restrictions.
*	Efforts to radically re-engineer the personal computers and
networks to eliminate the very power and adaptability that makes
these machines valuable.

*	The cultural implications of allowing fans and creators
worldwide sample cultural products at no marginal costs through
peer-to-peer computer networks.
*	Futile attempts to restrict the use and distribution of
powerful encryption technology out of fear that criminals and
terrorists will evade surveillance.

*	Commercial and governmental efforts to regulate science and
mathematics, including control over the human genome.

*	Attempts to stifle the activities of political dissidents and
religious groups.
*	The information policy implications of recent United States
policies including the USA Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness,
and the Department of Homeland Security.

This essay is the first of a series for openDemocracy that will
consider these battles for control of information. This introductory
piece will examine the proliferation of peer-to-peer systems.

The nature of peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer electronic networks such as Napster, KaZaa, and
Gnutella, solve two communicative problems and create two more.

The first problem is somewhat trivial. Where do we find a convenient
index to files on other people's hard drives? Or, in the case of
Napster founder Sean Fanning, a Boston-area university student, how
can I find music on other people's computers without asking them to
expose themselves to threats by copyright holders?

The second problem is more substantial. How do we exploit two of the
great underused resources of the digital age: surplus storage space
and surplus processing power? More significantly, how do we do this
in a way that is effectively anonymous and simple?

Fundamentally, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems such as KaZaa,
Gnutella, Freenet, and the dearly-departed Napster attempt to
recapture or at least simulate the structure and function of the
original internet, when all clients were servers and all servers were
clients.

This original vision of the internet, call it Internet 1.0, arose in
the 1970s and devolved around 1994 with the rise of ISPs and dynamic
Internet Protocol (IP) numbers. The handful of netizens of Internet
1.0 worked with mainframe computers linked to each other through the
Domain Name System (DNS), which helped direct packets of data to the
proper destination. Each sender and each destination had a discreet
and constant IP number that identified it to the network hubs.

But as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) proliferated in the
mid-1990s and connected millions of personal computers to networks
for only several minutes or hours at a time, it became clear that
rotating and re-using IP numbers would allow many more users to share
the internet.

Thus began Internet 2.0, in which increasingly personal computers
allowed their users to receive and consume information, but allowed
limited ability to donate to the system. This extension of the
network cut off personal computers from the server business. Most
users donated information only through e-mail. And it became clear
that while the internet once seemed like a grand bazaar of homemade
goods and interesting (albeit often frightening) texts generated
through community dynamics, it would soon seem more like a shopping
mall than a library or bazaar.

Two new problems

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is a set of protocols that allow
users to open up part of their private content to public inspection,
and thus, copying. In the digital world, one cannot access a file
without making a copy of it. From this fact arose the first
peer-to-peer problem: there is no way to enforce scarcity on these
systems. The popularity and common uses of these protocols produce
massive anxiety within the industries that rely on artificial
scarcity to generate market predictability.

The second problem is less well understood because there is no
special interest constituency complaining about it. So states have
stepped up to take the lead in confronting it. That problem is
irresponsibility. Because most of what happens over peer-to-peer
networks is relatively anonymous, servers and clients are not
responsible for the ramifications of their communicative acts. Using
widely available forms of encryption or networks that assure privacy,
one may traffic in illicit material such as child pornography with
almost no fear. In many places in the world, the availability of
adult pornography or racist speech through peer-to-peer systems
undermines a decade of efforts to cleanse the more visible and
therefore vulnerable World Wide Web.

This second problem is actually a solution to another communicative
problem that exists primarily in illiberal communicative contexts.
Many of the same states that hope to quash pornography also want to
quash the speech and organisational communications of democratic
activists. So the very existence of these communicative technologies
creates moral panics throughout the illiberal world as well as the
liberal world. While some worry about the erosion of commerce, others
worry about the erosion of power. And the same technologies that
liberal societies would use to protect commerce might find more
effective uses in Burma or China.

Listening to Napster

But most of the popular discussion about the rise and effects of
peer-to-peer technology has read like a sports story: who is winning
and who is losing? Some has read like a crime story: how do we stop
this thievery? I am more interested in looking at peer-to-peer
communication in its most general sense. How do we explain the
peer-to-peer phenomenon? How do we get beyond the sports story or the
crime story?

Peer-to-peer communication is unmediated, uncensorable, and virtually
direct. It might occur between two computers sitting on different
continents. It might occur across a fence in a neighborhood in
Harare, Zimbabwe. What we are hearing when we listen to peer-to-peer
systems are "bruits publics", or public noises - not the reasonable,
responsible give and take of the bourgeois public sphere.

This is very old. What we call 'p2p' communicative networks actually
reflect and amplify - revise and extend - an old ideology or cultural
habit. Electronic peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella merely simulates
other, more familiar forms of unmediated, uncensorable,
irresponsible, troublesome speech; for example, anti-royal gossip
before the French Revolution, trading cassette tapes among youth
subcultures such as punk or rap, or the distribution of illicit
Islamist cassette tapes through the streets and bazaars of Cairo.

Certain sectors of modern society have evolved with and through the
ideology of peer-to-peer. Academic culture and science rely on an
ideal of raw, open criticism: peer-to-peer review, one might call it.
The difference, of course, is that academia and science generally
require a licensing procedure to achieve admission to the system. The
Free Software movement is the best example of what legal theorist
Yochai Benkler calls "peer production", but what we might as well,
for the sake of cuteness and consistency, call "peer-to-peer
production".

This form of speech has value. But it has different value in
different contexts. And while peer-to-peer communication has an
ancient and important, although under-documented, role, we are
clearly seeing both an amplification and a globalisation of these
processes.

That means that what used to occur only across fences or on park
benches now happens between and among members of the Chinese diaspora
who might be in Vancouver and Singapore, Shanghai and Barcelona. As
cultural groups disperse and reify their identities, they rely more
and more on the portable elements of their collective culture which
are widely available through electronic means.

The clampdown strategy

Several technological innovations have enabled this amplification and
globalisation of peer-to-peer communication:

*	The protocols that makeup the internet (i.e. TCP/IP) and the
relative openness of networks that make up the internet.
*	The modularity, customisability, portability, and inexpense
of the personal computer.
*	The openness, customisability, and insecurity of the major
personal computer operating systems.
*	The openness, insecurity, and portability of the digital
content itself.

Understandably, states and corporations that wish to impede
peer-to-peer communication have been focusing on these factors. These
are, of course, the very characteristics of computers and the
internet that have driven this remarkable - almost revolutionary -
adoption of them in the past decade.

These are the sites of the battle. States and media corporations wish to:

*	Monitor and regulate every detail of communication and shift
liability and regulatory responsibility to the Internet Service
Providers.
*	Redesign the protocols that run the internet.
*	Neuter the customisability of the personal computer and other
digital devices.
*	Impose "security" on the operating systems so that they might
enable "trust" between a content company and its otherwise
untrustworthy users.

These efforts involve both public and private intervention, standard
setting by states and private actors. The United States Congress, the
Federal Communication Commission, the Motion Picture Association of
America, Microsoft and Intel have all been involved in efforts to
radically redesign our communicative technologies along these lines.
And they are appealing for complementary legal and technical
interventions by the European Union and the World Trade Organisation.

These moves would create Internet 3.0, although it would not actually
look like the internet at all. It would not be open and customisable.
Content - and thus culture - would not be adaptable and malleable.
And what small measures of privacy these networks now afford would
evaporate. These are the dangers that Lawrence Lessig warned us about
in 1998 in his seminal work Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Only
now are we coming to understand that Lessig was right.

These regulatory efforts have sparked an arms race. The very
suggestion of such radical solutions generated immediate reactions by
those who support anarchistic electronic communication. Every time a
regime rolls out a new form of technological control, some group of
hackers or "hacktivists" break through it or evade it in a matter of
weeks. The only people who really adhere to these controls are those
not technologically proficient: most of the world.

It might surprise casual observers of these battles that the
important conflicts are not happening in court. The Napster case had
some interesting rhetorical nuggets. But basically this was classic
contributory infringement by a commercial service. KaZaa is a bit
more interesting because it is a distributed company with assets
under a series of jurisdictions and a technology that limits its
ability to regulate what its clients do. KaZaa might collapse and
only fully distributed, voluntary networks might remain: namely,
Gnutella and Freenet.

The real conflicts will be in the devices, the networks, and the
media products themselves. And there seems to be few areas of healthy
public discussion or critique about the relationships between
technology and culture.

Meanwhile, the strategies and structures that limit peer-to-peer
communication also quash dissent, activism, and organisation in
illiberal contexts - that is, oppressive, totalitarian and
authoritarian states. And for this reason, p2p systems like Freenet -
encrypted, completely anonymous, and unquenchable - are essential
tools for democratic activists in places like Saudi Arabia, Cuba,
Zimbabwe, Burma and China.

The lessons for the public sphere

Where there is no rich, healthy public sphere we should support
anarchistic communicative techniques. Where there is a rich, healthy
public sphere, we must take an honest, unromantic account of the
costs of such anarchy. And through public spheres we should correct
for the excesses of communicative anarchy.

Still, we must recognise that poor, sickly, fragile public spheres
are more common than rich, healthy public spheres. And the battles at
play over privacy, security, surveillance, censorship and
intellectual property in the United States right now will determine
whether we will count the world's oldest democracy as sickly or
healthy.

Anarchy is radical democracy. But it is not the best form of
democracy. But as a set of tools, anarchy can be an essential
antidote to tyranny.


o o o

opendemocracy  |  10 - 7 - 2003
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-101-1348.jsp

Part 2: 'Pro-gumbo': culture as anarchy

Siva Vaidhyanathan

In much of the American South before the Civil War, drums were
illegal. Slaveholders were aware of the West African traditions of
"talking instruments" and tried everything within their means to
stifle free, open, unmediated communication across distances. Drums
could signal insurrection. And drums could conjure collective
memories of a time of freedom.

Mostly, slaveholders realised that to subjugate masses of people,
they had to alienate them from their culture as much as possible.
They had to strand them in a strange land and try to make that land
seem stranger than it was. They had to strictly regulate slave
culture. They had to outlaw slave literacy. They had to commit social
and cultural homicide to keep otherwise free people from rising up
and taking charge of their own bodies.

That the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean still set the time for
American culture speaks to the determination and courage of African
American slaves. The slaveholders outlawed the tools. But they could
not stop the beat (see Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans
and Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue)

That the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean still set the time for
American culture speaks to the determination and courage of African
American slaves. The slaveholders outlawed the tools. But they could
not stop the beat.

As oligarchic forces such as global entertainment conglomerates
strive to restrict certain tools that they assume threaten their
livelihood, they should consider that throughout the history of
communication, people have managed to use and adapt technologies in
surprising and resilient ways.

Once in a while, a set of communicative technologies offers
revolutionary potential: peer-to-peer networks do just that. They are
part of a collection of technologies - including cassette audio
tapes, video tapes, recordable compact discs, video discs, home
computers, the internet, and jet airplanes - that link diasporic
communities and remake nations. They empower artists in new ways and
connect communities of fans.

The battle to control these cultural flows says much about the
anxieties and unsteadiness of the power structures that had hoped to
exploit cultural globalisation. It also teaches us much about the
nature of culture itself.

Global culture by the download

A couple of years ago, a journalist friend of mine put me in contact
with a gentleman who does consulting work for the World Bank. This
gentleman called me to see if I was interested in participating in a
meeting in New York that June which would enable cultural ministers
from a handful of African countries - including Nigeria, Ghana, and
South Africa - to meet leaders from the American music industry. The
goal was to brainstorm about how African musicians might exploit
digital music distribution systems to market and deliver their songs
directly to diasporic communities.

The battle to control these cultural flows says much about the
anxieties and unsteadiness of the power structures that had hoped to
exploit cultural globalisation. It also teaches us much about the
nature of culture itself.

He had no way of knowing what I thought of this idea. I had yet to
publish anything on the subject. So my opinions were not widely
known. So he was not quite prepared for my reaction.

"Why do they need record companies?" I asked. "The artists can do it
all themselves for less than $10,000."

He was stunned. Having a World Bank perspective on development, he
assumed that the artists of the developing world would need and
welcome the giant helping hand of Bertelsmann or AOL Time Warner. So
he responded with an appeal to technological expertise. The artists
would need the major labels, he said, because the labels are working
on incorporating digital rights management software into digital
music files. Without watermarking or copy-protection features, the
artists would just be giving their music away.

Then I explained to him that it was too late for all that. The power
of digitisation and networking had beaten him and the record
companies to it. I didn't even touch the subject of the complications
inherent in asking African musicians - who are often dissidents - to
work with government culture ministers. I just made it seem like he
had missed a technological moment. He had the best of intentions. But
he had not considered that certain technological changes had fostered
a new ideological movement as well. And that these trends might
change the nature of global music and creativity.

All music will be 'world music'

One of the great unanswered questions is how file sharing and MP3
compression will affect the distribution of what music corporations
call "world music", tunes from non-English-speaking nations, offering
rhythms that seem fresh to Europeans and Americans who have grown up
and old on the driving four-four beat of rock-and-roll.

Now, rhymes and rhythms from all corners of the Earth are available
in malleable form at low cost to curious artists everywhere.
Peer-to-peer has gone global. Of course, there are some big economic
and technological hurdles to overcome before it can affect all
cultural traditions equally. As the differences narrow, how will the
availability of a vast and already stunningly diverse library of
sounds change creativity and commerce? Won't all music be "world
music?"

The riches of ephemera

On any given day, on any peer-to-peer file sharing system, one can
find the most obscure and rare items. I have downloaded some of
Malcolm X's speeches, Reggae remixes of Biggie Smalls' hits, various
club dance mixes of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and long lost Richard
Pryor comedy bits that were only released on vinyl by a long-defunct
company. Through nation-specific and general "world music" chat rooms
on the now-defunct Napster, I had been able to find Tamil film songs,
Carnatic classical music, and pop stuff from Asian Dub Foundation,
Ali Farka Toure, Orisha, and Youssou N'Dour. The most interesting and
entertaining phenomena of the MP3-peerto-peer is the availability of
"mashes" - new compositions created by combining the rhythm tracks of
one song and the vocal track of another. (The best example of a
popular "mash", currently, is Genie's Revenge, a combination of
vocals by Christina Aguilera and a guitar riff by the Strokes).

Anxious ethnomusicology

This is a phenomenon that ethnomusicologists are just starting to
consider. During the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologist Steven Feld
raised some serious questions about the future of global cultural
diversity as "world music" gained market share and generated interest
among western producers and labels.

Feld published some of his thoughts as an article called A Sweet
Lullaby for World Music. The article traces the development of
marketing efforts for this new genre of "world music", which meant
anything from drum beats from Mali to the ambient sounds of lemurs in
Madagascar.

Feld expressed concern early on the very term "world music" made some
forms of music distinct from what academics and music industry
figures call "music". Since the rise of the world music genre as a
commercial factor, music scholarship has been asking the question,
"how has difference fared in the new gumbo?" Feld wrote that recent
world music scholarship has revealed the "uneven rewards, unsettling
representations, and complexly entangled desires that lie underneath
the commercial rhetoric of global connection, that is, the rhetoric
of 'free' flow and 'greater' access."

"Free flow" is a buzzword in north-south communication policy
debates. Stemming from 1970s arguments in Unesco forums, the United
States argued that the world community should establish standards
that would encourage the free flow of information across borders,
ostensibly to spread democracy and ensure civil rights.

Many oppressive states - chiefly India under Indira Gandhi - argued
that the doctrine of "free flow" was merely a cover for what we now
call the neoliberal agenda: sweetening American corporate expansion
by dusting it with the sugar of enlightenment principles.

The "free-flow" vs. "cultural imperialism" argument (which has since
been supplemented by another approach that emphasises the complex
uses to which all audiences put cultural elements) has unfortunately
limited our vision and stifled discussions about what we might do to
encourage freedom and the positive externalities of cultural flow
while limiting the oppressive and exploitative externalities of the
spread of American and European modes of cultural production and
distribution.

Feld also outlined the reaction to scholarship that embraced this
"cultural imperialism" model. In contrast to those who raise concerns
about the spread of new loud noises, "celebratory" scholarship
emphasised the use and re-use of elements of American and European
musical forms in the emerging pop sounds flowing from the developing
world. It also celebrated the new market success that artists from
the developing world were achieving. This scholarship emphasised
fluid cultural identities and predicted an eventual equilibrium of
the power differences in the world music industry.

This school, which I subscribe to, downplays the influence of
hegemony and underlines the potential creative and democratic power
of sharing. Instead of "celebratory", I prefer the term "pro-gumbo".

Steven Feld, who belongs to that group of scholars who utilise what
he calls "anxious narratives", sees little possibility for resisting
the commodification of ethnicity and musical styles. For the anxious,
"global" becomes "displaced"; "emerging" become "exploited";
"cultural conversations" become "white noise". To make his point that
we should not ignore the effects of the cultural violence that is
primitivism, Feld writes, "The advertisement of this democratic and
liberal vision for world music embodies an idealism about free-flows,
sharing, and choice. But it masks the reality that visibility in
product choice is directly related to sales volume, profitability,
and stardom."

Even though I celebrate sharing, free flows, and gumbo, I must
concede the gravity of Feld's concerns. But my question now is: how
does peer-to-peer change these issues?

Feld is really writing about the anxieties of ethnomusicologists. He
is not so concerned with the effects on the actual music and how it
works in the lives of musicians and fans:

"In the end, no matter how inspiring the musical creation, no matter
how affirming its participatory dimension, the existence and success
of world music returns to one of globalization's basic economic
clichés: the drive for more and more markets and market niches. In
the cases here, we see how the worlds of small (UNESCO and Auvidis)
and large (Sony) and major independent (ECM) music owners and
distributors can come into unexpected interaction. We see how
production can proceed from the acquisition of a faraway cheap
inspiration and labor. We see how exotic Euromorphs can be marketed
through newly layered tropes, like green enviroprimitivism, or
spiritual new age avant-garde romanticism. We see how what is
produced has a place in a larger industrial music zone of commodity
intensification, in this case artistic encounters with indigeneity,
as made over in popular Western styles. In all, we see how world
music participates in shaping a kind of consumer-friendly
multiculturalism, one that follows the market logic of expansion and
consolidation."
The peer-to-peer solution

Perhaps the spread of peer-to-peer libraries should allay the
concerns of anxious critics. Peer-to-peer music distribution - so far
- has been all about decorporatisation and deregulation. Music
corporations do not control the flow, prices, or terms of access
anymore. Music distribution has lower barriers of entry than ever
before, and offers the potential of direct, communal marketing and
creolisation.

We should acknowledge some key concepts about cultural globalisation:

*	It's happening, but it's rolling out in ways that are
alarming to those who hoped to profit the most from it.
*	The prices and profits of globalisation are falling unevenly
and unpredictably.
*	Culture is not zero-sum. Using something does not prevent
someone else from using it, and does not degrade its value. In fact,
it might enhance it.

Culture is anarchistic

We often mistake the collection of end-products of culture - the
symphonies and operas, novels and poems - that have survived the
rigorous peer review of markets and critics as the culture itself.

Culture is anarchistic if it is alive at all. It grows up from the
common, everyday interactions among humans who share a condition or a
set of common symbols and experiences.

We often mistake the collection of end-products of culture - the
symphonies and operas, novels and poems - that have survived the
rigorous peer review of markets and critics as the culture itself.
Culture is not the sum of its products. It is the process that
generates those products. And if it is working properly, culture is
radically democratic, vibrant, malleable, surprising, and fun.

These two different visions of culture explain much of the difference
between the assumptions behind information anarchy and information
oligarchy. Anarchists - and many less radical democrats - believe
that culture should flow with minimal impediments. Oligarchs, even if
they seem politically liberal, favor a top-down approach to culture
with massive intervention from powerful institutions such as the
state, corporations, universities, or museums. All of these
institutions may be used to construct and preserve free flows of
culture and information. But all too often they are harnessed to the
oligarchic cause, making winners into bigger winners, and thus
rigging the cultural market.

What Matthew Arnold thinks of P2P

In 1867 the English critic Mathew Arnold published a treatise called
Culture and Anarchy. The book was an extended argument with the
cultural implications of John Stuart Mill's 1859 book On Liberty.
Arnold took Mill to task for endorsing a low level of cultural
regulation. Culture, to Arnold, was all the good stuff that cultural
authorities such as himself said it was. And culture, in the
Arnoldian sense, was preferable - was in fact and antidote to -
anarchy.

Samuel Huntington expresses this same oligarchic theory of culture in
his simplistic yet influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order. Huntington sees cultures as grounded on
certain immutable foundations. He sees the emphasis on cultural
transmission, fluidity, and hybridity as "trivial" when compared to
the deep, essential texts and beliefs of a culture. Huntington
affirms the role of the Bible in what he calls "western civilization"
and the role of the Analects of Confucius in what he calls "Confucian
civilization."

In this way, Huntington disregards how people who live in these
cultures actually use the texts and symbols around them. "The essence
of Western Civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac,"
Huntington writes, despite the fact that most residents of the
nations he labels "western" have no idea of the history or
significance of the Magna Carta, yet no one can underestimate the
cultural power of the Big Mac. Huntington is arguing against cultural
globalisation, against fostering flows and exchanges of ideas and
information. He looks at a dangerous and angry world and prescribes
walls instead of paths.

Huntington's preferred world might be quieter, but it would also be
darker and dumber. The fact is, cultures change, grow, and revise
themselves over time if they are allowed to. And cultural life is
healthier when cultures are allowed to grow and revise themselves.
Only during the European "Dark Ages" (5th to 12th centuries CE) have
we seen a large portion of the world sever its cultural arteries and
rely on internal and local signs and symbols. Europe was stuck in a
time of crippling cultural stasis while the rest of the world, led by
Persian and Arab traders, moved on. The Dark Ages in Europe were a
time of mass illiteracy and not-coincidental concentrations of power
among local elites.

Every area of the world becomes more diverse in the local sense as
long as people are free to borrow pieces of cultural expressions and
re-use them in interesting ways.

As Tyler Cowen explains in his book Creative Destruction: How
Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures, cultural exchange
generates cultural change. Exchange might make disparate cultures
more like each other, but it also infuses each culture with new
choices, new ideas, and new languages. Every area of the world
becomes more diverse in the local sense as long as people are free to
borrow pieces of cultural expressions and re-use them in interesting
ways.

Culture as process

This idea of culture as temporal, contingent, dynamic, and Creolised
best describes how culture actually works in people's lives. No one
lives in Matthew Arnold's "culture"; and few would want to live in
Samuel Huntington's. The fact is, most of us don't have a clue why
the Magna Carta as a document is important to us, if it is at all any
more. Many more of us can wax about how Madonna is important to us.
And she is important to our culture in different ways to different
people at different times.

Madonna, like the culture that rewards and follows her, is temporal,
contingent, and dynamic. As Lawrence Levine explains in Black Culture
and Black Consciousness, "culture is not a fixed condition but a
process: the product of interaction between the past and the present.
Its toughness and resiliency are determined not by a culture's
ability to withstand change, which indeed may be a sign of stagnation
not life, but by its ability to react creatively and responsively to
the realities of a new situation."

If we use some instrument of technology or law to dampen that
vibrancy, malleability, or dynamics, of culture, we risk cultural
stasis. Deployed carelessly, such instruments can freeze-in winners
and chill losers - or those merely waiting to play.