Chris Zappone’s published a long, wide-ranging interview with me in the Sydney Morning Herald where I try to connect the dots between digital rights, surveillance, climate change, and wealth disparity.
Doctorow points to the internet itself and inequality – two things that have a surprising link.
“I think wealth inequality is related to the internet in lots of ways, partly because globalisation is an internet phenomenon.”
Global corporations relied on globalised supply chains enabled by the web, he said. The wealth that had flowed into their hands gave them the power to push their agenda, even if it ran counter to the common good.
Australia and Canada’s political resistance to addressing climate change reflected this effect of inequality, he said.
“Where the people whose wealth relies on us not doing something about climate change can exert more influence, then all of us … suffer as a consequence of their veniality and their greed,” he said.
But the internet also enables diverse groups to form opposition to a cause or a political situation quickly.
In 2011, during the protests in Tahrir Square in Egypt, members of the LGBT and socially conservative Muslim Brotherhood were unified to achieve the same goal – ousting then-president Hosni Mubarak. Keeping diverse factions together to rule with the help of the internet has proven much more elusive – a point anyone watching Australia’s revolving-door position of prime minister would accept.
Coming together for opposition is easy. Coalescing to rule is hard.
Before the internet, opposition groups and politicians used to spend years building skills, ideas and even networks they could use once in power. Now, the internet can thrust power on parties, movements and leaders who are far from ready for it. This is true in developed democracies, as well as fragile ones in the developing world.
Doctorow said one theory is that it took many years for society to adapt to some technologies. If that’s true, the effective use of the internet for politics had some way to go.
But the big question regarding the internet in politics was “figuring out how to take this game-changing new reality on the ground and harnessing it not just to say ‘no’, but to say ‘yes’.”
