Solomon
Few
media eyebrows went up when the World Bank recently canceled a global meeting
set for Barcelona in late June — and shifted it to the Internet. Thousands of
street demonstrators would have been in Spain’s big northeastern port city to
confront the conference. Cyberspace promises to be a much more serene location.
The
World Bank is eager to portray its decision as magnanimous, sparing Barcelona
the sort of upheaval that has struck Seattle, Prague, Quebec City and other
urban hosts of international economic summits. "A conference on poverty
reduction should take place in a peaceful atmosphere free from heckling,
violence and intimidation," says a World Bank official, adding that "it is time
to take a stand against this kind of threat to free expression."
A
senior adviser to the huge lending institution offered this explanation: "We
decided that you can’t have a meeting of ideas behind a cordon of police
officers." Presumably, the meeting of ideas will flourish behind a cordon of
passwords, bytes and pixels.
If
hackers can be kept at bay, the few hundred participants in the Annual Bank
Conference on Development Economics will be able to conduct a lovely forum over
the Internet. The video conferencing system is likely to be state-of-the-art,
making possible a modern and bloodless way to avoid uninvited perspectives.
The
World Bank’s retreat behind virtual walls may fulfill its goal of keeping the
riffraff away, with online discourse going smoothly, but vital issues remain —
such as policies that undercut essential government services in poor countries,
while promoting privatization and user fees for access to health care and
education.
"The
objectives of the World Bank with this failed conference were simply an
image-washing operation," said a statement from a Barcelona-based campaign that
had worked on planning for the demonstrations. Now, the World Bank is depicting
itself as the injured party.
Protest organizers are derisive about the Bank’s media spin: "The
representatives of the globalized capitalism feel threatened by the popular
movements against globalization. They, who meet in towers surrounded by walls
and soldiers in order to stay apart from the people whom they oppress, wish to
appear as victims. They, who have at their disposal the resources of the planet,
complain that those who have nothing wanted to have their voice heard."
The
World Bank’s gambit of seeking refuge in cyberspace should be a wake-up call to
activists who dream that websites and email are paradigm-shattering tools of the
people. Some who take it for granted that "the revolution will not be televised"
seem to hope that their revolution will be digitized.
But
there’s nothing inherently democratizing about the Internet. In fact, it has
developed into a prodigious conduit of political and cultural propaganda,
distributed via centrally edited mega-networks. America Online has 27 million
subscribers, the New Internationalist magazine noted recently. "They spend an
incredible 84 percent of their Internet time on AOL alone, which provides a
regulated leisure and shopping environment dominated by in-house brands — from
Time magazine to Madonna’s latest album."
At
the same time that creative advocates for social change are routinely putting
the Internet to great use, powerful elite bodies like the World Bank are touting
online innovations as democratic models — while striving to elude the reach of
progressive grassroots activism.
If,
in 1968, the Democratic National Convention had been held in cyberspace instead
of in Chicago, on what streets would the antiwar protests have converged? If, on
Inauguration Day this year, the swearing-in ceremony for George W. Bush had
taken place virtually rather than at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where would
people have gathered to hold up their signs saying "Hail to the Thief"?
Top
officials of the World Bank are onto something. In a managerial world,
disruption must be kept to an absolute minimum. If global corporatization is to
achieve its transnational potential, the discourse among power brokers and their
favorite thinkers can happen everywhere at once — and nowhere in particular.
Let the troublemakers try to interfere by doing civil disobedience in
cyberspace!
In
any struggle that concentrates on a battlefield of high-tech communications, the
long-term advantages are heavily weighted toward institutions with billions of
dollars behind them. Whatever our hopes, no technology can make up for a lack of
democracy.
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Norman Solomon’s latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." His
syndicated column focuses on media and politics.