The empire strikes back again: the cultural-politics of the Internet

I n the March 1996 issue of Wired(4.03), Nicholas Negroponte provided one of the more recent expressions of a concept that has been at the heart of on-line interaction for quite some time. In this editorial, which is titled "Pluralistic, not Imperialistic," the founding director of MIT's Media Lab argues that the telematic [1] network is not the next stage of American imperialism but rather a free domain that fosters and encourages global pluralism. "The idea that the Net is another form of Americanization and a threat to local culture is absurd. Such conviction completely misses and misunderstands the extraordinary cultural opportunities of the digital world" (Negroponte, 1996, p. 216). Contrary to the imperialist aspirations that had accompanied the "mechanical age," the "information age" has been determined to offer global liberation and multicultural empowerment [2]. According to Negroponte's assessment (1996), "the Net is humankind's best chance to respect and nurture the most obscure languages and cultures of the world" (p. 216). I would like to reconsider this rather popular line of argumentation that has had profound effects on the perceived social and political implications of the telematic network. Although the internet appears to be international, it has distinct national origins and was developed for purposes other than global communication. The Net originates in the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. In the early 1960's, the DOD was experimenting with a new data communications technology called "packet-switching. " This technology fostered the development of a new kind of computer network, one which supported multiple-users and resisted system-wide crashes by automatically rerouting data around downed circuits. The goal of this experimental network, originally named ARPANET, was not the decentralized global information system that is heralded in current technical and popular discourses. Rather, its original purpose was directed by the exigencies of the cold war. The DOD researchers that developed ARPANET sought to design the prototype of a national-defense, data-communications systems that would be immune to and survive the devastation of nuclear aggression. The internet, therefore, traces its genealogy directly to one of the primary agents of American hegemony and the effects of this paternity can still be read in the very structure and content of the "global network. " At The Virtual Center Of Decentralization The decentralized characteristics for which so many praise the net did not arise out of anarchist intention, but out of nomadic military strategy (Critical Art Ensemble, 1997, p. 2). One of the most distinctive characteristics of ARPANET and its direct descendent, the internet, is its decentralized architecture. Prior to the development of ARPANET, information networks were commonly designed around a central server that coordinated and controlled all aspects of data communications. The disadvantage of this systems-architecture is obvious. To disable the entire network, one only need hinder the central hub. ARPANET, on the contrary, disseminated all operations throughout the network. It was, therefore, comprised of a loose amalgamation of independent computers, or what Negroponte (1995) has called "a lattice of heterogeneous processors" (p. 180). It is this decentralized systems-architecture that rendered ARPANET virtually immune to failure or destruction. And it is this same infrastructure that has been determined to constitute the Internet's resistance to cultural imperialism and control. As Negroponte (1996) asserts, "colonialism is the fruit of centralist thinking. It does not exist in a decentralized world" (p. 216). The decentralized system of the Internet is dependent upon the allocation and designation of separate and distinct domains. Currently there are two kinds of top-level domains available to the public. Generic domains (.corn, .net, and .org) [3], which are administered by Network Solutions through Internic and are assigned irrespective of geophysical location, and country domains, which are specified in ISO 3166 and administered locally. Despite the apparent neutrality of this conceptual schema, its practical implementation has, in effect, granted a privileged position to American users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Everybody} Guide 7b The Internet (1991) indicates this privilege without comment. "In general, American [Email] addresses end in an organizational suffix, such as ". edu," which means the site is at a college or university. Other American suffixes include: . corn for businesses, . org for non-profit organizations, . gov and . rail for government and military agencies, and . net for companies or organizations that run large networks. Sites in the rest of the world tend to use a two-letter code that represents their country" (p. 23). Top-level domain designations for users in the United States have not, in practice, incorporated suffixes indicating their nation of origin. Although some US institutions (most notably federal offices and state agencies) do employ the . us suffix specified