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I believe this debate is spot on the mark and cuts right through to the ongoing problem with modern revolutionary movements.

I just want to offer a specific, narrow and tangential contribution to the debate.

It concerns bseattle's apparent conclusion that "the information war is inevitably winnable" based on these steps of logic:

1. that the internet as we know it and desire it is here to stay
2. that the internet we know or desire will facilitate the information war
... snip ...
n. that the information war will be won.

I will act as the devils advocate and argue that the conclusion of point 1 is premature.

Progressive interests have made good use of the internet as a way of organising information and building support from places that otherwise would be out of reach.

The structure and properties of the internet are as yet, not well understood. Its resilience until now depends much on that fact. It just so happens that the internet has a number of properties that revolutionary organisations find convenient. This means the internet provides a temporary goldmine for revolutionary activity, at least for the near future.

I fear, however, the bourgeoisie still have ample time to experiment with ways with which to control the internet. If you have no form, you cannot be attacked, but the internet is far from having no form. It has a physical form, it has a virtual form.

The physical form is about infrastructure: machines (servers and routers), connections and protocols (the way machines communicate), user agents (the applications used by users such as browsers) - all the things that make it work that we don't really see, or take for granted.

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The virtual form is about information: images, text, sound, animation, navigation (eg. hyper links). It is that part of the internet that we experience and truly interact with.

Both forms of the internet will continue to evolve: The original military, and academic internet was no way like the internet we see today, and tomorrow's internet will be much different yet again.

Yes there have been attempts at controlling the internet and they have largely failed. bseattle quotes filtering as such an example. But those attacks on the internet fail only because they those approaches are built around on the misunderstanding of how the internet operates. Whereas means such as filtering and spying on the internet are bound to fail because they work against the character of the internet, it still does not rule out the possibility that more imaginative approaches will work.

For instance, whereas the recording industry was able to pull down Napster with the rule of law it has been unable to defeat more decentralised forms of file sharing such as kazaa. They are learning quickly however and realise the internet's strength can also be its weakness. By putting more junk onto the kazaa network (eg. poor quality music files), they increase the chances the unexpecting downloader will download junk. The decentralised distribution of the network is such that by publishing only a few junk files, they can rely on those files infesting entire network. The inability to authenticate downloads, and the anonymity of the medium only means that the high quality and low quality files or sites cannot be easily be distinguished from each other.

Therefore, although the most hardcore of users will remain, the general population will be put off using such an unwieldy medium. The recording industry have effectively achieved what they want and they will continue to do it with ever increasing (and possibly more dangerous) payloads.

Remember, this is but one way the internet can be attacked to reduce its 'less desired' uses without reducing its value as an economic accelerator.

Another example is email. Email as we know today where anyone can reach anyone else is also its weakness. It is constantly abused by spammers which reduce the value of the communication medium. To deal with it, the solution of 'filtering' was initialially proposed - but it is ineffective. Eventually, it could be replaced by another similar form of communication where the accessability to everyone has been removed. Will any or all such new approaches result in a less connective medium that is useless to the masses? Maybe not, but time will tell. All I know now is that spam is on the increase: the future of email as it is today is at stake.

Palladium:

Microsoft is pioneering a new family of technology they collectively codenamed 'palladium' which is essentially security from written from the most basic hardware all the way through to the software. It results in a system where all files and information is heavily guarded by cryptographic keys. So heavily guarded that it may be possible to arrange the following security measures:

• Prevent applications from spying on another. For instance, it would be possible to stop you from being able to take screen captures of a movie you are watching or a document you are viewing, or copy text from an electronic document.
• Prevent you from watching a movie more than once, or after a certain date.
• A movie you have bought would normally be viewable an unlimited number of times could be subsequently denied to you at the whim of the content provider.
• Any document you distribute could identify you.
• Prevent a document from being viewed except on trusted machines.

In such an authoritarian system, it may not be difficult to implement the control of the internet.

Why should the masses accept such a system, let alone to the extent where authoritarian internet control becomes feasible?

The stick:

With the 'war on terrorism' raging in the united states, politicians are leveraging it as an opportunity to implement 'security' measures. They might require that it be used by law. In the absolute worst case (but unlikely) scenario, conventional computer architectures (those we use today) could be made illegal.

The carrot:

Anyone who does not want to use this system will no longer have access to content: movies, music, products, literature - because they will only be made available for secure architectures. With the general population addicted to content, I don't believe there will be many who will be willing to give up their leisure activities. The cost and effort of maintaining conventional computers in addition to controlled computers could become a burden the general population may not accept.

I anticipate many more such attempts.

Does it mean palladium will take over the world and email will disappear? Will those changes to the internet make waging an information war increasingly difficult. Maybe. Maybe not. That isn't the issue I am trying to raise. The issue is that the art of internet control is still largely unexplored: Internet control is not necessarily a completely bogus concept concocted by a desperate ruling class trying to delude itself. They expect progress on this front and not only that, they hope to make some money on it too.

We can be as inventive as any bourgeois effort, though I do believe we have the _harder_ territory to defend. Decentralised systems are difficult to attack, but the weaknesses of decenstralised systems are notoriously much more difficult to comprehend and solve. I assume that is why many systems are initially built in a centralised manner.

I still have a gut feeling that a serious attempt by an aggregation of diverse, principled revolutionary organisations such as that envisaged by bseattle can win this front of the information war in addition to the main front. It will take effort.

My conclusion at this time: I see no firm evidence that this front of the information war will inevitably turn out in a positive way. This front of the war itself I believe is inevitable, but not its outcome. And if the greater information war depends extensively on this front, the worst thing we could do is be complacent about it.

8thfloor