The Digital Frontier

Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web

Sangeet Kumar

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056504
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Communication Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, and spreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and geopolitics.

The Digital Frontier interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned to reveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states.

In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

1

INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONTROL

Introduction

Justifiably presented as a transformative media technology, the web and its global emergence have arguably been the defining phenomena of the past two decades. The changes wrought by this global media technology are yet to be fully understood, and recent studies have emphasized both its emancipatory potential and its disciplinary dimensions. Key bodies of recent scholarship account for the seepage of the web and its digitized culture into all aspects of life globally. Emerging critical studies have analyzed the web’s unalterable effects on our quotidian lives including the transformation of politics, business, cultural production, human relationships, and knowledge as well as the enhanced modalities of surveillance and the power it embodies. While deepening our understanding, these studies have also opened avenues for public deliberation and policy discussions that have pushed against attempts to compromise the egalitarian ideals and promises that the internet started out with. Invoking those early promises, scholars have posed questions about power and inequity, cautioning us that the digital ecosystem could be reinforcing the very preexisting hierarchies that the web was intended to challenge. This book adds to those existing metacritiques of the World Wide Web to conceptualize the inevitable ways in which it is reconfiguring key dimensions of global culture. It extends the critical questions posed about the social effects of digital culture to a global scale to understand the transnational consequences of the web’s gradual global adoption.

Inspired by critiques that have emphasized dimensions of discipline, control, and power on the web, my attempt here is to capture a fuller account of how significant aspects of global culture are being transformed inexorably by the speed and scale of digital culture and the related rise of networked norms of sociality. I ascribe these transformations to a gradually expanding form of networked cultural power instantiated on the web. This modality of power functions akin to Deleuzian control that inheres within and modulates through the conventions, protocols, default settings, and algorithmic regulation that, by forming key components of the digital infrastructure that regulate online sociality, determine the essential preconditions for accessing and participating in global digital culture. This book seeks to present the operation of such a networked form of control, delineated in the ensuing pages, as the successor to earlier forms of global cultural hegemony that were previously acknowledged as key determinants of global inequities and asymmetries. As the web expands globally, the frictions created between its universalizing codes and conventions and the local cultural milieus irreducible to it open up sites of contestation that reveal the operation of this power. These sites instantiate a familiar and historical dynamic between the center and the periphery, the developed and the developing, and the erstwhile colonies and metropoles. This reenactment of a familiar historical trope wherein an overriding system claiming universal values can act in the name of the larger common good (Hardt and Negri 2000) by masking its contingent origins and parochial interests is given an entirely new valence by a networked modality of power that the web heralds and concretizes. Hence, despite the similarity between historical forms of cultural dominance and their contemporary digital iteration, especially in their claims of embodying universal values and ideals, this recent operation of power is also different from its historical avatars. That difference can be ascribed, among other reasons, to the self-presentation of digital networks as a centerless and neutral overarching entity whose diffused and horizontal architecture allows it to conceal its cultural, political, and ideological core and present itself as a potentially egalitarian network.

Expectedly, the proliferation of this emerging form of power through the web’s expanding sinews is continuously contested and negotiated by competing worldviews, values, and visions that collide with the dominant cultural and political ideals embedded within the web’s cultural architecture. While these contestations have a longer history in the Euro-American West (given the web’s longer presence there), they are visibly pronounced today in large parts of the non-Western world and the Global South as they gradually come on board the digital network. This book’s analysis proceeds by interrogating four such sites (described below) where the cultural power of the overarching digital ecosystem engenders confrontations between the universalizing codes of the global network and the irreducible local particularities that resist them. The goal is to show how these sites reveal moments of tug of war between the resilient preexisting cultural milieus located at differing stages of networked digitization and the newly assertive modality of networked cultural power. Undoubtedly, the heterogeneous nature of these conflicts at each site also reveals how local cultures and histories intertwine with global affordances of the networked technology in radically different ways to create distinct digital worlds (e.g., “national webs” [Rogers 2013]).

To be sure, the web’s architecture inscribes a dialectical logic on this form of power wherein its ability to regulate, shape, and constrain rides on the ruse of emancipatory promises of expression, association, and subversion. Hence, pointing to its assertive force is not to deny the obvious advantages of connectivity, access, and collaboration but to show that those rewards are parts of a package that come along with the constraining impositions of conventions, protocols, algorithmic regulation, and behavior design that inherently privilege particular social, cultural, and political values over others. Embedded within the design, conventions, and modulating algorithms that function akin to soft infrastructures (Peters 2015) shaping digital culture, these ideological values reveal that, far from being some neutral enablers of human interaction, the web’s affordances structurally incentivize particular norms, epistemologies, and cultures while disincentivizing others. By privileging particular ways of being, knowing, and belonging, these systems of rewards and penalty, sanctions and seductions, concretized by the web’s architecture, share their modalities with prior regimes of power (Rose 1990, 1998) that sought to bring about social modulation through a similar system of incentives and penalties. The web’s novelty lies in its ability to mask its directionality as well as its cultural and political core by rendering them invisible behind a horizontal, centerless, and diffused modality that helps support perceptions about its flexibility, emptiness, and apolitical nature.

It is this very center—and the cultural, political, and social directionality embedded within its incentive structures—that repeatedly collides with the preexisting norms and values at each of the four sites and instances of global contestations analyzed here. The book locates the first instance of this imposition within the expanding private enclosures of the global digital oligopolies that, in replicating a discourse similar to the colonial one of spreading progress and civilization beyond the frontier, instantiate how the logic of the global common good is being deployed as a ruse to expand private corporate interests. Next the analysis focuses on how the rules, protocols, and conventions that regulate knowledge production on collaborative online knowledge sites (such as Wikipedia), far from enabling diverse epistemologies and ways of knowing, have an exclusionary effect by strictly policing what counts as legitimate knowledge. In the same vein, the book’s next site of interrogation underscores the ways in which the affordances, design, and algorithmic regulation on social media platforms help enable and foster emerging norms of global selfhood whose irrefutable origins can be located within Euro-American modernity, where these aspirational ideals of subjectivity were institutionalized. Lastly, the book focuses on a series of recent conflicts between the global web and nation-states to show how the former’s cultural and political power poses unprecedented challenges to national sovereignty. This challenge is experienced disproportionately by countries depending on their differential power in the off-line world and due to preexisting asymmetries aligned along the North/South, the colonial/metropole, and the developed/developing world axes. These phenomena, with a chapter devoted to each, represent a common logic wherein the seemingly decentralized, horizontal, and diffused network reveals the cultural, political, and ideological valences embedded within the conventions and protocols that form the digital ecosystem’s architecture.

This exploration of the global consequences of the web learns from extant critiques of power inequities within the globalization of culture that have occupied scholars making a case for difference, plurality, and heterogeneity (Jameson 1998) in the global cultural order. The book’s core is animated by critical perspectives, such as postcolonial theory (Spivak 1999; Bhabha 1997; Said 1979; Fanon 2008; Parameswaran 2008), that have sought to subvert the universalizing narratives of post-Enlightenment Europe (Chakrabarty 2007) in the realm of knowledge and culture. This argument also extends critical scholarship about the process of cultural globalization (Kraidy 2007) that has theorized inequities within global cultural transfers, first through a lens of cultural imperialism (Schiller 1992; T. Miller 2005) and then through corrections to that lens that deployed more complex analyses of power (such as hybridity). Critiques of hegemonic moments within the global cultural order form key precursors to this project, which interrogates the iteration of those same asymmetries within the digital domain today. This book’s contention that the globalizing cultural architecture of the web should nudge us to reconsider the relevance of those prior critiques of cultural dominance, long advanced by critical scholars of globalization, challenges the myth that globally expanding digital networks represent a globally representative summative mean and hence are without a particular center of their own.

Global Power in the Era of the Digital

Situating itself within a lineage of scholarship that has analyzed inequities within the global cultural ecosystem, this book seeks to extend to the digital domain critical insights about how processes of cultural production and consumption can function as sites of global contestations between ideologies, values, and norms. Prior attempts to theorize global dimensions of cultural power have shown how the dominance of particular cultural industries, institutions, and texts shape the symbolic, discursive, cultural, and ideological ecosystems at distant sites by overriding local values and norms and molding the trajectories of desire in recipient societies. Such interrogations of globalization through the lens of culture have complemented other related perspectives—such as the economic, political, historical, or technological—through which the structures of global hegemony have also been studied. Analyses of global economic disparities, for instance, have brought together Marxist critiques of the exploitative nature of capitalism with the historical fact of colonialism to argue that the modern economic system created distinctions between the higher and lower value modes of production to create a “core-periphery” (Wallerstein 2004, 17) relationship within the world economy. As seen by the world systems theory, colonialism was a logical consequence of the exploitative impulse within capitalism (Wallerstein 2004) since it realized the inherent instinct within capital to expand outward in pursuit of markets and raw materials.

This project deepens and broadens that critical cultural lens on globalization by pivoting its focus onto the digital domain to better interrogate the cultural consequences of what is arguably the most transformative media technology of our age. Such an examination, through questions about cultural power, must learn from prior understandings of the material, political, and economic consequences of cultural dominance while also remaining attentive to the unique ways in which the networked digital domain allows for a diffused, immanent, and hence invisible operation of power. The web’s radical modality and architecture necessitate that we go beyond previous understandings of cultural dominance that have focused on political economy (T. Miller 2005; Schiller 1992), technological dominance (Adas 2009; Balwin 2016), or the ideological values inhering within the text itself (Liebes and Katz 1994). One of the most trenchant and powerful critiques of such dominance comes from the field of postcolonial studies (Said 1979; Spivak 1999; Kumar and Parameswaran 2018), which has sought to unravel how the cultural, symbolic, and discursive realm created the mandate for the physical and material subjugation of large parts of the world. Focusing on areas as distinct as identity (Bhabha 1997; Fanon 2008), knowledge (Connell 2014; Spivak 1999), language (Fanon 2008; Viswanathan 1997), media (Shome and Hegde 2002; Shome 2019; Gajjala 2013), and culture (Said 1994; Parameswaran 2002), threads within postcolonial theory have sought to understand the powerful effects of the symbolic and discursive structures in legitimizing cultural and political domination and control. The continuing ways in which those vestigial structures shape cultural, political, and ideological choices in the postcolonial era (Harindranath 2003; Kumar 2016) underscore the abiding contribution of this body of work in understanding global power relations today.

In addition to the historical analysis of postcolonial studies, the field of cultural globalization has similarly pointed to the continued influence of former imperial powers in the world through a manifest and measurable dominance in the production and distribution of culture (Schiller 1992; Dorfman and Mattelart 1975). Critical inquiry along these lines has asserted that the economic and technological advantages of former imperial powers allowed them to continue their cultural and ideological hegemony over still-developing nations, in an argument categorized as the “cultural imperialism” thesis (Dorfman and Mattelart 1975; T. Miller 2005; Schiller 1992; Tomlinson 1995). Here, global cultural flows were shown to represent a new imperialism of ideas, reinscribing the worn paths of military imperialism. The cultural imperialism thesis was obviously a product of its time, since a polemical attack on Western cultural domination of the world and an unmasking of its collusion with capitalism was much needed during the gradual process of decolonization in the twentieth century. In so doing, the thesis reminded observers that the end of de jure colonialism did not necessarily end the dynamics of global domination. Even though its theorizations have proven largely correct, it is worth underscoring that cultural imperialism was a phenomenon that, in a convoluted, perhaps ironic way, contained the roots of its own transcendence. Cultural reprogramming has been spectacularly successful driven by various causes but also by people’s (often educated) desire to embrace a certain idea of modernity (Appadurai 1996). In this new context, scholars posing a correction to the cultural imperialism thesis made a case for theories of hybridity, arguing that cultural export, even in conditions of less than total equality, did not result in homogenized, look-alike cultures but rather a productive and empowering fusion referred to as “hybridity” (Bhabha 1984; Appiah 2006; Canclini 2006; Pieterse 2006). In consonance with active-audience theorists such as John Fiske and Elihu Katz (Fiske 2010; Liebes and Katz 1994; Appadurai 1990), those making a case for hybridity argue that global audiences remake the culture they consume, in a process of adaptation by which, it is suggested, they can assert collective power great enough to mitigate the potential homogenizing power of the dominant culture industries.

Locating Cultural Power in Digital Conventions

The rise of the digital domain and the consequent transformation in the economic, cultural, and media ecosystems it has engendered necessitates extending and going beyond these prior paradigms of global power in order to understand how the older power dynamics morph within the digital ecosystem today. The global span of networked digital media creates the conditions for an altered modality of cultural hegemony that is irreducible to singular causes such as political economy, technological prowess, distribution networks, or cultural texts. In responding to the exigencies of the digital era, this book goes beyond those extant factors to locate cultural power within the conventions, protocols, and algorithmic regulation that form the infrastructural backbone of digital culture globally. It advances the contention that the constraints on social interactions in the digital ecosystem that manifest themselves through a system of rules and affordances, which distribute rewards and penalties, have powers to shape norms, ideological values, and social behavior similar to the dominant cultural industries of yore, thus forging a new vantage point for understanding the nature of global power today.

In emphasizing the ways in which standards, conventions, and algorithmic modulation (elements defined as infrastructures of control below) regulate human behavior on the web, this book seeks to move the dominant paradigm through which to analyze global cultural power from an ideological and disciplinarian modality to that of control (Deleuze 1992), which also helps us reconcile the power-centric narratives of the web with its democratizing and enabling dimensions. In merging the critical threads of cultural dominance and postcolonial theory with the Deleuzian notion of control, this book continues similar engagements with Deleuze (Bignall and Patton 2010; Bensmaïa 2017) that allow it to underscore the dialectic of global connectivity heralded by digital and new media technologies by simultaneously pointing to its cultural and ideological costs. The emerging picture of a networked form of power that advances through seemingly necessary and invisible conventions holds true within a schema that places freedom and control in an eternal seesaw wherein the latter’s promise of the former makes it seductively effective and deceptively invisible. The tantalizing narrative of enabling expression, democratizing production, and facilitating solidarities over time and space often renders invisible the structured sinews and pathways through which digital culture channels online human behavior. We see this duality of freedom and restraint play out in specific case studies such as the deployment of emancipatory discourses to usurp the digital commons, legitimizing certain epistemologies as truer than others, elevating particular notions of selfhood as aspirational, and presenting a variable challenge to national sovereignty—ideas that the subsequent chapters of this book are respectively devoted to.

An analysis that focuses on the ideological and cultural effects of seemingly neutral conventions, designs, and algorithmic modulation must carefully refute claims that present those elements as acultural, unbiased, and hence unable to assert any cultural, political, and ideological influence of their own. In presenting these protocols as a necessary and uncoercive background that merely facilitate communication instead of shaping it, the web is often presented as an aggregation of the global zeitgeist rather than an assertive force whose interactive promise is expediently premised on accepting innumerable conditions that privilege particular cultural and ideological values, nudging users toward behavior change. Even as studies have rightly emphasized phenomena such as the democratization of cultural production through digital platforms, political empowerment through social-media-enabled uprisings, and a growing global digital ecosystem of expression and collaboration, there are also conspicuous omissions such as the “deafening silence when it comes to the legacy of US Empire” within scholarship about global digital media and culture (Aouragh and Chakravartty 2016, 560). In addressing those gaps within studies of the global dimensions of the web, this book pays homage to and extends the work of prior scholars who have centralized asymmetries and inequities within the production, consumption, and circulation within global culture.

In countering unidimensional and celebratory visions of the web, this analysis maneuvers through critical theories of technologies (Heidegger 1977; Feenberg 1991; Ellul 2014; Ihde 1979; Marcuse 2014) that underscore the cultural and political orientations of technological infrastructures thus making a strong case for their deep imbrication within relations of power. Their insights on the irrefutably normative dimensions of technologies anchors this book’s excavation of the cultural architecture of the World Wide Web, allowing it to pose corrections to claims about the value-neutral and apolitical nature of the web’s architecture, often imagined as representing some ground-up organic global desire. The book’s argument takes into account the rich history of media scholarship (McLuhan 2003, 2011; Innis 2008; Carey 1992; Kittler 1999; Peters 2015) that has conducted close analyses of the nature of the medium, including its affordances, technological features, and design, in order to challenge the primacy of content. Situating my analysis in that lineage, this study interrogates the cultural values and ethos embedded within the web’s architecture—a point underscored by key recent scholars of the internet (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018; Hillis, Petit, and Jarrett 2013; Turner 2010) who reveal how the contingencies surrounding the web’s origin shaped the dominant values of the medium. When transposed onto the global context, these codes and conventions have cultural and political ramifications far beyond their sites of origin.

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An exploration into the ways in which the seemingly neutral and acultural medium of the web conceals a cultural and political core can be significantly enriched by a ph...