A VERY CONFUSED INTERNET STRATEGIST

An article counseling India to join with the BRICS countries to “develop an alternative” to American “Internet hegemony” (The Hindu, 6 June, page 9), displays such a comprehensive misunderstanding of global realities that it is difficult to know where to begin a critique.

The author, Parminder Jeet Singh of the Bengaluru-based NGO IT for Change, argues that because the Internet ‘has become like a global neural system running through and transforming all social sectors,” whoever controls that network “begins to wield unprecedented power.”

And who might that be?

Anyone who controls the “connectivity architecture” and “Big Data.”

The connectivity architecture of the Internet is, for historical reasons, in the United States, where it has evolved from its military roots into a public utility governed by anti-monopoly regulations and a vociferously defended equal access philosophy.

What is Big Data?

It is “the continuous bits of information generated by each and every microactivity of our increasingly digitized existence.”

But does anyone control Big Data?

Singh is a shameless fear monger on this topic.

Monsanto is an example of an entity controlling Big Data, he says; it “holds almost field-wise micro information on climate, soil type, neighborhood agri-patterns, and so on. Such data will form the backbone of even its traditional agri-offerings.”

Instead of telling us how Monsanto will use that information in ways detrimental to India in the face of a strong global movement towards organic farming, he merely asserts that it “is easy to understand how data control-based lock-ins are going to be even more powerful and monopolistic than the traditional dependencies in this sector.”

Perhaps to paper over that gap he then notes that John Deere, the world’s largest agricultural machinery company told the US Copyright Office that “farmers don’t own” the computer code that runs their tractors, they only have an “implied license.”

That sounds like a huge power grab, until you consider that it is no different from buying a book and not owning the author’s copyright. Or a computer, and not owning its operating system.

But Singh wants us to feel threatened.

“Similar developments are occurring in every other sector. Policy-making and governance are becoming dangerously dependent on Big Data, even as the public sector is all but giving up its traditional responsibilities for public statistics. The State is increasingly dependent on data collected and controlled by a few global corporations.”

Google, which people “think right now is a mere support” is entering many substantive fields like medicine where networks carry patient information; it is “threatening the traditional players” in various sectors, and “may become the primary agent in the relationship.”

He holds out the prospect that data providers in the education sector who sell “personalized offerings for every student and every context” will “add to the power of the monopolistic networks at the expense of their peripheral users. As their power consolidates, so do the terms of engagements mutate in the favor of the network controllers.”

This is a classic Chicken Little “sky is falling” scare.

It pays no attention to the fact that the logic of global connectivity is not just anti-monopoly but anti-mega corporation.

The mega corporation is increasingly a dinosaur because its essential strengths are based on top-down/center-periphery communications systems that allow small groups to amass, hoard and manipulate information to their advantage.

In the age of the Internet and Worldwide Web, such control is impossible. Power lies in networks that are flat and do not permit top-down control; any power grab by corporations like Google, Facebook or Twitter will spell their instant doom.

As for Big Data, Singh misses the revolutionary potential of the smart phone and the geospatial organization of information.

We are facing a future when Big Data will be collected automatically by billions of individuals and organized geospatially on the publicly owned cloud, beyond the power of any corporation or government to corner or manipulate.

The only way small elite groups will be able to continue enjoying their privileges will be through brutal control of the Internet as in China.

In democratic countries, elite groups have generated fear of terrorism to legitimize their own efforts at fascist control of networks, and in that context, Singh’s advice that India ally with China against the United States is madness.

The only course for democratic forces in India and the United States – not to mention in the other BRICS countries – is to ally against their own power-grabbing elites and internationally, against China, which is now the ugly face of global fascism.

In that international face-off, the key issue is not who will govern the Internet but how we perceive international terrorism: it is not “Islamic” but British, camouflage for its massively profitable post-colonial business of laundering the proceeds of organized crime.

Only if we lay the bogey of terrorism can we move beyond the surveillance/police State and realize the rich democratic potential of a connected world.

Indian Strategists in Oz

"Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain” says the voice of the powerful and awesome Wizard of Oz when he is discovered to be a mere trickster.

If India’s strategic pundits had been there with Dorothy and Toto they would undoubtedly have saluted and returned to analysing the grand illusion projected for their benefit.

The latest indication of their credulity is in Brahma Chellany’s Hindustan Times piece headlined (in my local Goa newspaper), “In a Heating Pot of Water.”

The burden of Chellany’s analysis is that India needs to be worried because of the promised $46 billion in Chinese aid to Pakistan. It will promote Beijing’s “Silk Road” project, which he considers nothing more than the old “string of pearls” strategy to “encircle” India.

Although Chellany notes a number of potholes in the Silk Road/String theory, not least the success of Myanmar and Sri Lanka in “escaping Beijing’s clutches,” nowhere does he even hint at the overall absurdity of Chinese ambitions.

Beijing is touting the Silk Road project at a time when it has alarmed every one of its neighbours with its power drunk swagger (not exempting Russia grateful for oil contracts in a season of cold weather).

How Beijing expects to gain the cooperation of South-East Asian nations outraged by its grab of marine resources is a question that can be answered only by a student of mental pathology, not geopolitics.

Its grandiloquent talk of multi-billion investments in a variety of international schemes including the BRICS and Asian Infrastructural banks ignores another inescapable reality: Chinese economic growth is stalling and could turn into a precipitous and debilitating fall.

What makes the Wizard of Oz comparison apt is the blind eye Chellany turns on another aspect of the China-Pakistan picture, the critical British role in shaping their anti-Indian policies.

Pakistan became an anti-Indian British proxy with Partition in 1947.

China's deeply ambiguous India policy today is not so much a legacy of Mao-era paranoia as it is of Margaret Thatcher's deal on Hong Kong that left its huge money laundering industry untouched, to be the conduit of the enormous flow of investments that powered the Chinese economy for three decades. 

Much as President Xi might want to open a new chapter in India-China relations, he dare not for fear Britain will pull the plug on the Chinese economy.

The alliance between Islamabad and Beijing, especially in its anti-Indian dimension, makes sense only if we take the British role into account.

Chellany notes that Pakistan and China have little in common except for their anti-Indian policy but he does not then ask why either continues to maintain that stance when the overwhelming logic of the Asian situation is for much greater regional cooperation.

The answer is in that little man behind the curtain, Britain, with its multi-billion dollar interests in the Afghan heroin trade and its even more massive stake in Hong Kong's flows of black money.

Only those connections make any sense of Pakistan’s suicidal hostility towards India and China’s bizarre Jekyll and Hyde performance.

If India is to deal effectively with this situation, our strategic analysts will have to face the rigours of life without the goodies Britain provides to its "friends" in the mass media. 

They will have to write as if the country's fate depends on their honesty -- as indeed, it does.

What the Stats Foretell

Okay children hold on tight, for the global economic rollercoaster will soon go off a cliff.

Here’s why.

There’s been a sharp slowdown in manufacturing in all the major economies, and it’s tied to slackening exports.

Most of the economies of the Eurozone are contracting. Germany is just a hairsbreadth away from joining the rest. The United States had zero jobs growth in August. Japan, reeling from the tsunami and nuclear disaster, is facing continued slow growth. The Canadian economy shrank 0.4 per cent in the last quarter.

Of the BRIC economies, Brazil and Russia are heavily dependent on commodity exports, which will plunge with the continued drop in manufacturing. The good news/bad news is that oil and gold prices will drop like stones.

China’s dependence on export-led growth will boomerang into an export-led depression. Signs of sharp contraction are already evident: car sales have slipped dramatically in the last few months and are projected to fall 45 per cent by 2013.

Analysts say the cause of this synchronous global slowdown is the end of the growth generated by the enormous economic stimulus packages after the 2008 crisis. As all countries are in debt up to their eyeballs, there’s no hope of anything like the last round of deficit financing. It remains to be seen if other major economies will follow the United States in its stimulus package disguised as a jobs programme.

Overall, we are looking at a scenario last seen when falling exports triggered the Great Depression of the 1930s. The sequence has a fatal internal logic: as export markets fall, corporations cut back on production, throwing millions of people out of work, thereby shrinking domestic demand and setting off further cuts in manufacturing and employment in a continuing vicious cycle.

Of course, if there is a default by any of Europe’s heavily indebted countries the crisis could develop far more rapidly. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned last week that the European financial system is on the verge of collapse. To avoid it, European countries will have to inject capital into their ever more shaky banks, but that seems unlikely.

What about India?

The funny thing is, while the exports of the rest of the world have been taking a nosedive, Indian exporters have been racking up staggering rates of growth ranging up to 84 per cent. There is widespread suspicion that this does not reflect real exports, only black money flooding back to take advantage of the only major economy that shows continued signs of vitality.

Can nothing be done to forestall the coming gut wrenching period?

A great deal, especially by community activists; but the corporate Powers-that-be will probably not allow things to get out of their control. Traditionally, they have maintained control by starting up conflicts to disrupt cooperative efforts at change. In Europe during the 1930s, that involved funding the rise of fascist parties under Hitler and Mussolini. It is sobering to remember that the world economy fully recovered from the Great Depression only because of the massive military expenditures of World War II.