Manuel Castells And The Logic of Cybersecurity

The current storm about cybersecurity in the US has rightly been the subject of some skepticism, not least from yours truly, but it’s worth remembering that there is a world beyond the US. This week, the UN announced its intentions to dig deep and do something about terrorist use of the internet, and yesterday South Korea seems to have leaked its intentions to host a UN cybersecurity agency. Last October, the UN announced it would attempt to ban global first cyber strikes by the end of 2010, and they may have had a hand in US-Russia cyber talks. Interestingly, the UK’s Office of Cyber Security seems to take a pretty dim view of the utility of such talks, or of any agreements that might come out of them. I suspect they’re right.

All this put me in mind of the following lengthy quote from Manuel Castells’ excellent Communication Power (OUP, 2009, p.115). Castells has just expressed his frustrations with the UN’s attempts to address global internet governance, and stem from his involvement in these discussions over the last decade. I’ve split what are two long paragraphs into more digestible chunks.

I came to the conviction (leading, of course, to my withdrawal from all these bodies, including those relating to the United Nations) that the fundamental concern of most governments is to establish regulations to control the Internet and find mechanisms to enforce this control in the traditional terms of law and order.

Regardless of my personal feelings about such a policy (I am against it), there are serious reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the proposed controls when they are not directed toward specific corporations or organizations but at the user community at large (unless there is a generalized attack on Internet service providers that would cripple the entire Internet communication system—never say never).

Yet this is an unlikely hypothesis given the extent of business interests already invested in the Internet and the widespread support that the Internet enjoys amongst most of the 1.4 billion users for whom it has become the communication fabric of their lives. Therefore, the regulation of the Internet has shifted its focus from the Internet itself to specific instances of censorship and repression by government bureaucracies, and to the privatization of the global communication infrastructure that supports Internet traffic.

So, in spite of regulation, the Internet thrives as the local/global, multimodal communication medium of our age. But it submits, as everything else in our world, to relentless pressure from two essential sources of domination that still loom over our existence: capital and the state.

Castells goes on to explain that capital trumps state in this communications environment, and has facilitated the ‘global diffusion of new forms of communication’, including his concept of ‘mass self-communication’ (which is what I’m doing right now). He finishes the passage by suggesting that the result of ‘the yielding of the state to the interests of capital leads to the rise of a new form of communication that may increase the power of citizens over both capital and the state.’

Surely, this is where we’re at now, right? Is this actually what’s driving the current stampede to enfold ‘cybersecurity’ within government, rather than entrusting it to producers and consumers as the free market would mostly do? Has the beast has been unleashed by communications deregulation and re-regulation over the last twenty years, and governments are now wondering what the hell they’ve done? Branding computer and network security as national security may well be just a discursive ploy, and internationalising action on this problem is looking like some weird universal heuristic for reconfiguring global flows of capital and political power.

I described Castells to someone the other day as ‘an enlightened Marxist’, and I guess he has more of a structural take on global networks than I do. However, the explosive rise of ‘cybersecurity’ in the global political imagination has to be explained somehow, and Castells seems like as good a place as any to start.

[cross-posted at Ubiwar]