hydrarchist writes this from the cover page of the pamphlet P2P Fightsharing produced by the WSIS We Seize! group in Rome.

Seizing -- You Can't Beat the Feeling!

The WSIS positions itself as an opportunity to develop a common vision of an 'information society' and bundles with it a series of promises; a just world; more transparent government; bridging of digital divides. An examination of the material propositions, trade agreeement (WTO, FTAA) realpolitik, and the positions of market dominance and social misery left untouched, and unmentioned, tell a different story.

As communications networks spread information becomes central to both production and the organization of social institutions. But rather than making life easier, informationalization supplements and intensifies production and labor. Spiralling demand for productivity imposes close-quarters labor surveillance; dockers’ movements tracked as they move palettes around a warehouse; the waitress whose orders are memorized and who must balance her float exactly at the end of the shift; the temporary worker assigned to a new data entry office or call center every couple of days. Benefits of digitalization accrue principally to those who have the capital resources and power to capture them, and the fight over the laws regulating the digital sphere is a struggle over the destination of this wealth between global regions and social classes.

The purpose of new legal instruments has not been to 'reform' but to extend and entrench preexisting commercial interests. A clear example are the laws on digital television (DTV) introduced in the US and Italy which intensify monopolistic and oligopolistic control over the media, closing the potential for other voices ceated by DTV’s efficient use of radio spectrum for broadcast. In DTV there has been subterfuge, but copyrights, patents and trademarks have simply been extended and enforced by means of coercion based on trade sanctions under TRIPS and bilateral treaties. When the essential raw materials of production are knowledge and data - both of which can be shared and reproduced infinitely - these laws limit the productive potential of social cooperation, by maintaining an artificial scarcity of that which is in fact plentiful.

The preparation process for this summit has been long and tedious. Initially enthusiastic NGOs have seen their hopes evaporate. The basic reformist agenda has received no significant concessions even within the merely discursive framework the summit offers. Attempts to establish a new fund to finance Southern development have been stymied; language extolling the benefits of free software and public interests in “intellectual property” (IP) has been expunged; the drive to elaborate a substantial legal concept of communication rights has been blocked. To add ignominy to business as usual, groups such as Reporters Sans Frontiers and Human Rights in China have been barred from participation for having raised rights abuses by participating states.

The failure of the WSIS is no surprise and occurs in a continuum of defeat for reformist movements in the ICT field stretching 25 years. The neo-liberal logic is unrelenting: privatization of telecommunications services over community-oriented development, removal of ownership restrictions in media and more intense concentration of ownership, maintenance of artificial scarcity in radio spectrum so as to benefit broadcast and telcoms incumbents, expansion of IP laws prioritizing private profit over health and education and the maintenance of neo-colonial international ordering.

Seizing
Not Asking...

Against this background, ”WSIS? WeSeize!” poses another point of view, another strategy - from below. Ordinary people build every society, including any would be information society, and their unsatisfied needs express themselves in cooperative and often illegal ways vexatious to the rulers. Our task is to help these communities recognize one another, hybridize, and realize their strength - to create a new commons of potential and struggle. File-sharers resisting copyright laws, free software programmers who challenge proprietary software monopolies, grassroots communications guerillas who breach the wall of the media-advertising complex, casualized call-center workers in search of means of struggle after the departure of the unions, migrants hacking border management in pursuit of a better life.

Blinded by the fantasies of the officially powerful, we underestimate the power of resistance. And widescale resistance brings reform even when it is not requested. Concessions come not because we ask for them but because we impose them- the law formalizes that change post-factum. There comes a moment when the costs of continuing with the old arrangements exceeds that of changing them, domination then integrates what it can and seeks to pacify the rest. Our ability to control the consequences of that passage pivots on our cooperative capacity to ensure that it maximizes our potential to subordinate time and resources to life rather than the accumulation of dead labor for others."