By Emaline Friedman
The 1999 protests in Seattle at the World Trade Organization (WTO) was described by Naomi Klein as the ‘coming-out party of a resistance movement’.1 Activists organized to decry the damning effects of neoliberalism and the reduction of all social life to transaction relationships, and all meaning to capital. Since then, anti-globalists have sought alternatives that aren’t against globalization per se, instead understanding it as an objective process.2 This conceptual shift has led such activists to move progressively from condemnation of globalization, to demanding a more fair and humane globalization, and finally to articulating means by which forces of globalization might be harnessed toward the interest of civil, human, and employee rights.
It is in this spirit that this chapter poses some ideas about how to harness the technologies that emerge in the context of the inevitable process of globalization to bring about a humanitarian transformation of society. Rather than empty defiance, we must be willing to articulate how change comes about and to proffer an ethic of social sensibility in deploying the tools, processes and inter-connectivity that the high times of globalization have brought about. Alterglobalism was rare in its time for specifically addressing the meaning and influence of the ‘information revolution’, so it is fitting to adopt its progressive premises to forward locally valuable uses of global computing infrastructure.
Two points stand out in particular: first, alterglobalism embraces a tighter loop between economies and societies. While global coordination of exchange of goods and services may be necessary, any institution responsible for this area should take into consideration a broad range of social goals, such as provision of basic economic rights to all people (fair wages and working conditions), environmental protection and the promotion of the model of sustainable development. Second, alterglobalism opposes social uniformity. This manifests in practice via support of local movements. In this sense, it propagates a program that is close to communitarianism. Although it does not distance itself from globalization processes, alterglobalism promotes the catch phrase ‘Think globally, act locally’. It uses the term ‘glocalism’ to define such a model of community, which, while making use of the opportunities offered by globalization processes (for example fast information communication), does not lose its local, regional color.
Yet, since the founding inquiries of alter-globalism in the 2000’s, much has changed. We find ourselves now in a historical moment when neoliberal globalization is breaking down of its own internal crises; the financial crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine have all manifested new tendencies toward deglobalization.3 The monolithic New World Order in which the United States is the state, and other nations are expected to subordinate their sovereignty to the interest of its firms may in fact be coming to an end, and accordingly we may adapt alter-globalism to this new context of post-globalism. So, as far as social technologies are concerned, the creations of Silicon Valley, under the auspices of American national security policy, might be considered but then also reconsidered.
Against platform monopolies
Global-scale platforms that enrich transnational, American-based firms have tended to treat their mass of users as a fungible set of ‘any people’ whose value is solely in the data traces that they leave. The novelty of data as an economic asset is that, while the value of any data point is minimal, it contains meaning that becomes very valuable in aggregate. That aggregated masses of data are so valuable is a linchpin of the data economy as we know it today, where a few platform giants fight ruthlessly over the privilege of hosting peoples’ actions, thoughts, and online “behavior” and to exclude others from accessing the same aggregate data. We mill about as these ‘any people’, caught in the cross-hairs of misinformation campaigns between imperialists vying for dominance.
Ultimately, we are pulled by social and economic imperatives to migrate on-line. Network effects work, and we need to be wherever our social support systems are and to follow the money into increasingly digitized labor. As it stands, these social forums, or platforms, certainly constitute the faceless, inhumane globalism against which we should fight. Yet, they currently render our memories and our pasts. The politics of cultural records is a question of who defines what is worth saving and why. On monopolistic social platforms, the project of archiving, personally and collectively, is a nearly antithetical practice to the corporate and military surveillance and hoarding of data. The personal data we supplied remains archived without our conscious intent, according to protocols we have no input in shaping. Most importantly, it is not available for creative re-use. Is it possible that the limited forms of social coordination generated on these apps might seed a proliferation of society-level coordination in the name of alter-global, collective sovereignty against hyper-global expropriation?
Social applications are distinct from other types of technologies with these same capabilities because they are the ones that people use to relate to one another and to carry out our daily activities. The capturing of such activities as ‘inputs’ slowly becomes an end in itself, with ad-driven, attention grabbing social web environments built to suit this end rather than specific needs of people using it. Against the alter-global ethic of tightening the loop between social and economic activity they loosen it; proprietary software with its own business agenda is placed in between the people it is supposed to help connect. For this reason, social applications and the transfer and exchange of social data is a uniquely rich zone of activity for local applications of Web3 technologies.
Imagining local stacks
So, what does it look like when global-scale record-keeping is placed in service of local cultures and distinctive ways of life? The impetus toward preservation is not only preservation for an unknowable future, but preservation in the present: of style, flavor, custom, and local meaning. Planetary computerization is a product of globalization. Together with the rise of global computing came the rise of global metrics that implicitly turn groups against their own needs. Nevertheless, the web can and must involve sub-networks whose logic is not subordinated to any defining, single market characteristic; in other words, networks can retain the cultural flavors of the people who use it. It is this integrated character of diversity and the persistence of difference-in-itself that is what needs to be preserved in order to ‘think globally and act locally’ about software. For this reason, it is critical that alter-global information technologies lend the full force of humanity’s know-how to local causes, customs, and meanings. Primitive elements of social computing can be focused and easily programmed to further goals that take shape in the context of this group or this people.
It is this integrated character of diversity and the persistence of difference-in-itself that is what needs to be preserved in order to ‘think globally and act locally’ about software.
Some techno-social responses to the problem of the globalization of the Internet and the way it takes our attention away from issues ‘on the ground’ are networks and protocols that forward a culture of participation and collaboration around digital technologies, fostering not only literacy but input into the design of social technologies and the metrics and values they implicitly carry. At the bottom of the stack, this can mean storing and processing data locally. P2P or peer-to-peer describes consensual connections between peers using open protocols that facilitate permissionless sharing and contributing. Mesh networks, too, are private networks that are hosted locally and used without an internet connection to connect and communicate locally.
Local-first development is also in this tradition, using edge computing to process data closer to the source, at the “edge” of the network, instead of in remote data centers. It enables a modern, real time multi-user synchronization, offline capability, resilience, privacy and data ownership. This technological affordance – holding and processing data locally – is an entry point to a larger discussion about how social software might be used and even re-designed for the purposes of geographically proximate or otherwise culturally close groups to further their economic interests and remediate some of the damage done by the hyper-mediated character of global capital.
In the organization of grassroots associations, for example, a social platform might be useful for tracking contributions, recording local history of activities, recording votes and pledges, connecting people and services, vouching for oneself and others, attesting to events witnessed on the ground, and on and on. It is important, then, to have both more choice about what platforms optimize for (e.g. what kind of participation, what kind of valuing the system does) and less choice in that selecting a tool for community organizing does not pull participants into a global web or chasing metrics that have no merit in the contexts in which they live; why should we need to use Facebook to organize locally?
Global records: personal hedge and group mouthpiece
Concurrently, cypher-punk libertarians and anarchists dreamed of a decentralized cash system that would release control of central issuance of moneys by nation states, creating a new system of exchange that accomplishes some of the same goals as these movements – disrupting the trade relations of national economies and their financial sectors – but with no position or interest in locale. In fact, such a cash system might seem like the apex of hyper-globalism in transcending the limitations of nation-states and fostering ‘trustless’ participation between any parties whomsoever in financial transactions and speculative games.
What in the world, then, do blockchains and distributed ledger technologies have to do with localism? At first blush the answer might seem to be ‘nothing’. But we should not be so quick to dismiss web infrastructure that retains the waning hyper-globalism of the 2000’s. What can be done with it in the interest of giving voice to collective diversity, fostering peaceful coexistence, and preserving local customs and character? First, persisting records on non-local, but also censor-proof and tamper-proof ledgers adds protection against both infighting and devastation of local infrastructure. As collectivities we want outside groups to know how we do things and why, and as individuals, we want outsiders to know that our reputations are real in our communities of origin.
As subjects of global markets and the migrations to which they give rise, the preservation of personal history is paramount to digital subjectivity and being-in-networks. As envisioned in the Neighbourhoods project, data generated in a local context should be held locally such that it can benefit owner-members in the objective process of globalization. Data sovereignty and the ability to take personal data with you, as it were, across the web and to new contexts, is the technological requirement for being able to transmit information about one’s history and past relationships in order to make way for the new, and to reliably become neighbors. A web of connection should make no one a stranger; it should put a data-clothed face to the migrant who might otherwise be met with contempt. While personal data is generated locally, often geographically local but also proximate to the meaningful activities of the person, appending these to tamper-resistant, distributed ledgers means that these are handed off from the community in which they are meaningful to be globally recorded.
At the collective level, data sovereignty means giving voice to the needs, interests, and capacities of the data-generating group. Combining Web 3.0 and local stack technologies means lowering the cost of record-keeping and enabling group-specific custodianship of all of information and the software that generates it. This means that communication and record-keeping can be preserved, creatively used on- and off-line, modified, and deleted without the limitations or permission of anyone cloud-based service provider — think Google, Meta, YouTube, and even smaller companies like Miro and Figma that create excellent tools but whose lifespans as companies are ultimately unpredictable. Such an approach fosters internal coordination power. Old school, non-web based apps put files directly on peoples’ computers for exactly these reasons.
The combination of local-first/distributed/p2p protocols and Web3 technologies offer the close collaboration groups need to thrive, plus the resilience, control, and offline use possible with traditional applications. The Neighbourhoods project ($NHT) is a local-first project that combines interface-level configuration of interactions and metrics per community, but utilizes a token on the Ethereum network to (1) harness funds from a global network of communities, (2) provide a means of trustworthy interaction between communities, and (3) attest to various community-held social data by inscribing them in a tamper-proof, decentralized record.
Conclusion and questions
In summary: hold data in common with the community of purpose that generates it! Decide together how to append these to a resilient, “global” ledger for the benefit of those to whom the data pertains. Many questions about what this entails remain. For example, is the context of data generation necessary geographically local? I don’t think so, though this may often be the case. As the era of de-globalization progresses, it remains to be seen what the target unit of social change will be. Much to the chagrin of blockchain maximalists, many of whom represent the market fundamentalism that alter-globalism opposes, the nation-state may again come to matter as much as ever in representing the interest of members of various societies and communities on the ground, arranging methods of peaceful coexistence with other collectivities, and facilitating or blocking access to computing infrastructure. And, while context may be non-geographically proximate, personal data generation will always pertain to the imagined communities on which actual people depend. The way in which ‘online first’ and ‘offline first’ communities stand to utilize the approach outlined here remains to be seen; my hope is that the tension between local and global participation become generative, rather than cancerous, to the development of subjectivity and society in the 21st century.
Back to Table of Contents | Next: dPAN’s | Previous: Third Interlude
Footnotes
-
Naomi Klein, “A Fete for the End of History” March 2001, https://naomiklein.org/fete-end-end-history/ ↩
-
Leszek Gawor, “Globalization and Its Alternatives: Antiglobalism, Alterglobalism and the Idea of Sustainable Development,” Sustainable Development 16, 2008, 126-134. ↩
-
Wolfgang Streeck, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (United Kingdom: Verso, 2024). ↩