CYBER POWER

CYBER POWER

Power is the condition and limit of politics, culture, and authority. Cyber power aims not at the immediately obvious forms of politics, culture, and authority that course through cyberspace but at the structures that condition and limit these. A certain complex form of power that operates on the three levels of the individual, the social, and the imaginary now careens through the virtual lands, directing conflict and consensus toward certain distinctive issues and social structures.

No one level of cyber power determines or dominates the others. In particular, the powers of the individual and the social are in constant battle. The powers the individual gains in cyberspace, such as cryptography, may contradict the domination of a technical elite, just as the techno power spiral may lead individuals to increasing reliance on technological tools whose metaphorical bonnet they cannot hope to open. We can expect these two levels to swing back and forth, with individuals gaining powers against elite only to find they have given birth to another part of the elite. Libertarianism gains its special place as the political discourse of cyberspace here because it emphasizes both individual liberty, speaking to individuals and their powers, and that cyberspace that produces the best possible outcomes through free markets, speaking to the elite as a justification for their growing control. Libertarianism on the net has at its core a doubly articulated concept that fuses individual liberty with free markets, allowing the one ideology to speak to both the elite and the grass roots. This means not that libertarianism will be universally celebrated on the Internet but that it is a uniquely equipped ideology through which politics on the Internet will be played out.

Cyber power points not to the ultimate dominance of the leading, although it clearly identifies the burgeoning power of an elite, nor does it predict the libertarian ideal of individual empowerment, although it makes conspicuous the ongoing creation of powers for individuals in cyberspace. Cyber power points to these processes continuing, driven by dreams and nightmares. When examining cyber power, we must always be aware of the roar of battle and the complex conflicts that define virtual lives, elites, and dreams.

What can be called the techno power spiral consists of three moments. First, there is the ongoing and repeated sensation of information overload in cyberspace. Cyberspace is the most extreme example of a general acceleration in the production and circulation of information. For example, cyberspace encourages people to produce more information rather than passively consume it. Information moves faster and in greater quantities in cyberspace than in other space. Most powerfully, cyberspace increases information by releasing it from material manifestations that restrict its flow and increase its price. Ideas embodied in books have inherent costs and restrictions on the number that can be produced and the speed at which different people can obtain them. Information is largely freed of its material form in cyberspace. This constant increase in the sheer amount and speeding up of information leads to the experience of information overload. While the notion of having too much information might seem paradoxical, it is also the case that only a certain amount of information can be dealt with at one time. As early as 1985, Hiltz and Turroff estimated that computer-mediated communication resulted in what they called super connectivity, whereby individuals' connections to each other increased tenfold. Too much information or information that is poorly organized leads to information overload. How many of us have signed on to an e-mail list and then found that the constant flow of e-mails required us to delete messages without reading them, so that we ultimately resigned from the group? How many of us search the Web for a particular topic only to end up with megabytes of files or piles of printouts destined never to be read because there is simply too much material? Cyberspace increases the velocity and size of information to such an extent that information overload is a constant experience in virtual life.

The second moment in the spiral in techno power is the attempt to master whichever moment of information overload has occurred. This mastery can be accomplished simply by switching off, but doing so removes all the powers from which the individual might feel he or she benefits. Instead, information overload is constantly addressed by new technologies.

Third, new tools nearly always make more information available and cyberspace easier to use, tending to create a new overload. This seems too paradoxical to be true, in that the goal of many tools is to reduce the amount of information received by focusing or managing it in some automated way. However, the very success of any such tool tends to produce more information because it makes the process of gaining information more efficient, and there is always more relevant information out there in the infinite reaches of cyberspace. Problems reemerge when devices that have become essential to information management themselves produce too much information. For example, having a browser showing a ticker tape of stock prices means being connected to your stock portfolio (assuming you have one) and to your possible wealth, every minute. "Sell or buy" becomes a permanent state.

BY

KIMATI ELITRUDAH. BAPRM 42582