Thursday, 12 October 2000
.....
Having or getting a "clue," in the parlance of the so-called New Economy, means that one is savvy about underlying technologies, business models, market realities, or political angles. One who consistently has "a clue" is said to be "clueful," and a Web site that calls itself "Cluebot.com" is claiming to be a "clue robot," a site that dispenses "clueful" utterances with machinelike precision and regularity. Or maybe Cluebot.com is just a bunch of technolibertarian halfwits who spout racist nonsense. Decide for yourself.
After discovering Cluebot.com, I was busy crawling around the site, seeing what there is to see. I was intrigued by the site's slogan -- "Technology. Politics. Get a clue." -- since Monkeyfist has "politics of technology" and "technology of politics" categories, and Monkeyfist is a mixture of geeks, activists, activist geeks, etc. My initial reaction to Cluebot.com's content was that it's policy-wonkesque, rather libertarian, and boring as hell. But anyone can get off to a slow start, so I figured I'd watch Cluebot.com once a week for a month, and maybe it'd pick up steam.
Then I saw a little Cluebot.com item about the ICANN elections. I wish I hadn't stopped to read it. Racism isn't something I go looking for, and it makes me ill when I find it. The disgusting part of Cluebot.com's "micro-commentary" (which is New Economy jargon for "the stupid things we say to introduce a link to someone else's content") about the ICANN elections hit me like a kick in the guts:
Board members were elected in other regions as well. Call us biased, perhaps, but it seems wrong to give the U.S. and Canada the same representation as Africa, a place where only 130 people on the entire continent voted. That's out of some 650 million residents of sub-Saharan Africa alone.
There's actually quite a bit that can be said about this ugliness, most of which I'll leave as an exercise to those Monkeyfist readers (hopefully the majority of you) who are disgusted by it. I'm just going to scratch the surface.
In the first place, I direct your attention to the cleverness of this bit of racist bash-up: it masquerades as a kind of formal objection, when in fact it's just pure ugliness. It pretends to concern itself with the fairness or equity of representation. Of course, whether or not any particular constituency exercises its franchise is strictly irrelevant to the claims that lie behind proportional or non-proportional representation. Strictly speaking, that is, artificially ignoring the racism for a moment, the objection is completely incoherent. Judging the right of a constituency to representation based on the degree to which members of the constituency do or do not exercise their individual right to the franchise is a category mistake.
In other words, imagine someone were to say that it "seems wrong" that Californians, for example, have a right to elect two senators since, despite its huge size, turnout rates are very low there. Anyone who makes such a claim seriously would be laughed into oblivion, and they would deserve it. (I leave as another exercise for interested Monkeyfist readers to figure out if, taken strictly on its incoherent terms, Cluebot.com's objection is even worth noting. Were African voting rates as much lower than American and Canadian ones as Cluebot.com wants you to think? You may be surprised at what you find.)
Now, let's put aside the artificiality, and talk about what's really going on here. In reality, while New Economy pundits -- of the sort that run Cluebot.com -- drone on and on about the global nature and implications of the Internet, that's largely specious hot air, not worth the electrons that illuminate it. (If they took their hot air seriously, they'd never object to geographic, non-proportional representation, since it's clearly warranted prima facie by their claims about the Internet.) The Internet is not making a difference, and one wonders if it ever will, for the majority of human persons on the globe, for whom things like TCP/IP, HTML, and email are far less vital than clean and sufficient food and water, helpful medicines, decent shelter, and, in addition to material needs, political self-determination. The Internet simply does not exist for most human persons; it cannot matter to them, one way or another, if it doesn't exist for them. (And if or when it does exist for them, it's not at all clear it will do so helpfully at all. Lots of Western scientific and technological whiz-bangs have made the lives of the world's poor worse, not better.)
One wonders why, rather than attacking Africans as unworthy of representation per se in a putatively global communications infrastructure, a deeply hostile and racist move, the Cluebot.com people didn't dig any deeper than their own racist bias. It took me exactly 30 seconds to discover that of the three ICANN candidates from the African region, two were white South African men. Is it so implausible that this might have had something to do with voter turnout?
Ignoring the postcolonial condition in Africa in order to spew glib, first world racism is unacceptable. It's certainly unworthy of any decent person's consideration or attention. Cluebot.com owes Region 4 ICANN members, ICANN, Nii Quaynor, and its readership an explanation and an apology.
If Cluebot.com holds true to form, however, what we'll get, if anything, is blustery talk about "editorial integrity and journalistic independence." Cluebot.com is not the place to go if one wants to "get a clue" about politics and technology. There are good alternative sources that aren't racist and are clever and trustworthy.
I suggest the halfwits at Cluebot.com spend some time educating themselves about the real world; a careful reading of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, his Orientalism, or Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth are all fine places to start.
This is Why Cluebot.com is Clueless <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/682>