Joline Blais
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Colonial Paradigms, Female Prisons & New Selves - 2006/05/09 10:44
The Problem:
Colonial Paradigms for Cyberspace
While the virtues of the wild, the frontier, and the commons are increasingly invoked by well-intentioned agents fighting encroachments of property on the digital ecosystem, these metaphors map the American colonial narrative—and its myths of freedom—onto cyberspace. At the same time, politicians continue to exploit a false patriotism by referring to the genocide of Native Peoples as part of a heroic myth of civilizing the frontier. In 1981, in his first inaugural speech, for example, Ronald Reagan praised the “brave pioneers who tamed the empty wilderness.” While the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has courageously defended basic Internet freedoms to publish and read without censorship, its development is steeped in ‘cowboys & indians’ rhetoric. The EFF’s signature honors are called “Pioneer Awards.” John Perry Barlow, a cattle rancher who co-founded the EFF in 1994, writes in his manifesto “Jack In, Young Pioneer!”: ( http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html )“Today another frontier yawns before us, far more fog-obscured and inscrutable in its opportunities than the Yukon.” For Jeff Davis, noted EFF cyberguerilla, “Cyberspace, in its present state, is a very wild and free place, not unlike the Wyoming high country a few miles from me.” And Joe Dellinger, claims “We're lucky enough to be living through the Wild West days of networking.”
This cowboy mythology also survives in contemporary hacker culture, with cyberspace conjured as a new frontier that enables digital cowboys to “jack in” leaving the “feminized” prison of meatspace behind. Barlow cites William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a source for this updated myth. Neuromancer features a counter-culture rebel, Case, hired to rustle data from cyberspace in an attempt to unite the two machine entities wintermute and neuromancer—thus sealing the domination of machines over humans. In return he gets the satisfaction of a job well done, a liver which is re-sensitized to drugs, and a new future as a code hacker for hire—hardly a model of freedom. Case’s freedom is largely a freedom from attachment to any other beings: he rejects a dream life with his only real girlfriend, and abandons his razor-girl sidekick, Molly, at the end of their mission. Even his boss is no longer a human being, but a machine working through the wasted cyborgian body of a former general. While Case has little real freedom, he appears able to dominate this territory like a lone ranger, bringing order to the wilderness with his rough-and-ready codework. But this domination, like that of the colonizer, is an illusion masking its opposite—his enslavement to the machines.
The Wild West narrative that misunderstands Native American culture as wild and hence needing civilization served as justification for 500 years of colonization and genocide. According to gkisedtanamoogk, a Wampanoag elder, the European settlement of the Americas followed a much earlier and often forgotten colonization: "We, the Peoples of Turtle Island, were colonized recently, so we still remember what it feels like to be free; you North Americans were colonized so long ago, you no longer remember what it means to be free.” Like Case, we read freedom in the very terms of our enslavement.
Of course, neither Turtle Island—the Native name for North America—nor its inhabitants was wild. What the settlers had mistaken for the wild was in fact a fully populated, fertile and thriving ecosystem far superior to their own, with humans and animals living in such delicate balance that the natural bounty appeared to be a property of the earth itself. Calling this bounty “wild” was a way of overlooking the careful tending of their relations—the animal life, the plant life, the rock life, the water life—that forms the basis of Native spiritual and practical life. It was also a way of denying and destroying the very freedoms taken from the settlers during their own colonization.
The frontier—whether physical or digital—is an imaginary line between the wild and the civilized, one that reflects the structure of the colonized mind. Within this colonized world-view, the remaining wild is perpetually vulnerable to an ever advancing frontier, currently progressing onto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and into the Yanomamo rain forests . If cyberspace is to work as a theater for practicing liberation, we must first abandon the scripts that keep us colonized.
A fundamental legacy of the colonized mind is our atitude toward land as property. Property, an atitude of individualist domination and exploitation of land for the immediate wealth or resources it can provide, leaves the land unprotected for the larger social good or for our progeny. To remedy this plunder, we set up safety zones, like "Commons" or "Nature Preserves" or "Reservations". But I'd like to suggest that the system of individual or corporate property is fundamentally flawed and, in the long run, revokes our freedoms rather than granting them. When the topsoil is spent by agribusiness, when the waters in our rivers and aquifers are polluted, when wealthy corporate retirees buy up our coasts and beaches, when Walmarts sprawl over our neighborhoods, and when our wilderness areas are posted "no trespassing" or slated for major development, as they all are in Maine, are we really free?
Before I discuss the problems of property & some alternatives, I'd like to post the questions that led to my own research and to suggest some possible links to Sharon & Mara's work, also part of this Community Domain discussion.
1-What happens to an internet (or, for that matter, a bio-region, a country) run according to colonial notions of property?
2-In what ways do these uses limit or constrain our freedoms?
eg. Feminists have long seen the domination of land and women as linked; what is the relationship between the "feminized" prisons of meatspace in hacker mythology and Sharon Daniel's investigation of real female prisoners? Is there a relationship between public secrets & private property?
3-Are there alternatives (of land use, or cyberspace practice) that might return some of the freedoms lost to private property? If property is historically & etmologically linked to the French "propre" meaning both connected to self & also clean, then perhaps there's a way new notions of self-referentiality discussed by Mara Traumane can open up alternatives to property. What do avant-guard artists propose as alternative forms of self-referentiality that might suggest new relationships to land and the natural environment?
4-Does the "Commons" , eg Creative Commons, offer an alternative or just a saftey zone that actually keeps the current property system operating?
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Alice Ming Wai Jim
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Re:Colonial Paradigms, Female Prisons & New Se - 2006/05/09 13:29
Hi Joline, thank you for starting off and suggesting also insightful links to Sharon and Mara's work. Indeed an acute awareness and cultural sensitivity to how the language of colonial paradigms extend to and remain pervasive in the digital ecosystem is necessary. The term frontier, I of course agree and inserted provocatively, is intimately tied to not only pages and pages of colonial rhetoric but the legislated mechanisms and actual practices by which land has been parcelled out by the powers that be. If the Internet is run according to colonial notions of property it would seem that the colonized world-view would remain paramount and true freedom a forever unattainable state. I am very interested to hear about the alternatives you will speak about. And how perhaps if the writing of 'alternative' histories might be one of these when we speak about land ownership in the space between virtual and physical contexts. Specifically, if safety zones like 'commons' or 'reservations' have been historically blocked off as expedient measures for colonial practices, how can these alternative historical referents to property be re-envisioned?
Post edited by: ajim, at: 2006/05/09 13:34
Post edited by: ajim, at: 2006/05/12 07:50
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Sharon Daniel
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Re:Colonial Paradigms, Female Prisons & New Selves - 2006/05/14 13:07
Joline, I am very interested in your questions about alternatives to private property and your suggestion that the “commons” may be a “safety zone” or “reservation" that keeps the current property system operating. I have posted a reply to your questions for me at
http://01sj.org/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,149/func,view/id,119/catid,24/
which, I think, addresses these questions. I included a links to two projects that engage this issue by exploiting the legal and regulatory system and some thoughts I have about the problem of reliance on Legalism as a means of resistance. The question I think we are all interested in is how to operate “outside” systems of property and law.
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Christine Nadir
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Re:Colonial Paradigms, Female Prisons & New Selves - 2006/05/18 12:03
Joline argues that frontier mythology limits our imagination of virtual space to dichotomies of public commons and private property, the wild and the civilized, the refuge and the prison—with the result that the discourses of activist organizations like EFF accept colonization even while seeking dubious freedoms. Some questions / thoughts:
The fight for commons is not only an American struggle, so is there anything we can learn about thought on public space from elsewhere? Vandana Shiva writes on and organizes struggles in India, extending the enclosure of the commons to both intellectual property rights and the corporate ownership of life itself in the form, for example, of patented seeds that replace indigenous seeds to the point of extinction or plants engineered to kills bees and prevent pollination: “My fight against patenting and genetic engineering is a fight against the enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons that is the basis of survival of the large majority of the people of the world.” (http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Dec2002/shiva1202.htm). Do non-U.S. discourses of the commons present alternatives that we can learn from, e.g. linking perhaps a multitude of environments mediated and nonmediated? What is lost / gained when we speak of digitally networked environments through ecological metaphors?
Relating Joline’s discussion to the ecological also raises the possibility of learning from another area of thought that is currently working through its permeation by U.S. frontier mythology: American ecocriticism and environmentalism. Environmental historian William Cronon has pointed out that mainstream American environmentalism desires an “uninhabited wilderness,” an ahistorical space to get away from it all that simply does not exist—or is made to exist only after ridding it of people. As a result, Cronon argues: “In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism… Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home…. Calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home” (Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness” in Uncommon Ground [NY: WW Norton, 1996] 81, 89).
In an initial effort to work through a frontier-informed environmentalism as well as to respond to the relative absence of “nature” and its basis as our homes and lives within new media technologies / digital discourses, Cary Peppermint and I created a series of videos entitled “A Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness.” Links to the videos can be accessed at http://restlessculture.net/practicalperformance/. Recently posted to dvblog.org, this work attempts to bring wilderness (back) into the global digital network. Moving beyond nature as simply metaphor for networks (e.g. the Web, Rhizome, iPod, etc.) or nature as preserved wilderness/frontier, Cary and I tried to work with a relatively “natural” environment as a historical space and a place of performance: labor, foraging, food, friendships, “philosophical bickering” (as one reviewer called it)—an actively used hunting shack interrupts the pastoral while new media technologies are used to plug nature (back) into digital networks.
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