Internet Freedom and "Our National Brand"

Given the skepticism about Google I expressed in a post last year, its been interesting to watch that corporation take to the stage as the purportedly heroic protagonist in recent conflicts over freedom and the Internet.  It seems a bit odd to celebrate Google for finally--only now, only it most explicitly challenged their business plan, only after years of complicity--speaking out against censorship in China.  Those of us who remember vividly the announcement that Google would censor search results at the behest of that state will perhaps be forgiven for maintaining some of the skepticism that animated my previous post. 

But the whole confrontation has had an interesting consequence.  For the first time, it seems, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, has articulated internet freedom as fundamental to American foreign policy.  Explicitly calling out regimes in China, Egypt, Tunisia, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia, she declared that [t]hose who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.  The sentiment is an attractive one, and we can always hope her words might have salutary effects on dissenters around the world.  But in the sentence I quoted, at least, the focus is on the effects of other states censorship on U.S. civil society, not the sometimes fragile public spheres in those states themselves. 

As with so much of U.S. foreign policy, its not actually about them.  Its about us.  It's less about opening lines of communication than it is about controlling them.

The coverage of the address in the New York Times emphasizes the sweeping nature of the address, and its novelty.  But is it really novel?  Not really.  When Clinton calls (rather creepily, I think) on American companies to take a principled stand in service of our national brand, she participates in a long history of linking access to information to the idea of America. 

According to literary historian Meredith McGill, for example, the antebellum United States rejected international copyright agreements in part because of a Republican understanding of print as public property.  Universal access to print was seen as a cornerstone of American identity and politics.  A nationalist investment in information availability thus shaped how the U.S. engaged with the world (in short, piratically) and had effects far beyond the nations borders.

An even better precedent can be found during the cold war, when the U.S. Information Agency sponsored information centers and libraries in fragile states around the world, from West Germany to Southeast Asia.  The use of libraries in public diplomacy "not only spread American ideas, one former USIA employee writes, it also provided a working example of how a democratic society educates itself.  USIA information centers thus not only carried books with favorable depictions of America, it embodied the U.S.s vision of itself as an open society where information was not hidden away but shared and distributed across the land.  It was more open than the Soviet Union, certainly, but given that the USIA was the visible arm of a larger, and largely covert, counter/intelligence operation makes the irony a little thick.  It seems unlikely that the best model for democratic society would, in fact, be  a propaganda distribution center.  Rather, USIA libraries were less principled stand[s] for openness and more a part of the process by which the U.S. fashioned a national brand around the always strategic availability of information. 

The general sentiments that seem to be behind Clintons address--and Googles( finally, sort of) principled stand--are lovely.  But paeans are not enough, especially when they do not serve to advance the potential for radical openness represented (though only ever partially) by digital network technologies but rather to further the painfully familiar closure of nationalism. 

These tensions are often quite visible in Clintons address.  We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas, she declared.   [T]he United States, she said later, will protect our networks.  The banal nationalism of that "our" should remind us despite the seeming dominance of globalization that, as Michael Billig insists, [n]nationalism is still being reproduced: it can still call for ultimate sacrifices; and, daily, its symbols and assumptions are flagged.

That "our," in other words, should be a nice sharp pin in our fantasies (aren't they grand and beautiful?) of digital utopianism prompted the the events, pronouncements, and speeches of the past week.