Geert Lovink, in his book ‘Zero Comments’ (2007), argued that blogs were the cause of a “decay of traditional broadcast media” … exhibiting “a ‘nihilist impulse’ to empty out established meaning structures.” In a network based on reciprocal linking and peer-recognition, he wrote that the “lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or ‘zero comments’.”

Zero Comments is something that I know about….

The report MPs online: Connecting with constituents published today by the Hansard Society touches on the decay of traditional media in its investigation into the attitudes of our Parliamentarians towards ‘new media’, it’s use and its value to them in political communications.

The internet creates “an opportunity to restructure communication between MPs and their constituents” writes Andy Williamson in the Background to the report. ” This has,” he writes, “led to both an increase in opportunity and, in some cases, motivation for MPs to communicate online.” He continues

“It is not just the volume and immediacy of communication that is changed by the internet, new network technologies change the very nature of communication, conversation and engagement and this is clearly visible across the wider online world.”

While the use of ICT has increased year on year, much of the experimentation with internet based communications by political parties, elected representatives, government departments and other bodies such as local Councils tends to miss opportunities for modifying the practices of communication away from vertical, uni-directional marketing and message propagation. Frequently we see not ‘zero comments’ but actually no comments at all. Where the experiment is with a ’social networking website, some corporate bodies have ‘zero friends’ (although Stockport Council has a few friends now, following an ‘OLD media’ source printing a story about it).

Andy Williamson concludes that

The internet has had a demonstrable impact on parliamentary communication. Most MPs are now communicating online and many have websites, some blogs and a handful maintain a presence on social networking sites. Although the internet does clearly support MPs to become more independent, the primary paradigm remains rooted in the party model. The foregoing suggests that the internet is a tool to communicate outwards, self-promote for the purposes of re-election and to gauge opinion and it is not seen as a tool to aid representation or to enhance engagement: internet-based communication by MPs is largely about delivery and devoid of strategies for engagement.

(MPs online: Connecting with constituents, 2009, p. 6)

I’ve recently been following Tony Curzon-Price’s essay The Liberty of the Networked (and part 2 and part 3) published over at the excellent openDemocracy.net to coincide in with The Convention on Modern Liberty to be held in London and across the UK on February 28th. Tony’s paper considers the social role of technology with regards to political thought and activity, comparing the liberty of the Ancients with the liberty of the Moderns to discover the liberty of the Networked.

With regard to TCPs use of  Nozic’s Anarchy, State, Utopia to interrogate the hyper-individualised networked society I had this to say (emphasis added):

Amongst the libertarian Nozick’s many failures in Anarchy, State, Utopia is his failure to properly deal with conflict between his ahistorical individuals. It is the abstraction of the individual and the social order in Nozick’s work dislocates individuals from themselves, from the choices they make and the communities they form that is the source of conflict. What the neo-Kantian Nozick fails to recognise in demanding the priority of individual rights over the common good is that this “can only exist in a certain type of society with specific institutions and that it is a consequence of the democratic revolution.” (Chantelle Mouffe, 2005, The Return of the Political, p.65) That is to say that neo-Kantian liberals fail to recognise the historicity of liberalism, for some reason missing the very context of the emergence of liberal political theory from the struggle against arbitrary and absolute authority.

So what then of politics in our liberal age? Do we really have to choose between the liberty of the Ancients and the liberty of the Moderns? No. We do not have to accept a false dichotomy between individual liberty and rights, i.e. the choice of the neo-Kantians, or between civic activity and a strong political community. As Mouffe argues “Our choice is not only one between an aggregate of individuals without a common public concern and a pre-modern community organized around a single substantive idea of the common good. To envisage the modern democratic political community outside of this dichotomy is the crucial challenge” (ibid).

The project of the networked liberal is then to defend extend and deepen the liberty of the networked and to democratically build meaningful institutions to articulate and resolve conflict.

The problematic of what sort of institutions - through which claims, of rights or otherwise, can be articulated and conflict mediated - would work in a networked society is often underthorised at the expense of an over-emphasis on the negative spectres of Orwell, Kafka and other writers on totalitarian politics. I’m not trying to play down the dangers to our socio-political relationships, threatened by the database state or the surveillance state. I’m simply more interested in the challenge from Mouffe (2005) to find meaningful frameworks beyond the institutions of modern liberal democracy. These are themes continued in Dean, Anderson and Lovink (2006) ‘Reformatting Politics’; a collection of papers on the notion of post-democracy, information technology and global civil society.

I’m going to post again on this topic with regard to the current fluttering around ideas of new localism in the UKs political settlement as the themes of liberty, democracy and the nature of politics in network society remain open and contested: hackable. Investigating the positive possibilities rather than imagining dark nightmares is my contribution to the Convention and to civil society.

Earlier this week 50 or so Plane Stupid activists managed to breach Stansted Airport’s perimeter security fence. Idiots. If someone really wanted to shutdown an airport and cause over a week of disruption, all they would have to do is get enough people to sit down.

Last month anti-government protesters in Thailand where able to close the country’s major international airport for over a week. Hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of flights were disrupted and rerouted where possible. The world’s attention was focused on the protest, shining a light onto the political problems in the country. Most amazing was the peaceful passing off of the protests. I doubt that within a few days the mass sit-in will fade, becoming just a surreal memory. This protest was a success, internally and internationally.

The Beeb asks a few questions, some of which are pertinent to the Plane Stupid protesters:

• How could a country as advanced and as dependent on exports and tourism as Thailand allow such a vital transport hub to be stormed by a mob that never numbered more than a few thousand?
• What is the PAD, and what gives the movement the confidence to commit its dramatic acts of economic sabotage without fearing any legal sanction?

No more than a few thousand people halted a major international airport for over a week. This large group took action with impunity; Thai police could not or perhaps would not use force against these protesters.

Now, how does all this relate to the old-school black-ops methods of Plane Stupid this last week? To my mind the protest which closed Stansted was a flash in the pan, a stunt. The airport authorities and police responded with force, treating this militaristic assault on key infrastructure as a terrorist attack. Rightly so! What if these were not Plane Stupid protesters but rather stupid hi-jackers?

Environmental protesters like Plane Stupid should take notice of Flash-mobbing, silent raves and other network-powered interventions in the public space. Organise a flash-mob of an airport, all the airports! Just get a lot of people to head to their nearest airport and just sit down….

Here are a few steps to taking over every airport in the country on one day…

1. Pick a day, any day and a time… just make sure its far enough in the future to allow your network of activists to…
2. …Buy up tickets on the cheap flights (this is the important part) on that day all around the same time.
3. On the scheduled day, set off with a packed bag, a passport and a ticket to local airport - this is the black-ops part, when the radical environmentalists disguise themselves as people going off for the weekend on a cheap flight.
4. Wait for the agreed time and sit down.

If Plane Stupid or another similar group were to co-ordinate such an action this would be a flashmob of epic proportions causing much more serious and significant disruption to air travel infrastructure.

Yet the real beauty of this networked direct action is that the Plane Stupid protesters would most likely be able to close every airport in the country even without having to turn up on the day. The very threat of this direct action and very fact that of it being discussed openly, perhaps via Facebook or a custom social network site hosted on Ning, would probably be sufficient for the authorities to seriously reconsider opening airports on the appointed day.

Some may call this weeks action by Plane Stupid terrorism, others may call it civil disobedience. What I’m proposing here combines direct action and electronic civil disobedience backed up with the threat of real people turning up and paralysing infrastructure in a very public way. For the cost of a place ticket on, say, the 1st April 2009 (which is cheap if booked now) Plane Stupid could close every airport in the country…..

Just a thought.

So, some digital information has leaked from its home. Its been played with by an excel monkey and plotted on maps. It shouldn’t have happened, but it has. Doh! doesn’t quite cover it when I think of the stupidity of some people.

While there are many political uses of the information, the lists of names of membership of any organisation should be kept private. Lists of names, as Tom Steinberg (MySociety) said, start us down a path best not begun. There are lots of lists of names missing or lost about the place, perhaps they shouldn’t be seeded as torrents or publicly searchable. Just because there are techniques to mash this data and present it in interesting ways (against ethnicity data, or social deprivation indexes, or just against voter turnout) does not mean that anyone should.

From an Information Governance and Information Security perspective, these BNP kids are going to have to get their act together. The Information Commissioner is going to want to have words with them. Perhaps there will be court proceedings for breech of human rights act and data protection legislation; although perhaps in not quite the way that Nick Griffin expects, with claims against the BNP for negligence.

It’s been a busy fortnight for open-information projects and campaigns. Widely announced and re-announced were the winners of the Show Us A Better Way (SUABW) competition, sponsored by the Government, which sought new solutions to perhaps unknown problems. SUABW asked people what web-based tools they would build from public data-sources that would  improve the way public information is shared and presented.

The winners are:

• Can I Recycle It?
• UK Cycling
• Catchment Areas
• Location of Postboxes
• Loofinder

The BBC PM report referred to a court case being thrown out because a piece of law that the case was built on had been taken off the statute book. The codified law of the British Isles is a huge chunk of public data I’d like to see freed up, so I’m hoping for great things from the Free Our Bills campaign: wide open and accessible Parliamentary Bills… searchable and remixable legislation… a wiki statue book?

Sarah Teather wrote back to me this week concerning EDM2141, saying

The Liberal Democrats believe that Bills ought to be published in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public.

Sarah will be adding her signature to the EDM which currently has 76 members of Parliament supporting it.