Networking Peripheries. Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism

280 Pages·2014·2.502 MB·English

by  Anita Say Chan

Networking Peripheries
Networking Peripheries
Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism
Anita Say Chan
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chan, Anita.
Networking peripheries : technological futures and the myth of digital universalism
/ Anita Say Chan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01971-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Information society—Peru. 2. Information technology—Peru. 3. Digital divide—
Peru. 4. Technological innovations—Social aspects—Peru. I. Title.
HN350.Z9I5634 2013
303.48′330985—dc23
2013006956

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Arturo and Rosario Say
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction: Digital Reform—Information-Age Peru 1
Part I: Neoliberal Networks at the Periphery 21
1 Enterprise Village: Intellectual Property and Rural Optimization 23
2 Native Stagings: Pirate Acts and the Complex of Authenticity 53
3 Narrating Neoliberalism: Tales of Promiscuous Assemblage 89
Part II: Hacking at the Periphery 117
4 Polyvocal Networks: Advocating Free Software in Latin America 125
5 Recoding Identity: Free Software and the Local Ethics of Play 153
6 Digital Interrupt: Hacking Universalism at the Network’s Edge 173
Conclusion: Digital Author Function 197
Notes 211
References 215
Index 243
Preface
The question has been posed to me more than a few times: why study digi-
tal culture and information technology (IT) in Peru? Within global imag-
inaries, Peru evokes the mountainous South American nation that once
served as the heart of the Inca civilization: home to Machu Picchu, high
stretches of the Andes, and large populations of Quechua- and Aymara-
speaking communities. Or, as the source of raw, natural commodities, such
as the world’s largest cultivations of coca leaves—from which cocaine is
infamously drawn—and some of the largest reserves of gold, silver, and
copper, whose promise first lured Spanish conquistadores to South America
in the early sixteenth century. This Peru might be known as an ideal space
from which to peer into past tradition, native culture, or the plethora of
nature’s bounty - but what could it tell us about the dynamics of contem-
porary digital culture, high technological flows, or their associated future-
oriented developments?
The question itself, of course, merits unpacking, given it often assumes
that digital culture—despite its uniquely global dimensions—does indeed
have more legitimate, productive sites from which to undertake its study.
Foremost among them are the labs, offices, and research sites nestled in
Silicon Valley and their dispersed equivalents in other innovation capitals
worldwide. It is there that digital culture presumably originates and has its
purest form—only to be replicated elsewhere; there that visions for digi-
tal futuricity in their most accurate or ideal approximations emerge; and
there that technological advancements—and thus digital cultural advance-
ments—are understood to be at their most dynamic, lively, and inspired.
Although places such as Peru unlock a path strewn with the relics and trea-
sures of a technological past one must struggle not to forget, sites such
as Silicon Valley unlock the secrets to a technological future whose path
has yet to be fully tread, even though it has already become the source of
fevered cultural obsession.
x Preface
Rarely does anyone have to justify choosing such exclusive places to
represent “digital culture” writ large. Just as rarely is there a need to explain
the implication that the digital futures imagined by select populations of
engineers, designers, and innovators of new technologies in elite design
centers can—or should—speak for the global rest, and that the present cur-
rently unfolding in innovation centers must surely be the future of the
periphery. There is a particular notion of the periphery conjured here, of
course, as mere agents of global counterfeit—as sites of replication of a
future invented prior and elsewhere. As much as the authoritative role of
innovation centers for extending design and invention is rarely questioned,
so, too, is the periphery viewed unquestioningly as a zone of diffusion and
simple uptake of such designs. But the periphery is hardly so passive or
uninventive. Outdoor markets of used, recycled, and reassembled computer
parts take up entire streets, Internet cafés pepper neighborhoods with low-
cost and ready Internet access, and gray markets of digitized local music
and pirated films fill multistory buildings. Such technological hacks and
local improvisations are an everyday part of the periphery’s technology
landscape (Alarcon 2008; Durant 2009; Liang 2003a, 2003b, 2004 2005;
Liang and Prabhala 2007; Sundaram 1999) whose vibrancy is only partly
captured by comparing them to formal or established commercial markets
of digital goods. Just as accounts of the innovation culture of Silicon Val-
ley based only on the research activities, entrepreneurship, and hacks of
engineers and IT-related professionals—rich as such accounts have been
(Anderson 2006, 2010; Cringley 1996; Hafner and Lyon 1996; Hiltzik 2000;
Kidder 2000; Levy 1984, 2000, 2011; Lewis 2001; Markoff 2006; Saxenian
1996; Turner 2006; Vaidhyanathan 2011)—tell only part of that story. By
applying methods and techniques that previously have been unapplied—
and often unimagined—in innovation centers, these places on the “digital
periphery” build new structures and spaces that—for those living in the
Global South today—enable the primary means of accessing and inter-
acting with digital technologies. As the social scientists Daniel Miller and
Don Slater (2001) observed in their study of Trinidad, “the Internet is not
a monolithic cyberspace,” but exists instead as a globally expansive tech-
nology with various local realities, adoptive practices, and cultural politics
that surround its varying localizations. There have been, indeed, more ways
than one to imagine what digital practice and connection could look like.
Conserving centers as exclusive sites of origination and invention, of
course, also neglects another crucial detail—that the centers of the present
were once on the periphery, too. To focus on centers as inventing models
that simply come to be adopted and copied elsewhere presumes the perfect,
Preface xi
continual extension of replicative functions and forces. It fails to account
for the possibility of change within the larger system—the destabilizations
and realignments of prior centers—and so, too, the realignments of prior
peripheries. The global financial crisis of 2008 and its fallout thereafter pro-
vided the latest reminders that the stability of established powers and the
permanence of center-periphery relation can be put in question. At a time,
indeed, when the power of existing global centers and circumstances seems
no longer to be a given, when the invocations of “freefall” (Stiglitz 2010)
and the “end of times” (Žižek 2011) have been used by liberal economists
and progressive philosophers alike to characterize the contemporary, and
when unexpected interruptions and shifts in world dynamics seem to be
the only reliable constant, heightened scholarly attention to the creative
engagements in digital culture at the periphery, more than ever, seems to
be warranted. Far from merely lagging behind or mimicking centers, the
dynamic activity from peripheral sites suggests how agents once holding
minor status—and even the notion of “the copy” itself—can emerge instead
as fresh sources of distinctly optimized or unencumbered productivity.
What follows here, then, aims to trace the vibrant micro narratives
and situated stories around IT and innovation cultures multiplying at the
periphery. Such diverse threads unsettle the unspoken presumption that a
single, universal narrative could adequately represent the distinct digital
futures and imaginaries emerging from local sites today. This work explores
the extension of such micro narratives, then, not in the sense of being
minor in either scale or ambition but rather for departing from conven-
tional frameworks that presume digital imaginaries and futures as neces-
sarily—or even best—represented by innovation centers. Minor narratives,
similar to minor chords in musical scales, can be read as complementing
and decentering the movements of their major twin.
More than a decade into the new millennium, there is, indeed, little
shortage of new social experiments and global collaborations emerging
around digital culture from technology’s so-called periphery. Although
audiences around the world were captivated by the wave of social protests
in the Middle East starting in early 2011 and the online corporate protests
of the Anonymous global hacker network (Coleman 2011, 2013), popular
uses of digital technologies have been associated with social movements
since the early years of the twenty-first century and in sites as diverse as
Mexico (Schultz 2007), Iran (Burns and Eltham 2009; Grossman 2009),
the Philippines (Uy-Tioco 2003; Vincente 2003), and Ukraine (Morozov
2010b). In the wake of other networked social movements that followed
the 2011 Arab Spring—from Spain’s 15-M Indignados movement to North
xii Preface
American Occupy movements—social networking technologies originally
developed and launched years ago by US IT firms seem to have come of age
in the hands of users in remote and distant elsewheres.
Media channels worldwide also have registered a new urgency to find
explanations for the rapid, globally mimetic spread of such popular upris-
ings. In the midst of the 2011 Middle East uprisings, Silicon Valley entre-
preneurs and designers of the digital applications used by networked
protestors were sought out in news reports for their analysis of the grow-
ing transnational activity. Yet for all their familiarity with the technolo-
gies, they seemed little better prepared for nuanced explanation of the
emerging global forms and calls for political change than other commenta-
tors on global communication policy—neither of whom seemed to have
been asked before to directly address what innovation cultures and digital
practices could mean outside of technological centers. Prior explanations
recirculated of the Internet’s global diffusion as either—by nature—foster-
ing greater liberty and democracy through the extension of technologi-
cal openness, or fostering precisely its opposite through the extension and
acceleration of open markets, economic globalization, and, ultimately, a
digitally paced capitalism that served only a limited collective of techno-
logical elites in such centers (Anderson 2006, 2010; Castells 1996; Castells,
Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, and Sey 2009; Kelly 2010; Ross 2004, 2010; Shirky
2009). Both versions, relying on visions of networked technologies as sim-
ply diffusing from innovation centers in the West to the rest (Callon and
Latour 1981; Latour 1987, 2005) seemed at once entirely familiar and all
too partial.
Indeed, this study was partially inspired by the clear diversity of
accounts of worldwide digital cultures. Predictions that digital technology
would produce either freedom or oppression as defined from centers simply
didn’t match the contours of digital culture at the periphery. In Peru, such
evidence had visibly accumulated by the early 2000s—bringing a range of
distinct actors and interests into unexpected and often contradictory prox-
imity. Collectives of free software advocates (who had helped to bring the
first UN-sponsored conference on free software use in Latin America—a
landmark event—to the ancient Incan capital of Cuzco in 2003) sought to
reframe the adoption of open technologies as not just an issue of individual
liberty and free choice, as it had been for free, libre, open-source software
(FLOSS) advocacy in the United States, but of cultural diversity, state trans-
parency, and political sovereignty from the monopolistic power of transna-
tional corporations in the Global South. “Digital innovation” classrooms
installed in rural schools by the state would later be converted into the largest
Preface xiii
deployment network for MIT’s high-profile One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
initiative just several years later, all in the name of enabling universal digi-
tal inclusion. And intellectual property (IP) titles newly and aggressively
applied by state programs on “traditional” goods promised to convert rural
producers and artisans into new classes of export-ready “information work-
ers” as part of the nation’s growing information society–based initiatives.
Accounts of such engagements would eventually make it into the chap-
ters of this volume; but when I first encountered them as a graduate student
years ago, there were few resources in the field of digital or new media stud-
ies that could make the range of their investments legible. FLOSS advocates
and high-tech activists in Cuzco, state-promoted “innovation classrooms”
in rural schools, and traditional artisans as new global “information work-
ers” were not the conventional interests or protagonists that emerged from
most of the existing tales spun through centers of digital culture. To watch
these “other” stories unfold was to watch the details of each spill over the
edges of the existing frameworks and dominant narratives of digital cul-
ture. Global imaginaries around IT, now a decade into the new millen-
nium, might have made Silicon Valley hackers, the obsessions and tireless
work ethic of high-tech engineers, and strategic enterprise of competitive
technology entrepreneurs and innovators the stuff of popular Hollywood
films. But to capture the dynamic engagements and fraught experiments
in digital culture in Peru still required attention to a host of other stakes,
agents, and developments than the increasingly recognizable cast of high-
tech heroes and villains allowed. In working around the digital in Peru,
such actors inevitably confronted the contradictions of what it meant to
build new links and exchanges between spaces of the rural and the urban,
the high-tech and traditional, and pitched appetites for the global with
intensive commitments to the local.
They were a reminder that to study the Internet across global sites
required more than continued attention to the line between online and
offline worlds, or to unpacking the development of networked infrastruc-
ture and their associated digital technologies, or to the workings of Western-
centered engineers and innovators. Valuable as such research trajectories
have been, the stakes being carved out across globally-dispersed local sites
continue to expand. Information technologies at the beginning of the
new millennium, after all, have come to operate as shorthand for imag-
ining global connection in a variety of modern forms—economic, politi-
cal, scientific, cultural, and, indeed, digital. And in twenty-first century
Peru, they have been as much about imaging—and reimaging—relations
with the local, rural, and peripheral as they have been about drawing out