Week 11 Post: The Public, Cyberspace and Kobrin

Since our Week 11 discussion, I have been mulling over the question of whether the “public” can exist beyond the “state,” whether it is a broader concept.  The consensus of the class appeared to be “no.”  Andrew presented an example in Venezuela. This was countered in a statement that the public was still defined by the laws of the state; the public was not sovereign.  We then looked inward at the shrinking of the concept based on Erica’s point that certain groups in a given country might be omitted from the services, rights and protections provided by the state. This, in effect, renders those groups “quasi-publics.” And, finally, we looked at privatization, discussing whether outsourcing certain functions of the state might render the state, at some point, no longer viable, and a private entity simply a replacement state.  However, I am not so sure there is not a fluid component to a public, something that perpetually resides outside the state, and that is perhaps so taken for granted we do not consider it public.  I would like to explore this a little through (1) Kobrin’s concept of a de-territorialized mode of operation in the international market, (2) social and public networking, and (3) the proliferation of misinformation sources and appeals to base emotion molding a public bound not by a sovereignty but by impulse. 

I suggest up front, while sovereignty defines “state,” it does not define the public on which it is dependent.  Hobbes himself spoke of the “State of Nature.” While I do not buy into his characterization of it or the idea of absolute autonomy, any consideration of it precludes a dependency on state for a public to exist.  There are human groups (albeit small) particularly in our pre-history, that effectively survived in fluid modes of community with no clear authority. To some extent, that flexibility was the survival strategy itself.  We create our boxes – our definitions and rules –  in temporal context.  But, to Kobrin’s point, something did exist before drawn and universally recognized political boundaries and this is where I wish we had had time in class to discuss the readings in greater depth.  Kobrin’s suggestion that the transition of economic politics to cyberspace alters the fundamental nature of economic governance along with his arguments related to networked forms of organization speak precisely to that notion of a sovereign-free public extending beyond a sovereign-bound state.  He likens it to a medieval dynamic replete with overlapping, meshed, competing, or separate but parallel political authorities. Kobrin identifies network transaction webs as replacements for previous economic hierarchies. Actors become, in essence, a public operating simultaneously in disparate national economies and an unbound globalized network.  And, that can conceivably be extrapolated out to include contexts that are not economic, but social or even quasi-civic in nature

As illustrated by Kobrin, a public can adapt fairly readily to fundamental contextual transformations.  Increasingly, this is true of social networks and NGOs operating globally. This may not always translate to adaptation that is reasoned or in the actor’s self-interest. But, for better or worse, it need not be bound to geography or the state from which it has its roots. It can exist simultaneously in two or more worlds and can ultimately affect the state or a collection of states from both within and without.  Hearkening back to another class module, through communications connectivity, ideas and information now flow relatively freely, networks are formed and a new set of shared values take place across geographical space.  Loose, sometimes mercurial conglomerations have power to alter state action, offer protection to its members, provide information, and so on. This might be more tangibly seen the case of international NGOs, but online social networks can mobilize toward goals as wide-ranging as petitioning a global actor to change policy or bringing the cause of an individual to the fore. There are bone marrow transplant connections and crowd funding sites.  They can influence language and sentiment - and subsequently the way we think generally.  The “public” in this sense may be fluid and distinct from any governing entity, but it has needs that are met by it virtual host and effect on both its own members and geographically bound actors.

A concern lies in the normalization of interactions with few, if any, established bounds so that recruitment to extremist group or fake news sites swaying the results of elections, for instance, become socially enabled mechanisms to ends couched in passion and impulse rather than ideas or rational self-interest – terrorism or demagogic adoration. We asked in class whether ISIS, as an example, might be considered a state.  The argument that it was not lay in the absence of universal recognition, based on, in its nascence, non-conformance to fundamental values deemed acceptable by the global community.  There is another consideration: ISIS is a global entity highly reliant on virtual connection and hype.  Is it possible that we are looking at it from the wrong side of the lens, that it constitutes a public as Kobrin imagines global economic actors, at once bound to geographic communities and governance within those, but also residing in unbound cyber-generated webs value-aligned to terror predilections?