by Normal Solomon

Adios, Barcelona

World Bank prefers to meet in cyberspace instead

When the World Bank recently canceled a global meeting set forBarcelona in late June—and shifted it to the Internet—the media barelytook notice. Thousands of street demonstrators would have been inSpain’s big northeastern port city to confront the conference. Butcyberspace promises to be a much more serene location.

The World Bank was eager to portray its decision as magnanimous,sparing Barcelona the sort of upheaval that has struck Seattle,Prague, Quebec City and other urban hosts of international economicsummits. “A conference on poverty reduction should take place in apeaceful atmosphere free from heckling, violence and intimidation,”said a World Bank official, adding that “it is time to take a standagainst this kind of threat to free expression.”

A senior adviser to the huge lending institution offered thisexplanation: “We decided that you can’t have a meeting of ideas behinda cordon of police officers.” Presumably, the meeting of ideas willflourish behind a cordon of passwords, bytes and pixels.

If hackers could be kept at bay, the few hundred participants in theAnnual Bank Conference on Development Economics were going to be ableto conduct a lovely forum over the Internet. The video conferencingsystem would be state-of-the-art, making possible a modern andbloodless way to avoid uninvited perspectives.

The World Bank’s retreat behind virtual walls may fulfill its goal ofkeeping the riffraff away, with online discourse going smoothly, butvital issues remain—such as policies that undercut essentialgovernment services in poor countries, while promoting privatizationand user fees for access to health care and education.

“The objectives of the World Bank with this failed conference weresimply an image-washing operation,” said a statement from aBarcelona-based campaign that had worked on planning for thedemonstrations. But then the World Bank turned things around and beganto depict itself as the injured party. Protest organizers werederisive about the Bank’s media spin: “The representatives of theglobalized capitalism feel threatened by the popular movements againstglobalization. They, who meet in towers surrounded by walls andsoldiers in order to stay apart from the people whom they oppress,wish to appear as victims. They, who have at their disposal theresources of the planet, complain that those who have nothing wantedto have their voice heard.”

The World Bank’s gambit of seeking refuge in cyberspace should be awake-up call to activists who dream that websites and email areparadigm-shattering tools of the people. Some who take it for grantedthat “the revolution will not be televised” seem to hope that theirrevolution will be digitized.

But there’s nothing inherently democratizing about the Internet. Infact, it has developed into a prodigious conduit of political andcultural propaganda, distributed via centrally edited mega-networks.

America Online has 27 million subscribers, the New Internationalistmagazine noted recently. “They spend an incredible 84 percent of theirInternet time on AOL alone, which provides a regulated leisure andshopping environment dominated by in-house brands—from Time magazineto Madonna’s latest album.”

At the same time that creative advocates for social change areroutinely putting the Internet to great use, powerful elite bodieslike the World Bank are touting online innovations as democraticmodels—while striving to elude the reach of progressive grassrootsactivism.

If, in 1968, the Democratic National Convention had been held incyberspace instead of in Chicago, on what streets would the antiwarprotests have converged? If, on Inauguration Day this year, theswearing-in ceremony for George W. Bush had taken place virtuallyrather than at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where would people havegathered to hold up their signs saying “Hail to the Thief”?

Top officials of the World Bank are onto something. In a managerialworld, disruption must be kept to an absolute minimum. If globalcorporatization is to achieve its transnational potential, thediscourse

among power brokers and their favorite thinkers can happen everywhereat once—and nowhere in particular. Let the troublemakers try tointerfere by doing civil disobedience in cyberspace!

In any struggle that concentrates on a battlefield of high-techcommunications, the long-term advantages are heavily weighted towardinstitutions with billions of dollars behind them. Whatever our hopes,no technology can make up for a lack of democracy.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is “The Habits of Highly DeceptiveMedia.”