Who, one might ask, are the architects of strategic infrastructures? Who sees themselves as empowered to articulate, demand, implement, or force the adoption of particular information infrastructures (or resist them)? These include those who seek a flow of images that reinforces sovereignty; those who wish to ration the import of potentially destabilizing advocacy; those who consider their state to be vulnerable to communal violence. But infrastructure design is also significant for those who advocate a full and free independent marketplace of ideas. Each of the authors in this volume brings to the table, at least, an implicit architecture, an implicit conception of infrastructure.
Those who design satellite systems or cable television systems, who recommend the loci of undersea cable, or transponder regulation are all engaged with strategic infrastructure. Just to reinforce the point, it is not the hardware alone that defines a strategic infrastructure and its freedom-related or control-related potential. Cell-phone towers, surveillance cameras, satellite dishes, and flickering television sets, do not fully tell the story. One needs to know the legal and policy setting. “Freedom” is the combination of the technologies, themselves and the institutions that surround them. And that is true of communications rights generally.
A few examples of information infrastructure that help explain the complex relation to freedom are: the satellite and cable system of Singapore, which permits large-scale access to information necessary for a modern business society, combined with an explicit set of norms and the machinery to enforce them; the now-obsolete Dutch system of allocation of broadcast time to ensure that pluralist values in the society are recognized and performed; and in more modern times, concerns with Internet shut-down capabilities (as in Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Kenya). Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote brilliantly about technologies of freedom,2 but the burden of this approach is that no technology is intrinsically an instrument of freedom. Indeed, some technologies of freedom have had Trojan-horse effects; by design, they have been engines of surveillance and betrayal.
Strategic Narratives
I turn now to what I call strategic narratives, which are increasingly in the tool kit of states and movements as strategic communicators. Strategic narratives include stories a society tells about itself or stories that those outside seek to impose. Strategic narratives are of the same family as propaganda and include how a society is made to think about itself, fully understanding that how a society perceives itself influences what policies it adopts. And “narratives” are a theater in which these positions are honed. Narratives of fear and destabilization, for example, lay the groundwork for more cautious and restrictive regulatory outcomes. Narratives of freedom generally embolden participation and encourage entry.
Who are the manufactures of strategic narratives? On what might be called the positive side, the Freedom Online Coalition is a consortium of states that recognizes the need for a narrative to foster adherence to a relatively strict regime of non intervention in the regulation of social media. They further a narrative of freedom that supports, as it were, a strategic infrastructure. Some powerful states insist on an open social media structure (the strategic infrastructure) and they advance a global narrative that reinforces it. The EU invests in a bedrock narrative that supports its internal strengthening and its capacity to advocate for freedom throughout the member-states and beyond. As is true both for the EU and the Freedom Online Coalition, the capacity to maintain a strategic narrative is itself a matter contested. A final example: Ukraine, in the information conflict with Russia, developed a strategic narrative for domestic and global, as did Russia. These strategic narratives were used to justify uses of law and uses of force to further some voices and restrict others.
The contributions in this volume imply an important point about the political economy of strategic narratives and their relationship to freedom that is worth examining. We must study not only the operation of a single strategic narrative (such as the narrative of the need for free and independent media) but the mix of narratives, their interaction and changing patterns in their production, what might be called, as these techniques become more potent, the cauldron of narratives.
For example, it has been a difficult time for narratives of freedom. In Europe, the idea of “illiberal democracy” has grown, often at the cost of institutions that were constructed precisely to advance pluralism, the rule of law, and independence – basic aspects of freedom. This is mirrored elsewhere, including for example Myanmar, where promising narratives have dimmed. We can see how, the impact of narratives turns, partly on geopolitical trends. China and its Belt and Road Initiative gains a significant narrative focal point, much like the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s and 1950s as it sought to further ideas of democracy and freedom in post war Europe
There has also been a concerted attack on the very engines of narrative that are most supportive of freedom. In the United States, the press – or major elements of it – are characterized as “enemies of the people.” In Russia and elsewhere, non local NGOs, often the backbone of civil society and the instruments of freedom, are outlawed and harassed. Similarly, we are witnessing how delegitimization has become a hallmark of narrative production and how computational propaganda has industrialized this delegitimization.
A volume such as this, is written within the context of a globalized world and virtually borderless communication enabled by the Internet. This cumulative approach emerged after a twentieth-century push for the recognition of universal human rights.
A cauldron of narratives approach requires that we think more about the loci of a narrative’s invention, more about the institutions and organizations behind the narrative, and more about the interplay and interactions among often competing narratives. It is in a cauldron of narratives that state intervention in social media can be more effective. Russia invested heavily in its RT channel as part of a cauldron of narratives, and it has been an effective investment. China has organized its Global Television Network to render more available its perspective on global news. And the US has rebranded many of its efforts as the US Agency for Global Media. These are all part of a changing context for the production of narratives.
The meaning of communication rights is affected by shifts and changes in strategic narratives, by the locus and intensity of strategic production of socially significant narratives. Communication rights incorporate who participates in narrative production, including the decentralization of narrative production – through social media and the Internet. In terms of the cauldron of narratives, the affordances of the Internet and social media – are more about enlarging the freedom to produce narratives than it is about the production of narratives of freedom.
Markets for Loyalties and this Volume
All of this ties to Markets for Loyalties, a concept that helps bring together notions of strategic infrastructures and strategic narratives and the valuable insights from the contributors to this volume. Those who yearn for communications rights do so in countless contested markets for loyalties where struggles to define who can affect the information field and how are battled out. Markets for loyalties exist where large-scale entities compete for power. These include states, religions, movements, ideologies, political parties, “all those for whom myths and dreams and history can be converted into power and wealth.” In their ongoing shuffle for allegiances, these “sellers” use technologies – in conjunction with other tools I have mentioned – strategic narratives and infrastructures to expand their sway. They use force, law, subsidy, and negotiation to intensify their reach or to facilitate or limit entry for others. The operation of such markets can help us understand the relationship between technology and freedom.
The 2019 IAMCR meeting where I was introduced to this volume occurred in Spain, and I will conclude with two examples of the working of markets for loyalties from there. The long struggle between “the center”