Towards the Hyperglobalisation of the Individual: How the Ubiquitous Internet Will Make the International Political Economy Increasingly Dynamically Unstable

Abstract

In this exploratory article, I pursue the thesis that communications regulation in the next century will need to fulfill the role of supporting this global edifice of interdependent spheres: political, economic, financial and communications. The mundane business of keeping local telephone calls unmetred in the U.S., or neo-Nazi propaganda off European websites, or providing Internet access to the Chinese hinterland, are all part of this process. Writing about ICTs and globalisation after the 1990s party is over is a useful exercise in perspective. This is not only because too much ‘globaloney’ was talked during the 1990s foreign direct investment ‘gold rush’ into the Asian Tiger economies, mass privatizations, the Latin American revival. It is not only because the ‘e-enema’ applied by the pricking of the speculative bubble in Internet, telecoms, media and technology stocks from March 2000 has removed the ICT euphoria.It is also not just because the sites of resistance to globalisation – i.e. unfettered free market capitalism – were evident in for instance the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, or environmental nationalist Indian demonstrations against foreign investments in agro-chemicals and power plants. The rise of fundamentalist terrorism which culminated in the World Trade Center attack of 11 September 2001 was the most dramatic episode in a cycle of resistance to Western imposed hegemony in the newly post-Marxist, post-colonial, post-nationalist, and Islamic worlds which stretches back centuries, and in its international form at least to the wave of anti-imperialist movements which sparked the Great War of 1914 (for instance, Communist, Young Turk, Boxer rebellions in respectively Europe, the Ottoman and Chinese empires).