Net-I

The Internet has been the source of a great deal of moral panic since I first started working in the field a decade ago. Up to now I've scoffed at each of the alarmist tocsins as they have sounded, but suddenly find an new one starting to ring in my ears.

Throughout most of Western history possibly the most significant divide in our culture (and especially our political culture) has been that typified by the ancient opposition of Athens and Sparta: the archetypal open and closed societies, the individualist plurality and the enforced collective.

The twentieth century in Europe saw one of the most overt confrontations between the two systems, but in much of history the duel between them has created schismatic antagonisms inside many of our core institutions, such as the Christian church. Studies of bacterial behaviour have shown that some degree of oscillation between the two extremes is fundamental to the way many organic systems respond to changing circumstances.

Now at the start of the twenty-first century the Internet is interfering with this age-old polarity in ways that are already destabilising to the societies we live in.

Many have compared the structure of Al Qaeda to the virtual corporation of the modern globalised economy, observing how well Islamic terror groups have adapted to the wired world. Fewer though have commented on how a networked culture helps to shape the mentality of Al Qaeda's alienated human bombs.

"In an institutional world that lays excessive emphasis on the personal, particular and concrete the abstract finds expression in occasional, extreme eruptions", wrote Andrew Calcutt last week in Spiked. He casts the cultural dispute underlying our current predicament as that between me-centered mainstream society and networked groups of willful outsiders, of a sort we have seen many times before, but given a new anti-Western, anti-imperialist twist by the teachings of radical Islam.

“Our so-called scholars of today are content with their Toyotas and semi- detached houses” mocked Mohammad Sidique Khan, the late ringleader of the July 7 attacks. Noting this mood of disenchantment with secular rewards Calcutt is prompted to suggest that "Islam exists in Britain today as a timely form of British popular culture. Indeed, I have observed young British people crossing over from Muslim culture to its Bling-Bling counterpart, and vice versa." He compares our home-grown suicide bombers with Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners - they are the absolutist beginners of July 7, comprehensively rejecting the personal in favour of an impersonal ideal, and in the process willingly "un-becoming the non-descript individual they might otherwise be."

Is this really just another, more deadly form of counter-culture?

On the ride home on Friday I chatted with Stefan about La Haine burning brightly every evening just across the channel. I related how when we drove down through France in September the sense of national exhaustion was almost palpable. Stefan confided his own suspicion that the UK is in many ways equally disfunctional, but we just don't know it yet.

Both nations have punched above their weight for a half century. Thanks in part to the "special relationship", Britain is still jabbing away, but France is clearly tiring and has been outscored in the last few rounds. No doubt you could write a monster essay explaining all the causes of this tip into decline, but as this particular post is about the Internet, so I will stick to that line of investigation.

In the case of Spain going online has re-opened the country up to the wider Spanish-speaking world. Unfortunately for the French it has simply revealed to them the sad truth that there isn't much of a global Francophone culture to belong to. For much of the nineties the French political elite banked pretty much everything on the EU, but the technocratic rump of this ideal no longer excites anyone. There's little else for them to do except protect the vieux fort of Frenchness from creeping multicultural mongrelisation - which has meant banishing the supermarkets, furniture stores, Buffalo Grills and African immigrants to the margins behind the ring roads.

Yet it's not just French politicians that have been left without a big project with share-eable values, the problem is clearly more widespread in the West. The response from politcians has generally been to jump on the bandwagon of me-centrism in the hope that home improvement and digital lifestyles might together refine into a new opium for the masses.

Meanwhile the Net continues to short-circuit many of our traditional modes of association. Most commercial enterprises have come to see this as an opportunity. But on a political and cultural level the effects are perhaps more worrying. It allows users to be virtual individuals within any number of different virtual collectives and the old rigid dichotomy of open-closed/individual-collective no longer reigns supreme over our political selfhood. (You might say that the dominant state of mind is neither Me nor Not-I, it's Net-I.)

The suicide terrorist is perhaps the ultimate prophet of this phenomenon, committed to an abstract self-negating collective ideal that rejects the evils of modern consumerism, yet at the same time aspiring to the VIP rewards of martyrdom.

Olivier Roy argued in Gloablised Islam that second or third generation Muslims in Europe tend have a more personal, alienated kind of faith owing to the absence of the social framework typical of a traditional Islamic society. Such a lack (or leakage) of the grounding of shared territorial citizenship is a feature of the netizen mentality that has helped to delegitimise traditional political elites and their agendas. Old-fashioned institutions (whether they are open or closed by inclination) may find it increasingly hard to get any traction with individuals whose minds have formed within the network, and the more disenfranchised in the real world they are, the more likely they are to blur into abstracted rebellion against it.

OBL's nihilistic footsoldiers may represent a long-term weakness for his Jihadist enterprise. After all alienated youth is not the best ingredient for an all-conquering horde or any other kind of mass movement - imagine an army of Pete Doherty's! Still, they have the power to be very destructive, especially whilst the self-consciously trashy world order they oppose remains so convinced that the problem can be fixed in the old-fashioned way.