Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace
An overall understanding of the Internet and cyberspace from an integrated sociological, cultural, political, and economic perspective would be a key resource for understanding and developing virtual life. This paper proposes such an understanding by defining the nature of power in cyberspace. Cyberpower has three intertwined levels, each of which is permeated by a different type of power. First, when cyberspace is understood as the playground of the individual, then cyberpower appears as a possession an individual can use. Here can be found the obvious and typical forms of cyberpolitics such as privacy, encryption, censorship, and so on. Second, when cyberspace is understood as being a social place, a place where communities exist, then cyberpower appears as a technopower in which greater freedom of action is offered to those who can control forms of cyberspatial and Internet technology. The three linked figures of Kevin Mitnick, Bill Gates, and Linus Torvalds exemplify this form of cyberpower because they are all, in different ways, “powerful” because of their ability to manipulate virtual technologies. The conclusion of this form of cyberpower is that what appears from the individuals’ perspective to be an empowering medium is, from the social perspective, dominated by a technologically empowered elite. Third, when the Internet and cyberspace are understood as being a society or even a digital nation, then cyberpower appears as an imagination through which individuals recognize in each other a common commitment to virtual life. This imagination is structured by opposed obsessions with the heaven that cyberspace may bring, with immortal, godlike life on silicon as its ultimate goal, and the hell cyberspace may bring, with the total, minute surveillance of all virtual lives made possible by cyberspace. These three forms of cyberpower are closely interrelated because the imagination is the medium in which cyberpower of the individual and of society exist and because these two powers feed each other through individuals’ demands for better tools which leads to greater elaborations of technology and so feeds the power of a technopower elite. The final conclusion from this analysis is that cyberspace and the Internet are riven by a sociological, cultural, economic, and political battle between the individual and a technopower elite.
