/ 28 July 2000

Like nailing jelly to a wall

David Beresford Another Country A former American foreign correspondent turned dot-com finance consultant tossed a thought to me over dinner the other day. He asked rhetorically what would have happened if PW Botha and his boys had tried to impose censorship on South Africa today as they did in the mid- 1980s?

The question is almost worth a book. It conjures up images of the world’s websites carrying uncensored news from the townships – activists particularly prizing palm-tops – and the international brotherhood of hackers ganging up to present South African Defence Force securocrats with the (wagging) finger when they boot-up in the mornings. Not to mention hacking Silvermine, paralysing air- traffic control, denuding the state coffers … For chaos, the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand would have had nothing on it. A cyber- Jihad!

It is a comforting thought, particularly at a time when the leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, is accusing the African National Congress of displaying “fascist” tendencies. If the charge is ever sustained by the sight of Thabo Mbeki cultivating a funny little moustache and practicing his jack-booted goose steps in the grounds of Groote Schuur, doubtless he will be bounced off his cyber- board by the spam equivalent to raspberries the next time he ventures on the Net in search of medical advice. The unfortunate thing is that, while the freedom of the Net is so fundamental to its power, there seem to be a lot of people out there, whom one would normally describe as civilised, desperately trying to control it in much the same way as PW no doubt would have tried to do if it had been around in the mid-1980s. A battle royal is going on in the United States Congress, for example, over plans to control gambling on the Net. The cause is being pushed by an unholy alliance of the “legit” (that is, big-money) gambling interests and religious

pressure groups, both of whom are committed to the minimisation of gambling venues for contrary reasons. Britain has just “shelved” draconian legislation for Net surveillance that – the UK being one of the world’s more repressive democracies – will no doubt resurface soon, if in a different form. Hollywood has joined the music industry in trying to bolster copyright on the Net by litigation against websites – a curious attempt to control a 21st-century

phenomenon with an 18th-century legal concept. And now anti- fascists have persuaded the French courts to try and ban the auctioning of Nazi memorabilia on the grounds it is an insult to the nation’s “collective memory”. As an Aussie attorney general, Gary Humphries, has observed with that stark hyperbole familiar to his countrymen:

“Trying to regulate the Internet is like nailing jelly to a wall.” But for all the counter-productive effect, sections of society keep on hammering away at the nail and the jelly. The impulse to control seems to be compulsive when visited on the individual, no doubt because it is born of childhood trauma: the poor child from the wrong side of the tracks driven into adult life by the urge for riches, as the means to control his material circumstances. The wife-beater

driven to a parody of control through emotional insecurity snatched away at mother’s breast. The uniformity of belief which religious and the ideologically minded try to impose on others as a universal truth, shutting out, for security’s sake, the manifold and often contrary “truths” which clamour for recognition in the imagination. Above them all are perched, through some perversion of potty-training, the politicians with their compulsion to grab the levers of power, an ambition they would justify as the expression of a public-spirited desire to bring order to people’s lives. When one looks back across the recently departed century horribilis, the destructive effect of such a will to control and the consequent “order” is self- evident, through the lives and communities destroyed by the likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, HF Verwoerd and Pol Pot.

The Internet is their repudiation. Born, by some accounts, of the US military’s cold war concerns that a Soviet first- strike nuclear attack would wipe out phone lines, disrupting a coordinated retaliation, it is a sublime example of how real order is to be discovered in chaos. Where life was concerned it used to be believed that man wrote the rules while playing the game. It now seems to be dawning on us that perhaps the name of the game is the discovery of the rules.

One of my favourite English kings was the much-maligned

Canute. His name is remembered with ridicule – as is proper, where rulers are concerned – because he reputedly commanded the tide to turn. It should be said in his favour that there is no record he attempted to punish maritime disobedience by setting his army upon the waves. In that respect, at least, he is unlike the would-be

controllers of the modern world who maintain their assault on the jelly with reckless disregard for the mess they are making of the children’s pudding.